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Serial novel

Beckett’s Last Mixtape – Chapter Five

ANTHO

 

Judge Roberts looks like my father. This is not a good thing.

Courtrooms are not what they look like on TV, or at least this one isn’t. It’s mostly off-white, with dark paneling at the judge’s bench and witness stand, and the Seal of the State of Arizona hanging behind him. Despite the fact that the ceiling isn’t two stories tall or that the floor is dark, polished wood does not make the space any less intimidating. My heart squeezes behind my ribs like a hand around a tennis ball.

Judge Roberts has asked me a question and is now waiting for me. So is everyone else.

I better make this good. This ain’t—

This isn’t a speech tournament. Lose there, and you don’t get a plaque. Lose here, and I’ll spend freshman year in the Maricopa County jail.

I clear my throat, wipe my hands on the thighs of my best navy blue dress pants, and stand.

“Yes I do, Your Honor.”

With that, I stride to the podium on my side of the room. I can see my lawyer, Mr. Goldsen, is both nervous and confident. He’s honestly not a lot older than me, by the look of him. My parents have known his parents for a long time. They play golf and tennis together at the club.

Judge Roberts sits back in his chair and appears to rock back and forth, holding a pen between his index fingers. He’s just asked if I have anything to say for myself, as Mr. Goldsen had said he probably would.

I have no note cards, nothing written down. This is extemporaneous speaking at it’s . . . what? Best? Finest? Most important?

Here we go:

“First of all, thank you for the opportunity to speak, Your Honor. I appreciate the consideration being shown me.”

He arches an eyebrow.

“Secondly . . . to be clear, I do accept responsibility for what I’ve done. It was a bad choice, and I do want to extend my apologies to Joe—uh, Mr. Bishop—for the harm I caused. I also want to apologize to my family and friends for putting them through this ordeal.”

The judge either nods, or rocks in his chair.

“I won’t try to excuse what I did, Your Honor, but I do wish to say that when it comes to my family and my friends, I am very protective. I’ve known Ashley Dixon most of my life. She’s like a sister to me. So when it was clear that someone had—by the definition of the law, Your Honor—had sexually assaulted her, I lost my cool and I reacted inappropriately. And while I certainly won’t let that happen again, I need to tell Ashley’s parents right here and now that I will always be there for her, and I will always do my best to protect her. If that protection has consequences, then I accept them.

“But again, Your Honor, if I ever face another situation like this, and I sincerely hope that I will not, then I will behave in a manner commensurate with the situation.”

Judge Roberts drops his pen on the desk and yanks his eyeglasses off. “Did you just say ‘commensurate’?”

“Um . . . yes, Your Honor.”

“And you’re how old again?”

“Almost fifteen, sir.”

He snaps his glasses back into place. “Go on.”

“That’s all I have, sir. Thank you.”

“I have to say, Mr. Lincoln, you are without a doubt the most eloquent and well-spoken fourteen-year-old I’ve ever met in this courthouse. In fact you may be the most eloquent and well-spoken person I’ve ever met in this courthouse.”

There’s a mild chuckle behind me from all the people here. They shut up when the judge shoots them a look.

“I don’t suppose you plan on becoming a lawyer.”

“As a matter of fact, yes, I do, Your Honor.”

He picks up some papers and snaps them with his hand to get them to stand straight on their own. “Straight As in junior high. You just started high school at . . . Camelback?”

“In August, yes sir.”

“Mmm-hmm. What are you taking?”

I struggle to remember my schedule. “Um . . . integrated math, honors English, speech one, business keyboarding, French, and earth science.”

“Speech? Are you competing? National Forensics?”

“Yes, sir, two weeks ago there was an AIA practice tournament.”

“How did you do, Mr. Lincoln?”

It is very hard not to smile. “First place in extemp debate, sir.”

“Well done, Mr. Lincoln.”

I force myself to be cool, and nod my thanks. I’ll start bragging if I open my mouth, and that feels like a poor idea right now.

“What about your extra-curriculars?” he asks.

