"The Incident at Chastity Falls" by Nico Grey

[Rutabaga]

Surprising that no one has commented yet on this story, which is still in progress.

Not 100% where this is going, yet, but several major points of conflict have arisen, not the least of which involves the lead character's bitchy older sister, Rachel.  We'll see.

R

[Cole Parker]

Very well-written story so far from a brilliant young author.  Well, I have no idea if he's young,  But he sounds like he is.

C

[Altimexis]

Perhaps young, but there’s a sophistication to his writing style that I find appealing. I’m looking forward to reading more.

[Cole Parker]

When you're my age, anyone under 60 is young.

[Rutabaga]

It seems obvious that fellow student Perry will take on significant importance in this story.  I found myself reflecting on whether I had encountered anyone named Perry in the past.

The answer is yes:  Once.  During and after college, when I worked in broadcasting, there was another engineer named Perry.  I later discovered that Perry was a nickname for Peregrine, which I could see on his FCC license (we all had to post ours, and there was a wall of them).  That must have made his early school days fun, if the other kids found out his real name.

But the real kicker was that his last name was White.  Perry White.  Can you imagine giving your kid that name?  

R

[Cole Parker]

At least yoyu can imagine what the parents' favorite TV show was.

 

c

[Talo Segura]

I'm really liking this story and the comments are amusing. The speculation about the author makes me think about the speculation of the little group of the CSA, which I had to look up to get what the initials stood for, Genders & Sexualities Alliances. Not being an American leaves me one step removed from school life in the states.

If I continue the author investigation I would highlight two points, his email gives his age as 48, which is young for @Cole Parker, ha ha! His other short stories are also based in Vermont, well two are, so I'd guess the author spent part of his life, at least, in that rural area, and part in a city. I love playing the detective, or should I say Perry Mason...

[Talo Segura]

Chapter seven and the big question is what Ross will do about Perry versus his (ex) group of friends. The story story is gripping, but also frustrating having to wait for each chapter to be published.

[Altimexis]

It seemed pretty obvious from the beginning that some of Ross' friends are full of themselves and not worth having as friends. It's unfortunate for Ross that the rest of them went along with the trouble-makers in lockstep, rather than at least listening to Ross' arguments. Of course they had a history before Ross came along, and this is high school, we're talking about. I just wish Ross had pointed out that sexual harassment isn't just between a man and a woman. There have been plenty of lawsuits brought by men against other men, regardless of sexual orientation.

Sometimes it's hard to do the right thing when it involves losing friends. That said, true friends will respect that, even if they don't feel they can be as outwardly supportive as they'd like to be. I have a feeling that in helping Perry, Ross will realize far greater rewards than sitting with a table of snobs.

[Rutabaga]

53 minutes ago, Altimexis said:

It seemed pretty obvious from the beginning that some of Ross' friends are full of themselves and not worth having as friends.

I found the persistence of this hostility a bit hard to believe.  It makes me think there must be some underlying issue with the tormentors that causes Parry's mere presence to be a threat to them.  What are they so afraid of?  What are they trying to prove?

R

[Talo Segura]

7 hours ago, Rutabaga said:

I found the persistence of this hostility a bit hard to believe.

I didn't find it hard to believe, but I do wonder why? Making a stand against such a group unanimity on Ross' part is at once courageous and at the same time suicidal. He is risking everything and he doesn't know the full story, one might presume he is madly, blindly, head over heels, in love?

[Talo Segura]

I feel as nervous as Ross that something bad is going to happen to Perry and it was not very reassuring when he said: "I like it here. It’s my favorite place. I hope one day that this is the last sight I ever see."

[Altimexis]

5 hours ago, Talo Segura said:

"I like it here. It’s my favorite place. I hope one day that this is the last sight I ever see."

Perry might as well have said, ‘This is where I intend to commit suicide.’ Unfortunately, Ross is too young to realize it. For all the misgivings he has about ratting out his former friends, this is way beyond what he and his accomplices can handle.

That said, Perry would never again trust Ross if he went to the authorities, who might not even believe him.

[Rutabaga]

“I can’t believe those guys won’t just leave him alone.”

Immaturity, thy name is Jason.

R

[Nico Grey]

My thanks to Rutabaga for starting this thread and to all who have commented so far.  As an inexperienced author, I’m particularly dependent on direct feedback from readers so I can figure out whether or not I’m holding up my end of the author-reader relationship.  This thread has already added a lot to my understanding of how people are reacting to this story.  Thank you all!

I don’t know whether there’s any value to maintaining an author’s anonymity.  But since I consider who I am of little importance when compared to what I do, and since there does appear to be at least some curiosity here about me, I’ll say that I’m not young, even by Cole’s standards.  I’m turning sixty-five this summer.  I was born on the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut River, but have lived my entire life in the small towns and surrounding rural areas of southeastern Vermont- with the exception of the four years I spent attending college in Worcester, Massachusetts. 

