Interview
What do you write?
I was a weird kid once, so I’m drawn to writing stories about weird kids in weird places who get caught up in weird situations. Just give them some agency and turn them loose and see what happens. Genre-wise, this ranges from middle-grade hijinks up to contemporary fiction that features a young character. I’m a journalist by trade, so fiction is my escape.
Is there an author or artist who has most profoundly influenced your work?
I grew up on nonfiction (wasn’t allowed to read scary stories), and we always had compendiums of columnist Dave Barry in our bathroom, filled with his humorous takes on news both offbeat and serious. He taught me to look for the absurd in everything and how to tell the truth through satire.
Why did you choose Stonecoast?
I’d been dabbling with writing fiction for seven or eight years on my own and reached a point where I knew I needed professional help to push me over the hump. That, and I stumbled across it after moving to Maine from the west coast. A happy coincidence.
What is your favorite Stonecoast memory?
The open mic/talent shows. Like being back at summer camp, minus the self-consciousness.
What do you hope to accomplish in the future?
Write a bunch of stuff. Get some of it published. Go snowboarding on every continent. Play “Plinko” on The Price Is Right. Make a dent in my student loans before I die.
If you could have written one book, story, or poem that already exists, which would you choose?
Ever since high school my favorite novel has been A Separate Peace by John Knowles. I’ve read better stories, but there’s something timeless and haunting and honest about it that has given it staying power over the years.
Featured Work
Skunked
The following is a work of fiction exclusively for Stonecoast Review.
Oregon, 2009
Skunk earned his nickname the first day of school when he arrived in the same ratty flannel shirt and jeans he was wearing now. His real name was Dylan, but the teachers acknowledged his existence only to wake him from his regular naps. “Sorry,” the zombie boy would mumble, and again turn invisible. They didn’t even bother to send him to Principal Adams’s office. Maybe they felt sorry for him.
As always, he was sitting right in front of me. It was seventh period Geometry with the bald robot, Mr. Foster. Half asleep and fading fast, I was roasting inside my brand-new neon yellow RadioactiveTM ski jacket. Infused with patented retina-burning Atomic‑X® polyfibers, it was guaranteed to glow in all conditions like an unstable isotope and keep me toasty through the next Ice Age. Everyone said it hurt their eyes. Even if it caused my core to melt down and left only a puddle of sweat where I sat, I didn’t care. Coolest. Jacket. Ever.
I put my head down on my desk, chin on my hands. A sour vapor blitzed my nostrils like a shot of smelling salts. I buried my nose in my jacket and sucked out the oxygen. Gah! Why wouldn’t Skunk take a shower after gym class? Me and my ski team buddies, Matt and Tanner, put soap in his locker for him. And deodorant. Not our fault he ran off crying when we tried to hose him down with body spray. His stench rolled off his body in waves like the toxic yellow fumes of a cartoon character. I couldn’t hold my breath any longer.
“Pleh!” I gasped.
Mr. Foster turned his head and gave me a long side-eye over his shoulder. I picked up my pencil and pretended to take notes as I doodled a stick-figure skier, a.k.a. me, slaying a slalom course. After missing qualifying for Junior Nationals by a tenth of a second the winter before, I had thought of nothing else. I checked the classroom clock again. Just a few hundred seconds to go. But forget family and food and all that Thanksgiving nonsense on Thursday. Friday was all that mattered. The official start of winter. Opening day on the mountain.
True, I went to summer downhill racing camp at Mt. Hood, and Mom and Dad dragged me and my sisters to Canada to ski on some man-made junk during fall break, but it wasn’t the same. My new season pass, a photo RFID card with me grinning like a goon and finally free of my braces, already occupied the pocket of my atomic jacket, ready for the turnstile scanners the moment the lifts started spinning.
A trickle of sweat raced down my side. All right, maybe it was too warm inside for my minus-20-degree rated jacket. I pulled it off, draped it over my seat back, and stared out the window. My winter playground, a dormant volcano with a sheared top, loomed in the distance most afternoons. But the high desert had pulled a cold, gray blanket over the Cascades, and the clouds were now spitting a slushy rain onto the empty schoolyard and the neighborhoods beyond.
I leaned forward to re-wipe the fog from the glass for a better look—and a fresh whiff of Skunk funk knocked me back into my seat. That time I tasted it, like licking a dirty sock filled with rotten onions. Out of hall passes, I was trapped, all because Mr. Foster just had to have assigned seats.
