My parents were pretty much dirt poor. We lived in a trailer park in the western Chicago suburb of Hodgkins. It was a small park behind a shopping mall next to an old quarry. My parents had me when they were seniors in high school. They worked and got the trailer after graduation. It was no secret that I wasn't expected or wanted. My mom left us when I was seven, and we never saw her again. My dad started whoring around and drinking before that. But at least, even after Mom left, he never abused me, he just wasn't very affectionate or caring.
There were other kids in the park to run around with, and I had friends there and in school. I wasn't a jock or popular, and I wasn't a brain or a gaming dork. I wasn't a small kid, so I wasn't picked on a lot, and I knew how to fight anyway. I was quiet and kept to myself for the most part.
That quiet side of me grew larger when I hit puberty and started finding guys far more interesting than girls. I started puberty a little sooner than most of my classmates, so I ended up being one of the bigger kids in seventh and eighth grade.
I was tall and broadly built, had dark-blond hair and blue eyes, so I got a little attention from the girls. I pretended to be interested, and even took a girl to our eighth grade dance. We made out a little, but it felt like I was faking the whole thing.
Over that summer, I ran around with some of the other kids in the park. I was pretty much the oldest one there now, as Terry was seventeen now and hardly ever there, being out driving around with his high school friends.
I'd been interested in guys instead of girls for almost two years now, and there was this one guy in the trailer park named Cory. He was almost a year younger than me and in the grade below mine. Now that I was almost fifteen, he had just turned fourteen.
Cory was a cutie. He had nearly platinum-blond hair, big green eyes, and juicy red lips. He needed braces for his slightly buck-teeth, but his parents didn't have the money or insurance. There were a few little freckles across his nose and cheeks. He was slimmer than me, and more slightly built. He liked gaming and reading and got great grades. We didn't hang out at school because we were in different cliques, but at the trailer park we were pretty much always hanging out with each other - if he wasn't playing some fantasy game or something with some of his gaming friends.
One thing we liked to do was sneak into the old quarry and sit on the end of one of the old truck trailers and watch it storm. We could see all around us, facing west, away from the city lights, and watch the lightning. The trailer kept us dry, usually. The smaller kids didn't follow us because the quarry was supposed to be haunted - that was why it was closed, they said. And climbing down the steep side was very hard to do unless you had the reach of longer arms and legs. So the quarry was mostly left to Cory and me, now that Terry was no longer interested in going there.
One hot, humid, sultry evening, during summer break, we knew it was going to storm pretty bad, so Cory came over and we headed down to the quarry before the rains came and made it harder to do. We took the little radio, snacks and drinks and a lantern, and our portable GameBoys. This was before kids had cell phones with games on them.
I'd been fantasizing about doing stuff with Cory for a long time now. Often while sitting on the back of a trailer in the quarry during a storm. The last few times we had gone down and watched it storm, I'd thought about reaching over and seeing what he'd do if I put my hand down his pants.
As we got to the bottom of the quarry, he turned on the radio and we walked to one of the trailers. Just as we hopped up into the trailer the radio announcer said Cook County was now under a tornado watch and a sever thunderstorm warning. Big hail, dangerous lighting, and damaging winds were coming and would last nearly an hour.
Excited, we got settled in a couple feet from the open doors where we had sat a bench seat from an old car that someone had thrown into the pit - the seat not the entire car. We also had a couple of tables of old wire spools.
Faint flickers of lighting were outlining the top of the quarry walls to the northeast. Blue, green, even reddish flashes wove in with the usual white and yellow ones.
"Gonna be a great show," Cory said excitedly.
I could see his grin in the faint flashes. His teeth were very white, his lips very dark. And his big eyes reflected some of the faint flashes.
"Yeah," I agreed.
It was unusual for the wind to affect the trailers down in the quarry, but a big gust slightly rocked the one we were sitting in.
"Downblast," he said in awe.
"Yeah, huge one," I agreed.