“Speech and drama club, Your Honor. Masque & Gavel.”

“No athletics?”

“No, sir.”

The judge stares at the papers for a long moment before setting them down and pulling his glasses off again. “Mr. Lincoln, for the record, I want you to acknowledge that I have every right to sentence you to a jail term. Do you understand?”

My heart skips. “Yes, sir.”

“I also intend to make sure a young man of your caliber doesn’t step foot in this building again until you’re trying your first case.”

My heart resumes. Maybe—maybe—I pulled this off.

“I understand, Your Honor.”

“It is the order of this court,” he says, “that you serve one hundred hours of community service and attend not less than twenty hours of anger management classes and counselling. I’m also recommending without enforcement that you find a good sport or two to work out whatever aggression you’ve got to work out. Is that understood?”

Someone behind me lets out a breath like they’ve been holding it. I think it’s Mom. Or Dad. Or maybe Mr. Goldsen.

“Yes, Your Honor!”

“And finally, Mr. Lincoln, make no mistake. If you ever appear before me again for a charge of this nature, I will make it my business to ensure you won’t hurt anyone else for a very long time. Understood?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Very well. I’ll see you in about ten years, defending or prosecuting your first case. Court adjourned.”

He banges his gavel, and that’s that.

I’m not going to jail.

This time.

Categories
Serial novel

Beckett’s Last Mixtape – Chapter Three

TOMMY

I lose track of what Mr. Morrison is teaching because of the girl I share a table with.

English Literature is an elective, but taking it now means I don’t have to take the second semester of English senior year. I’ll be ready to get out of high school by then, I’m sure.  I can feel it. High school pretty much bites, and it’s only September.

We share small tables in Lit instead of individual desks. Mr. Morrison’s classroom is the best-smelling of any I’ve been in, and there’s a rumor he lights specialty fragrance candles when no one’s here even though there is no way open flame is allowed. Today it smells like pine.

His classroom is wallpapered with musical theatre posters like Les Misérables and Phantom of the Opera, and every Spring he takes groups of kids to London. I really don’t care about musicals, but I like Mr. Morrison and it would be cool to go to London to see all the castles. I don’t think my parents can afford to send me, but I plan on asking anyway just in case.

But this girl . . .

She and I say Hi to each other in the morning when we get here, and usually See ya! when class is over. Sometimes one of us will ask the other to borrow a pencil or sheet of paper. But that’s it.

I can tell she’s pretty; meaning, I recognize she is attractive. I can discern—by any conventional standard—most people would agree her body is structured in such a way as to elicit arousal, envy, or some mixture of the two; and that her facial features, her hair, and all her “vital stats” fall within the parameters of modern American beauty.

I’m talking here about a girl who, if she closed her text book, turned to me and said, “Listen, if you’re not busy at lunch, I would totally have sex with you in the library study room,” I would most likely reply, “Well, I mean, sure, okay.”

That is what I am supposed to say in such an unlikely event. And, who knows, maybe she’s got a winning personality, or works in a soup kitchen, or is secretly solving the cure for cancer. I’m not trying to objectify her. I don’t think. Am I? I probably am.

Which is another thing I’m supposed to do if you look at the magazines and Playboy channel when it pops on for second between changing channels.

I should be attracted to her.

I’m not.

Goddammit, I’m just not, and I don’t think I ever will be, and someone’s going to figure it out sooner or later.

Maybe if I put some effort into it? She has long curly hair that’s practically the color of a new penny. I think she’s older than me, too, like maybe a junior or even a senior. Also he’s very . . . developed.

There’s just nothing outstanding about her to me. She’s a paper doll, just one more in a long line of attractive lookalikes I’ve seen at this school.

But . . .

I don’t think that’s why I don’t like her the way I’m supposed to.

So every day, I keep her in the corner of my eye while Mr. Morrison goes on these rambling diatribes about Elizabeth Bennet and Helmholtz Watson and Daisy Buchanan.