Last period. Every day. Skunked.
“Dylan,” Mr. Foster said from the whiteboard littered with multicolored numbers, letters, triangles, quadrilaterals. The head of matted, curly hair in front of me remained motionless, face down atop a notebook smeared with drool. A wave of giggles swelled in the front row. Waking him was just another daily routine.
“Dylan.”
Again, no response. Mr. Foster looked at me expectantly. Why was it always my job to wake the Skunk? I held my breath, reached for him with my pencil, and poked a bare button of spine that was showing through a dime-size hole in his flannel. Startled, he turned to me and wiped his nose, the tip red with an angry cold sore.
“Whuh?” he said.
I averted my eyes and pointed my pencil toward the front. Dylan sniffled and faced Mr. Foster.
“Sorry,” he said, and hung his head.
When the bell finally rang I burst out of the classroom, gasping for breath.
“Skunked again?” Matt asked.
“Better toss your pencil, dude,” Tanner said. “Skunk germs.”
Careful to avoid the tip, I fished it out of my pocket and dropped it to the floor. After pausing at our lockers to slam our books inside, we rejoined the crowd pushing for the doors.
Matt pulled a beanie over his shaggy head as he checked his phone. “You ready for Friday?”
“Heck yes,” I said. “Fresh pow on opening day.”
“Keep dreaming,” Tanner said. He flipped his sweatshirt hood up over his head and pushed the door open outside. “The mountain app says the base isn’t even two feet. It’s gonna be a minefield.”
“Don’t jinx it, dude,” I said. “If it’s snowing in town it’s gotta be nuking up there.”
“Speaking of,” Matt said, “where’s your jacket?”
A cold, wet flake landed on my bare arm. Crap. I wheeled around and swam against the noisy school of humans back to Mr. Foster’s room, where he sat behind his desk and stuffed papers into his brown briefcase.
“Can I help you?” He didn’t even look at me, and so I didn’t answer his question.
“Where’d it go?” I said.
“Where did what go, Max?”
“It was on my chair.”
Mr. Foster stood. “What was?”
“Right here, right on this seat.”
“What are you talking about?” He snapped his briefcase shut.
I looked under the desks.
“Max?”
“What?”
“What are you looking for?”
“My jacket.”
“Your jacket?”
“Yes! My jacket!”
“All right, no need to yell. Maybe one of your friends grabbed it for you.” Mr. Foster shrugged. He lifted his briefcase from the desk and turned to leave. “Well,” he said, “I didn’t see anything. Your clothes are your responsibility, not mine. Happy Thanksgiving.”
With a groan I stomped out of the room. Maybe Principal Adams could help. The school had more security cameras than a prison, so at least one had to capture the thief, right? I went straight to the office, declaring that someone had stolen my jacket.
Miss Sheila, the secretary, who was busy on the phone, didn’t acknowledge me. Mr. Adams’s door was shut, a do-not-disturb-meeting-in-progress sign hanging on the knob. Great. Maybe it had already been turned in; not likely, but worth a shot. The Lost and Found was in a supply closet back behind the tall horseshoe counter, between the tank of a copier machine and exclusive faculty bathroom. Forbidden territory, sure, but I didn’t have time to wait for permission. I squatted low, skulked down to the end, peered around the corner; Sheila was still on the phone. Perfect. I made a break for it and pushed the door open and slipped inside.
Beyond the boxes of paper and shelves filled with pens and whiteboard markers and empty binders, coats and jackets hung from a rack on the back wall. None of them were mine. Below was a laundry cart filled with clothes and I dug through it. And, as I was digging through the mass of hoodies and jeans and shoes and unwashed P.E. shirts, someone cleared their throat behind me.
Principal Adams stood in the doorway. He tilted his head, clearly struggling to place my name out of his hundreds of students. “Matt?”
“Uh, Max.”
“Shaeffer? Eighth grade?”
“Fleener. Seventh grade.”
“Right. What are you doing in here?”
“Someone took my jacket, but Miss Sheila was busy and she said I could look.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Well, do you see it?”
“Nope.”
“Then you better check when you get back on Monday, Mr. Fleener. Happy Thanksgiving.”
