Chapter One: Still no name :( - July 2, 2011
AN: Lee...how are you one of my characters? So...crude...>_<
Although Hiseville is the name of an actual town in Kentucky, I've never visited it nor have any experience living there. My Hiseville is fictitious. Also, to my knowledge, there is no city in Iowa named Hemaca. ;)
Chapter One
“I wanna be a cockroach.”
“Ugh! Why?!”
Lee rolled over an punched me lightly on the shoulder. “So I could survive the apocalypse, of course.”
It was an early afternoon in July, and as the temperature slipped closer to a hundred degrees, Lee, Carol and I had snuck outside to play one of our favorite games. We would take turns stating who, what, or where we would rather be than who, what, and where we were. The list was pretty long by now.
“Ma says roaches are disease-spreaders,” Carol murmured sleepily from the other side of the old redwood we were laying under. “She says they’s the reason so many people in town got fever this year.”
“Oh yeah? That’s an added bonus.” Lee grinned. “Hey Lie, maybe I could infect your sis. Get her out of your hair for a while?”
“Rather you didn’t.” I always felt uncomfortable when talk turned to my sister. I got these odd twinges-not of protectiveness, which i should have felt, but of embarrassment, with guilt for feeling ashamed of her mixed in. My sister wasn’t a bad person, but she trusted few people, and I wasn’t one of them.
I changed the subject. “My turn.”
I knew what my wish was. I felt it every time I looked out my window at night and saw absolute death, a ghost town in the making, and every morning when I woke up and looked again and nothing had changed. I wanted a window with an ever-rolling view, where there were always new people to meet and new streets to walk down and new foods to try. I wanted a world that could change as quickly as I changed.
“I want to be a bird.”
Lee cracked up laughing. I slapped his arm.
“I didn’t laugh at you, Mr. Roach!!”
“You want to be a bird? Birds have shit for brains.” He was still laughing. “You want to have shit for brains?”
“Cockroaches don’t even have brains that you could see without a microscope,” I retaliated. “They’re just like you that way.”
Carol, as usual, tried to be a peacemaker. “Why do you wanna be a bird, Aliza?”
“I want to fly,” I said quickly, fending off pokes from Lee. “I want to get out of here. I want to see the world. If I had wings, I’d be over some ocean in...in China, or Africa, or anywhere else except for this useless, run-down pile of-”
Lee’s hand clapped over my mouth. “Now, now. A lady shouldn’t have a potty mouth.” He turned to Carol. “What’s your wish, Care?”
“My mouth pales in comparison to yours,” I muttered around his fingers. I don’t know if he heard me.
There was a moment of quiet, of whispering leaves and the sound of the creek in the distance, before Carol answered. “I want to be a doctor. If I were a doctor, I could help Ben.”
The smile withered off of Lee's face. My spirits sank. Carol's little brother had leukemia. He had been sick for over a year, but his parents were too poor, and had too many children, to afford treatment. Little Benny’s situation was fast dissolving from tragic to hopeless, and every time someone brought up his name in conversation, you could count on hearing sympathetic groans from all the onlookers.
My heart fell even farther when I looked up at Lee. His face, freckled and soft as it was, was designed more for laughter than anger. But at that moment, I could have sworn the fires behind his eyes would have burned through steel.
“If birds have shit for brains, doctors have shit for a heart.” He had startled Carol. I could hear her sitting up, rustling about in the grass, and a moment later she came crawling cautiously round the trunk to sit with us. Lee just kept on talking. “They do what they do for money, nothing else, or they’d be helping fifty people with fever and a six-year-old boy with a deadly blood disease instead of some filthy rich stockbroker who has a wart on the bottom of his foot or something. Ya know what? This town hasn’t had a decent doctor living here in over twenty years...not because the world’s short on doctors, but because they. Don’t. Care. They don’t give a rat’s ass about some little hick town down south...population one hundred ninety-five, for Christ’s sake...one hundred ninety-five people who need a lot more help than they’re getting.”
He’d finished ranting but continued to glare, brows knitted. Carol looked a little shell-shocked. I guess I felt the same. Lee, like me, had always harbored a secret hate for our “hick town.” It was what drew us together. This was the first I’d heard about his resentment toward doctors, though. However, his uncharacteristic outburst didn’t worry me. We told each other everything. I knew I would figure it out soon enough...
-Alex Rush