I pretend to glance out the window when I’m really looking at her chest. But I do it really quick, so she doesn’t notice. I don’t want to be rude or crude. Sometimes she sits cross-legged on her orange molded plastic chair, and her legs, which always seem very tan, sneak into the folded edges of her Guess jean shorts. So I clandestinely look at her skin there and if she’s really not paying attention, I follow the line of her thigh into the denim and stare—for only a second or two—at the middle spot where the four seams of her shorts join.

And I think: C’mon, come on, man . . .

Nothing happens. No jolt of excitement, no . . . you know. Turn on.

Nothing until today, when she turns to me so quickly that I get startled and almost fall backward out of my chair.

“What?” she whispers as Mr. Morrison sallies forth, as he likes to say, about some Shakespearean character named Antonio.

“What?” I whisper back, while very, very quickly lifting my eyes to hers.

I can smell cinnamon on her breath as she whispers. “What did you say?”

“When?”

“Now.”

“Just now?”

“Yes.”

“I have no idea.”

She frowns. “It sounded like you said ‘come on.’”

I make myself frown right back, like she’s crazy. “Uh, no! No. Why would I say that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to go out?”

“Mr. Anderson and Ms. Haight!” Mr. Morrison calls. “Perhaps you would like to enlighten us on the subject of metatheatre in Shakespeare’s immortal comedy, Twelfth Night?”

“No thanks,” I say.

“Nah, I’m good,” she says.

“Then zip it,” Mr. Morrison says, with a smile, because he is a pretty nice guy. “Now! Let us sally forth . . .”

We both nod. Mr. Morrison goes back to his lecture.

I write on the corner of one sheet in my notebook: Your name is Hate?

Smirking, she spells beneath my writing in block letters: Haight.

I give her a nod and thumbs up when Mr. Morrison’s back is to us.

She writes: Did you ask me out?

Crap. I did say that, I heard myself say it, I just don’t know why I said it. And she totally heard it.

Now I have to answer.

But she keeps writing before I can: Are you a freshman?

Yes, I write. You?

She writes two letters: J R

Then that’s it, she doesn’t write anything else. I have no idea what to say, but I am pretty sure she didn’t just suddenly forget that I blurted out asking her on a date.

Which . . . why did I even do that? Maybe as a distraction? She did catch me totally checking her out, even though that’s not technically what I was doing, not in any traditional way.

She taps the end of her eraser on the table while Mr. Morrison acts out a scene from Twelfth Night, complete with different voices and postures for each character. He’s terrible, and he knows it, so it’s actually kind of fun. Everybody laughs.

There are four minutes left of class when she suddenly scribbles on the paper. Just two more letters.

O K.

I’m honestly not sure what that means, so I spend the last four minutes squinting at the letters, then at her. This appears to amuse her.

The bell chimes, and everyone jumps up except us.

“Okay, what?” I say over the sound of thirty people slamming notebooks closed, zipping backpacks shut, and shuffling toward the door.

Smirking again, she says, “Tomorrow night. I’ll pick you up. Where do you live?”

It feels like my head slowly twists around like the little girl in The Exorcist.

“. . . What?”

Laughing, she—I am not making this up—pinches my cheek, like a grandma.

“You’re so cute! That’s why I’m doing it. Here. Write down your fucking address, freshman.”

Hands numb, I somehow manage to scrawl it out. She tears the paper from my notebook.

“Seven o’clock tomorrow. Dress nice. See ya!”

“Wait!” I call out as the classroom empties and she’s dashing toward the door. “Um . . .  what’s your name?”

“Jenn! Bye, Tommy!”

Then she’s gone, her laughter trailing behind her, and the next bunch of students wanders inside while I’m still standing here like an idiot at our table.

She knew my name? But I didn’t know hers?

Well, regardless. I guess I’ve got a date.

With a very attractive junior girl, no less.

Who apparently drives. So that’s cool.

. . . I just don’t care.

Is that a problem? Because it feels like a problem.

