Troy

I decided I had a story to tell so I started my first novel. Here are the first few chapters. Let me know if you enjoyed it or not

I

“Why are you here and not somewhere else?”

The prompt for the essay that he felt would decide his fate. It was the only school he had imagined attending thus far because it was perfect for him and people such as him got into the schools that they dreamed of. 

It was the only school he toured with interest so as to avoid diminishing his enthusiasm for it. He sat inside the crowded chapel, a crowned jewel packed with prospective students that  felt the chapel’s effect in unison. The grandiose chapel, with it’s long, red carpet running straight down the aisle between the rows of wooden benches; the stunning gothic (at least he thought gothic) architecture that"with shapes and colors that demanded deference from the crowd"surrounded him like an empty colosseum and instilled in him a most lustful sense of belonging; the radiant and divine light that washed over everyone like it yearned to heal them; the place seduced him, gave him a feeling for the first time that was like a high that he was eager to chase for a while.

He sat with his father in the front, near the alter and not much further than that from the organist as he played. He looked about the hundreds of people packed inside to hear the presentation and perceived them as his potential saving grace. He saw light beam from each of them and imagined what it would be like to see their hands reaching out at him from the top of an abyss as he mustered all of his strength to climb just a little further and reach them.

Various students and faculty from the university spoke on it’s behalf. Each of them stood before the altar with mighty rays from the evening sun piercing the stained glass behind them and illuminating them as they spoke. An infectiously suave, young, white male spoke first, followed by an Indian girl, an asian girl, a few old men, some more ethnic men and a gorgeous blonde sophomore that he could picture running off with. Their clear and cogent command of the enormous space impressed him so much he was suspicious; this deterred him none, for he decided he was supposed to feel this way. 

The Dean of Admissions spoke last and by then the room clamored for his sermon as if they had just witnessed him part the Red Sea for them to cross on over to the holy land.

“What is the most important part of the application?”

“What makes an applicant stand out?”

“What kinds of topics do a lot of students choose to write about?”

Any scrap of advice they could glean from him satiated them as much as it did him. The Dean spoke with elegance as he made the application process out to be some sort of groundbreaking, new-aged online dating service intended for the most creative students that sought a university worthy of being home to their talents.

The Dean’s speech is what perplexed him so much in that week before the deadline. The University of Chicago stood for creativity. It rejoiced in its diversity and it how it could inspire and change people. Troy believed those things too and he knew that his essay had to prove it. The essay meant everything; that fact made Troy nervous that his would mean nothing. He reminded himself frequently that he would make the best of whichever place he want, however he could not shake the fear that the one skill he felt he had might not be good enough to get into the school that he believed was searching for people like him.

A week until the deadline and the thought of the essay became an infection. He was by no means without a solid essay to submit, for he had one that he wrote on the car ride back from Chicago and had been revising ever since. The prompt he chose: “Omne trium perfectum? Create your own group of threes, and describe why and how they fit together.” He passionately typed a lengthy piece on the true nature of the relationship between the ideas of freedom and security"he felt it was obscure and insightful enough and he knew the writing itself was solid. But that other prompt still felt hinged between where his top vertebrae met his skull and gave him headaches all throughout the week.

“Why are you here and not somewhere else?”

One of the handful of prompts provided to applicants deemed the “Uncommon Essay Questions.” After completing his first essay Troy continued to think of what he might write for each of the prompts, always evaluating whether a new idea would have a better chance at success than his old one. He never changed his mind about the essay although he considered until the last possible moment"mainly because of the one prompt that he had yet to come up with a satisfactory way to answer.

“Why are you here and not somewhere else?”

Five excruciating months of senior year later and he got the news: he would never feel what it was like to live out all of the daydreams that he dreamed as he sat in class while a blizzard raged around him and he zoned out, away from all of the voices he was so tired of hearing, and instead kept creating new voices of his own. His second choice"which felt like a dumbed-down version of his dream that he could probably come to accept"also rejected him. His third choice then became his final choice, and he had to live with that because he told himself before that he would. He would be many miles further from Michigan than he previously imagined, which consoled him. He prepared just enough for fates final verdict that he never lost confidence in his dreams to follow him anywhere may go. 