By the time I realized I could have taken any coat and Principal Adams wouldn’t have known the difference, it was too late. And I’d forgotten all about the security cameras. That was my whole reason for going to the office in the first place. Now I had to walk home in the freezing cold in just a t‑shirt. “This sucks,” I said to anyone who cared to listen. Which was no one. The school had cleared out faster than a fire drill.
#
Matt and Tanner were waiting by the front doors of the school, thumbs working their phones. I reached into my jeans pocket for mine. Empty. Also in my jacket.
“Didn’t find it?” Matt asked, without looking up.
“Look like it, dilweed?” I said. “That’s a three-hundred-dollar jacket. My parents are gonna kill me. My phone was in it. And my season pass.”
“Sucks to be you,” Tanner said. He stuck in an earbud and we followed him through the door into the chilly afternoon.
“If someone is dumb enough to wear it to school, or on the mountain, we’ll help you kick their butt,” Matt said. “Just wear one of your old ones.”
“Yeah, and be the gaper in last year’s gear,” I said. “My dad’s gonna make me pay for a new pass out of my allowance. And a phone too.”
They shrugged, eyes still locked on their devices as we shuffled across the damp grass of the soccer field. “Look what Brittney wrote on my wall,” Matt said to Tanner, tilting his screen toward him as he shielded it from the slushy rain.
“Yeah, dude, she wants you—hey, look at this sick vid Zack made,” Tanner said.
I didn’t ask to see. I didn’t care.
Now off campus, wind swept down the empty street walled by clone houses. Shivering, I crossed my bare, goose pimpled arms and wedged my hands into moist armpits; gross, sure, but it was an emergency. I picked up the pace.
“Slow down, Turbo,” Matt said.
“Yeah, dude, you’re walking like my mom,” Tanner said.
I told them both to shut up. A block or two up the sidewalk, a tall figure approached. Long hair. Baggy clothes. Duffel bag. Slinking dog. It was one of those grizzly dudes who always stood by the Parkway in grungy, olive green fatigues with a sob story scrawled onto cardboard. Sometimes they got lost and drifted through our neighborhood.
Dad had told me they were scammers. We passed one on a recent trip to the ski shop to get fitted for new boots. “Those guys go home every night with more money than if they worked a real job,” he’d said. “And they’re getting Welfare on top of it. It’s all an act.”
I wasn’t sure if I believed him, but Dad was a banker, so maybe he knew. I scanned the street and tacked toward the opposite sidewalk. Matt and Tanner glanced up, winced, and followed suit, giving the scraggly stranger a wide berth.
We reached the iron fence that guarded our unfinished subdivision. My two-story castle occupied the far corner, on a cul-de-sac between a rocky, vacant lot and the wooden skeleton of an abandoned house-in-progress—a living relic of the day the housing market imploded, as Dad had explained. A half-dozen oversized houses remained standing among a treeless wasteland of empty streets and clumps of sage and utility boxes. Mountain Vista Estates was a ghost town in reverse, one that died before it ever really existed.
We used to live in town, in a real neighborhood, with trees and sidewalks and, well, neighbors. I missed the old hippies and the hipster ski bums on our block, and swimming in the river, and hanging out at the yogurt shop, and tossing around a Frisbee or a ball at the park with my old friends. Now, out on the edge of civilization, I had only rock chucks for neighbors, and those fat little furry devils would bite your finger off if you gave them the chance. Beyond my back fence, an expanse of sandy, juniper-choked woods—crisscrossed by deer trails and irrigation ditches—spread toward a distant, snowless mountain to the east, begging to be explored.
And it was all off limits. Back in fifth grade, not long after we moved to our new house, I chased a dog into the trees one evening, and six hours later I reappeared out at the airport, bewildered and hungry but unhurt. I rode home in the back seat of a cop car and made the local news. Mom and Dad didn’t think it was as cool as I did.
Matt, Tanner, and I reached the abandoned Information kiosk, which promised Affordable family living and mountain views from the $210’s! A poster of the master plan lay in the weeds below, faded by the high desert sun. I punched in the key code and the gate rolled open.
“You wanna come over tonight?” I asked Matt.
“Gotta leave for Eugene soon as I get home,” he said, texting as he veered to his house. “See ya Friday.”
I turned to Tanner. “What about you?”
“Same thing,” he said, face glued to his screen. “Thanksgiving with my lame fam in Vancouver. Sucks. I’ll text ya when I get back.”
