On the Outside
Chapter 1
Watching
The pale little boy watches as his best friend's family plays in the snow. The father throws snowballs, the mother helps make smiling snowmen of twigs and carrots, the younger sister makes snow angels, and the older brother makes huge snow forts to hide in. Everyone is so happy, everyone except Shawn Hunter. He lives terrified of being condemned to watch his best friend be jovial for the rest of his life, while his family lives a life of complete turmoil: Moving around constantly, never finding that one place that suited them, afraid of the government because they could never afford those damn electric bills, going through useless steps in daily life, never able to find true friends. Shawn was the exception in the Hunter family. He dared to look beyond the trailer park, wonder, "Is there something more than what I have right now?" He saw more than the rest of his family, and what he saw in Cory Matthews managed to keep them together throughout his emotional trauma, his family trauma, and the trauma in almost every aspect of his life. But best friends, they have no troubles, Cory often repeated. They stick together, and they couldn't hurt each other if they tried.
He keeps watching the normal family, the one with no troubles, that had three children living in a comfortable, normal house in suburban Philadelphia. His own family lives in a trailer park, a far from comfortable lifestyle, one where you have to worry about having electricity for dinner that night or use the worn-out, stubs of candles, dirty from decades of usage. A whole extended family lives in that little trailer park, just three streets south from this cozy home, yet it is a whole different world, one of fear, screams, and terrible shootings that leave parents screaming at children, "Stay inside! You don't want to die, you rotten child, do you? Get away!"
His brown hair falls to his shoulders: too long, but there are times of economic troubles when the seven-year-old knows he can't dare to ask for a haircut. His parents would lecture him, dad would say, "You can't think of your own lowly needs at a time like this," and his mother would ask him to please leave his parents alone. They're working, they're paying bills, they're sleeping for the first time in days. It was always some excuse they made up, some lie that kept them from being positive, parental figures in his life. When he looked at his best friend's family, he saw love and compassion, someone to stand by you if you needed to be defended. They were there for each other, far more than you could say for his own family. As long as you lived in that house, you had parents that would take a few hours off their work schedule to play with you, to watch TV, or to talk about your day. Shawn wished he could be part of that family, but he knew he wasn't. Even with Cory saying, "Remember Shawnie, you're always welcome here. You can come over and play whenever you want to. That's what you had me for, right?" Shawn refused to believe him. Despite the fact that Cory was his best friend, he had hurt Shawn. Shawn knew as long as he continued in his trailer park life, with his dirty, pack rat, pathetic family, he would be condemned to looking on at all the smiling people from the outside for the rest of his life.