Playing by Ear
Chapter 1

Copyright© 2021 by Lumpy

“Baby, wake up. Come on, you’re starting school today.”

I moaned as the dream I was having vanished, the mansion we lived in replaced by the fake wood-paneled walls of our trailer.

“I was having such a good dream,” I whined, rolling over and pulling a pillow over my head.

“I know, sweetheart, but you don’t want to be late for your first day of school, and I have to get to work. Come on, I made you eggs.”

“Urrf,” I mumbled as I felt her get up from the edge of the bed and go back towards the front of the trailer, flipping on my room light as she left.

I lay there, head covered for another moment, wishing I could go back to sleep. I knew, however, she’d just be back, and I didn’t want to skip breakfast. While Mom wouldn’t be mad at me, I knew we couldn’t afford to waste the food, and I didn’t want to be the reason she was late for work.

Rolling over, eyes still squeezed shut from the light, I leveraged myself up, planting my feet on the rough carpet. I stumbled my way through getting dressed and brushing my teeth, finally managing to get my eyes open by the time I walked through the small living room into the kitchen that doubled as the entrance to our trailer.

I found her sitting at the table drinking a cup of coffee next to my spot, where she’d set out some scrambled eggs, a piece of toast, and a cup of milk.

“Just coffee for breakfast?”

“You know me; I’m not really a breakfast person. I just need to have my coffee.”

“What about your lunch?”

“I’ll get something at the cafeteria.”

“Don’t do that,” I said, sitting down my fork and giving her what I thought was a stern look.

“I’m not doing anything. You worry about doing good at school today and let me worry about the parenting stuff. You may be the man of the house, but I’m still your mother.”

“Mom, I’m not a kid anymore. Things are different now. We’re not getting handouts from bar kitchens, and Dad isn’t here to steal groceries anymore.”

“Don’t talk that way about your father, Charlie.”

“I heard Uncle Tony tell someone that once.”

“You shouldn’t listen to gossip, Charlie. He may have done some things I don’t approve of, but he’s still your father. He did what he had to do to support us.”

“What he had to do was not drink every dollar he made,” I mumbled under my breath.

I know she heard me, but she let it pass.

“Baby, I promise I’ll take care of myself. Okay?”

“Fine. I just worry about you.”

“And I worry you aren’t going to finish your food and make it to the bus on time. Get a move on.”

I rolled my eyes but wolfed down the rest of my eggs without argument. Looking at the clock on the stove, she wasn’t wrong.

I grabbed my backpack, which had the school supplies she’d gotten for me over the weekend in it. It was really light without any books in it yet.

“Bye, Mom. Have a good day at work,” I said, leaning over to give her a kiss on the cheek.

“Have a good day at school, sweetheart. Make lots of friends.”

I gave a wave over my shoulder as I pushed through the screen door of the trailer and skipped down the wooden steps that had been set up in front of them. Our trailer was at the very back of Oakdale Estates, which was a ridiculous name for the single loop that made up the trailer park. We’d only moved in a few months ago, and most of the people who lived here were either young adults just starting out or older people living on a fixed income. There were a few other families, but all the kids I’d seen before were all a lot younger than me.

I assumed I was the only public school-aged kid since there wasn’t even a bus stop at the front road that led into the ‘mobile home community.’ Mom had called the school and asked about having a bus stop at the front of the park, but they said they couldn’t create new stops unless there were no currently available stops nearby. They decided since there was a stop just a few hundred yards from our trailer that was close enough. Never mind that I had to walk through a stand of trees, jump over a creek, and then either circle my way around twenty houses or go through someone’s back yard to get to it.

I circled around the back of our trailer and crossed the ten feet of open space into the trees. It had rained the night before, which made the ground a little spongy, and drops of water fall onto my head and the back of my t-shirt every time I bumped into tree branches as I pushed my way through to the creek.

That was another thing that made it so obvious no school-age kids lived in Oakdale. No one had crossed through this section of trees often enough to make a path, making me push through wet leaves. I broke a couple of branches off and made a mental note of where I entered this small patch. I figured if I took this same way every day and broke off some obstacles each time, I’d have an easier time of it by next semester.

