Chapter 3

Growing up in a small town is exactly how television makes it out to be: you spend your whole life waiting to escape and then you end up working the cash register at the corner store down the street from where you grew up until the day you die. That’s what my great great grandfather did when he first came to America, opened up a corner store. When he died, my great grandfather took over, then my grandfather, then my dad. He was just a teenager at the time. Dropped out to sell groceries. That’s the life I’ve got ahead of me. What was once his pride and joy is now my curse, like our names. Trevor was his father’s name. I will never be the right Trevor.

 

I’m not a kid. I’m not an adult either, but I sure understand a hell of a lot more than everybody gives me credit for.

 

The thing is, I don’t actually know what I want to do with my life. I know I don’t want to work the store, but other than that… blank. I try and picture my life beyond twenty-five and I get nothing.

 

But that’s the kind of excuse that gets you laughed at. That guarantees a spot behind a counter. Public service will be my hell.

 

So when I’m in English class and Mrs. Barrows tells us to ‘freewrite about what we want to do with our lives’ I have nothing. So I watch the way she alternates between twirling her pen cap between her fingers and chipping off her nail polish. She does this every class. In the two years I’ve been at this school, she’s never taught a whole class. The way she works is she writes a sentence on the board and tells us to write about it. At the end of class, we hand them in, and then when we come in the next day, they’re on our desks; graded with the occasional witty comment.

 

The guys think she’s hot. The girls think she’s a b***h. I don’t think much of anything.

 

I notice the way she pretends to look at her phone or laptop when really she watches the class. I notice the way she sometimes smirks when reading our writing.

 

I notice a lot of things about her, but I don’t really think about them. They’re just facts, like gravity.

 

Once, at the end of a paper, I asked her why she bothers being a teacher if all she ever does is sit there. She asked me why I bother being a student if all I ever do is answer her questions the way I think she wants.

 

I didn’t leave another question after that.