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[27 May 2009|10:20pm] |
Tristan James was nothing amazing. He was your average kid growing up, the son of mechanic and a kindergarten teacher. He was always getting into trouble and escaping punishment by making up some unbelievable story. As a kid, he was the resident bad boy, the one who would slip whoopie cushions under teacher's seats or lizards into little girl's lunch boxes. More times than he can remember he set the family cat on fire and shaved the neighbor's dog. But Tristan was more than just a terror to animals and people. He was a legend. By the time he reached junior high, Tristan held the record for the most visits to the Principal's Office since the school opened, he didn't mean to get into so much trouble, but it came naturally to him. He rarely did something horrible, mainly he was in trouble for talking too much or terrorizing his classmates. One time, he gave a girl a bottle of shampoo as a gift when he was in 7th grade...the girl didn't go back to school for two weeks because her hair turned green. But no one really knew that this prankster exterior was really a wall to hide the pain of losing his mother at an early age. Tristan was only eight years old when his mother was killed in a car accident. Tristan and his mother had a special relationship...she understood his crazy antics and she knew they weren't for attention but mainly because more than anything he loved to humor people. As a kid he loved to just have fun and make people laugh. After her death, it was hard for him to take things, especially life, seriously anymore. He didn't see the purpose to it if from one second to the next, your life could be taken away from you.
His father was a different story. Before the death of his mother, Tristan's dad was like an older version of him, joking around with his mom and always in a good mood. Her death hit him hard, shortly after he began working overtime almost every night and coming home drunk, leaving Tristan to take care of himself and their once happy home. Throughout high school Tristan learned to take care of himself and his father and he became more like the parent, always leaving all the responsibilities to Tristan. But even though his relationship with his dad turned sour and never really recovered, Tristan cared about him and even though he had way more responsibility than any high school senior he knew, he found that he couldn't just up and leave the only family he had left, and if he left there was no telling what would happen to his dad if he wasn't there to watch over him. Though he came from poor beginnings, deep down Tristan always knew that there would be something else out there for him, that even though he didn't go to college, and he wasn't exactly making something out of himself, that he would eventually find something that clicked with him. But despite the fact that he didn't have much family to speak of, there was something that Tristan did have. However dirty he was, however rude and terrible he could be, he still found his family within his group of friends, and they became so close that eventually they took a step toward becoming actual adults and moved in together. After countless nights of playing Ding Dong Ditch and pretending to be plumbers (complete with exposed cracks,) the boys stepped back into reality and left Bachelor Pad #1, all splitting up and going their separate ways. Without his own way to go, Tristan's first thoughts were of remaining in Southington and seeing after his dad as he had always planned to do, but after living without his dad for a while he decided that he really couldn't go home again. It wasn't until Meir had planted the idea of a road trip to nowhere into his mind that he thought about actually getting away from the city, and that's exactly what the two of them did. Chicago ended up being their destination, and after Meir was accepted into a college there, the boys found an apartment and started their life in the big city. Working as a mechanic was all Tristan had ever really known, but he felt that since he was essentially starting over, he needed something else to do, something that preferably didn't involve coming home with grease caked into his pores. It didn't take long for him to find another job, he wasn't even really sure what he was looking for so it wasn't until he was out paying some bills that he wandered into a daycare by accident. All the screaming babies wasn't enough to thwart him, he was sold at the idea of taking care of kids but being able to send them home at the end of the day, and the rest was history.
After being away for quite a while, Tristan found that things were definitely different when he returned home to Southington. What had been meant to be just a trip home for the summer ended up being permanent, and Tristan ultimately ended up moving back in with his dad. Instead of feeling like the wild and untouchable teenager that he had so often related to, he felt more like a man, and certainly more mature. He bonded with his dad, which was an issue that he had always dealt with, but he found that now it was easier to relate to his father. After about a year, Tristan's father became ill. Instead of being diagnosed with some kind of silent and slow killer disease, he suffered a massive heart attack and passed away a few days later, leaving Tristan his home and all of his belongings. The death was hard on Tristan, not only because he had become close to his dad in recent years, but because everything he had gone through when his mom died was happening all over again. But as he always did, Tristan prevailed and worked through everything, and luckily, he had the help of his friends.
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