The name Nico Grey, as I’m sure most anticipated, is a pseudonym.  It’s derived from the name of one of my ancestors.  It isn’t intended to conceal my identity so much as to distinguish any of my LGBT fiction from work I may do in the future in other genres.  A few of you already know my name.  I’m sure more will as we communicate directly.

I appreciate the number of trenchant observations here about the characters in “Incident” and how they are behaving.  I believe there’s psychological consistency in each character’s behavior, although I’m sure it won’t always be clear until the end of the story.  Both Tal and Altimexis mention a couple of important hints that may explain behaviors. 

Some of the contributions to the main conflict in the story depends on one of my core beliefs about people in general, which is that we’re all the same deep down inside (think about Stanley Milgram’s psychological experiments in the ‘50s if you want a really dark take on that thought).  We all have the same flaws and strengths, just expressed to different degrees and in different ways, that can reveal themselves depending on the circumstances in which we find ourselves, unless we act with great mindfulness and determination. 

In this story I never really spell out the motivations for each character’s behavior in detail.  But I hope, taken with an understanding of how I view human behavior, that in the end most readers will find reasonable internal consistency to each character. I’ll be particularly interested to hear what people think- both what worked and where I missed the mark- when the story concludes in a few weeks.

And finally a bit of a spoiler.  I don’t think it an important point, but since Rachel was mentioned in the thread, she’s mostly a bit of a red herring.  She’s a source of tension and conflict for Ross during the early part of the story that will- hopefully- help readers learn more about Ross and begin to care about what happens to him.  She isn’t a very big part at all of the main crisis, which is the “incident”.  But her contributions also aren’t completely finished yet.

Hopefully that adds some interest to the remaining chapters of the story without spoiling the discovery process for anyone.  I really enjoyed hearing from each of you and look forward to any other thoughts, both positive and negative criticism, you’re willing to share about this story or anything else I write. 

[Altimexis]

Nico,

Thanks for posting a bit about your background. As you've gathered, a lot of the authors here are 'seasoned' and so you and I are among the young set. My 68th birthday is coming up the middle of next month. Whereas you've lived your entire life within a radius of less than a hundred miles or so, I've lived on the east, west and north coasts, plus two months in Houston. The smallest city I lived in was a summer spent at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, when I was sixteen. I grew up in Indianapolis and have lived in the SF Bay area, Washington DC, Rochester NY and Detroit. Now, I live in Manhattan. I've been to every state in the U.S. except for N. Dakota, and to many cities around the world. Many of my experiences from my travels have made their way into my stories.

As a fellow author, I love hearing about other people's thought processes and how they construct their stories. Clearly, Incident is a character driven story and if you write much as I do, the characters you created are largely responsible for the direction the plot ultimately takes. Given well-constructed characters, the story literally writes itself. Not that you didn't have an idea of where you wanted to story to take the reader at the outset, but the interaction of the characters you create often dictates how the reader will get there. In my stories, that can lead to unexpected detours, but then real life is like that.

You've indicated that your characters' motivations are never fully explained and I like that. Although all of my characters have a backstory, keeping hidden secrets isn't my forte. I'm more like a magician, doing things in clear sight while using distraction to keep the reader otherwise occupied. It's fun to bury clues, but keeping things just under the surface as you do is much more interesting.

Keep up the good work, and I look forward with trepidation to the coming incident.

A.

[Mattyboy]

When this started I though we were in for a simple joke that the "incident at Chastity Falls"  would be some sort of highly climactic gay sex rampage. 

Now it's kind of looking like something else. 

 

Enjoying the story-  new-kid-navigates-high-school-drama is a popular genre,  but lots of fresh characters and interesting twists.  

[Nico Grey]

20 hours ago, Altimexis said:

The smallest city I lived in was a summer spent at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, when I was sixteen.

So at one point in our lives, at least, we were about 125 miles and two years apart.  My family spent the summer of 1970 at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois.  We even met a family there from Rochester, NY.

I find that the way we each construct our stories is fascinating.  For me, I often get a thought or image in my mind for a brief scene or vignette and then begin wondering what it's all about.  Sometimes I'm able to develop a fairly clear sense of what happened to get the characters in the scene to that point, and where they go from there.  When it comes together in my mind enough to feel like an interesting story, I start writing.  Please tell me that's normal!

[Nico Grey]

15 hours ago, Mattyboy said:

When this started I though we were in for a simple joke that the "incident at Chastity Falls"  would be some sort of highly climactic gay sex rampage.

I had an awful time coming up with a good name for this story.  Nothing really captured it in a way that I thought was interesting.  

Somewhere over the past few years I had made a note that Chastity Falls sounded like an interesting name for a place.  I decided that this story was as good a time as any to use it.  The name even serves as a kind of click-bait, but I hope not abusively so.