The other thing the lack of trail told me was that no one from the nice houses on the other side of the creek ever crossed over to play with kids in the trailer park. Of course, that might not say anything about them, since there weren’t really any kids in the trailer park old enough to get visitors who’d be cutting through a grove of trees and over a creek, but I’d met enough people in the kinds of houses I was walking towards to know what to expect.

I slipped as I jumped over the creek, my ratty sneakers sliding in the mud, sending my right foot into the chilly water.

“Shit.”

Now I’d have a wet sock all morning.

I was just starting to shake the extra water off my foot when I heard a kid scream.

“Hey. Stop it.”

It was a little kid’s voice, still high pitched. It sounded like it was coming from in front of me. I assumed at first it came from some kids arguing in their back yard or something until I got a little closer and heard a second, much older voice.

“Harry saw the money, kid. Just give it to us, and you’ll be okay.”

“Aunt Jennifer,” the kid’s voice screamed.

It was probably as loud as he could get it, but it wasn’t loud enough. As I came around the back of the yard, I could hear someone say ‘ooff’ and a light thumping sound. When I got to a point where I could see who’d been talking I saw three kids about my age standing over a much smaller kid.

The younger kid was probably in elementary school, maybe seven or eight years old. He was wearing a costume of some kind with patches on one shoulder and some kind of toy space gun in a holster on his hip.

He was sitting on his butt, and it looked like he’d been pushed down, although he probably wasn’t actually injured. The three guys were standing over him menacingly as the little kid tried to push himself away from them. When one of the guys started to reach for him I decided I needed to do something.

I normally tried to not get involved in other people’s business, since that hardly ever ended well for me. Especially in situations like this. I wasn’t a fighter, and while I was fairly tall at an even six feet, I was rail thin. Not so much from genetics, since my dad was broad-shouldered and pretty well built, but more from just a lack of a good diet. We didn’t normally eat a lot and what meals we did have were made out of the least expensive things on the shelf, which never included things with actual nutritional value.

I might not have been the right person to try and do something about this situation, but I couldn’t stand bullies.

“Leave him alone,” was the cleverest thing I could think of as I dropped my backpack in what looked like a dry piece of grass and walked towards them.

“Unless you want your ass kicked too, you need to turn around. Right now,” the biggest kid in front said.

“So three of you can gang up on one little kid?”

“Listen you...”

He never got the rest of his sentence out. I’d watched my dad get in plenty of fights in bar parking lots over the years as we followed him from gig to gig, and the one strategy I’d picked up from that was, always get the first hit in.

Sadly, that was the only thing I’d managed to pick up from my dad’s fights since he got his ass kicked more often than not. I ran up the last two steps to get some momentum and threw a wild left swing that caught him completely off guard, landing in between his nose and his right eye. The punch hurt my hand like hell, but it dropped him to the ground like a bag of wet cement.

That was the last thing that went well for me. His buddies didn’t waste any time. One of them punched me in the cheek and the other one hit me square in the stomach. I had a weird thought as I doubled over that the punch to the stomach actually hurt more than the punch to the face. I didn’t have long to dwell on that, however, as the guy who punched me in the stomach followed up with a punch to my other cheek, knocking me to the ground.

“Run,” was all I managed to get out before a foot smashed into my chest, almost picking me off the ground.

I grabbed at his leg, managing to catch the end of his tennis shoe and pulled, sending him falling over backward, his wheeling arms catching their leader who was just getting back up, knocking the both of them down.

I was halfway to standing again when a foot smashed into my stomach again, sending me spinning over, crashing to the ground on my other side. A heel smashed into my foot, sending a burst of pain that almost felt like electricity shooting up through to my hip.

I tried to ignore it and punched straight out at the guy who’d smashed my leg, catching him right in the nuts. He fell over, giving me a moment’s breather. I tried to stand, but as soon as I put weight on my left leg I almost fell over again. I managed to shift my weight at the last second, staying upright, but my foot hurt like hell.

