STAN: Exclusive First Chapter

Chapter OneBel
Okay, so Stanley Remington got hot. When did that happen?
I secretly watched him from across the caravan park. Secretly, as in I casually sat slumped in my fold-out fishing chair, my head held high in innocent wonder as my curious gaze strained sideways, hidden behind my shades.
He stood on one of the dirt tracks, one of many that wound their way through the park, linking each other in a series of labyrinth-like discoveries. Chiselled wooden signs were the only guide for survival, unless you stumbled across a Remington, as this fortunate retired couple had done.
Stan’s arms flailed animatedly as he pointed over his shoulder and then to the map that the silver-haired man held in his hand. His wife stood by his side, her eyes narrowed in deep concentration as if studying and secretly taking in each direction like she really didn’t trust her husband to remember. I couldn’t hear anything other than the occasional outburst of laughter from the couple as Stan charmed them out of their stress and into comfort.
Nope, you won’t die today.
The shirtless, tubby man that sported nothing more than a painful pair of high-waisted shorts and a towel draped over his shoulder tapped Stan on the shoulder with gratitude as he belly laughed. At his parting words, his wife smiled adoringly up at Stan, as if he was Superman or something. Stan smiled small at first, hanging on every word the couple had to say before his mouth pressed into a blinding beam of white. The sun almost glinted off them. But it wasn’t that that made my head turn slightly; it was the loud and genuine laughter that burst out from him. My eyes narrowed. He wasn’t merely humouring them, he was actually being … nice. Pfft.
I cast my eyes forward; I felt in danger of gaining a headache or going permanently cockeyed from eyestrain.
So Stanley got hot, so he was still sickeningly nice, and helpful and blah, blah, blah. I would never forgive him for yelling at me for running around the park pool.
I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was chasing my brother around the pool, and Stan had called out as he passed by:
“Hey, no running!”
Okay, so at the time it seemed a lot more dramatic than it actually was, and, yeah, he had a point. But when you’re sixteen years old and trying to wreak revenge on your older brother for nearly drowning you in the pool, logic and safety don’t come into it. Still, that was a few summers ago now, and, hell, we all made mistakes. In fact, I was living proof of that, for I had made the single biggest mistake of my life. It was called a haircut circa 1994 Winona Ryder in Reality Bites. My friends and I thought if there was ever a haircut to replicate, then this was the one. My friend Naomi and I as always were the only two who had the guts to go through with it. And, of course, she looked amazing and I looked like the animated fairy girl from FernGully. The difference being Naomi had the patience and the flyaway hair to grow it out, I didn’t. So here I was, I still looked like a boy. Cropped black hair that I wedged under my baseball cap with the illusion of protecting my fair skin against the sun’s rays, but it was mostly to hide my shit-awful hair.
So much can happen in a few summers and that is exactly what it had been since my family, the Evans, came back to the shore of Lake Onslow. Even though it had been a while, it wasn’t exactly a foreign place; I grew up here, actually went to school here for a while, I would even go so far as to say a greater wedge of my heart belonged here, although I would never admit that to my parents. Mum and Dad loved Onslow, and chose it as the recurring family holiday destination. My dad, Doctor John Evans, had been the local GP here for over twenty years so I knew his heart was well and truly tied to the place, especially when the locals all still referred to him fondly as Doctor Evans, or Doc, very rarely John.
But now we called Maitland home, a larger populace where you were unlikely to run into a patient and little to no one knew who you were. A foreign concept to our family, and it took some getting used to. Still, it was never the anonymity or a change my parents were after, I knew that much from overhearing adult conversations. Nope, it was money.
Bigger, better wage was key, as was the testament of our luxurious caravan we housed in Remington’s Caravan Park. It stood out a mile away, a stark white house on wheels with cherry wood cabinetry and marble counter tops. Many people stopped by to say hello in the beginning, but mainly to marvel at the craftsmanship of such a beast of a caravan, no one more impressed than Stan’s dad Glen, who was amazed that it had its own shower and toilet room.
“Well, bloody hell, would you look at that?” he said, opening the shower door in wonder, his eyes wide and alive in amazement.
How much did this set you back?
Yeah, the van was spacious, luxurious, but never more so than now, now that my older brothers weren’t here to annoy the living shit out of me. No Grant trying to kill me in the swimming pool, no Ben trying to kill me with his silent farts; the only thing that was set to kill me was boredom or my younger brother’s incessant questions about everything.
“Why are they laughing?” Alex asked; it was his tenth question in as many minutes.
“Maybe they’re laughing at you?” I replied, as I casually thumbed through my Cleo magazine.
“They are not,” my brother snapped.
I would have probably stirred him some more, but Mum was hovering nearby and I didn’t fancy getting yelled at to remember how ‘sensitive’ my brother was. I guess I would cut him some slack; after all, he was only eight.
I sighed, chucking my mag aside and stretching my arms to the sky, hearing the bones click and pop.
Bored, bored, bored.
I yawned, and moved my head from side to side, stiff from sitting for so long.
God I was bored, so bloody bor—

I froze mid-stretch, my eyes locked onto the sight of Stan Remington as he made a clear-cut path toward our van, made a direct, straight line toward … me.



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