Life As A Treehouse

Chapter 1: Hello World!

Hello, world. I'm Oliver Bennett. The world calls my generation entitled snowflakes. This applies to my peers, but it doesn't apply to me. I'm not your typical high school student, glued to their phone like a screen-faced zombie.

I hate phones so much that I ran my dad's phone over with my skateboard in the tenth grade. As a result, I was grounded until prom. Am I still grounded? Well, yes, but my conscience is clear.

Instead of having a phone to take awful selfies with, I use a walkie-talkie. I was born in the wrong era, and everyone loves to remind me of this.

My friends get angry that I don't use Snap Chat - whatever that is. So to piss them off, I snap my fingers in their faces while we are chatting.

I will never understand social media. I don't even have a computer. I handwrite all my papers for school. Hell, even a typewriter would be an improvement.

I wish we could go back to a simpler time when people enjoyed their moments when amateur phone junkies didn't photograph weddings. And where every smile a baby did was admired and not documented.

I use a walkie-talkie to chat with my three best friends. My best friend, Maximus Wellington, is still pissed when I make him use code names on the walkie-talkie. He hates the walkie-talkie - and yet here we are, still friends using code names. My code name is T-Rex, and he is Bowser. We never stopped loving dinosaurs and dragons.

My other friend is Lucas Evans. He's a cocky little four-eyed, five-foot dork. We believe he is the product of an affair between Mrs. Clause and a Christmas elf. I haven't seen him inventing toys yet. We are still waiting.

We were always the Three Musketeers until our fourth walkie-talkie partner came along, Miss Victoria Swann. We all call her Tori. To me, she is the stereotypical girl next door. She lives right next door to me. I'm not going to sit here and pretend Tori isn't on my mind. For now, let's leave it at that.

When we were seven, Tori's dad and mine were close friends. They saw we had similar trees growing in our two backyards and decided to build two treehouses. They connected them with a bridge. That same treehouse is still alive and well today. We keep it up to remind me of my dad. He passed away six months ago in a car accident.

Tori's dad has taken my family under his wing. Even Tori's mom has helped us with grocery duty. My mom is here - but not. Since my dad passed, she sits in the corner, barely human, moping about the house. I think she wants to move somewhere else, away from his memories. I want to stay here and keep the memories of the treehouse alive. That treehouse was our biggest accomplishment. It was the foundation of our relationship.

Lucas and Tori have their own walkie-talkie code names. She went with Tinkerbell, and Lucas is Red. Don't ask me where these code names came from. We were all ten and weren't creative at the time. I have begged everyone to change their names to a theme like Star Wars or Game of Thrones. I got outvoted.

So here we are, the four musketeers getting ready for our senior year. We are all sea creatures in the ocean of school. You can pretend to be tough and puff yourself out like a pufferfish. You can run away and hide in your inky getaway like an octopus. Or you can be a great white shark and prey on your mindless victims. The great white shark of Western High School is Jake Brady.

Jake Brady is the reason elementary students wet their beds at night. From what I can tell, he has no tragic back story. He just chooses to push girls into lockers, threaten animals and takes lunch money. He's the reason I've been packing my lunch for the past four years.

My mom hasn't noticed that I don't use my lunch money. I have been saving it up for my college fund. She gives me cash for lunch at the beginning of the week, and it goes into my secret stash in the wall.