[Talo Segura]

13 hours ago, Nico Grey said:

I often get a thought or image in my mind for a brief scene or vignette and then begin wondering what it's all about.

That's how my story which is posting now started out, an intriguing image that posed an awful lot of questions. Then the story developed around the characters, their relationships, and their conflicts. But it wasn't simply character led, because the storyline contained a crime which the protagonist's father was accused of. This added an important other element I wanted in the story, how it gets resolved. In fact the whole story was a question of how things get resolved. What I loved about the crime element was the twist to that resolution. An outcome that joined the two different parts together, the crime and the characters personal conflicts. I liked constructing a plot with the idea that you can be faced with a dilemma, a difficult choice, although maybe, no choice at all? So, yes, the way you wrote your story is very normal, how you developed it, the layers you added and how it's resolved, well that's what you ended up with through developing characters and plot.

[Rutabaga]

Sociopaths -- all of them. They don't belong in school.

A quick look at the relevant Vermont statutes suggests that all of the young men who came after Perry could be convicted of assault under 13 V.S.A. § 1023(a), aggravated stalking under 13 V.S.A. § 1063(a)(4) because the person stalked (Perry) is under 16 years of age, and all with the hate crime enhancement under 13 V.S.A. § 1455(a) because the "conduct is motivated, in whole or in part, by the victim’s actual or perceived protected category." Under 13 V.S.A. § 1455(c), “'protected category' includes . . . sexual orientation, . . . and perceived membership in any such group."  They all should be arrested and charged.  And of course if this course of events leads to Perry's death, they all should be charged with second degree murder.

R

[Talo Segura]

I understand your anger and the author did a great job in bringing the story to this point, a cliffhanger. But, hold on a minute with the police and US justice system, these are kids and kids sometimes make bad choices and do stupid things. There's a collective direction that they all got swept up in. Put them in court and they might all get sentenced to 100 years detention with no hope of parole. I don't like too much criticising another country's police and justice system when I don't know the country except from what I read, but the system of justice in the US comes across as warped and vindictive. I hope Ross finds Perry and the trauma gets worked through, I don't want even the bad guys marked for life!

[Nico Grey]

11 hours ago, Rutabaga said:

Sociopaths -- all of them. They don't belong in school.

I blame their parents... and many of the other "responsible" adults in their lives.  It doesn't appear that these young people have ever been taught their limits and their individual responsibilities as members of society.  If they want something, they feel entitled to pursue it.  They find an internal justification (e.g., he just doesn't know he's gay and we're helping him discover this about himself).  If anyone does question their behavior they have a facile excuse on speed dial ("I was just complimenting him" or "We were flirting with each other, not with him") and generally they skate by without serious challenge... until it all comes to a head and things really do get serious.  And then we all wonder how the situation could get so badly out of hand.

Psychopaths are born that way but sociopaths are created, sometimes even by people with reasonably good intentions but no comprehension of their own inability to understand and manage social dynamics.  

I appreciate that you took the time to visit the V.S.A., Rutabaga!  Maybe you're a lawyer, or maybe I'm not the only person that finds it entertaining to wander through the arcane back alleys of our legal system just for fun.  Cool!

 

[Nico Grey]

9 hours ago, Talo Segura said:

the author did a great job in bringing the story to this point, a cliffhanger.

My editor gets all the credit for this, Tal.  I submitted all 55,000 words of the story as a single installment.  He took one look, advised me that it needed to be broken up into chapters for publication at AD, and then did an excellent job finding those story breaks for me!

[Altimexis]

I think that by definition, most high school students are sociopaths in a sense. Kids tend to be self-centered, but there's a key difference between a true sociopath and an ordinary teenager. Sociopaths are incapable of relating to how other people feel. Kids are obsessively focused on what other kids think of them. I think Dante, for example, might well be a sociopath, with the others falling under his spell. Without getting into the abusive nature of the American criminal justice system, had a group of high school boys cornered an underage girl, taken her against her will to a clearing and stripped her naked, I think that the lot of them would be looking at some serious jail time, either in Juvie or possibly in adult prisons. This is well beyond the level of parole with counseling and community service. I doubt the situation would be treated any differently when the victim is a boy.

The first priority is to find Perry and keep him safe until the 'authorities' arrive. When faced with actual arrest, I think there's little doubt that the kids will turn on each other. The parents will lawyer up to the extend they can afford it, and those kids not directly involved will plea to lesser charges in return for testifying against Dante and those most directly involved. I can't say how things would be handled in Vermont as opposed to New York, but my guess would be that those directly involved would be tried as adults and those on the periphery would be treated as juveniles, with the possibility of having their record expunged when they turn eighteen.

However, I'm not an attorney, so what do I know? I do think the school will have some serious soul-searching to do.

Let's hope Perry's okay.