Hello, my friend! I hope you’re enjoying the story. Take a look at other stories and more at my linktree here:

linktr.ee/tomleveen

See you soon!
~ Tom

Categories
Serial novel

Beckett’s Last Mixtape – Chapter Four

ASHLEY

I’m so scared I want to cry.

Or at least sniffle a bit.

Coach Bradley walks back and forth in front of all of us like he should be chewing a cigar and wearing one of those drill sergeant hats like in Full Metal Jacket, which is my dad’s favorite rental for some reason. There’s twenty-two of us “trying out” for cross country. I counted. We’re all sitting on the browning grass beside the school race track, facing the sun and squinting in unison. I promise I put on deodorant this morning before school, but you’d never know it to smell me. Ugh. We haven’t even started running yet, and already the elastic waistband of my horrible blue gym shorts we are forced to wear is damp. Gross.

“We have three rules on this team,” the coach says, taking these slow steps back and forth “Everyone runs. No one quits.”

He pauses.

And smiles.

“No Skittles for breakfast.”

Some of us, me included, laugh a little, and the tension breaks.

Coach slaps his belly, which looks as solid and smooth as our antique oak dining room table under his white Camelback High School T-shirt. “You’ll be putting in thirty to fifty miles a week. When you’re running fifty miles a week, you can eat pretty much whatever you want. Just eat a lot of it. You’ll need it.”

He blows his whistle—chweet!—and shouts, “Feet!”

We all get up. Someone groans.

“Four laps. Take your time. Just warm up. It’s really dang hot out here, so stay hydrated.”

Chweet!

“Go!”

We all take off for the track around the field.

“Did he say fifty miles a week?” I ask this tall boy beside me.

He only grins and shoots off down the lane. Must be Varsity.

Dad insisted I take a sport, he didn’t care what it was. I think secretly he was hoping for tennis, since he and Mom play almost every weekend during the season. But the tennis season in Phoenix is winter. Outdoor tennis is not a great idea in July.

I put Dad off for almost a month, but he finally wore me down. When I heard that it’s basically impossible to get cut from cross country, and that some people on JV even walk during the races, at least a little bit, I thought, “That’s the sport for me!” and signed right up.

So far, the rumors have been true. Coach B is a nice guy, and doesn’t seem to put a lot of pressure on the JV team unless you clearly want to make Varsity. Then he digs in and coaches. I don’t need to be on the receiving end of that, thanks.

But I do run. I take it slow, since that’s what Coach B said: to take our time. After the first lap, a couple people are walking, which puts me in the middle of the group. I guess it’s a decent jog, because I catch up to another boy who is almost wheezing. Sweat runs from his short brown hair and stains his white T-shirt.

“You okay?” I ask, which is all I can manage.

He nods and stumbles into a walk. “Didn’t. Train. Summer.”

His cheeks are splotchy. He puts his hands on his hips, huffing and puffing.

I hear the dreaded whistle followed by Coach B’s voice. “Anderson! Okay to walk, no hands on your hips!”

Followed by another chweet!

The boy beside me drops his hands to let them dangle and keeps walking.

I figure helping him is a good excuse to slow down, so I downshift to a walk, too. “Sure you can breathe?”

He nods but doesn’t answer. He brings his hands to his hips again as if on instinct, then quickly drops them, shooting a look coach’s direction.

We walk side by side for about hundred yards or so before he has his breath back enough to speak. “Should have run over the summer. That was dumb. Just played video games.”

“Yeah, not a big workout playing Super Mario.”

“It is if you’re doing it right.” He glances at me with a little half-grin. “I’m Tommy.”

“Ashley. Nice to meet you. Freshman?”

“Afraid so. You?”

“Yeppers.”

“Sucks, huh.”

I shrug. “The first week was bad. But I had friends from junior high, you know? Where’d you come from? You didn’t go to Mohave.”

“No. Private school. I’m one of those kids.”

“Ooo. Fancy.”

“Not that fancy, trust me.”

“Anybody come with you? Here, I mean?”

“Nope. All my friends are up north at a private high school.”