“I’m going to beat you to death,” their leader said as he finally got back up, blood streaming from his nose.

I took another wild swing, but he ducked back, and I missed badly. I was already stumbling and on the verge of falling when his fist smashed into my temple, sending me crashing hard to the ground, my head banging off the mud and grass.

I tried to push myself up again, knowing if they got me on the ground and got on top of me, I was done for. I got partially up, half kneeling, and managed a few more wild swings, clipping one of them in the hip and missing the second one entirely but unable to dodge or otherwise get out of their way, since I couldn’t put any weight on my back foot.

A kick at the knee on the leg I was using to hold myself upright sent me sprawling on the ground again. Thankfully it didn’t hit my knee directly, or I would have had serious long term damage, but it was enough to get me back on the ground.

The guy I’d punched in the junk was back up, and all three were on top of me. I pulled myself up into a ball as they surrounded me and started kicking the crap out of me. I tried to protect the center of my body by doubling over almost in the fetal position and put my arms over my head, trying to block the kicks they were trying to land on my face.

“Hey, get off of him,” a voice yelled from somewhere far away. “I called the cops.”

I wished I’d thought about doing that instead of trying to take on three guys bigger than me all by myself. I watched their feet run away, around the side of the house, and then half saw another blurry pair of legs come into my eye-line before I threw up and passed out.


There was a low murmur of sounds as I came to. It wasn’t loud, but it wasn’t particularly quiet either. More distracting than the noise was the strong smell of disinfectant.

My confusion only lasted a second or two as a wave of pain hit me the moment I tried to take a breath. The pain brought back the memory of getting my ass kicked. I tried to open my eyes and sit up, and then shut them again to keep out the piercing light that kicked my headache into high gear, lying back on the pillow.

“Gahh.”

“Are you okay?” a female voice came from somewhere a few inches from my head.

That stopped me cold. The voice wasn’t one I knew. I pried my eyes open slowly to adjust to the light and saw a girl sitting in a chair next to the bed I was in. I had no idea who she was.

At least now that my eyes were open, I could figure out where I was. The railing on the bed, some kind of monitor next to it with a line snaking down into my arm, the florescent lights and off-blue curtain that circled a small area around the bed I was laying it.

At some point, while I’d been out, someone had taken me to the hospital. I vaguely remembered a voice saying something about calling the cops right while those guys were kicking the ever-loving hell out of me.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Hanna. You were fighting Aaron Campbell and his buddies in my back yard.”

“I didn’t get his name. I just saw him picking on some little kid, tried to help, and got my ass kicked for my trouble.”

“The kid was my cousin Sam. He ran in and told us some big kids were trying to take his money, pushing him down, and you’d come running out of the woods and had gotten into a fight with them. He said you’d told him to run and get help. He was very impressed.”

“If he’d stuck around a few seconds more, he’d have been less impressed.”

“I saw that part. How are you feeling?”

“Like I got my ass kicked. My side hurts, my head hurts, my face hurts.”

“You’re going to have some massive bruises you know?”

“Don’t girls find bruises sexy?”

“That’s scars. Bruises, not so much.”

“Man, I can’t win for losing.”

“Huh?”

“Something, my dad, used to say. I have no idea what it means, but...”

We both fell quiet, the topic of me getting my ass kicked having more or less run out of steam. I looked her over, although I tried to not be so obvious about it. I thought she might be a little older than me, but I was a terrible judge of that kind of thing. She had wavy brown hair that looked to go down her back and wore a hoodie with the logo of the school I was supposed to be starting today.

“Shit, my backpack!”

We’d had to get that and the school supplies from the school late last week as part of their ‘helping the families’ program, and I didn’t think they’d just give us a second helping.

“My mom has it. Sam saw where you dropped it, and went and got it.”

“Actually, I need to call my mom. She thinks I’m at school.”

“My mom’s doing it.”

“How does she know how to get a hold of my mom?”

“Inside your backpack was some of that paperwork they always send out for you to get signed and brought back to school. Her number was on one of them.”

