Area 52 -1- Mesa - by Erin Halfelven (Patreon)

Starting 10th grade in Mesa, AZ, in September turned into a real hassle. With the Pandemic mostly over, classes were in person, and people got to meet me, and apparently hate me.

I’m Joshua Christian Grenoble, known as JayCee, age 15, just barely. I’m small for my age anyway, and having a birthday in August means I’m younger than most of my classmates, too. So even smaller. 

I’ve been told that I’m cute, too, which figures; my mom is gorgeous. She used to be on TV growing up, partly because of her looks and partly because with her size, she could play parts of much younger characters.

So, it seems that being small and cute is a mortal sin for high school males in Arizona. A few hours after the third beating in four weeks, my stepdad, Nelson Starkey, took me aside to discuss it.

“Why haven’t the teachers done anything to stop this?” he wanted to know.

I shrugged, not wanting to speak for fear of bursting into tears. I wasn’t hurt that bad. A bloody nose that had stopped bleeding, some bruises and scrapes from where I fell on the pavement and got stuffed into a bin. Kids do worse to themselves all the time with doing like skateboarding. But not only am I small, skinny, cute and underdeveloped, but I’m also clumsy and a bit of a crybaby. It’s true. I will cry about almost anything. Already I could feel my lip trembling.

My own father had been killed in one of the wars we weren’t fighting back before I started school and my mother, Babbie, had remarried within a year, so Nolan was pretty much the only father I really remembered. Babbie and I both called him ‘Daddy’, at his request. Most boys my age had stopped calling their fathers ‘Daddy’, but he always corrected me if I said, ‘Dad’. 

He didn’t want me to call my mother, ‘Mom,’ or Mommy’, though. He had me call her Babbie, like she had been credited in those old TV shows, before she was my age. When they started crediting her as Barbara, well, her career as a child star was over.

Frankly, Babbie and I were both terribly spoiled by Daddy, and in return, we always did exactly what he wanted us to do. It worked out for us. We lived in a big house with a housekeeper and a gardener. We wore nice clothes, had lots of video games, and ate really good food. Though neither of us was much at eating.

So, I wasn’t afraid of Daddy, exactly. I could have been easily. He was six-feet-five and had been a three-letter-man in college, football, basketball, and track and field, specializing in the hammer throw. He had a craggy face with a brush-cut, deep-set gray eyes, and usually a three-to-five-day beard. His looks were useful in his job as Co-ordinating Director of the Greater Phoenix Area Law Enforcement Council, dealing with police. He’d been a cop himself and a bodyguard, which is how he met my mother.

Being scary, as he put it, was his business. But to Babbie and me, he was Daddy who could be talked into many things with just a bit of effort to look cute and appealing. And Babbie and I were well-equipped for that. She wasn’t quite five feet tall, basically the same size as me. We both had nearly white, platinum blond hair, mine straight to my shoulders, hers curled to her waist. We both had pale blue eyes but wore green contacts.

We dressed a bit younger than our actual ages, too. I was so small that I had to shop in the little boys’ department anyway, so I looked about eleven, or maybe even younger. Babbie always said I would do well in Hollywood, but Daddy nixed that, and that was fine with me. Babbie had turned thirty a couple birthdays ago, but would easily pass as just out of high school and dressed the part.

That day we both were wearing blue denim shorts, me with a white polo and Babbie with a yellow bandeau top. My polo was a bit blood-stained from the bullying incident. 

But Daddy was happy with me. When I saw the bullies coming for me, I knelt down and picked up the biggest rock I’d been able to carry to the spot. I’d been waiting for them.

And when they surrounded me with their taunts and jeers, as soon as one of them touched me, I dropped the rock on his foot. I didn’t know it would break four bones in his foot. I’d never even heard of metty-toros, anyway. But while he was hopping around screeching, his two friends grabbed me, stuffed me into a recycling bin and then ran off, leaving me with a bloody nose and some scrapes.

I was in trouble with the school, for causing bodily injury, but what made me want to cry was Daddy was proud of me!

“You stood up for yourself, JayCee,” he said. “You did just what I told you to do.” The whole thing with the rock had been Daddy’s idea, but I never ratted him out about it. Only Babbie knew.

“I didn’t mean to hurt him!” I protested with a sniffle.

Daddy laughed. “Tell it to the judge!” he said with a sour tone.

Okay, that did it. I burst into tears.

Babbie cuddled me and scolded Daddy, well as much as she ever did. “You shouldn’t say things like that!” she said as she held me close. “It’s okay, JayCee,” she cooed. “Daddy didn’t mean you’d actually have to talk to a judge.”

“But they want to kick me out of school!” I sobbed. “He had to go to the hospital and wear a cast on his foot and everything!”

“Don’t worry, baby,” she consoled me. “Daddy will take care of it.”

“Hmph,” said Daddy, but like it was funny, and he didn’t want to laugh. “I’ve put lots of hoodlums in the hospital. Some with broken heads! He’ll be okay, but I bet he doesn’t want to mess with you again!”

“He’s gonna hate me!” I said.

“Well, you weren’t one of his favorite people to begin with,” Daddy pointed out.

“I dunno,” said Babbie. “Boys who cause you trouble are often doing it cause they think they like you, and it scares them.”

“Hmph,” said Daddy again, but this time more doubtful. “You mean like a schoolyard crush?”

“Uh-huh,” said Babbie. “It was a plot on that soap opera I was in, where Orville liked me, Juliette, my character, so he pushed her off the roof of the hotel. Right after my agent asked the studio for more money, too!”

“What were you doing on the roof of a hotel?” Daddy aske

“It was in the script,” Babbie explained.

“Hmph,” Daddy said, amused again. A lot of Babbie’s stories about acting end the same way.

I’ve used the line myself. When Connie, the housekeeper, asked me why I dropped the carton of milk on the kitchen floor, I told her it was in the script. And she laughed, just like Daddy does sometimes when Babbie says it.

So now we were all grinning at each other, though I was still leaking tears. “Maybe I should tell that to the judge?” I asked, opening my eyes wide with the tip of my tongue sticking out just a little. That expression always got big laughs when Babbie used it on television, and it did here, too.

When we stopped laughing, Daddy had to wipe his eyes. But he said, “Don’t worry, Jaycee. If they kick you out of school, you can go live with my Uncle Gray on his dude ranch.”

“Maybe he could go to that Boys’ Academy place in Chandler,” Babbie suggested. “That’s right here in Arizona. Your uncle’s ranch is in some place like Albert or something, isn’t it?”

“You mean Alberta,” said Daddy. “But, no, it’s in Wyoming.”

“Dude ranch?” I said, seizing on the important detail. That sounded like fun. “With horses?” I asked. I got to ride a pony once when I was ten, and I loved horses. Babbie and I have tried so hard to talk Daddy into getting us ponies, but we live in town and wouldn’t have anywhere to put an animal that big. Instead, we just have a cat named Horse, which is how I know I can’t pick up a twenty-pound rock, cause that is what Horse weighs.

But Daddy confirmed that Uncle Gray had horses, cause it sure wouldn’t be much of a dude ranch without them. “Sure,” he said. ‘I used to stay with him in the summer when I was your age. We rode horses a lot.”

And that’s how I ended up in Casper, Wyoming, a week before Halloween, waiting for a bus to take me to Sundance. Yeah, that Sundance.