Alive, or Just Breathing

By Travis Hill

Devin Fischer lost both of his parents when he was nine.
His controversial mother was taken from him in a freak accident. His father made him an emotional orphan that same day. Devin's goal is to leave small-town Southern Idaho and the legacy of his mother's sensational death behind. The only obstacles in his path are the last two years of high school, and the many enemies he's made with his quick fists and quicker temper.

Melinda Liddy dreams of the day she can escape from the nightmare her life has become.
Her life has become a bitter tug-of-war between the need to escape from her drunken, abusive father, and her inability to leave her mother behind to face the monster's explosive, unpredictable violence alone. As Melinda struggles to hold on long enough for an academic path, instead of becoming a runaway like her older sister Theresa, she finds a kindred spirit in Devin.

Together, they attempt to navigate the minefield of broken families, high school society, and the chaotic, sometimes confusing emotions that come with falling in love for the first time.

84,600 word novel
Mature themes / language

• Language: English
• Publisher: Travis Hill
• Release date: Dec 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781519905055

Travis Hill

I'm an author in the Pacific Northwest. I live with my five completely worthless but awesome cats. I write stories I want to read that no one else is writing. My mailing list: https://www.angrygames.com Writes: Science Fiction / Fantasy / Horror / Adult Fiction / Drama / Humor

Book preview

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Life never quite ends up how we want it. In some cases, it takes a turn when it should have kept going straight. Sometimes it just keeps turning, spiraling in on itself. I’m not sure how mine got to this point, but it seems like I had no control over any of it. It makes me wonder why we go on, and if living is worth all of the pain and suffering. It makes me wonder if there is a God. But I am like my mother and father. I don’t believe in God.

My parents were openly atheist. From before I was born to when I was nine years old, they were activists, constantly fighting for separation of church and state any time the religious interests tried to implement Creationism or prayer in school. Intelligent Design is what the evangelicals called it, as if it were just another field of scientific study. My mother and father were always on some television show, doing a radio interview, or writing articles for various newspapers across Idaho, trying to combat the push from the devout, and those who weren’t so devout, but more than likely had special interests in pretending to be so.

A number of people looked upon them as champions of the Constitution. However, the majority of Idaho is very conservative, especially rural Idaho, which really means any city other than Boise. My parents lived under a constant bombardment of hatred and venom. Death threats were simply a normal (yet thankfully always harmless) occurrence during heated debates when school boards were trying to make a mockery of science, as well as introduce religious ideals into the various school districts around the state. Ideals that were pointedly one-sided and excluded anyone that wasn’t of the same religious affiliation.

They tried to shield me from it as I grew up, but every once in a while something got through that was directed toward me. I wasn’t bullied in elementary school much, though some kids tried their best to torment me at every opportunity. A few of those kids got their noses bloodied for it. There were many more times I had to explain to my mother why the front of my shirt and the lower half of my face were crusted with blood.

I.

My mother was killed in a freak accident when I was nine years old. She had been driving along the freeway, just south of Portland, to see my Uncle Barry, when a corporate jet that had just taken off from Portland International suffered catastrophic failure in both engines. In less than thirty seconds, it plunged from eight thousand feet, in a nearly vertical dive, straight toward I-5. Somehow, some way, my mother’s Toyota happened to be directly underneath it the moment it slammed into the earth at over three hundred miles per hour.

I’ve never been able to understand how, out of the thousands of vehicles on the road that day, it had to be my mother who took the hit. Therapists spent years from that point on trying to lessen the trauma of being nine years old and having Mom’s goodbye kiss on the forehead as my last memory of the woman who made me oatmeal and Pop-Tarts twelve hours before being snuffed out.

By ten years old I was in a black funk so deep that I nearly suffocated. Boys of that age are supposed to be out playing baseball or having sword fights with broken broom handles and trash can lids, pretending to be knights of old, defending chivalry and rescuing the princess in distress, learning new curse words, and discovering that the thing between the legs is for more than writing names in the snow. Instead, I was filled with anxiety, depression, and bitterness.

