Andrew Chapin

My unpublished manuscript ‘Knowing When You’re Too Young to Grow Up’ chronicles Andrew Brown’s struggle to reconnect with his best friend Pete Goodman as a lurid secret Andrew has never told threatens to break them apart for good.

As I mentioned in “A Reintroduction: The Prologue,” I intend to post edited chapters every few weeks. Here’s a sample from Chapter 10. As always, feedback is STRONGLY encouraged via the contact tab or comments section.

On the couch and all alone again, I scroll to Ant’s number. She put it in my phone after dinner the other night.

I should tell her, I think, not about Pete and Ms. Benevo, but about me and her, Ms. Benevo. She’d understand. She always understood even when I didn’t. Maybe. Maybe she won’t.

I feel my eyelids getting heavy. They flutter down, down, down like an angel on high descending. And I’m seeing through fewer and fewer crevices, fading into the shadows that surround me in my life, in my dreams – the ones that offer me no reprieve from the present.

Then, I’m not on the couch. I’m somewhere else I can’t see. It’s darker than a cave without a torch, a church maybe. Yes, it’s a church. And it seems familiar.

St. Peter’s, that’s where, and someone’s running for the bathroom. Without the sensation of my limbs moving, I’m following him. And I’m there and he’s rubbing his flushed face with running water, water as red as wine. He’s covered in it.

Under the incandescent lights that are uncomfortably bright, like we’re on a stage with the spotlights turned up, I see that the beads streaming down his face are glass. And although it’s blank, I recognize his face from somewhere.

He’s mounting the sink now and throwing his belt over the labyrinth of exposed pipes. What is he doing? I think, but I know what he’s doing with the strap fastened around his neck and when he jumps it snaps taut – the same sound my uncle’s did before he belted me.

Wheezing, gasping, and flailing, he squirms and kicks and tries to reach the sink behind him, but his legs aren’t long enough – only a few inches away, a chasm that could’ve been miles. The fear of the unknown bulges from his eyes. After one final heave, his arms fall slack and his feet dangle like a mobile from a crib.

His imperceptible face, lifeless and limp, is coming into view now. And those eyes with their sickly pallor, those eyes looking back at me are mine.

I blink.

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My unpublished manuscript ‘Knowing When You’re Too Young to Grow Up’ chronicles Andrew Brown’s struggle to reconnect with his best friend Pete Goodman as a lurid secret Andrew has never told threatens to break them apart for good.

As I mentioned in “A Reintroduction: The Prologue,” I intend to post edited chapters every few weeks. Here’s a sample from Chapter 9. As always, feedback is STRONGLY encouraged via the contact tab or comments section.

“Man, need to smoke, need to,” Tommy had pleaded and pleaded until he got his way and in the process completely disproved his longstanding contention that weed isn’t addictive.

So here we are in the hallway outside our room where Tommy and Candace are rolling all over each other like marbles. Everyone’s pretty belligerent and giggling from all those bottles of wine.

I can hear a low moan droning on like an old, overworked dryer. Except this one isn’t that old, I think. Thank God Ant’s playing a board game with Large Charley and the nice and ugly kids.

I slide the card into the door.

The light turns green.

Click.

On the other side, it’s as loud as a slaughterhouse. And they don’t even know we’re there. Not yet.

“P-E-T-E?” Marie timorously mouths to herself.

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My unpublished manuscript ‘Knowing When You’re Too Young to Grow Up’ chronicles Andrew Brown’s struggle to reconnect with his best friend Pete Goodman as a lurid secret Andrew has never told threatens to break them apart for good.

As I mentioned in “A Reintroduction: The Prologue,” I intend to post edited chapters every few weeks. Here’s a sample from Chapter 8. As always, feedback is STRONGLY encouraged via the contact tab or comments section.

In a quaint Italian square, the familiar street-hustlers hocking their miniature David statuettes and brass-plated Leaning Tower of Pisas are beginning to pack their goods away. Shadows playfully tag each other in the fast-descending dusk.

The group, meanwhile, pushes on into the undetermined night on streets that are as anonymous as we are, devoid of breaking dancers and beating drummers, the destination in front of Glenn and only Glenn. She leads us into a hole-in-the-wall that from the outset resembles a typical old man bar, a dump.