“Ohh. So you go to Carr?” I asked, gesturing at the sweatshirt she was wearing.

“Yeah, I’m a senior.”

“Today was supposed to be my first day.”

“Did y’all just move here?”

“At the beginning of the summer.”

“What grade are you going into?”

“Tenth.”

“Ahh.”

Being complete strangers, we really didn’t have anything to talk about. I groaned as I tried to roll back to lying flat, looking at the ceiling.

“Are you okay? Should I get the doctor?”

“No, it just hurts to move. I appreciate you calling my mom and getting my backpack. You don’t have to hang out here with me.”

“Actually, I do. My mom would shit a brick if I left before she came back.”

“Well ... I appreciate you sitting with me.”

“No problem. I really like my little cousin, and we appreciate you helping him.”

“Next time, I might try and get help first.”

“Might be a good idea.”

I tried to laugh and ended up groaning as the curtains slid open revealing a man in a doctor’s coat, and a woman I guessed was Hanna’s mother from the family resemblance. Behind them, I could see other beds and curtains, which explained the constant hum of lowered voices I’d heard ever since waking up.

“How are we feeling?” the doctor asked as he walked over to me and checked the bag of fluid dripping into my arm.

“I’m pretty sore, and my head is killing me.”

“We’ll give you some Advil here in a minute. You had a pretty nasty concussion.”

“Is it serious?”

I’d read somewhere that concussions were what drove football players and wrestlers crazy.

“We were a little worried when you took so long to wake up, so we’re going to keep you here a few more hours just to keep an eye on you.”

“How long was I out?”

“About an hour, which is why we were worried. Being down that long makes this a moderate brain injury. You don’t seem confused or disoriented, which is a good sign. When your mother gets here, I’m going to talk to her about getting a CT scan, just to be sure everything’s ok. She’ll have to keep an eye on you, just in case there are any delayed symptoms.”

“Is it serious, though? Any, like long term stuff?”

“If there aren’t any additional symptoms like nausea, blurry vision, or confusion; then no, you should be fine as long as you don’t get hit in the head anymore. After about a month, give or take, any damage should be reversed. When it comes to this kind of injury, repeated incidents are where things start getting pretty bad.”

I tried to push myself up but stopped as the doctor put a hand on my chest.

“Just lay still. I’ve scheduled you to get some x-rays here soon. I want to look at your ribs, and all the bruising on your foot suggests you might have some damage there too. Just lay still, till we look everything over.”

The curtain pushed open again, and my mom rushed in.

“Charlie. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Mom,” I said, which was pretty much the most obvious lie I’d ever told her.

“Fine, my rear end. Look at your face. They said you’d been in a fight.”

“Mrs. Nelson?” the doctor said.

“Yes. I’m Charlie’s mother.”

A man in a pair of blue scrubs came in and stopped when he saw all the people that were starting to pile up in my little curtained area.

“Go ahead and take him,” the doctor said to the new arrival before turning to my mom. “He’s going to take your son up to get some x-rays. He’s a little tender around the ribs, and I want to make sure he didn’t break anything.”

“Is he...” I heard my mom start to say before the guy in scrubs pushed the bed I was sitting on out of the curtained area and began wheeling me into a hallway, cutting the rest of her questions off.

The process of getting an x-ray was more annoying than anything else. The orderly pushed me against a wall outside of the radiology lab and went off to move someone else. Apparently there was a whole position in the hospital to just push people from one place to another.

I sat on that thing for what felt like forever, with nothing to do, just staring at the florescent lights on the ceiling. About the time, I thought I should hop off the damn bed and go looking for someone, a nurse came out of the lab and rolled me over to the machine. She then took pictures of my leg and chest.

When someone eventually rolled me downstairs, the doctor was gone, and instead, my mom was talking to a police officer.

“Here he is now,” she said as I was rolled up.

“Son, could you give me an account of what happened?”