My father would ask me a question, and I would scream at him that I wished it had been him that died, not my mother. Inside, I knew it was a lie. I couldn’t remember him ever raising a hand to me. He rarely raised his voice with me, and had always treated me fairly. Unfortunately, he was the closest target, and the things he did (or didn’t do) regularly broke the last failsafe on my temper.

He was more torn up about Mom’s death than I was. It had destroyed an incredibly passionate affair that lasted well into marriage, up to the day she died. I’d catch him sitting in her favorite chair, or at the kitchen table, caressing her favorite book, scarf, whatever object of hers that was a reminder of their time together. The tears would stream down his face, and his shoulders would tremble as he remembered some moment or other from their past.

Instead of feeling sorry for him, I felt immense rage. I would fantasize about grabbing the nearest heavy object and smashing it into the back of his head. Sometimes it stemmed from a blinding rage, sometimes from compassion to end his pain and send him off to meet my mother in an afterlife that neither believed in. Mostly it was selfishness. I’d had my entire childhood stolen from me at nine years of age, never to recover any of it again. Mom’s death had stolen my father from me as well.

I became the subject of constant whispering, pointing, gossiping. Shrouded stares, pretending to look at someone or something else would turn into challenges more often than not. If my mother’s death had happened when I was a teenager, I might have been able to use it to my advantage to get laid by sympathetic girls who were full of new, exciting, and confusing emotions that come along with puberty. Instead, I had to put up with being a social pariah in the eyes of the other kids around me, not to mention the syrupy condolences piled on by the adults who remembered my mother’s sensational exit from the world. The adults that didn’t believe she was in league with Satan, anyway. I’d gone from the bitch’s kid to the dead bitch’s kid in the eyes and hushed tones of the ones who had moral and philosophical views that were the polar opposite of my mother’s.

They’d whisper to each other when they thought I couldn’t hear them. They thought I didn’t see the nudges and stealthy pointing. I could only imagine the things they said when I wasn’t around. The worst ones were the religious types who took every opportunity to announce to anyone within earshot, always with me standing within arm’s length of them, that my mother had been righteously punished by The Lord. That she was nothing but a God-less whore. During particularly nasty tirades, it turned into too bad you and your God-less father weren’t in the car with her that day. They always seemed to make it a two syllable word. God-less. And they always sounded pious and smug, like a television evangelist.

Even moving away from Twin Falls to Presland, forty miles to the northwest, didn’t stop the whispering and taunting. Information of that sort is like your credit report, following you everywhere you go, especially in the small town network of rural Idaho. No matter where I went to school, everyone seemed to know the story of my mother. The ones who didn’t know heard through the grapevine. Like any good grapevine, the story became more distorted the further it spread. I suppose when God smites your high-profile, God-less mother in such a spectacular fashion, the freakish nature of it is too interesting to ignore.

II.

I didn’t want to be an outcast, so I attempted to socialize by trying out for most of the sports teams. I was athletic, and good at most sports thanks to the time spent practicing with my father before Mom died. I made the football team in ninth grade, but that only lasted about half of a season. I quit the team, or got kicked off, depending on who tells the story, after a meltdown during practice. The meltdown ended with me serving a five-day suspension and receiving four stitches to close a cut under my right eye.

Basketball lasted until the first game, when we played the Twin Falls sophomore squad. Kevin Preston decided to preach at me whenever we were on the court together, telling me I was going to burn in hell, that I would get mine in the end, just like my God-less whore of a mother did. Kevin didn’t keep his hatred for me and my family, especially my mother, a secret. His father, Garand Michael Preston, a city councilman and retired pastor, had tangled with my mother twice, and lost both times, when he’d attempted to push a religious agenda through without a public hearing. Kevin left a fair amount of blood on the parquet in the second quarter, and I left school for another five days of vacation. I also left my uniform on Coach Jensen’s desk at his request.

