Subdivision

Together and Apart

Photo by Victor Zhuk on Unsplash

Sometimes you don’t really know what you’re fighting for.

I used to get in a lot of fights because I was a Cut ‘em.

Maybe I used to get in a lot of fights because I was defensive about being a Cut ‘em. 

My mom tried to tell me there was nothing wrong with being a Cut ‘em. She was right.

Mostly.

Almost.

When they tore down Zupper Aerospace, a place they used to make some kinda part for some kinda plane they don’t make anymore, a developer bought the land and started building nice houses.

Big ones.

Winding streets.

You’ve seen subdivisions like it.

They’re all over the place. 

They were setting these house frames down,had drawings of what the houses were supposed to look like, taking orders.

Except they weren’t getting orders.

Turns out people who could afford big homes didn’t want big homes that close to Archert Airport.

Archert wasn’t a big airport, or all that busy, but… people just didn’t want ‘em.

So the developer cut ‘em. 

Made ‘em duplexes.

A whole development of duplexes.

People weren’t that keen on being that close to an airport anyway, then they lowered the price.

Cut ‘ems.

We moved in. 

I started a new school.

“Where do you live?” kids asked me.

“Clover Estates,” I’d answer.

“You live in the Cut ‘ems.”

The kids from Clover Estates were Cut ‘ems. 

There weren’t that many of us.

Most of the people who lived in the Cut ‘ems were college drunks, old drunks, waitresses, shit like that.

My mom was a waitress.

Worked nights, six nights a week.

I don’t really know why kids made it a thing that it was a bad thing to be a Cut ‘em. Kind of like an American caste system or something.

“Ain’t nothing wrong with it,” I’d say. 

And somehow I’d be fighting.

Or someone would say something to my younger brother. Reed was five. He’d get mad,they’d make him cry, then I had to fight.

I started playing football, thought if I got good at football people would stop fucking with me and my brother.

I wasn’t very good at football. 

I was better at fighting, but not by much.

Someone wrote an opinion piece in the Raceaux County Courier that the influx of lower income citizens in Clover Estates was bad for Nadfield, Michigan. That property values as a whole had gone down, that it was a hotbed of crime.

I was a thirteen year old kid who got in fights.

But I felt like they were talking about me.

“There’s not a damn thing wrong with Clover Estates,” my mom said. She said it a lot, the rare times I saw her.

She was still sleeping when I got up for the school bus and she was gone to work by the time I was home from not being very good at football practice.

***

I used to wonder what it would take for kids in Nadfield to be nice to me, to not snap me with wet towels in the locker room,to not tape my locker shut with eighteen layers of duct tape.

I got an answer.

I was in Life Sciences when Basha, the assistant principal, got me out of class.

I was worse at Life Sciences than I was at football, so for a second I was almost happy.

The school chaplain was with Basha.

I never met the school chaplain in person before, but the way he put his hand on my shoulder I knew it wasn’t good.

And I knew it was worse than getting kicked out of school for fighting. 

***

All the kids in school made me a big card. They made one for my brother too.

The football team made a separate big card, so I got two of ‘em.

When my brother pouted that I got two and he only got one, I knew he didn’t understand.

A student pilot landing at Archert came in too low, clipped some trees, sheared off a wing, wing took out some power lines.

Loose power lines electrocuted my mom when she was in front of the house in Clover Estates, gardening.

It didn’t occur to me at first that they weren’t going to let us live in the duplex in Clover Estates anymore. I didn’t think about it.

I kinda took care of me and Reed anyway, I just thought…

Reed’s bio dad decided he wanted him. I never met the guy. Not once. And he was gonna take my little brother and they were gonna live in Muskegon. I didn’t even know where that was. 

I met the guy for the first time in a social worker’s office. He said he wanted to keep us together but his new wife…didn’t want a troublemaker.

The social worker looked at Reed’s dad. Like he was furious. He excused them and took the guy outside the office. For a second I thought they were gonna fight.

But adults don’t fight like that.

And I thought, for a second, that I might be worth fighting for.

I was a Cut ‘em.

And there’s not really anything wrong with that.

Except that the Cut ‘ems are too damn close to an airport.

***