“No phone, dude,” I reminded him.
He shrugged and turned down an empty street.
Yes, the crow who stole my jacket would pay. Vengeful tears surged upward and I broke into a run, my shoes slapping the wet asphalt until I squished across our fairway lawn. The house was dark, lifeless. Dad was at the bank downtown and Mom was shuttling Maddie and Mackenzie to gymnastics. Or was it voice lessons on Tuesdays? Girl Scouts? No idea.
The trash bins by the garage were tipped over. Again. Wet garbage spilled out across the driveway. Probably a raccoon, or another of the wild critters that lived out in the scrub. Not my problem, though; we had a maid and a landscaper to take care of that sort of stuff. Besides, a rare hour at home alone awaited. Fingers numb, I punched the five-digit alarm code into the panel by the front door. It beeped in disapproval.
INVALID CODE.
“Invalid?”
I entered the code again, certain it was correct.
Beep-beep-beep.
INVALID CODE.
I tried again. Same result. The message on the screen blinked: SYSTEM LOCKDOWN. OVERRIDE CODE REQUIRED.
I stepped back and surveyed our house. It was now a fortress. Cold, unfamiliar, imposing. Its tall, fake columns and brick walls guarding my spacious, warm room upstairs. Why would Mom and Dad change the alarm code and not tell me? Of course—they probably texted me the new one, and, well, no phone. And no spare key, either. All electronic.
Stupid. All of it was stupid. And I had nowhere to hide from the cold and rain. Even the back porch and pool house and fence were booby trapped against intruders by our security system. All that, and we couldn’t stop a little animal from tipping the trash in broad daylight?
The keypad kept beeping. SYSTEM LOCKDOWN. OVERRIDE CODE REQUIRED.
Freezing, I wiggled the doorknob; the panel squawked like a cyborg goose. I leaned a shoulder against the heavy door with the vertical panes of stained glass and pushed it, jumped into it, threw my body against it till it hurt. More squawking. Across the grid of empty lots, Matt and Tanner’s parents backed their SUVs out of their driveways and rolled away, leaving the neighborhood wet, cold, and dead.
I slammed a fist against the door.
“Gah!” I cried, alternating punches, each more desperate than the one before. “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Stu—”
Krish.
A shrill siren shocked my eardrums. I stared at the busted glass, then at my stinging hand. Blood trickled from the base of my pinky finger and painted a red dot on the clean concrete.
Blood. Alarm. Cops. Angry parents.
Oh, crap.
I bolted into the woods like a deer that had just taken an arrow to the butt, following the path of least resistance, darting this way and that into whichever opening presented itself, hoping to outrun the harsh, clanging racket of the alarm. Blood appeared on my wet jeans. I sucked on my finger, tasting copper. The cut was deep. But I kept running until my adrenaline petered out.
My footfalls slowed to a stop, and I turned in place, panting, releasing columns of steam from my heaving chest like a smokestack. A curtain of twisted juniper all around. Concrete slab sky. I held my breath, listening. No hum of distant cars. No security alarm. Nothing. The cold caught up and shook my shoulders like an angry yeti. I tried to retrace my steps, but the footprints had disappeared in the damp sand.
Not again.
Before I could go into full panic mode, I smelled something familiar, something heavy and rich and woody. The scent was a memory of camping trips with Dad.
It was smoke.
I followed my nose. The frigid rain intensified, soaking me to the bone, but I shook out my soggy hair like a dog and pressed on, cautious, every sense on high alert. I soon broke through to a narrow path and followed it to where it joined a bigger one, and then an even bigger one, rutted out by bike and ATV tracks. Who would be camping out here, and in this weather?
I kept going. Through the tangle of evergreens, something blue appeared. The closer I got, the larger it grew, until it formed a wall before me. Tarps.
“H‑hello?” I called through chattering teeth.
No response. After a wary look around, I entered the clearing. Protected from the elements, a handful of shabby tents ringed a fire pit. A thin wisp of smoke rose from ashy logs. It wasn’t the sort of campsite I remembered from the state parks we once frequented. The tarps and tents were faded and worn, obviously not dragged out of the garage for the weekend.
“Hello?” I called again. “Anybody here?”
No response.