Almost everyone left me alone after tenth grade. I’d accrued a reputation of someone that would scrap without warning. I didn’t have a reputation as a badass by any means. Other than a grudging respect from some that I’d already tangled with, I was mostly considered a borderline psychotic. When I put Gerald Merritt in a coma and broke Ken Sharps’ jaw in four places before making him eat a half dozen of his own teeth, my peers no longer considered me a borderline case. But what else could anyone expect from a God-less freak like me? Violent retaliation was the only thing I seemed to be good at.

*****

My reputation was carved in stone after the incident at the practice field behind the high school. I was warming up on the mound while Dave Grell squatted behind home plate. Gerald made a comment that caused Ken, Larry Livingston, and Maury Pritchard to break out into exaggerated guffaws near first base. I would have tried to ignore it if all four hadn’t been staring at me the entire time. My mind burned with hate toward the four, since I could easily guess the subject of their fun. As I stood there, fists clenched, anger blazing, Gerald loudly informed me that it was sad that my mother wasn’t around to suck off the entire baseball team, as was her custom every Spring.

That’s all it took for me to drop my mitt and rush them. Maury and Gerald were surprised, but Ken and Larry looked ready for it. Maury was the slowest to react, and the closest to me. I veered slightly left toward him, my arm cocked back as far as I could get it, my scream of fury preceding me. Near-blackout rage formed my fist into a concrete wrecking ball, ready to demolish his head like it was a condemned building. I pivoted at the last second, and surprised Ken when my fist rocketed into his jaw with a sickening crack. His jawbone shattered, causing the bottom half of his face to sag into a grotesque mask of pain and fear. I didn’t feel it then, but two bones in my own hand had fractured as well.

I was wild with rage and immediately turned toward Larry. Larry took one look at Ken, then my face, then my fist as it homed in on his own face. He tried to duck, but fell down awkwardly. The way he fell would have been funny in any other situation, but it only enraged me further as I completely missed him and tripped over his legs on my follow-through. He got to his knees, then his feet, then got his cleats churning up turf as he took off toward the gymnasium. I looked back to the other three behind me.

Ken screamed through a pulverized jaw as he rolled around on the grass, trying to hold the lower half of it to his face. Maury stood frozen, staring in shock at Ken. Gerald took advantage of my trip to the earth and jumped on my back, fists swinging. He shouted something into my ears, but I couldn’t hear anything except a high-pitched whistle. The only coherent thought I had centered around killing him, finishing off Ken, and then possibly Maury, if Maury was stupid enough to stick around.

Full of adrenaline and rage, I stood up with Gerald clinging to my back, one arm locked like a vice around my neck, the other ending in a fist that constantly crashed into my ear and skull. It must have been an impressive sight to watch me stand straight up off the ground with a guy twenty pounds heavier than me attached to my backside. I reached up with my right arm, found the back of Gerald’s neck, and heaved forward. I kicked him in the mouth the instant he slammed into the dirt along the first base line. The toe of my cleats struck his temple multiple times as he tried to protect his face. I felt my foot connect solidly with something softer than skull, and the light went out of his eyes, taking the fight with it. I kicked him once more in the back of his head before turning to take care of Maury.

By then, Maury had burned a trail back to the gym in the same fashion as Larry. I approached Ken, who still screamed incoherently as he rolled around on the grass. I knelt down and grabbed him by the shoulder to stop his thrashing. Fear twisted his broken face when he realized through the fog of pain that it was me.

Fuck you, I said.

I cocked my fist back then drove it into Ken’s mouth. I felt his front teeth snap off, his lips, mouth, and my fist a bloody mess. Ken choked and turned his head to the side and spat blood and teeth out through a muted scream. He whimpered a while as his whole body convulsed and tears streamed from his eyes. I decided to hit him again, but as I raised my fist for a final game over blow, he gurgled out another broken tooth.

My rage immediately dissipated. I stood up, and blinked rapidly. My right hand was on fire. I looked down at it to see a ragged gash between my middle and index finger, blood pouring from it like a swollen river overflowing its banks. I turned around slowly, as if trying to remember where I was, what was happening. The rest of the team stood silent, transfixed by the carnage. They looked scared.

I’ll murder the next motherfucker who says a word about my mother, I said in a calm voice that sounded like it had emanated from someone else’s mouth.

