I know this is not Aisle 10 (whose next chapter is coming, it's being written in little bits every day), but a) I haven't submitted anything in awhile and that saddens me, and b) I wanted to try something out here. This was supposed to be completed and submitted as a really really really long one-shot, but I thought about it while I was on the freeway today and realized that I like the beginning of this but I don't ever know when I'll finish the whole thing, if ever. And I don't want it to just sit in my hard drive collecting dust. Sooo I'm submitting the beginning now, and then am going to attempt to submit the rest of it in parts. As you can see, each part will be really small instead of my usual BIG WALL OF TEXT. So, it's not really a chapter fic, it was never meant to be a chapter fic, but it will be completed like one that I'm casually writing and am not committed to and will be updated whenever I get inspired to write the rest of it :O should I ever finish it I'll just put them all on one word doc, delete all the chapters, and then replace this one, so it will be as if this never happened lol :D yay enjoy.

EDIT to reiterate this chapter is not the end of the story, it is not meant to sit on its own. there is MORE to come, just not right away lol

For most of his life, Tweek Tweak had lived on Little Avenue, and for as long as he could remember, there was hardly a thing "little" about it. The name was downright false advertising, he would argue, and people like him should have been given their money back for having moved onto such a street without being informed of how inaccurate its name truly was. The only reason it was called that at all was because it was named after a dog that had been hit by a car near the corner, but even the dog was anything but little: it was an overweight Rottweiler, which was probably why it hadn't gotten out of the way of the car in time. Not that he was blaming the dog, but its size probably played some role in its downfall.

It didn't stop with the dog, though: nothing was little. For a simple, middle-class American neighborhood, every house was a sizeable two stories, each lawn was its own sea of snow-coated green grass, the street seemed to stretch for miles in either direction. The squares of sidewalk were too large to jump from one crack to the next. The mailboxes were too tall for a kid to reach into, even on his tiptoes. The fences were high and wide, either keeping you in or keeping whatever was outside out.

The people were anything but little, either, every neighbor being somewhere between their mid-thirties and later seventies and towering over Tweek like ogres or giants as he avoided being stepped on or being knocked over. The people were big in other ways, too, ways that still reminded Tweek of ogres or giants that had nothing to do with their height or age. They were acutely more aware of everything, always talking big talk with big words and big ideas and staring a kid down in a way that was either disapproving or condescending. It was intimidating. It was scary. It was the stuff of nightmares.

That's how it had seemed to him when he was younger, anyway, but whether it was as scary as he remembered it being was irrelevant. Even as he got taller and his brain developed, even as he found himself easily able to reach the mailbox or suddenly capable of crossing an entire sidewalk square from crack to crack in one long stride, even as he found himself confidently chatting it up with his mailman or washing his neighbor's car to earn some extra cash, even then, the universe outside his house was still big, bigger than Little Avenue could contain, and that was enough for him to be convinced that the world was a scary, scary place.

Sometimes, when he stepped outside, he felt like an agoraphobe (a word his father had taught him straight out of one of his many thickly bound psychology books on the living room book shelf). An agoraphobe standing in a wide-open field, where the tall yellow grass grew and grew all around in every direction and there wasn't a sign of life in sight and no place to hide from anything that might harm him. He felt like a megalophobe (another from the book shelf), shrunk a hundred sizes down and wandering about in a junkyard where he was constantly running into abandoned mammoth-sized baseballs and titanic-sized car hubs.

He spent a lot of time inside, then, where the world was much smaller and more static. The most he had to worry about was furniture getting rearranged or his dad cooking dinner and setting off the fire alarm or his mom forgetting to replace a toilet paper roll in the bathroom. He didn't feel at all like a caged bird when he was constantly stuck in here, either. Outside his simple little two story mustard colored safety net was a world much too large for him to handle, so he was perfectly content right where he was.

In fact, growing up, the only things about Little Avenue outside of his own home that weren't so big to him were probably his friends, and he was glad to have them, because he didn't know how he could've been able to breathe here without them.

