Rick
His parents were from Quebec, and spoke French with such a deep accent that it was almost hard to understand, but easier than their English. They smoked odd little twisted French cigarettes that stunk up the house like cigars. The wallpaper on all the walls in the old house was coated and covered in years of smoke. It was a gray film.
Rick had never been his parents' top priority. That would be the old scotch and whiskey bottles in the back shelves of the pantry. These bottles were his parents' lovers and friends, midnight confidantes. These bottles were their everything.
Rick had never had an easy time making friends. He tended to read books instead of talk to people. He found dry words and the edges of pages easier to deal with than flesh and blood human beings. He could lose himself in books for hours, feeling captive. A prisoner of the characters in the stories that had sprung to full blown in his mind.
His father would hit him when he had it coming, and his mother would yell at him in French to stop it, to leave the boy alone. Through some drunken haze of hard liquor and beer after beer his father would see Rick's pleading eyes, his supplicant position, and he would stop.
They moved from the French speaking providences of Canada to Ontario, specifically Toronto. This was a city Rick was excited to live in, viewing it as a sort of New York of Canada, and he thought it would be better than the rural and downtrodden areas he had formerly inhabited. But what he found was kids unwilling to give him a chance, kids who invoked his considerable rage. Kids who had it coming.
In his stunted social way he saw any pity smile and bit of small talk as proof of friendship, and he saw any female attention as the beginning of a relationship. His books had left him ill equipped to deal with the social stratosphere of high school, and he was floundering.
Terri was beautiful despite being bigger, her little sparkly eyes and high cheekbones, pale smooth skin like flower petals, so perfect. Her full lips a natural red, her white teeth a perfect movie star row of pearl, the contrast against the red lips so pleasing. She matched all matter of heroine in his beloved novels. Novellas. Short stories. All the literature he'd read was describing her.
He left roses taped to her locker, going to lengths to avoid being detected, but she found him out. As he ultimately wanted her to. It was a game, and that much he understood. She smiled in her shy way, and he could see all he needed to see.
Her friends, on the other hand, that was something else. Jimmy was too attentive to her, he could see the deviousness. He could see it, he could smell it. Jimmy cast her as the lead in that play. He wanted her, and who wouldn't? And Jimmy didn't like the fact that he, Rick, knew a shitload more about theater than he ever would. He didn't want to take any of his suggestions, but he wanted to take his girl.
Rick's world was filled with villains and heroes and protagonists and nemesis. His life roughly followed a plot, with foreshadowing and twists and romance and danger and sneaky little sniveling high school shits like Jimmy and Spinner.
These were two brutish kids he just couldn't connect to. They were outside of his ability to relate, to make any sense of, probe the depths. There were none. Superficial nincompoops. He knew. He knew they were jealous he had Terri, he knew everyone wanted what he had. He knew they were intimidated by his intellect. So he'd deal with their slings and arrows. He'd deal with all of these…indignities. What choice did he have?
His father was absent more and more, a part of this club where middle aged men drank away all cares and sorrows. The glasses for the spirits were deep, and the taps were never dry. His father hung his lined face over the shiny oak wood bar and ordered another round.