Trashed and Scattered

Wiley rounded the corner with his best friend. They’d been feeling the urge to take in some nature, so they’d retreated into the nearest park for a stroll. It was mostly an excuse to smoke cigarettes away from the watchful eyes of Brian’s father. He’d been staying with the Haner family for the better part of a month following a particularly dramatic blow up with his father. Nevertheless, he’d moved on with high spirits and sought refuge with Brian.
It had been such a good time, filled with ruckus nights, that he was reluctant to return home. Everything about his life had felt so very chaotic. His grades were slipping, his attendance record tarnished beyond recognition. It wasn’t that he lacked the intelligence, but rather that he lacked motivation. He couldn’t quite understand the point of disarming his wit to fit into a societal standard. School was an excuse to see his friends; and nothing else.
“I’m just saying we should check it out,” Brian smirked, casting his deep brown gaze up at his tall friend. “Matt says there will be a shit ton of chicks there.”
Wiley rolled his eyes, “I don’t care about chicks.”
“Man,” Brian laughed, nudging his blue-eyed buddy. “If you’re still pining after that kid you grew up with, we seriously need to get your head checked.”
Wiley smiled, “I’m not pining, dude.”
“Oh, Lexi,” Brian teased in his squeakiest voice. “I can’t live without you, Lexi! I’ll swear off all other girls until the day you’re mine!”
Wiley’s face flattened without amusement.
“You need a girlfriend, man,” Brian chuckled.
“No, I don’t,” Wiley offered up simply.
Brian nodded, watching his feet as they walked, “Maybe I could hook you up with Kaylie’s friend Sarah. She’s got a nice rack.”
Wiley snickered, “She does, yeah.”
“That’s my boy!” Brian cheered, wrapping an arm around his brother. “Welcome to the land of the living, big guy.”
Wiley groaned playfully, wiggling out from Brian’s grip. Brian had all too quickly become obsessed with females. It consumed most of his waking thoughts and at the ripe young age of fourteen, he’d already had more girlfriends than he could count. That was hardly Wiley’s experience, though. He made friends easily enough and he’d had a few girls bat their eyelashes at him…He’d just never been interested.
No girl could ever compare to Lexi. Wiley just didn’t see the point in pretending it could be anything to the contrary.
“We’re fourteen, Jim,” Brian smiled. “Now’s the time to start making moves.”
“Making moves,” Wiley muttered. “Who are you?”
Brian laughed, “Just come to the party. I promise you can torment every fuckin’ person there.”
Wiley rose his brows, a distinct grin spreading across his face, “I do love a good torment.”
The boys crossed the street, Brian checked both ways for incoming traffic; Wiley didn’t bother. They have brakes, he’d figured. They slunk along the side of the house until they reached a gate, which Brian reached over to unlatch. Once they were safely nestled in Brian’s backyard once more, they stashed their cigarettes behind the garden hose. It wasn’t the best hiding place but it had worked well enough over the past few weeks.
They emerged to find Brian’s dad stretched out in a lounge chair.
“Howdy, boys!” Brian Senior called to the two young men.
Brian scoffed, “Are you fucking tanning?”
“Language,” Other Brian scolded happily. “And yes, son. I am. Thank you so much for your observation.”
“Your skin’s going to look like leather,” Brian noted, sinking down into a chair across from his lounging father.
Brian Sr rolled his big eyes, “You’re such a buzzkill, you know that? I’m embarrassed to share my name with you.”
Wiley cracked up, letting out a pointed laugh as he collapsed into the chair next to Brian. His hands were restless without a crackling cigarette pressed between them. He would have taken drum sticks to ease the anxiousness but figured without the kit, the sticks were just a tease. He hardly missed anything about his own home—but what he did miss was that drum kit.
“Well who’s fault is that?” the younger Brian shot back with a grin. “I’m bringing honor to the name, old man.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he waved off. “So, what have you boys been up to?”
“Oh, you know,” Brian shrugged.
“This and that,” Wiley added.
Brian Sr widened his eyes, “Off smoking cigarettes again?”
