Beethy

Shane wasn’t good at much, but he sure was a good gridball defensive lineman.

It was his build, really. Stocky, bottom heavy, and difficult to knock down. The guys on his high school team called him “the wall,” and he took pride in that.

He tended to lean on the skill, excusing his poor grades with claims that he wouldn’t need them once recruiters started catching onto him, and to an extent that was true. Despite his performance in all of the academic aspects of High School, he was offered a hefty scholarship from a state university to play on their team. From there, Shane hoped to make it pro. He would put his all into his college gridball career, and he often dreamed of the day he would be signing his fan’s jerseys.

That dream lasted for about two months.

It was his first home game when it happened. A night game. Hundreds of screaming students in the stands all adorned with the color of his jersey, artificial spotlights causing a trickle of sweat down his forehead, and the announcers chatter vibrating in his ears. Shane’s mother was in the crowd somewhere, having made the drive to see him play. Mark and Brenda were there too. On that night, he became acutely aware of the eyes on him– the eyes expecting him to do good.

He was all too preoccupied with the situation when the opposing team’s handler came running towards him. Shane stood with his knees slightly bent as he always did, bracing for the inevitable impact as he blocked the man’s path. What Shane didn’t expect was his opponent's sudden cut to the left, too quick for him to react in any meaningful way. The handler made it past him, but still managed a hard check to Shane’s entire right side as he went.

Shane’s entire body twisted with the impact, but his right foot stayed planted on the turf.

He felt a pop.

Maybe he heard a pop.

And the pain in his knee had him collapsing to the ground.

Shane doesn't remember much from that night, but he clearly remembered the sound of the crowd as they realized he had been injured. Despite the ringing in his ears, the burning in his leg, and the tightness of his lungs, he could hear the cheers and chatter die down to an eerie muted murmur.

A torn ACL, and yet the eyes on him remained at the forefront of his mind.

His knee would never fully recover. Something about his mothers poor insurance made it so he got the surgery a bit too late. He was a lot easier to knock down after his injury, so his coach “regretfully” made the decision to let him go.

One thing Shane never quite understood about the general population was their obsession with clothing. Well, presentable clothing.

To him, clothes were nothing more than a sort of armor that saved the rest of the world from having to look at your body. They were yet another menial decision he had to make each hungover morning before work, another thing that people judged you by.

Shane looked at the way people dressed in town, and it confused him. Take Elliott, for example. The guy wore layer upon layer of tight clothing to the point where he constantly looked like he was holding in his breath. For Shane, life was uncomfortable enough as is. He couldn’t fathom someone making the conscious decision to make it all worse just for vanities sake.

Because of this, Shane dressed easily. The same rotation of wrinkled t-shirts, old jerseys, khaki shorts, sweatpants, and Jojo-distributed zip-ups adorned his messy closet and made his life just that much less grating.

There was a very small selection of pieces in Shane’s clothing collection that had any actual value to him, one of those being his pair of lime-green crocs.

They were ugly as shit and Shane was fully aware of that, but they had been a birthday gift from Marnie and Jas. When Shane unwrapped them, Jas had squealed in delight and began musing about how silly they were because they looked like cheese. Marnie on the other hand shot Shane a look that he translated to her idea, not mine.

The shoes sat in the bottom of the closet for a while, until Jas’ “when are you going to wear your cheese shoes?” became persistent enough to have Shane slipping them on to join her during her weekly jumproping session outside. And with the way she smiled and laughed when he wore them, he couldn’t help but smile back.

“C’mon, just try a little bit! I didn’t steal it from the fridge for nothing!”

Shane stared hesitantly at his best friend's outstretched arm, hand clutching a blue Joja-branded can of beer. The same kind his dad used to drink before his “absence,” as his mother called it. It was open already, with Mark having taken a sip just a moment ago. Shane knew him well enough to know he was pretending to like it.

“I don’t know, if your parents see it we’re gonna get in trouble.” He continued staring at the can, envisioning the look on his mothers face if she had found out he had been drinking “the shit that ruined her marriage” (again, her words).

Mark continued holding the can up towards him.. “My parents are totally asleep. Besides, we’re thirteen. Teenagers– like– get drunk at sleepovers.”

Shane would be lying if he said he wasn’t the least bit curious. It was just one sip, right?

So he sighed, grabbing the can and expecting cold but feeling lukewarm from the time it had been hiding in Mark’s pillowcase.

“Yes!” Mark pumped his fist enthusiastically.

Shane shook his head. “I just wanna taste it.” He put the metal to his lips, the slightly sour smell wafting unpleasantly through his nose. As Mark watched eagerly, Shane tipped his head back and allowed the unfavorably temperate liquid to trickle onto his tongue.