“Well, if you need someplace to hang out at lunch Monday, we’ll be in the cafeteria.” Might as well ask. Right now it’s just me and Beckett, most of the time, if she doesn’t walk home. Antho’s almost always in the speech and drama department these days.

Tommy looks—well, not surprised, but kind of confused maybe. But then he says, “Yeah, okay. Thanks.”

“I mean, you don’t have to. I’m just saying.”

“No, no, it’s cool. Thanks.”

We keep walking for about another minute before I say, “Okay, I gotta run. Hey, haha! Get it? Gotta run? Anyway. Want to get into Varsity someday, right?”

Not at all true, but I don’t want to make it sound like I’m a slacker.

“Cool,” Tommy says. “Good luck. I’m going out for Varsity Walking Squad, so.”

That makes me laugh, and I pick up my pace.

Something about Tommy sticks with me, though, as my feet slap the track. It takes a couple minutes to hone in on what it was.

Most guys scan my body. A lot of them stare at my chest. Which is gross.

Not Tommy. He looked in my eyes.

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Uncategorized

What A Mixtape Really Means: How Adults Should Deal with Teen Drama

If you were to make a new mix tape today, what would be on it? What songs speak to you right now? Would you go back to the olden days and grab some of the songs from your mis-spent youth, or would you find something a little bit more modern? John Cusack had a bit about this in the movie High Fidelity, based on the book of the same name written by Nick Hornby. You have to time things out right, you want to lead the listener from one song to another to really make sure that they’re grasping your intent.

Giving a mixtape lets a person know you see them, you hear them, and you’re thinking thoughtfully about them. It demonstrates gifting them with your most precious commodity: Time.

I’m curious: what do today’s teenagers do? If you have teenagers, because I don’t quite yet, send me a message. Let me know how teens are sending one another messages that are not direct messages — and by “direct messages” I mean sending oblique messages, sending coded messages, because if I give you a mixtape, that’s a coded message. I’m coming at you from the side. For simplicity’s sake, when a boy wants to tell a girl he likes her, what does he do these days? What are the steps he takes? Because I don’t know if it’s the same as what we used to do or not, but I will tell this:

The feelings are the same.

This makes me so angry with adults who work with teens (or even those who don’t work with teens). What makes me so angry is adults who have completely and utterly forgotten what it was like to be 16, to be 18, or to be 13. It frustrates the shit out of me now, as an adult.

I understand frustration with kids. Yes, when your kid comes home and they’re all bent out of shape because somebody said something unkind to them, or they got a B instead of an A (or they got an F instead of a D, or whatever your standard is right now) and they’re all upset about that, and you’re over here thinking, “This is so not a big deal.” Maybe they got second place in the speech tournament (total gyp!!!) or the team didn’t make the playoffs, and you . . . a tax-paying, mortgage-holding adult or whatever you happen to be . . . is going, “FFS, this is not a big deal, please contain yourself, Young Person…”

Yeah.

I get it.

I absolutely feel the same way whenever one of my kids flips out (and they’re not even teenagers yet) and I’m over here going, “Oh, dude, this is so not the biggest worry you’re going to have in your life.”

But we have to do better, grownups.

We have to remember. We have to go back to those times when we felt that same way, because most of us did. (There were a handful of us who were born at age 30, like, “All right, how do I finish school? I got to finish school and go on with my life, how soon can I do that?” There were a couple of them at my high school who, from day one, were so beyond high school. They were so past dealing with high school trauma and bullshit, high school was just a speedbump for them.)

Most of us actually did go through adolescence. And we went through it hard, in the most dramatic possible fashion. Some of it was legit. I had friends who had no food, friends who were getting hit, friends who had real-fucking-life shit to deal with. And some of it was just . . . drama.

It doesn’t matter which it is when we deal with it as adults. Our response is the same.

We need to remember that, one: this is absolutely real to them. And two . . . they haven’t experienced everything we’ve experienced yet.