So he began, each and everyday, to reconfigure his dream so that it could be packaged nicely and shipped somewhere else. The things that flared his imagination when he was Windy City bound persisted and were able to nest somewhere unknown in Troy’s new future. 

He never lost the joyous feeling he got when he thought about moving away. 

But he was afraid, because he was setting out to tell stories, and to write his own, and after eighteen years of life"mostly spent in awe of human’s and their stories"he could not manage to give an answer that satisfied him like he desperately wanted one to. 

“Why are you here and not somewhere else?”

He felt wholeheartedly that if he had just come up with an answer he would’ve gotten in!

And as a result he packed the question with him in his suitcase for all of his travels until its answer and his destination collided together one night by chance and together sang out to him where it was that he had been traveling to all along.

II

He was born like the last grape that grows on the vine. 

At Mamaw’s kitchen table it looked as such. His Dad’s family was made of large, triumphant men, humble as they were, that thrived in the cycle of of masculine transference that all Schiffen boys grow up in. They had Virginia blood that was brewed by German immigrants and Cherokee Indians somewhere up in the mountains. They were bred to be large and it made them loud. Next to them he appeared as nothing more than a raisin.

“Troy, your done drinking your milk until you finish eating,” his mom said to him once after he sat down at the kitchen table and chugged his cup of milk until it was nearly gone.

“Did you hear what I said, Troy?” she asked him. Louder than before. 

“I like the milk more, though,” Troy said, trying to sound cheated.

“You’re not getting any more, do you understand?” 

Those two simple clauses, strung together so haphazardly, were like church bells banging and banging and banging together inside his head. He was infuriated because he really did like his milk more than his food and he wanted to be able to have more.

“Because if you keep only drinking milk, you’ll be too full to eat and you need to eat! I cut your chicken up for you so that you can eat it and everything, so eat it, please.”

Mamaw’s southern-style cooking expertise resulted in decadent, rich, wholesome, buttery, greasy, salty, sometimes spicy, overall fantastic and consistently irresistible meals every single Sunday. Troy knew this; he watched as his brother and his cousins and his uncles devoured their meat with a manly instinct. He could lean back and see his Papaw reclined in his chair in the family room, eating his wife’s homestyle cooking with the same enthusiasm he ate it with in 1969. Despite all this, Troy still wanted his milk most of all and felt justified to assert that he should have it. He couldn’t will himself to want to eat his food more than drink his milk"he had no other option.

Almost every week for his entire five year existence, Troy spent Saturday night in effusive anticipation of Sunday afternoon. Sunday’s were showers of affection and family. Sundays were fun every time, without exception. For the Schiffens, it never rained on Sunday. They all knew what Sunday meant and they were all responsible for teaching that meaning to their children. It was the one day of the week for them to let their blood flow free like the Potomac, into the Atlantic ocean where it mixed with the blood of far-away cousins that they knew only in the way you know something for no other reason than because you do.

They never discussed Sunday, but they all knew it well and kept it sacred.

Blind"as a child often is"to the defects within his own family, Troy perceived Sunday narrowly. Whispers shielded him from any and all discord. He spent much of his Sundays isolated in a sun-room the size of a teepee playing Supernintendo with his older cousins or building skyscrapers out of Lego’s. He made it easy for the rest of them to preserve Sunday for him, and in exchange they would laugh and smile when they heard him emerge from the tiny game room to join them for dinner.

For some inexplicable reason, unknown to Troy and seemingly inescapable, at the age of five he really preferred his milk over his meal. For this, he began disturbing the peace at Mamaw’s kitchen table. His thirst, insatiable and immutable as it was, compelled him to down it immediately at the beginning of almost every meal. 