It was bitter, slightly sour, and the taste of it all shot straight to the back of his throat in a manner that made a shiver run down his body and a hacking cough escape his throat. Quite frankly, it was disgusting. At least to 13 year old Joja-Cola addicted Shane.

Mark began to laugh at his reaction, and Shane put the can down, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “That was gross,” He remarked.

“I liked it, guess that makes me more of a man than you.” Mark shrugged, smirking at him.

Shane balled his fist and gave him a light punch on the shoulder. “You’re such a liar!”

Mark’s smirk broke into a more sheepish grin. “Yeah– fine– it was gross.”

The two boys then broke into a fit of laughter, mocking the others’ reaction to the beer. When it died down, Mark dumped the rest of the liquid into the toilet, flushed it, and buried the can in the trash bin.

“I’ll probably never have beer again” Shane thought to himself as he watched the liquid disappear down the drain.

…

“Seriously, you’re not gonna have any? You said last year that it was the only thing that made these parties bearable.”

Shane regarded the beer in Sam’s hand with a scowl. “No.”

The truth was that Shane wanted one. Desperately. It was the oh-so-voluntary JojaCo. Winter Star party that he had come to dread with every year he had worked there, and he had kicked a certain habit barely a month prior. The situations didn’t quite mesh well, as Shane came to realize.

Alcohol was everywhere. In the hands of every person he was forced to have a grating conversation with. In every half-empty cup carelessly left on the plastic-lined tables. In bowls, in glasses, in cans, and in bottles. It was all Shane seemed to see.

Most importantly, alcohol was in Sam's hand, and it was being offered to Shane. And he wanted one.

Sam cocked his head at him. “Really? You know it’s free, right?”

Of course Shane knew it was free (not that any cost had stopped him before). He knew he could just take it, drink the damn thing and scratch the itch in his brain and just be done with this whole facade of betterness.

But he didn’t. Despite every synapse in his body begging him otherwise, he didn’t.

“Fuck, Sam. I’m gonna tell you something, and you’re not gonna make a big deal about it. ‘Kay?” Shane spoke quietly, teeth gritted and hand balled in a fist.

“Okay?” Sam finally lowered the can, and Shane felt just a bit more breath come into his lungs.

“I’m sober now.” He found it almost difficult to say out loud, trying to formulate the words as matter-of-factly as he could.

Shane saw how Sam’s eyes lit up, how he smiled and opened his mouth wide to say something, and how he paused for a moment to correct the look of overexcitement on his face. “That’s great, man!” His eyes then darted to the beer in his hand, his face dropping. “Shit, sorry for that. I didn’t know.”

Shane shook his head. “S’fine. I get it.”

“Here, Lemme grab you a JojaCola to make up for it!” Shane didn’t particularly want that, but Sam was already rushing away before he could protest.

Shane often disappointed people. He just did.

It was a long running thread throughout his life, starting somewhere with his mother seeing his father in his eyes and ending sometime last week when Marnie found him passed on the floor of his bedroom, too drunk to make it into his bed the previous night.

He didn’t like doing it, it wasn’t like he reveled in the way people would look at him when he once again failed to reach their expectations, but something in him just couldn’t muster up the strength to care.

Shane found his remedy to his constant perceived failures somewhere between losing his best friends and moving to Pelican Town; if people didn’t have high standards for him, how could he disappoint them? Hell, it wasn’t the strangers around him that shook their heads when he spent the day in his room completely unresponsive, it was only the people who knew he could do better.

So why let people know he could do better?

Pelican town was a fresh start for him. Nobody knew him there aside from his aunt, and it was perfect. Sure, a single guy in his thirties with a child in tow drew some attention, but it was so easy for Shane to just brush it all off. A rude word here, a dirty look there, and suddenly nobody bothered with him and he was free to exist in those suffocating walls he put up for himself. Free to exist unchained, floating wherever his sadistically impulsive brain took him with no consequence. Free to just be

And then came the farmer.

Shane had never seen someone so inexplicably indifferent to his attempts at pushing them away. Angry glances and rude remarks did nothing for them. He could tell them to fuck right off and they’d still be running up to him the next morning with a pepper in hand and a greeting just as enthusiastic as the day before.

It was like they could see his walls, or rather see right through them. All they saw was his soft underbelly, the one that Shane could feel them getting closer and closer to. All Shane could think about was how he would one day disappoint them too.

Harvey never wanted to leave home for college. He was comfortable in his childhood bedroom, where his model plane collection flew over his head, he could play his jazz music as loud as he wanted, and his parents were just steps away to tell him what a good job he was doing. He didn’t want a new space, new surroundings, new people to look at him the way they always did for just being himself. But when his father insisted that Zuzu City University was the best place to be for future doctors, Harvey soon found himself on a train, arms filled with bags containing whatever comforts he could manage from home (as well as his lexapro).