Sometimes we place our adult metrics or screens of life experience against theirs and they don’t match up. They can’t. They’re flipping out over this “little tiny thing,” like they got third place in this competition instead of second or first.

We know it’s not a big deal. Trust me, in the grand scheme of things, nobody gives a righteous royal fuck that I was “Best Masque & Gavel Member 1992.” Nobody cares! It doesn’t matter when you’re 47. But at the time? My God! If I hadn’t won that award, it would’ve been so traumatic and so scarring!

. . . And I would’ve gotten over it, because there’s a ton of shit I’ve gotten over, just like you have. But we need to remember this is the first time teens are going through this. The first time they lose the big game, the first time they lose the competition, the first time they get the awful grade, the first time the girl or the boy says “No thank you, I’m not interested.”

We need to remember that and we need to treat them accordingly, speaking to them with love and kindness.

I admit, as an adult, as an instructor, as a parent . . . I sometimes forget, because I have my own problems and I get stressed, and I get snappy, and I say things that I later have to go back and apologize for. But most of the time, my wife and I try very hard to remember that, for whatever it is they are upset about, it’s for real.

My son is 10 and in fourth grade. Recently he and some of his friends got in trouble on the playground for playing Red Light Green Light, and apparently it was a very physical game (because they are 10 year old boys!). The playground monitor said, “No! Stop! You’re not allowed to do that anymore because you’re playing Squid Game!”

To which my wife and I were like, “What is the hell is that?” We had to go look it up, after which, okay yeah, I could see why maybe they would be concerned about it. But it’s not as if that’s what they were really playing! As if this were a life-and-death saga playing out on the playground.

My son came home really upset for having gotten “yelled at” at school. Turns out he wasn’t really yelled at, but the playground monitor didn’t do a good job of expressing her concern, so yes, she was also in the wrong. But he happens to be a very sensitive kid and he was physically, legitimately upset.

What we did not say is, “Son, life’s going to get so much worse, calm down.” You cannot say that to a 10-year-old in the moment. You say, “Oh my God, dude, that really sucks. What happened? Tell me about it. Wow, man, I am so sorry that happened. I’m so sorry you’re upset. Yeah, that really sucks.”

You can come back to it later and have the discussion about how it’s not a big deal, and about how to deal with such a scenario in the future, but you don’t open with that. You don’t lead with that.

This is particularly important the first time your kid comes home with a broken heart.

Man, I am not looking forward to that, because it’s coming. I know it’s coming. You went through it, I went through it, some of us went through it multiple times . . . but the first time, or the first time it’s the big one . . . in my experience, everybody has that one breakup that just fucking crushes you.

The first time they come home with that broken heart, it’s just all the angst and drama that you can possibly imagine, it’s just this Dawson’s Creek and My So-Called Life all over the place, it’s going to be so tempting to say, “Get over it,” or “She isn’t worth it,” or, “You’re too good for him.” Let’s all remember that our first job is to hug them (and maybe get ice cream) and say, “I’m so sorry. I know. I know, and I’m here.”

In other words . . . you sort of make them a mix tape. I see you, I hear you, I’m thinking of you.

Acknowledge that the pain is real. Acknowledge that it is true in this moment and the hurt is fucking real. Remember what it was like that first time, and give your kid or your students that same benefit of understanding.

Don’t worry, the day will come when you can talk about it and have a calm and reasonable discussion about the relationship or about what went wrong or what they can do differently next time, etc. etc. But right then in that moment, man . . . just let them be young people. Remember they are still children, and let them be children. Your brain isn’t even done developing until around age 25; let’s show a little grace.

Don’t dismiss them. Please, I beg you, do not dismiss them.

And maybe, I don’t know . . . make them a mixtape.

Be safe,
~ Tom

P.S.
If you have not yet read Mercy Rule, it’s quite possibly my best novel, and it’s all about the risks of dismissal. If you have a hard time differentiating your characters’ voices, this is an excellent book to study. Notice how the POV characters choose words and rhythms differently from one another.  Take a look at it here. (This is an affiliate link. Because royalties amount to squat.)