Most of them dropped their eyes, knowing they were guilty of it at some point in the past. A couple of them looked toward the gym, where Coach Malley and Coach Thomas ran at full speed toward us. I took one last look around before I walked to the gym. The torrent of blood rushing out of the deep cut between my fingers was nothing compared to the grinding, flaring pain of the shattered bones surrounding it.

What the hell is going on, Devin? Coach Malley asked as they flew by, but I didn’t answer, didn’t even look at them.

*****

I had fully showered and dressed, a white undershirt wrapped around my broken and still-bleeding hand, when the police arrived. One read me my rights while the other shouted about how I might have killed Gerald Merritt and Ken Sharps. Hollow, uncaring, unfeeling, I said nothing. They had barely secured me in handcuffs when a detective showed up and wedged his way between the officers.

Detective Michael Sharps of the Presland Police Department stood before me. Ken’s father asked the officers if I had been read my rights, and when they affirmed I had, he grabbed me by the left arm and gave it a rough jerk, nearly dislocating my shoulder. Detective Sharps gave my arm a second hard yank that smashed me face-first into a locker. My nose exploded in a bloody mess from the impact. Three of my teeth broke off at the gums as my mouth collided with the Schlage combination lock. I blacked out, and if Detective Sharps hadn’t maintained his death-grip on my left arm, my temple might have had a meeting with the sharp corner of the bench. I’m sure that he, and many others, would have felt a lot better about the situation if that had happened.

III.

Detective Sharps got fired from the department, but I don’t begrudge what he did. I deserved it as payback. The last I heard of Detective Sharps, he was serving time in county on his eighth or ninth DUI. He never recovered from what happened to his son that day. Or maybe it was the civil lawsuit my father brought against him and the Presland Police Department that ended up getting settled out of court.

He had to pay the consequences of his actions, the same as I did. An editorial in the local newspaper vilified me for what I’d done to two classmates, and eviscerated Detective Sharps for crossing the line from professionalism to brutality. That particular editorial received more hate and disagreement from reader responses than any other editorial in the newspaper’s history. According to most who wrote back in a furor, Detective Sharps should have been given a medal, while I should have been dragged through the streets until I was dead. So much for Christian love and forgiveness.

Ken avoided me after he got out of the hospital in Seattle, where he’d had to go to a specialist for his surgery. Gerald Merritt, on the other hand, stayed in a coma for almost eight months before waking up one Saturday evening in January. He couldn’t remember what had happened to him. I heard, through the grapevine, that he’d freaked out about being hooked up to life support machines in a Salt Lake City hospital. Gerald and his family never came back to Presland. It was probably a good thing for them as well as for me. If he had died or been taken off of life support, I would have faced a murder charge.

*****

I faced two counts of aggravated battery, which was down from four counts of attempted murder, among a slew of others the police initially charged me with. My father hired one of the most respected lawyers in town. Somehow, he cut a deal with the state, and I ended up pleading to two counts of aggravated battery, both felonies. I was sentenced to four days in juvenile detention, with fifty-six days suspended, assuming I could make it through six months of juvenile probation and a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation. Almost every newspaper in the state, from Bonner’s Ferry to Idaho Falls, splashed headlines expressing their outrage in fonts so large they hurt the eyes. Some of the smaller print made sure everyone knew that the day I turned eighteen, the conviction would get wiped away, as if to alert readers that it was their duty to never let me forget it, not even thirty years down the road.

After I entered a final plea of No Contest and was sentenced, my father and I rarely spoke, which wasn’t all that unusual by then. I thanked him for the attorney, and for standing by me, but he looked ashamed, embarrassed. I wasn’t sure if it was shame and embarrassment over what I’d done, or over the fact that I was not the son he remembered. Maybe he was ashamed that all of the head doctors and therapists hadn’t been able to cure me of my problems that stemmed from Mom’s death.

