Disclaimer: Look guys, can't I just take credit for one? Come on, this one isn't even that good. Fine you know what, when I get flamed I'm forwarding them all to you Steve and Craig.

Author's Note: Well this is my first story since I left school, and well I'm not sure how much I like it yet. I've never really written one about this little guy before, and when you try to make up a past for a current character it gets tricky. But enjoy anyway.

"Here in the Real World"
By Ashlee

Looking back I have made some seriously bad mistakes. I don't mean like joining some weird religious organization or making bad investments. I mean seriously life-wreaking, horrible mistakes. Things I could have and should have seen. It all started with my divorce. It was hard for me. I had been a firm believer in the institution of marriage, but things went bad, you know? My wife was a serious gambler. We went to Las Vegas for our honeymoon and stayed - mistake number one. With me working the wife decided to go out and have fun at the casinos. It started with bingo, something everyone has played at one time or another, but soon I started to notice that the grocery money was slowly growing smaller and that she would stay out later and later. I was to the point were I was going to mention something when she came home and told me the news - she was pregnant. I forgave all and started preparing for our first child. She even stopped with the gambling. I thought it was over.

After the baby came all was well, for a little while at least. Have you ever heard of post-partum depression? It happens after a baby is born and the mother's hormones go all funky causing depression. Well, let's just say that the money that was once spent on gambling went to some thugs on a street corner - that's right drugs. Between the drugs and the gambling my dear wife managed to rack up quite the little debt. So much so that one day while I was still at work she grabbed our baby and made a break for it. I came home to a house that had been ransacked and anything of any value had been stolen. That's when I saw her note still attached to the refrigerator with a carrot magnet. It said that she couldn't live with me anymore - that there was more to life than being a wife and a mom. So, I asked myself, why didn't she just leave the baby? As close as I could figure, she was going to use our baby to get child support to keep up on her little habits.

I was so depressed when she left that I just got in my car and left. I drove and drove until I arrived in some town called Blue Cove in Delaware. It was nice and small and looked like the perfect place to make a new start. I had lost everything and just wanted to wipe the slate clean and start all over. So I found a nice cheap apartment, paid for it out of my very plush bank account, which, thankfully, had not been a joint account. That was one of the very few things that I had done right. After I noticed all the money starting to disappear I made sure to set aside a good portion of my income. Anyway, one night while looking through the paper for a job to pay the rent I came across a very appealing ad. Some nice big firm was looking for a computer programmer to help set up and monitor systems - the one thing I was good at. So I called the place called the Centre. Some import company with an ominous name, nothing to worry about, right? Yeah sure. So I drove out to, basically, the middle of nowhere and saw this huge building sitting silently in the midst of a gray sky. The place gave me the heebie-jeebies. That's where I make the second biggest mistake of my life, and probably the most devastating of all - I kept going. That's right, me computer genius, top of his class at Iowa State Tech decided that he should keep going. So I drove up to this big electric gate and was let in by some man in a black suit. In fact ninety percent of all the people I saw were dressed in black. I know what your thinking, that by then I should have realized that something was really weird, but the job sounded so tempting, and who was to say that this place didn't just have some black suit dress code? Whoever said that being naive was good was on crack, I'll tell you that right now.

So I walked in feeling horribly uncomfortable in my brown suit. See us computer geeks, as we are so often called, have never been known for our fashion sense, and right then I was feeling horribly out of my element. Not to mention on the verge of pissing my pants. It took me a moment to realize just how creepy this place truly was. It was completely empty and barely lit. I felt like I was walking to my death. Boy, if only I knew how right I was. But still I kept walking.

Soon I came to the office where my interview was to be held. I was greeted by a woman sitting in the hallway outside a huge set of swinging doors. She looked at me without smiling and told me that Mr. Parker would see me in a moment. I stood fidgeting because there was nowhere to sit, and waited. After what seemed like an eternity an older man with gray hair and the coldest eyes I had ever seen smiled at me and asked me to join him in his office. When I entered I heard wheezing behind me and had my first run in with the man that I would come to know as Dr. Billy. I shivered but decided to go through with the interview, I was sooo not going to take the job, but I might as well follow through with the interview.

They asked me surprisingly normal questions, nothing out of the ordinarily but the place was a little to 'Scooby Doo meets Frankenstein' for me so I nearly ran out of the building, climbed into my car and burned rubber out of there. They had said they would be in touch, but I had absolutely every intention of changing my number. There was no way my ass was going to be a part of that freak show.

A couple days went by uneventfully - nothing much to talk about. That was until I got a knock on my door. There was a man standing there with a brown package. When I opened the door he looked up at me.

"Are you Mr. Broots?"

I looked at him a little oddly, but nodded.

"Yes."

He looked back and handed me the papers.

"You've been served," was all he said before turning on his heel and leaving. All I could do was stare dumbly at him as he walked away. After the slamming of the door jolted me back into reality I took the package and re-entered my small apartment. Opening it I found divorce papers along with an order for child support. The divorce was no problem, but the child support was outrageous. That drug-abusing witch wanted six hundred dollars a month. Six hundred dollars a month! I might have had one hell of a full bank account, but there was no way I could afford that! At least not with out one hell of a job.

As if on cue the phone rang. It was the Centre calling back to offer me the job. I looked at the child support papers I still held in my hands and sighed, I accepted the job.

Well you know the rest, almost a year after I got there I started working on getting Jarod back. By the way that was mistake three. I should have never volunteered for that higher profile job. Anyway, that's how I got here, sitting at some truck stop in northern Canada. I had a friend call my mom's sister, to have her call my mom and have her go pick up Debbie. After Jarod tossed me out of the car to go after Alex and get Mr. Parker I lost it. All those years of bad choices had just completely backfired. My life had just turned into one of those completely unbelievable soap operas where no matter what happened to the character; it's bound to be crapped on by the creator. I had a nervous breakdown and just couldn't face all the things I had done wrong again. So I'm sure there's something big going down at the Centre. I'm sure Daddy Parker's alive and well to play with all of his puppets, Lyle is probably making good use of his new thumb and Jarod, I'm sure, escaped once again. It's like one of those television shows where the good guy never gets caught and the bad guy never dies. Too bad this isn't tv, because there making the wrong choice can be remedied by the simple scribble of the writers pen, here in the real world the boy doesn't always get the girl, and what seems good at the time is always wrong in the end.

So did you like it? C'mon I can take it! PLEASE PLEASE give feedback - not that I'm begging <g>

zyp959@hotmail.com

Back