“Sure. I was cutting through the woods behind our trailer to my bus stop. When I came out of the woods, I could hear some kids arguing and came across the three kids pushing down a little kid, telling him to give them his money. I told them to get away from him, and when they didn’t I got into a fight with them. They knocked me out, and I ended up here.”

“Did you see them push the other kid?”

“No, when I showed up, he was lying on the ground. The other kids were standing atop of him threatening him.”

“Can we press charges for what they did to my son?” my mom asked.

“We were told that your son threw the first punch. Is that true, son?”

“Yes,” I said, looking away from my mom as her head swiveled towards me.

“We’ve talked to the other family involved, and they’ve agreed to not press charges if the three boys don’t press charges on your son.”

“So they put Charlie in the hospital, and get to walk away scot-free?”

“Ma’am, all the parties agree, and your son admits he was the aggressor. If they decided to press charges on him, he could end up in juvenile court. This seems like the best scenario for everyone involved.”

“I was trying to help that other kid!” I said in protest.

“Next time you should find an adult, or call the police. Taking matters into your own hands isn’t how anything should be handled. Now, if there’s nothing else...” he said, flipping his small notepad over and sliding it into his shirt pocket.

Mom just shook her head no, a frown on her face.

“That’s how things seem to go around here,” the woman I’d noticed earlier said from the doorway after the policeman left.

“What?” Mom asked.

“Sorry, I was stopping by to thank you personally and overheard what the officer said. They talked to me about Sam pressing charges, but made the same point that if he did then the boys would press charges against you.”

“It’s almost like they are protecting these kids.”

“There’s no almost about it. Around here people only have the high school football to root for, which gets these boys special treatment.”

“That’s not right. My son was just standing up for someone else. I don’t have insurance through the factory yet. There’s no way I can afford...”

Mom turned around, putting her hand over her mouth, her shoulders quivering as she tried to hold in her sobs.

“Ohh, honey,” the woman said. “You don’t have to worry about that. I was just down in billing, and we’re taking care of it.”

“I can’t let you do that. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Maybe, but the people who did, aren’t going to do anything about it, and you helped out my nephew. As I see it, that makes this my responsibility.”

Mom looked indecisive for a moment. I knew her pride made her want to turn down charity no matter what, but with our finances the way they were, a hospital bill would put us out on our butts. She was stuck.

“Besides, I’ve already paid. It’s a done deal.”

“Thank you,” Mom said.

“Yeah, thanks,” I added.

“My name’s Jennifer Philips. You met my daughter, Hanna earlier.”

“Well, thank you very much, Jennifer. We really appreciate your generosity. I’m Rebecca, and that’s my son Charlie.”

“How would you folks like to have dinner with us tonight?”

“I appreciate it, but I actually have to be at work at eight.”

“I thought you said you worked at the factory?”

“For my night job.”

“Ohh. Well, then we’ll have Charlie over for dinner. That saves you the trouble of having to figure out dinner and get to work after being here all morning.”

“I don’t...” Mom started to say before I interrupted.

“That sounds great.”

Most nights, it was a sandwich or a can of soup as she hurried out the door. It might be selfish, but I wasn’t going to turn down a chance at a better meal if I could help it.

“Excellent. I know it isn’t fair, but I don’t want to have to worry about you crossing the creek if you’re still hurt. So Hanna will come by at six to pick you up.”

Mom gave me a look to let me know she knew why I accepted, but smiled and said, “Okay. We’re number two-eleven.”

There was only the one long circle that made up the trailer park, so if they knew where it was, all you needed to know what the trailer number since everyone lived on the same street.

“Great. We’ll see you at six.”

Hanna’s mother left, leaving me to deal with Mom.

“Charlie...”

“Mom, I’m really sorry. I know this puts us in a bind, or it would if it wasn’t for Ms. Philips, and you had to take off work.”

“Well, I can’t say I’m happy that you got into a fight, but I’m proud of you for sticking up for someone else. You’re a good boy. I just hope you learned a lesson, and next time go get help instead of biting off more than you can chew.”

“I definitely learned that lesson.”

“Okay. Consider yourself chastised. Let me see what I have to do to spring you from this joint.”

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