“That’s it. If you don’t stop drinking all your milk, you’re done getting anything to drink at dinner! This is ridiculous Troy. You’re the only one who doesn’t finish your dinner because you always fill up on milk.”

“But mom, I still have a bunch left! See!” he pleaded as he held his cup as high in the air as possible. He watched for her eyes to meet his cup but they locked on him.

“Sweetie, I just watched you down almost your entire glass. Do you understand what I’m saying to you or don’t you? Im done asking.”

For the first time in the many week long struggle, Troy met an ultimatum. Her envelope could be pushed no further. The prospect of never drinking milk again flashed through his mind and became a frighteningly real possibility for him. He just liked milk more than his mom did and he never received an explanation for why that was not the bottom line. 

He sat silent for a moment and stared into his chicken and dumplings. He felt pressure in his stomach that festered and grew wings. He felt it try to fly up and towards the light, but it got stuck in his windpipe and gave him a jolt as it fell back into his stomach and died. The steam rising against his face reminded him of his mom’s scorn and he looked up.

“Yes,” he said, “I understand.”

Troy pushed his milk towards the center of the table with melancholy like the addict as he pushes his wedding ring across the pawn-shop counter in exchange for a high.

He finished eating before the rest of the men were done with their second helping. He thought to himself that Mamaw’s chicken and dumplings is probably the greatest thing he would ever eat.

But he still wished he had had more milk, and for that reason Troy got up from the harlem that was the Schiffen kitchen table on Sunday evening and slipped through the cracked door to the sunroom to play Nintendo. He turned the T.V. on its the highest volume. It was the first time he had felt the urge to shut his family out. It confused him so much it hurt. All he knew was that it didn’t make sense so he taught himself to tuck that urge away somewhere where it would not get lost but was always out of sight.

III

Mamaw never learned to drive. In her 60 years of life, no reasoning existed that was ever strong enough to compel her to want to drive on her own. She was well accommodated by her kids on the occasion that needed to shop for groceries or visit the doctor, however she had practically nothing beyond that house except for those routine excursions. Troy always felt strange about this. He sometimes got this feeling like a giant eye was floating far in space, so far away that no one would ever see it and it had the sole desire of watching him. When he got this feeling he became heavy and slow. It seemed to him that Mamaw should have felt like that all of the time.

If she ever did, he never knew about. She met him with a vanilla ice cream cone each time he walked through her front door on Sunday afternoon. She played go-fish with him while the adults played Euchre. She let him teach her how to play Donkey Kong when no one else would. At a time in Troy’s life when he was learning just how much there is to run from in the world, she was what Troy knew he could always run to.

“SHOOOOWEE CHILD!” she hollered when she walked into the bathroom and saw that he’d filled the toilet to the brim with raw potatoes. She buckled over laughing.

“Guess we ain’t meant tuh be havin’ tater’s tonight nah is we Troy?” 

He never knew what Mamaw was like when her house wasn’t teaming with Schiffen’s" when the only noise in the house was the T.V. playing the Pistons game and her husband passed out in front of it, snoring his dispositions out loud while she picked up the empty cans scattered at his feet.

He never saw her when she stood out in her garden alone and watched the shadows of her six kids run around the yard together again. He never saw her become paralyzed by the breeze as hosewater ran unchecked and drowned the flower bed before her. He never saw her there with 50 years of things to remember while she waited for another Sunday.

So he thought, somehow, that his Mamaw must have had a secret recipe for sacrifice. He was learning that some things had to be sacrificed. He teemed with enthusiasm to explore his world and try new versions of himself all of the time; the world apathetically revealed to him the burning consequences of self-expression. He learned that he was not Troy"he was Troy Schiffen and that meant certain things. 

To him, Mamaw was the smallest mountain peak with the biggest signal fire, the peak that he could climb only once a week, on a day of rest, to light the fire and enjoy its warmth.

He knew her for her fire.