Evergreen by Clifford Beck - HTML preview

Chapter 6

The Evergreen school system consisted of a single brick building placed just inside the edge of town. By no means, a one-room schoolhouse, the building was two stories of administrative offices and classrooms. There was no football team. No cheerleading squad or special field days. Not to say the young people of Evergreen didn’t receive a quality education. The school was obligated by the state of Maine to teach the same material given by every other school. However, in a lumbering town, the essentials were more than enough and far less costly than the extravagance of extracurricular activities.

Katie excelled in English and social studies and thought about going on to college to study creative writing. But, Evergreen was her home. It was where she belonged and with her father being the sole breadwinner, she knew that after graduation a job would be necessary. Outside of Evergreen, she and her father would be largely unskilled labor, subject to the anchor of minimum wage and fast food restaurants. This was something neither of them wanted. In fact, they, like many in Evergreen, wanted nothing to do with the outside world. Even the internet had been shunned and most of the town’s residents. Thus, by collective decision, the people of Evergreen chose to remain frozen in something of a mountainside pastoral dream. A place where life was uncomplicated and in spite of Katie’s ideas for higher learning, she refused to leave the sanctuary Evergreen provided. Instead, she would go to the school’s library. Reading and become her passion and her focus was on literature. Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, the Greek plays. She could not read enough, and she found no literature boring. Katie discovered the madness to the method. The reason why writers, of any era, worked their craft and it didn’t take long for her to be bitten by the bug - to feel its inky venom coursing through her soul. To become possessed by the obsession to create what worlds lay in the pit of imagination, exorcizing all manner of light and darkness from every corner of the psyche. Goodness, evil, logic, chaos. One day, it simply turned itself on, showing its maddening light from within her like a beacon in a dark distant ocean. She carried a notepad wherever she went and was never without it. She also came to understand that the principal weapons of change are the pen and human will.

But, Katie was a strong person. She had to be. Growing up without her mother meant taking on responsibilities not typical of the average teenager. Until she graduated and took a full-time position at the mill, Katie worked a day here and there in the mill’s secretarial pool. She realized that her father’s income brought them in just under the poverty line and was more than willing to contribute to the family finances. So, while her peers were out doing what high school students did, Katie was either working in the mill, reading or writing. She had led an almost nonexistent childhood, due to her mother’s death. There was, however, one bright spot in her life. Bobby. They met in elementary school and became fast friends. Bobby wasn’t nearly as strong as Katie and was an almost constant target of bullying. As a result, he lived with the fear of criticism and confrontation. But, Katie always seemed to be there to stick up for him, and on more than one occasion, tried to teach him how to throw a punch. “That’s all you need,” she’d say. “Just one solid punch and people will leave you alone.”

But, even after demonstrating it more than once on the school bully, Bobby couldn’t bring himself to take the swing. He didn’t have Katie’s strength and courage and thus, lived his life as a doormat, allowing himself to be stepped on by whoever saw him as an easy mark.

The idea of higher education eluded him. He had simply never considered it. Enlistment in the military had crossed his mind but after seeing videos of Army basic training in high school, he decided to remain within the sheltering mountainscape of Evergreen, away from the harshness and unpredictability of the world. He came to believe that no real harm would ever come to him, so long as he stayed put. But, his fearful nature didn’t prevent Katie from taking their friendship a small step further and given her personality, it was she who quickly became the aggressor. It started with a hug; a kiss on the cheek; a touch of the hand. She discovered that she had always been attracted to him on some level but had now only become aware of it. However, infatuation alone is not enough unless it is experienced through both mind and body. But, Katie was not quite ready for that and Bobby was anything but confident when it came to girls. However, that would someday change. Yet for the time being, Bobby was, perhaps, a bit more behind the ball than other young men his age.