Ant tells me to be nice, her arm neatly looped around mine. But it’s so hard, I whine, when we might be walking into the next Buddy’s, which was the dirtiest, dumpiest old man bar of them all around the block from Balaam. If the wind is blowing the right way and the windows are open in the chem. lab, you can potentially catch a whiff of the Buddy’s special – a pungent blend of piss and urinal cakes and crab cakes.

“I think you’ll be surprised,” Ant, always the optimist, says, “that some of the best food is in the littlest places.”

What’s surprising to me, besides that she’s giving me the time of day and that she picked me to begin with, is that she hasn’t asked me about Jess, but I don’t mention that. I actually don’t say anything once we get inside, too busy eating my words once that smell – tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, Parmesan cheese, fresh fish – hits me. I haven’t smelled anything like it since both my grandparents were alive and we were still a family – and I’m thinking this what I came to Italy for.

“Well?”

“The dated chairs and faded paint notwithstanding, you were right.”

“As usual.”

“As usual.”

And I swear it could’ve been sophomore year again – it felt like déjà vu – until we get to our table. And there’s only one.

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I have finally, FINALLY finished editing ‘Knowing When You’re Too Young to Grow Up’. Now, I have to find the time to send it out. And not screw up anything as I have in the past.

As I mentioned in “A Reintroduction: The Prologue,” I intend to post edited chapters every few weeks. Here’s a sample from Chapter 7. As always, feedback is STRONGLY encouraged via the contact tab or comments section.

Wishing wells bring me back to a time when I was young and actually believed they were real. Sure, I never got that pony I wanted, but, if last night’s anything, sometimes wishes do come true. But not because you threw a penny in a fountain, I remind myself.

There’s clearly a difference of opinion between me and Ant on the matter at hand. It was if we hadn’t broken up, just hit pause and then picked up right where we left off.

“Please, please, please tell me you have change?”

“Ha! You don’t really believe in that, do you?”

“What if I do, Mr. Too Cool?”

She has this quixotic look on her face. Like I just threw down the most elaborate prom proposal in the ultimate, cheesy expression of teenage love. Or like last night was our first kiss.

[Read More…]

My unpublished manuscript ‘Knowing When You’re Too Young to Grow Up’ chronicles Andrew Brown’s struggle to reconnect with his best friend Pete Goodman as a lurid secret Andrew has never told threatens to break them apart for good.

As I mentioned in “A Reintroduction: The Prologue,” I intend to post edited chapters every few weeks. Here’s a sample from Chapter 6. As always, feedback is STRONGLY encouraged via the contact tab or comments section.

It’s unbelievable how little you care about when you’re loaded.

A couple days ago, I was shitting my pants about getting caught by Bags and getting sent back to the big, hollow house. Now, we’re sneaking out to that “hot club” Lilly’s sister set us up at, and it only took a happy pill and a half to get Lilly to stop worrying about her mother and the future and everything that could go wrong – everyone besides Pete.

He was staring at the fuzzy TV screen in the dark when I left, staying in tonight, not feeling “too hot,” he told Tommy. I’m sure, since he miraculously came down with something the second his phone buzzed, which was about 10 minutes before we left. And everyone bought it. Besides me.

[Read More…]

I have finally, FINALLY finished editing ‘Knowing When You’re Too Young to Grow Up’. Now, I have to find the time to send it out. And not screw up anything as I have in the past.

As I mentioned in “A Reintroduction: The Prologue,” I intend to post edited chapters every few weeks. Here’s a sample from Chapter 5. As always, feedback is STRONGLY encouraged via the contact tab or comments section.

He wasn’t real.

It was a dream.

All of it was a dream.

That’s what it seemed like in the museum – that I wasn’t awake – when Pete and Tommy practically had to drag me down the street to St. Peter’s Basilica. Now, I’m here in the church, the drug having worn off but still feeling like a queasy bag of shit, more strung out than those junkies outside Grand Central Station with their pitiful dogs. This is why I never take pills, I think, walking through archways adorned with idols and statues of saint this and that.

I don’t know where Pete or Tommy or anyone else went although I have an idea where one of them is. Besides Becky. She’s to my left sketching something – a dove it looks like, fluttering through a towering, Gothic canopy. At its base is her own personal touch, the Balaam crest – the torch with the Latin I can’t read – wooden, dignified, and old.

In so many ways, Becky’s not like the rest of us. She doesn’t have a car, a designer backpack, artificially-whitened teeth, or even a cell phone, I think. After school, she works at the Walmart right down the block from Balaam. The girl had to fundraise to get to Italy, for Christ’s sake.

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