Angst, Anger, and Answers

By Joe Rector

A tough economy leads to job cuts, and Justin Bilbrey and his family must pull up roots to relocate in Brightenberry His overweight body and an overbite are only partially to blame for the a flaming temper with a hair trigger. In addition, he’s a middle child whose older brother is a star athlete and younger sister excels in school and athletics. Life is dark and frustrating for him.

Over the course of his middle school and high school years, Justin grows, learns and transforms into a person who can find the good things in life. Thanks to two friends, Carla and Barry, he overcomes bullying by other students and rage from within. He discovers music, and it becomes the key to his happiness.

Angst, Anger, and Answers is a 40,000 word book that moves quickly and covers many of the problems that children face as they make their ways through the teenage years. It’s a book with which students from grades 6-12 can identify.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joe Rector
• Release date: Nov 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9780983219835

Joe Rector

I spent 30 years teaching high school English to juniors, seniors, and advance placement students before retiring in 2008.. My writing attempts began in 2003 after the death of my older brother, who had always been thought of as the “scribe” of our family. I wrote a weekly column for the Knoxville Focus from 2004 until 2009. I also wrote a weekly community column for the Knoxville News Sentinel for three years from 2005-2008. In June of 2010 I accepted a job as the community editor for the Karns/Hardin Valley Shopper News and work on a part time basis. My wife Amy and I have been married for 36 years and have two grown children, Lacey and Dallas, and a grandson Madden. My work has appeared in eight different Chicken Soup books, as well Low Explosions, an anthology published by the Knoxville Writers’ Guild, and several other magazines and newspapers. Baseball Boys is my first fiction novel. A nonfiction work titled Love the Boy, Love the Game is also ready for publication. Additionally, I have sets of columns on a variety of subjects ready for publication under the title of The Common Is Spectacular, and several of them are available on my blog www.thecommonisspectacular.com.

Book preview

Angst, Anger, and Answers

Joe Rector

Copyright Joe Rector 2013

Published by Joe Rector Publishing at Smashwords

1

The bell rang and officially ended summer vacation. Twelve hundred middle school kids, most of them in new outfits and squeaky-clean tennis shoes, scurried to homeroom classes like a colony of cockroaches when the kitchen light exposes them.

Justin Bilbrey was one student, however, who moved much slower. It was fear that gripped him. His family moved to Brightenberry just two weeks ago. His dad Marcus, who’d been out of work for nearly a year, finally found employment at an insurance agency in town. The salary wasn’t great, but even a pay cut that offered only three quarters of what Marcus Bilbrey had made in his last job was better than the unemployment check he’d been receiving. Now he felt more like a man, a provider for his family.

The Bilbrey’s packed up all their worldly possessions in a large U-Haul truck and drove fifteen hours south to this new town. The family rented a modest house in a declining section of the town. It literally sat on the wrong side of the tracks, the east side of the rails that carried trains filled with coal and boxcars all hours of the day and night. For the first six months that he lived there, Justin never slept through the night. The walls of his bedroom shook when a train sped down the tracks and jarred him awake.

His mom Helen was the glue that held the family together. She was a reserved woman whose best quality was listening. She took time to hear what her children said. Of course, they had no idea that their mother heard a word they said because she rarely commented.

When Helen did speak, her family listened. She became vocal when things seemed out of control or when Marcus made sweeping edicts which were unenforceable but caused plenty of friction between him and his children. On many occasions, her guidance on key matters led the family in the right direction.

That’s how it occurred when a decision on moving to a new town, life, and job faced the family. Marcus’ hesitated about leaving the town in which he’d lived his entire life except for college. He knew well enough that once his family moved that they’d never return. For him, it was hard to give up the old home place and the friends and family that lived just down the road. A move not only to a new place but also into a new culture frightened him. The children sensed his fears and internalized them.

Helen faced an uphill battle. She wasn’t gung-ho about moving to a new life, but she knew their present location offered nothing for her family, both now and in the future. So, she demanded that Marcus talk with her about the situation. In her rational, organized manner, this mom wrote out a list of pro’s and con’s about the move. Then she made her husband vocalize his fears and objections to leaving, and it was then that he realized what must be done, what he had to do as a father, husband, and provider.

Next, the entire family sat down and voiced their feelings. In the end, the parents presented a united front in announcing that the move was definite. They gave the kids enough time to object and whine and plead and cry, but in the end, they quietly explained that no alternative was possible. Mom and dad knew that the move was difficult but also knew that their children were resilient enough to make things work at a new town and new school. Well, not all of them could bounce back so easily. The middle child was the one person who caused them any concern.

Justin’s older brother Britton and his younger sister Alexa completed the Bilbrey family. Britton began his school year as a sophomore at J.D. Harvey High School. Blond hair that lightened in the summer sun and a deep tan accentuated his muscular frame. God blessed him with a six-pack set of abs that rippled when he moved. Girls went gaga over him. In addition to his good looks, Britton’s athletic abilities wowed teens and adults alike. At his previous school, he quarterbacked the football team and played shooting guard on the basketball team. He gave up baseball in favor of track and held his old school’s records in the 100 and 200-meter events. The coaches in those sports licked their chops over the prospects of his joining their teams.

The high school served nearly 2000 students, and although no shortage of boys went out for sports, teams never lived up to expectations. The football team played most of its opponents’ homecoming games, a sure sign that they were bad and offered an opponent an easy W for their records. The basketball team fared better and even won the district title on occasion, but in the school’s history, not one team ever traveled to the state tournaments. Minor sports fared better, but still, no one brought back state titles or trophies for the case.

