Justin

Justin was staring out the window on that Monday morning, as he usually did on Monday mornings. As he usually did most mornings. His so-called friends rattled a vending machine behind him. It was the same as every other Monday morning. The same as every morning.

‘Don’t you ever get tired of always doing the same meaningless things, over and over again?’ he would ask them. But he would get no answer for he asked them only in his mind. He lacked the courage to confront them. Not only were they the only friends he had but they were also much taller and stronger than him. Justin doubted they actually considered him a friend but what choice did he have? In such a small town, either you were with them or against them. But how had it come to this? How had he become reduced to pretend relationships with people he despised, he  many times wondered. This is how.

Justin’s parents weren’t very close. They weren’t close at all. Product of a back-seat accident, Justin was raised by his grandmother after his mother fled town a couple of years after he was born. Till this day she still wrote to him but Justin never replied and he knew she would never come back.

Justin’s grandmother was a kind middle-aged woman, except when she got to drinking and then Justin hid the glasses around the house because, according to his grandmother, no self-respecting woman, no matter how desperate, should ever be seen sipping from the neck of a bottle.

At school things were always tough for Justin. He'd always been very thin, very pale and had always had a very substantial nose. It wasn’t offensive but it had a personality of its own. Unfortunately, intelligence or understanding didn’t roar a plenty in Justin’s little backwater town and so his nose was a deterrent.

‘Stu,’ they used to call him. ‘Stu, go do something silly to entertain us,’ they would say, knowing his name was Justin. Stu was for “stupid” and no, Justin was not proud of his nickname in the slightest. But fate had donned him with it and he accepted it, not having the mental or intestinal fortitude to do otherwise. But Justin was anything but stupid; he was just misunderstood.

One day, he lost himself staring out a window for some time, the very same window through which he was staring through now. The same friends, some years younger and fussing over a different vending machine. During the previous night, the town’s lake had frozen over. It had been a relentlessly cold night and the water had begun to ice as the families had sat down for dinner. Still, authorities dimmed the ice to be, as of yet, too thin for the practice of popular ice sports. But Margaret, a girl that all deemed from that day on, as a downright ninny, ascertained that she knew better than whoever it was that had the job of stating when the lake was safe for skating on. So off she went to skate on it.

And what a marvelous skater she was. She twirled and glided atop her silvery skates, her long wool skirt whirled around her, hypnotizing her sole spectator. Justin was enjoying her performance and  assessing Margaret in general when, suddenly, she stopped on her skates and opened her arms wide. She looked veritably upset, worried even, at least as far as Justin could tell from his view point a hundred feet away. Then it happened. With a terrifying shriek she sunk under the ice, her arms flapping above her and the fabric of her thick red skirt bobbing up to her chin.

Justin couldn’t help but laugh. Oh, of course he felt bad for poor Margaret: she could have died or been seriously hurt or fallen ill. But... he had to laugh. It was in him now and only a good chuckle could get it out. As he wiped the tears from his cheeks he noticed his friends' bovine stares at him. He regained his composure and urged them.

‘Come on', he said. 'We have to go help her.’

Circa 2005, edited January 2012