Fiction Fantastic 2025 Winning Story: “Strange Boy” by Adrienne White

The story below is a winner from our Fiction Fantastic Young Writers Contest, open to all youth in Lane County. For more information on this contest, including how to enter, visit here. Support this program with a donation.

You can purchase this story in the 2025 Winners Anthology, Echoes of the Future.

“Strange Boy” by Adrienne White, Cal Young Middle School

Honorable Mention, Middle School Level, 2025

Strange Boy

by Adrienne White

Cal Young Middle School

Editors’ Note: This story includes portrayal of drugs, self-harm, and suicide.

I still remember the summer I broke my leg. My first memory of pain, really.

I was only six, I’d like to preface. Kelsey McCormick was having her annual birthday party. The one her family hosted for the sole purpose of making others look bad.

And sure, I looked bad. Like a Ramona Quimby knock off in my choppy bob and dress slacks, Kelsey’s present kept in a brown paper bag with a red ribbon tied sloppily around it. We weren’t poor, but I sure fit the part. Especially when I looked at the girl’s old trampoline as if it was plated with gold.

That trampoline. That damned trampoline. Up and down I bounced, up and down. My hair closely resembled a lion’s mane, tendrils of it flying wildly in the air. Kelsey’s mother had put up a nylon net around the trampoline prior to my arrival, which Kelsey had said her mother had decided on due to my “reckless tendencies.” Reckless tendencies. That was something I heard often when I was young, which I never quite understood.

Even as my six-year-old self both front and backflipped, hair sticking out like some sort of mad scientist, I didn’t feel reckless at all. Until Kelsey’s friend Patty and her “boyfriend” Joshua dared me to flip off of the trampoline.

All the kids gathered around me at the end of the birthday party, after Kelsey’s mother had left, of course. Kelsey’s older brother Daniel looked at me and started a chant of my name, which everybody joined in on. Like I was not just his, but everybody’s saving grace.

I was on top of the world that day. I really was. Until I slipped off the edge, costing me both my entire leg and my parents enough money to make us actually poor. At the time, that was pain. My only pain.

But now, as I stand outside the funeral home as they lower Evan’s casket into the ground, I feel a new kind of pain. Far worse than falling off a trampoline could ever be.

I met Evan halfway through my sophomore year when he showed up abruptly. So abruptly, in fact, that I assumed he was some kind of exchange student. What didn’t help my assumption was the fact that he never spoke, furthering my misbelief.

It just so happened that the boy flunked his junior English class and he was demoted to my sophomore one. That was the catalyst for our relationship. Or rather, Mr. Baldwin, the uptight English teacher was the catalyst. He hated us both from the get-go, knowing of my “reckless” behavior and Evan’s tendencies to openly disrespect the teacher– something Mr. Baldwin brought up time and time again that never actually happened. Well, never openly.

The week Mr. Baldwin got sick was the week Evan was waiting for. Watching for, as he observed the class in a peaceful silence every day as they constantly mocked him. Listening for, as he overheard Mr. Baldwin discussing where he hid his classroom key during lunch.

Evan was an observer, and that was how he found Mr. Baldwin’s secret stash of “medicinal” marijuana. Every afternoon he’d take the stolen pot and smoke it in the janitor’s closet. He’d sell it too, apparently. Every kid knew about his side hustle. Every kid except me.

Patty (the same Patty who dared me to jump off that trampoline when I was six) had thrown up in our home economics class one afternoon, and I was sent by Miss Alison to fetch something to clean it all up. That was the day my first encounter with Evan ensued. He was in the janitor’s closet that afternoon, sprawled out across the floor as he smoked some of his ration of weed.

I screamed at first sight, and he screamed back. I accused him of being a druggie, and he called me a nosy bitch. I called him high, and he corrected me with a simple “No, I’m Evan.”

I yelled at him for being careless about his health, and he laughed. I called him a big dumb junior and he called me kid. Kid. That was what he called me. Never bothered to learn my name. Even after he coerced me–sweet talker that he was–into smoking with him to get me to keep quiet about what I’d seen.

His plan was still thriving. Even after that day, and the day after that when Mr. Baldwin came back and accused just about every kid of stealing his medicine. The only problem was, as somebody who’d never smoked before, I became needy for it. So I tracked Evan down.

Every day he’d switch up “his spot,” and it became some sort of guessing game for me. He was reluctant, of course. Splitting his goods with a tiny girl who just wouldn’t pay. But I was persistent and, any time he threatened to stop, I just threatened to tell Mr. Baldwin right back. And so, he let me in on his scheme.

Mr. Baldwin brought in more and hid it in a new spot and, after Evan located it, we began selling it. We were a dealing duo, Evan and I.

For the first few weeks, it was great. We only saw each other in what became “our spots,” and that was okay. But then I’d start to see him in other places.

Stores, at friends’ houses, and, most of all in my older brother’s band. Evan was younger than my eldest brother Peter, and all he would say about him was “he’s strange.” A good drummer, was another thing he called him. And Evan was. Practically a machine, as he pummeled into those things with everything he had.

“That sounded good,” I told him as he exited our house, me sitting on the front porch with a juice box in hand. “Very punk rock.”