Wiley gasped, drawing back further into the chair, “What? Cigarettes? I’m appalled, sir! How could you even ask us that?”
“For starters,” the parental figure half-laughed, “my son’s holding a damn lighter in his hand.”
Brian cringed, doing his best to palm the lighter into disappearance.
“An embarrassment,” Brian Sr reiterated. “And secondly, you both reek of cigarettes.”
“I’d like to see you prove it was us smoking,” Wiley grinned.
Brian nodded, “Yeah. Maybe we were smoking weed, Dad.”
“You wish you were that cool,” his father huffed.
Wiley shrugged, hands thrust out to the sides, “I guess the jig is up.”
“Don’t tell your stepmother,” Brian Sr instructed with a point to each boy. “She’ll accuse me of being a bad father or something.”
Brian laughed, “Don’t tell my mother.”
“Deal!” he proclaimed.
As the three men settled into a lull in conversation, Wiley reached out to slap at Brian’s chest with the back of his hand. When Brian ignored him, he only increased the frequency of his irritating hits.
“Dude,” Wiley grunted. “Dude.”
Brian finally gave in, laughing wildly as he whipped his head around, “What? What do you want?”
“Go get the smokes,” Wiley grinned.
Brian’s eyes danced between the amusement in Jimmy’s eyes and the judgement in his father’s. He froze with indecision.
“Oh, come on, man,” Wiley laughed. “He already knows!”
Brian Senior nodded, “May as well.”
Brian considered it briefly before skulking off to the garden hose. With his son’s absence, Brian Sr relaxed once more beneath the sun. Wiley stretched his growing legs out before him, kicking off his shoes.
“So,” Older Brian said into the air. “Home tomorrow, huh, Jimbo?”
Wiley nodded, “Yup.”
“It might work to your benefit to go along with your parents sometimes,” Brian offered his piece of fatherly advice. “At least for a while.”
Wiley grumbled inaudibly to himself.
“I just don’t want you to get into trouble, my man,” Brian smiled, glancing down with affection at his son’s best friend.
Jimmy spent a lot of time with his family, which was usually a welcome occurrence. He seemed to bring light to Brian’s life and they got along better than he’d ever gotten along with anyone. Two minutes into their first conversation, Brian knew his son’s friend was of a high caliber. He was sharp as a knife and his sense of humor was mature for his age. He was, for all intents and purposes, very much a part of the Haner family. In the same way that the Sullivans had always taken in his son, he was happy to take Jimmy in whenever both parties needed a break.
Jimmy could be a bit exhausting when he wanted to be. He was always recklessly pushing boundaries, sometimes just for the sake of experimentation. It had a tendency to corrode Barb and Joe’s nerves—and then, inevitably, things would blow up. Brian liked to think of his house as a safe haven for wayward Sullivans. So, when his son had asked if Jimmy could stay for a while, Brian didn’t need to consider it at all.
Brian Jr returned, tossing the cigarette pack into his friend’s lap. He sank back down into his chair, glancing between the two to see if he’d missed anything. Nothing appeared any different, so he grooved back into normalcy.
Wiley reached out for the lighter, which Brian happily gave up.
“Smoking’s bad for your health,” Brian Sr noted, closing his eyes as if it might help the rays of the sun better soak into his skin.
Brian laughed, “So is tanning.”
“Well played,” he laughed without looking.
“We’re thinking of going to a party at Matt’s house tonight,” Younger Brian thought aloud. “That okay?”
Brian Sr shrugged, “Sure, Bri.”
“I’m trying to find Jim a girlfriend,” Brian grinned widely, casting an all-knowing glance over at his friend.
Wiley blew a cloud of smoke from his lungs, giving his head a light shake.
“A girlfriend, huh?” Brian Sr piped up, cracking his eyes open once more. “I was starting to wonder if you were gay, Jim.”
Wiley laughed loudly, “Fuck you.”
“Language.”
“Fuck that,” Wiley smirked.
Brian Sr chuckled, “A girlfriend run…I’ve had my fair share of those.”