What coaches hoped was that Britton would ignite a spark in an athletic program that languished in mediocrity. A 6’3" 215-pound athlete just might prove to be the savior for which the school had so long looked. J.D. Harvey High School needed a shot in the arm of some kind. Although sports made up just one component of the school, they were the things around which the community and alumni rallied. Any upswing in it would bring a swelling of pride by students and faculty. A certain good-looking Division-1 college prospect who exuded confidence might just be the dose of medicine that the school and student body needed.

Alexa entered the fifth grade at the Southwood Elementary School. Bright blue eyes looked with wonder at all things in her universe. Like the family’s eldest child, she had blonde hair that fell across her shoulders. However, most days she brushed it back and pulled it into a tight ponytail. Muscular legs and broad shoulders indicated that she could also be a successful athlete in whatever sport she chose.

Her passion in sports was gymnastics. She’d trained from the age of three. When Marcus lost his job, she quit going to the training facility and no longer competed with the team. Instead, she found a sturdy limb on a tree and performed routines she’d designed. Then she put a landscaping timber across two stacks of cinder blocks and worked as if she were on a balance beam. Not once did she complain or cry, a fact that alerted her parents that she was mature beyond her years.

As much as Alexa liked gymnastics, it paled in comparison to school. She’d begun reading shortly after reaching the age of three, and by the time kindergarten rolled around, she was so far ahead that school officials promoted her into the first grade. Even that was too little a challenge, but psychologists worried about placing her in a situation that was more than she could emotionally handle. Her parents enrolled her in a variety of after-school programs designed to challenge her intellectual abilities. Additionally, they invested extra money in computers and software that opened up worlds of academic information to her.

Already Alexa dreamed of going to college and becoming an orthopedic surgeon, and some universities had begun sending information packets to her about schools for gifted students. Such a special student would make any college admissions office attentive to Alexa because a young genius attending classes would be worth untold dollars in publicity. What her parents wanted most for their daughter was happiness and a worry-free childhood. They sought the advice of a bank of psychologist and educators.

All the while, Alexa remained a precocious child who enjoyed the day-to-day occurrences of life. She spent time playing with children her own age and looked forward to becoming an important part of a gymnastics team, as well as an AYSO soccer team. She further drew excitement from making new friends at a new school and community.

Then there was Justin. He wasn’t missing the life at his former home in Farwell, Michigan. Located in Clare County, the town had nearly eight hundred residents. It was no wonder Marcus struggled to provide for a family in a place with an annual income about half the average for Michigan. The big events for Farwell were a July lumberjack festival complete with chain saw carvings, skillet tosses and a greased pig chases. On Labor Day folks gathered for a large carnival and figure-eight demolition derby. The boy considered escaping such a backwoods place to be as close to a miracle as he’d ever gotten.

Justin hated Farwell because the kids picked on him. In fact, the boys in his sixth grade class at the middle school delighted in hassling him on a daily basis. At least one classmate would make a smart comment or push him into a locker or wall. They ostracized him on the playground, and the only times he was chosen for a team was when doing so evened up the sides. No one ever threw him a pass or gave him a chance to shoot a basket during contests. He was invisible to every boy involved in the games.

From the outset, life posed problem after problem for Justin. He was born prematurely and weighed only four pounds, three ounces. The first six weeks of his life were spent in the hospital as his underdeveloped lungs and limbs gained strength. His mom called him the worst baby that ever lived. Until he was more than three months old, Justin squalled as colic cramped his stomach after every meal. For hours on end he cried, and only being held close to someone’s chest quieted him for any length of time.

His physical appearance was also unfortunate. Unlike his brother and sister, he was, to put things simply, an ugly child. The boy’s head appeared too large for the rest of his body. Dull blue eyes were set just a bit too far apart, and one eyelid drooped ever so slightly, but enough to give him the look of a child who struggled with every daily event. His chin looked too small for the rest of his face, and in time, the reason became clear. Justin’s smile in those early years displayed a set of bucked teeth.

Having been born so small, Justin seemed to be trying to make up for lost time. His ferocious appetite was on display at every meal. For breakfast he ate eggs, bacon and three slices of toast lathered in butter and smothered in jelly. A couple of bologna sandwiches with chips made up most of his lunches, and for supper he piled his plate high with any food, other than cucumbers, that his mom set on the table. He’d heard once that even a hog wouldn’t eat a cucumber, and that was enough to keep him from putting one in his mouth. Ironically, he could eat an entire jar of dill pickles at one sitting.

At an early age Justin begged for food. He would stand at his mother’s feet and whine as she prepared meals. Sometimes she couldn’t take any more and would hand him something just to shut him up. One time in a fit of frustration, Helen cut a stick of butter in half and gave him one end. He smiled and squealed with delight before tearing the wrapper from it and stuffing the entire thing in his mouth. Pale yellow drool formed at the corners of his mouth as Justin chewed and swallowed until the butter slid down his garbage disposal of a throat. Other family members gagged as they watched the sight. Justin turned his head up to him mother and said, more pwease!

The pounds jumped on his frame like fleas on a dog’s back. Justin went from being a small, frail looking baby to a Mr. Michelin look alike by the age of six. The pediatrician insisted that Helen