He laughed, and looked at me for a while. A long while. The kind of looking he did when Mr. Baldwin decided it was time to change up the hiding spot for the key, or my brother complimented his drumming. The kind of looking that made me feel seen.

Then he sat next to me on the porch and took my juice box nonchalantly as he brainstormed our next possible spots aloud.

The next day at school we were smoking, and he told me he liked me better than my brother, and he called me by my name instead of just “kid.” He said he wished he could leave our dead-end town, and I asked him why he didn’t. Part of me hoped he wasn’t going to, but I kept this to myself as he just shrugged and began his air-drumming.

Another few days passed, and I noticed he had removed his sweatshirt for the first time, wearing just a white tank top. He didn’t seem to pay it much attention, but I did. His arms were adorned with scars. Big, small, surface, deep. And, even as I brushed my hand against the torn skin there, he just laughed and asked me why I looked like I’d seen a ghost.

Weeks went by, and his spots became harder to track. He smiled more often, which scared me as we were seeing each other less. One afternoon during lunch I’d given up on looking for him, until I heard a crash coming from the janitor’s closet. The one we’d met in.

Slowly, I knocked and realized it was barely even shut. Giving it a gentle nudge open, I revealed Evan. Kissing a boy.

He stopped by my brother’s house one Sunday afternoon after that with an old bouquet of roses, but almost screamed as he saw that I answered the door.

We stood there in silence for a long time, and all of a sudden, he simply said, “I’m gonna miss you, Kid.”

Then he wrapped his arms around me and held me, swaying the slightest bit with the breeze. He smelled like wood and grass. Like the grass I fell off the trampoline onto.

I then kissed his lips and, to my surprise, he didn’t recoil away from me. He didn’t kiss me like he kissed that boy, either. That was different. With me, he just cried and held me tighter, murmuring three words I couldn’t make out over and over again.

That was the last I saw of him.

A month went by without Evan. Nobody said anything. Not even Mr. Baldwin, who’d installed his own makeshift cameras in the classroom and found out it was Evan who’d been stealing the weed. But even he didn’t seem worried by Evan’s absence.

I asked my brother when Evan was coming again, and he looked at me like I was insane.

I started to grow scared. Not the kind of scared I was when Kelsey called it her “birthday wish” to see me jump off that trampoline. The kind of scared you get when you feel the same, but everybody else is so very different.

As the end of the school-year approached, so did the junior prom. Joshua, Kelsey’s old boyfriend, asked me to go, which was honestly quite surprising. He said I’d become more confident in myself this year, but only I knew exactly where this confidence was coming from.

When a slow dance song came on, he put his arms around my waist and began to cry. Not the kind of real cries Evan made when he held me. Different cries.

I was confused, and then he told me that he still loved Kelsey. I just said “OK,” and he cried even harder into my shoulder.

“She’s with her brother in the hospital right now,” he sobbed. “And instead of being with her . . . I’m here with you.”

Instead of taking offense to his last remark, I pushed him off my shoulder and offered to drop him off at the hospital.

I guess I didn’t remember Joshua being this much of a baby. All I could think of were his feigned words of sympathy after the day I fell. But as he threw himself into Kelsey’s arms in the hospital hallway and wept like an infant on her, I realized you really can’t judge somebody by when you first met them.

I stood outside when he went into her brother’s room, which had seemingly dozens of bouquets outside of it. Ones like the kind Evan gifted me, only less dead.

I peered inside, and came face to face with an unfamiliar body on the hospital bed. Well, almost unfamiliar. I couldn’t place it at first, until I gently prodded Kelsey out of the way to look at his face.

Daniel.

“They’re saying he might not make it through the night,” Kelsey’s voice from the hall echoed throughout the room, and I realized it was just me and him. Daniel.

He was at Kelsey’s birthday party when I fell. He was there. He looked at me. He was there. He started the chant for me. He was there. He smoked with me. He was there. He played drums for me. He was there. He cried for me. He was there. He kissed me. He was there. He said goodbye to me.

“Evan?” I whispered almost inaudibly, though I received no response.

I then tilted his wrists, revealing scars. All sorts of scars. I looked over his neck, revealing the marks that boy left on him. I brushed my fingertips over his hands that had drummed for me, his eyes that had cried for me, and his lips that had kissed me. And said goodbye to me.

As I touched his lips, I remembered the three words he told me. And I said the same to him. Over and over again.

A nurse’s voice snapped me back to reality, pushing me out of the way. Doctors filed into a room as his heart rate monitor began to fluctuate, interrogating me on the spot. My head pounded. Kelsey and Josh were there, too, my head still pounding as they asked me more questions. Kelsey slapped me, tears rolling down her cheeks as the jagged line on the monitor went straight.

Now I’m here. Standing outside the funeral home. They don’t know I’m here. Nobody does. I got to see his body, though. Dressed in a suit for his burial.

It’s him. Even when I close my eyes at night and scream and cry that it isn’t, it’s him.

And I loved him.

And he loved me.

So next time you remember a love story, remember mine and Evan’s. Because no matter who he was, or where he ended up, my love for that strange boy was stronger than anybody else’s could’ve ever been.