“It’s not a girlfriend hunt,” Wiley groaned. “I don’t need a girlfriend. They’re distracting. I have enough trouble not getting distracted without a girlfriend.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Brian Sr smiled, pointing a finger in Wiley’s direction.
Brian rolled his brown eyes, “That’s not why he doesn’t want one. He’s just all obsessed with some girl he used to know.”
“Obsessed?” Older Brian caught with interest. “Tell me more.”
“I’m not obsessed,” Wiley offered limply, the word proving to be a nightmare for his misplaced tongue.
Brian laughed shortly, “Yeah, you fucking are—language, I know—she’s this girl that used to live next door to him.”
“Oh,” his dad nodded. “You mean Peyton Winchester.”
“How do you know that?” Brian and Wiley asked in unison.
Brian Sr rolled his fingertips onto one another, “I know everything, boys.”
The reality was that Peyton’s name had come up quite a bit between Barb and Brian. Jimmy had been going through a rough patch the last few years, which his mother mostly attributed to Jimmy’s lifelong friend up and moving late one night. She was distressed for her son, who seemed to lose interest in everything but his drum kit. The more he’d slave away at the skins, the more worried Barb would grow. She thought it was a blessing when Brian had come into Jimmy’s life, but it hadn’t done much to remedy the lasting effects of Peyton’s leaving. She wasn’t sure her son would ever totally recover from the loss.
So, she’d sought out advice from another parent. She’d asked if Jimmy had ever mentioned Peyton to him—or to Brian. She was trying, despite her failures, to get a sense of her son’s state of mind. He was impossible to read in the best of situations.
“Your dad’s psychic, man,” Wiley muttered quietly to his best friend.
“Anyway,” Brian moved on loudly, blowing passed the strange way his dad always seemed to be three steps ahead. “Jimmy’s obsessed with her.”
“Maybe she’s cute,” Brian Sr shrugged.
Brian laughed, “She was, like, nine.”
“Eleven,” Wiley corrected quickly. “Almost twelve.”
“Oh, sorry,” Brian grunted sarcastically. “Eleven.”
Brian Sr sighed, sitting up straight to properly address the impressionable boys before him. He folded his hands together and dropped them into his lap.
“Sometimes, Brian,” he began. “Women come into our lives and turn our brains into mush. It takes a long time to make it solid again, once they’ve worked their witchy magic. Maybe Jimmy, here, is still recovering from the voodoo.”
Wiley was going to interject about the difference between voodoo and witchcraft but decided it probably didn’t matter.
“And one day,” Brian Sr continued, focusing mostly on his son, “you’ll meet a woman and she’ll turn your brain to mush, too. But hopefully not the same woman. That’s never good.”
“Girlfriends are overrated, dude,” Wiley smirked, stretching his long arms out in front of him. “I’m trying to tell you.”
Brian scoffed, “Kaylie isn’t turning my brain to mush.”
“Then she’s the wrong girl,” his father noted pointedly. “Find the one that makes your knees weak. That’s the one worth obsessing over. Right, Jim?”
Wiley rolled his eyes, refusing to comment further on the situation. He was tired of the Lexi speech; he heard it from Brian constantly. Sometimes he was sure Brian was the one with the obsession. Wiley was just trying to live his life and find his place in the world. His resistance to all things romantic was something he figured would come in time—and if it did, he still figured it would be a lost cause. It wasn’t a matter of obsession but a matter of rationality. He’d already had his brain turned to mush—there wasn’t a brain left for another girl to manipulate.
But he wouldn’t tell Brian that. He couldn’t give him the satisfaction.
“Whatever,” Brian shrugged. “I’m going to find you a girlfriend tonight, Jimmy. Make you forget all about this ridiculous Lexi shit.”
“Fuck off,” Wiley half-laughed.
Brian Sr rolled his eyes, “Seriously, guys? Language.”
As his son lit a cigarette and his son’s best friend stared blankly at him through the haze of his own smoke, Brian figured he’d already lost.
“Oh, fuck it,” he sighed, holding out his palm. “I’ll take one of those.”
At least he’d imparted some of his fatherly wisdom onto their young minds. He told himself this over and over again as the three men smoked outside his California home.

Notes

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