"Don't you dare fucking talk to me like that." I snapped at the seething boy in front of me.
"Like what, princess? Like you're full of shit? Someone had to say it!" He yelled back.
"No, don't talk to me like you're better than me! You and I are the...
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★★★
In the Outer Banks of North Carolina, everyone had a category. You were either a Pogue, a Kook, or a Touron. Or you were like me, but there's nobody like me but me. Me? Stevie Kessinger? I'm nobody.
I'm neither a Pogue or a Kook, and I lived here full-time so I definitely wasn't a Touron. Let me break down the categories.
The Kooks are rich, obnoxious assholes who live in their second or third vacation homes on the Outer Banks and go to the preppy Kook academy. They were all up on Figure 8, and they liked to stay there. Their parents are all entitled too, which I guess is passed down through the family.
The Tourons are the kids who come here for a week or so in the summertime with their family to go to museums and take beach pictures and shit. They're not really around local parts of the OBX usually though, so you really ever ran into them at the beach or the boneyard.
Then there's the Pogues. I identified closer with them than with any other category. They're the working-class derelicts that live on the Cut. I live on the Cut, but I would never call myself a Pogue. You'd have to work and have friends to be a Pogue. I live on a houseboat with my Aunt Helen. She's a drunk with money left over from my grandpa's death to live wasted on the boat for the rest of her life.
I can't even say I live there though, seeing as I sleep on the beach most of the time. I built a little shelter there years ago when I was a kid, and now I just chill there whenever I want. I'm not homeless, obviously, but I don't like being with Helen.
She's a real bitch when she's drunk, and more times than I can count I've ended up wandering the beach with a black eye or bloody nose from one of her outbursts. She was a piece of work, but she was the closest thing to my dead parents I had left.
My mom was a Kook growing up but married a Pogue: My dad, Skip Kessinger. He died when I was four, and some say my mom died of a "broken heart" only months later. From what I've gathered, they were good people and hard workers. Helen was the only one I could live with since I was young and had nobody else. She's my mom's sister, kicked out of her Kook home at 17 because of her drinking problem.
They called her a disgrace, and to me, that seemed completely true. I guess she was still in the will though because, with my mom dead and obviously ineligible to inherit anything, Helen got some cash assets to hold her over. She's been living on it for a while, so I guess she's fine.
I woke up on the beach for the third night in a row that week, my facial wounds still healing from being beaten up by Helen for coming home without whiskey for her. Since when was that my job anyway? It's not like I had any money to get it with; did she expect me to go into the liquor store as a minor and just swipe it?
I stood up and shook the sand off of myself, fixing the faded gray t-shirt that was hanging off my shoulder. I had a backpack with some stuff in it but decided to go get the rest of my stuff from Helen's boat later that day. I was done with living with her, I didn't really care if I had to be homeless for a while. I had my own little boat that used to be my dad's, so I hung out on that a lot of the time.