There was Clyde, across the street in the two-story burgundy house with the station wagon parked in its driveway and the box planters of the wildflowers his mother loved so much and his toys (plastic dinosaurs and stuffed cowboys) always strewn about on the front yard. Clyde was small enough for Little Avenue. Clyde cried a lot, but he wasn't a crybaby. Clyde was chubby, but he wasn't fat. Clyde wasn't brilliant (math and words were never his strong points), but Clyde had a good sense of humor and everyone liked him. Clyde was a good friend to Tweek, inviting him over for taco night or letting him join his secret club that met in his tree house every Thursday afternoon, but Clyde was still very much a young boy, cracking teasing jokes about the way Tweek always twitched or wrestling with him whenever the mood struck him.

Clyde was mischievous, Clyde was playful, Clyde was sensitive, Clyde was like a breath of fresh air at the top of a roller coaster or the feeling you get before you run into a sliding glass door when you think it's not there or thinking you got an A+ on a test but you really got a B but you're content with it anyway. Clyde was real.

Clyde was small enough for Tweek.

And then there was Token. Token didn't exactly live on Little Avenue so much as he lived toward the end of Little Avenue, closer to the richer district of South Park, but it was within walking or bicycling or skateboarding or pogo-sticking or wagon-pulling distance (depending on what mode of transportation they felt like taking to get there). It was definitely not far enough to be jump-in-Clyde's-car-and-drive-there distance, (which was actually quite fortunate since Clyde was a reckless driver and only listened to bad pop music in his car), but they wouldn't worry about that until much later, so it wasn't even an option anyway.

Token was small enough for Little Avenue, and that was not taking into account the size of his house, which was enormous. Or the size of his bank account, which was gargantuan. Or the size of his toy collection, which was astronomical. Or how many pets he had or how many cars his parents drove or how many pairs of shoes he was able to wear in a month without repeating any. It was all daunting, of course, in the same way Clyde's need to sneak around corners and tackle Tweek into the mud was daunting, but Token was still very small to Tweek.

Token was brave; Clyde could make fun of how gay his clothes made him look sometimes or tell ghost stories when all of them were camping out in Token's walk-in closet, and Token wouldn't bat an eyelash. He would just smile knowingly, like nothing surprised him, and Tweek wouldn't have been shocked if that were true. Token was smart, and not just book-smart (though he was the best speller in the fourth grade), but he was wise, too. He had advice for everything. Tweek had once come to him to ask him why Millie Mitchells kept trying to grab his hand at recess, what did she want with him, why was she trying to give him diseases, should he file a restraining order, etc. Token told him it was a girl thing, she was obviously trying to steal his life source, and Tweek should probably throw spit balls at her and keep away from her if he wanted it to stop. Tweek did just that and he was never bothered again, although his parents were called after school and he was grounded for a week. It was worth it.

So Token was brave, Token was rich, Token was smart, Token was wise. Token could even play a musical instrument. But Token was small to Tweek because Token was the most genuine guy he knew. Token was honest, Token told you if you were bugging him, Token didn't make anyone feel like an idiot, Token didn't frighten anyone, Token never bragged about himself. Token had so many sleepovers at his palace of a house, that Tweek felt like he slept there, on the floor of Token's huge third-floor room, more than in his own bed. Token wasn't even perfect, because he got embarrassed by a lot of things, mostly his parents or his wealth. Token, for the great advice-giver he was, also didn't take his own advice very well. He shouldered everyone else's problems so much that he had few people to turn to himself. When he developed a crush on Red in the third grade, he told Tweek, but there was nothing Tweek could offer him. So he carried the crush, shyly and nervously and uncharacteristically bumbling, Tweek suspected, to this very day.

Token was small enough for Tweek.

And then…there was Craig.

In his quietest of hours, standing idly in the shower, tying his shoelaces, taking out his trash, lying awake in bed, Tweek would constantly and curiously reflect: how does one even begin to describe Craig? On countless occasions, he'd likened the experience to that of describing the color yellow to a blind person or a sonata to a deaf man.

Craig was not like Token or Clyde. Craig was unlike anyone Tweek had ever met or would ever meet. Craig was simple and Craig was complex. He was quiet and he was bold. He was boring and he was terrifyingly exciting. Craig was practical and he had an amazing imagination. Craig seemed emotionless, like a robot, and yet he could elicit things in Tweek that Tweek couldn't give names to. He was all that Tweek feared and all that Tweek admired. Craig was beyond words.

Craig was Tweek's next-door neighbor.