If you missed the chapters and would like to check them out now, keep on scrolling! I have included them here for your reading pleasure. Be advised, this is the story of how Zeth and Michael met and became friends. If you haven’t already, you might like to read the Blood & Roses series first.
Badlands
Michael
Before….
Growing up a half of something is a problem. As a rule, society is fairly accepting if you want to pour half cream, half milk on your cereal in the morning. But being half black and also half white? That’s not as okay. See, people need to put other people into boxes. The preppy guy, the jock, the nerd, the token black guy. Life is simple if everyone conforms and dutifully compresses themselves into the box they’ve been assigned, uncomplaining and accepting. As a person of mixed race, I’ve always been expected to identify with one side of my heritage or the other in order to make the people around me more comfortable.
When I was a kid, that felt like choosing which one of my parents I loved more—my mom, because she was white and being white was even more socially acceptable than knowing exactly who you were, or my dad, because he was black, and my skin was never going to be pure as the driven snow anyway, so why not?
In the end, it’s always the same. My skin is lighter than most. I’ve been described as coffee or mocha or honey, but those terms don’t usually fly with your smarter-than-average person of color. To be edible, to be actually fucking eaten, is to be dominated. Overpowered. And coffee and cocoa? Those two particular items fueled a once-thriving slave trade that can still make a lot of African American people understandably awkward. So yeah…perhaps you could say my skin is a warm golden color. Or Tawny. Or a deep tan? Whatever you want to label it, should you feel the need, my skin tone could never be described as Caucasian. That’s the only thing that seemed to matter when I was young. So. Even if I did identify with my mother’s heritage and her side of my family tree more than my father’s, if I wanted to do stereotypically white things like wear socks and sandals, or listen to Kenny Rogers, it wouldn’t have made a difference. To an onlooker, impatiently waiting to shove me into one of those boxes, I would still have been maybe-white-with-a-hint-of-something-else.
The scattering of freckles—thankfully gone now that I’m older—and the bright green of my eyes only served to confuse people even further. Seemed whatever I did, however I acted, whatever I wore or listened to or watched, I was always going to make people scratch their heads. It took me a while to realize that there was nothing I could do about that—the head scratching and the raised eyebrows. It was going to happen regardless, so I figured fuck it. Let it be their problem. As long as I knew who I was, that’s all that mattered.
Through high school, I was the jock, I was the nerd, I was preppy guy and I was the token black friend. In my early twenties, I was smart and studious, a college guy, and I was also stealing cars. Not cars that could get me arrested. Leave the Mercs and Jags and Beamers to punks who wanted to go to jail. No, I was stealing the Toyotas and the Camrys and the Fords. Average cars that flood the highways and streets of America, so hard to identify as stolen. Did I sell them on? Boost them and drop them at a cutting shop to have their VIN numbers ground out and replaced and then sold on to some other poor unsuspecting sap? Nope. I was earning enough money running gambling and odd jobs out of my apartment. I didn’t steal the cars to make profit. I did it because I loved the thrill of taking something that didn’t belong to me and then not getting caught. I also loved the thrill of driving the average-Joe cars out into the wilds of Louisiana and setting the things on fire.
Nothing more liberating that stealing something and watching it burn, after all.