Or maybe he decided that I hated him, somehow blamed him for her death. Maybe he blamed himself for being selfish and grieving so long, so hard, that he thought he‘d abandoned me and my own grief, birthing the monster that inhabited his son’s body. Maybe his shame was in his inability to put aside his loss and make a proper emotional connection with me. I know my father loved me. He simply hadn’t been able to overcome the grief of losing his one true love. A grief that was compounded by the fear of losing his son. It’s painful when someone you love slips away, beyond reach. It’s torture to stand by and watch it happen. We spent years torturing each other without even acknowledging each other’s existence.

Gone were the days of playing catch in the back yard, going to the high school football games, traveling to Boise to watch the minor league hockey teams beat the hell out of each other. For us, there were no more barbecues, no more curling up with Mom on the big couch on Saturday nights to watch whatever sappy movie they’d rented. No more quizzing me on whatever test I was studying for that week. No more ruffling my hair and telling me I was the best player on my Little League team. Those days were already fleeting, at best, within days after Mom’s death, and within a couple of months, they were like ancient memories. They became the kind of stuff you’d read about in a diary from a thousand years ago.

We avoided one another, strangers in the same house, and silently divided it into two halves. His bedroom and the living room were on one side, my bedroom and the family room on the other, with the kitchen acting as some sort of domestic DMZ in the middle. He knew when I was in the kitchen, and avoided it, the same as I did when he was around. My father’s favorite strategy for avoiding me was to stay at work until late at night.

I didn’t know how I could take away his pain, anymore than he knew how to take mine from me, so we both chose to avoid the issue altogether. I never blamed him for Mom leaving us alone together, even though I had accused him of it often enough. How could I truly blame him for a plane falling out of the sky and hitting one car, her car, out of hundreds of thousands that traveled that freeway every single day? Why did it have to be the one day that Mom was driving through Portland? I could barely begin to imagine how much he loved her. It took him almost a decade to get over her death. It took him almost that long to finally begin to break out of his own personal hell.

I know my father loved my mother more than anything, but I didn’t understand how strong such a love can be until I met Melinda Liddy in the early days of my junior year. I think I have a pretty good idea of what he felt then, and still feels now. What we both will always feel about the one that the romantic stories tell us is our one true love.

IV.

Melinda Liddy was one of the few girls in school who would talk to me, and not just to mess with me by pretending to like me. I first set eyes on her the same year I put Gerald in a coma and made Ken suck cheeseburgers through a straw for a couple of months. She’d greet me with an awkward hello if anyone else was around. If no one else was there to judge her for talking to a loser like me, she’d add a smile to the greeting.

The first time I interacted with her with more than an awkward greeting was fourth period English, in early October. I sat behind her for no reason other than it was the last seat in the row. With the crap I’d put up with since I was nine, I’d decided that I would always have my back to the wall, able to see everything going on in front of me, so I couldn’t be ambushed from behind. I wasn’t completely paranoid, but I had been waylaid a few times before.

Five weeks into my junior year, I walked in and sat down behind Melinda, my headphones blasting Judas Priest. Yari McCulloch and his dumb, fat friend Melvin Whittier were on either side of Melinda, and both messed around with her in the typical fashion of teenage boys in the midst of puberty. At first it seemed good-natured, but with losers who can’t get laid outside of their own masturbatory fantasies, especially around radiant, beautiful girls that they know they wouldn’t have a chance with if they were the last two idiots on the planet, it somehow turned ugly.

All three of them were goofing around one moment. The next, even though I couldn’t see her face from where I sat behind her, nor hear anything but Rob Halford still screeching through my headphones, I could see her shoulders tense, her body language change. The looks on the two idiot faces tormenting her had morphed from fun and games to predatory and dangerous. I pushed the Pause button on my Walkman, and pulled the headphones down to hang around my neck. I normally didn’t get entangled in other people’s nonsense. Freaks have no friends, and are almost always unwelcome poking their God-less noses in something that doesn’t concern them. Since I was socially invisible, most people pretended I didn’t exist. Since I didn’t exist, I was a regular witness to the uglier side of high school life.

Melvin’s laugh was a huffing, chortling, pig-snort sound, which was his normal laugh. Yari had an annoying