I held my hands to the smoking wood. The soggy coals offered little heat. Shivering so hard I thought I was going to puke. I was going to freeze to death in the stupid woods not even a mile from my house.
Whose tents were these? Did it matter? Could there be a sleeping bag, or a blanket, a sweater, something warm inside? Not to take, but to borrow. Just for a minute. I would put it back.
I shuffled over to the nearest tent, and my heart sank: A padlock held the zipper’s tabs together. I checked the next tent, and then the next, and then the next. One small tent remained, and I almost didn’t check it—almost just dropped to the cold wet ground to die—but then I thought, you may get my jacket, but you won’t get my life. I leaned and looked at the small tent’s zipper. It was open.
I yanked the zipper tab up, revealing a pile of blankets inside. The smell was unpleasant. Musty. But I needed warmth, so I reached in and snatched one. There was a yellow notepad underneath. With writing on it. I leaned in for a closer look. My own name jumped out at me, scrawled inside a triangle-topped square fringed with jagged lines. Oh, I thought, this looks familiar. Then it hit me. It was my house. My neighborhood. Matt’s and Tanner’s houses were there, too, drawn similarly. And around each of them were stick figures with hands on their heads and hair ablaze, mouths open in silent screams.
A different kind of chill ran up my spine.
“What the—”
“ARF-ARF-ARF!”
I spun. Across the clearing, a blur of bared teeth and fur zoomed straight for me. I screamed and dove inside the tent, yanked the zipper down, and buried myself in the dank blankets. Claws scratched the thin fabric, threatening to tear it.
“Down!” a voice said. The dog quieted but began to whimper at the tent door. I peered through the blanket, cringing. A vague shadow grew, bent down, jangled the tab from outside, and pulled up.
Sunlight blinded me. Sunlight from a RadioactiveTM sun.
“Skunk?”
He recoiled and dropped something, but his wide eyes narrowed in an instant. He held the dog by its collar. “That’s not my name,” he said.
I crawled out of the blankets to face him. “And that’s not your jacket,” I said.
“I was cold.”
“You were cold?” I stumbled to my feet and stared him down, ignoring the dog’s protective growl. “I had to walk home in the freaking rain. And I got locked out of my freaking house. Do you have any idea how cold I am?”
“Yeah, I do,” he said softly. “At least you have a house.”
Tongue tied, I eyed him like he was crazy, and I slowly took inventory of my surroundings. Tents, fire pit, clotheslines. Propane tanks, skinny dog, a half-eaten pack of sliced turkey on the ground. The grungy boy came back into focus, and, like an icy hand grabbing the downhill edge of my ski, the realization slammed me with violent force.
“Skunk,” I said. “You…you live…here?”
He looked away, then back, and, with defiance blazing his eyes he reeled off his credentials like a prisoner of war. “My name’s not Skunk. It’s Dylan. Dylan James Williams.” He took a step toward me, hands balled into tight fists.
I shrunk back. It wasn’t possible. He couldn’t be the same kid from school. I glanced at the open tent, snatched the notepad and held it up. “You—you really want to burn down my house?”
He jerked away with a squeal, then faced me again. “You guys are so mean to me. I never did nothing to you. I wish you and your stupid rich family and your stupid rich friends would all die!” And then he stripped off the jacket, slammed it to the ground, jerked his dog by its collar so hard that it yelped, and tromped over to the fire pit and sat on an overturned paint bucket.
Maybe I deserved his outrage. All that time, all those days I sat right behind him and crossed paths in the halls, I could have been nice to him, just for a moment. But I didn’t. I just went with the flow.
I approached Dylan from behind, cautiously, as if he would bite. He turned away and folded his arms, his elbows poking through the threadbare flannel.
“Leave me alone,” he said. “I hate you.”
The word was a dagger. No one had ever said they hated me, not even my little sisters. I may as well have dunked his head in the toilet and yanked his underwear up over his head every day. I didn’t feel like a bully. But maybe I was.
“I’m sorry, dude,” I mumbled. It may have been the first time I ever apologized on my own, without being forced.
Surprised, Dylan searched my eyes for a moment, then looked down and scratched his wet dog’s ears. “We used to live out by LaPine,” he said. He wiped his nose. “Dad lost his job and our house and stuff. Didn’t have nowhere else to go. Camped out here so I could go to a good school. Told my friends we were moving out of state.”
“Does anyone know you don’t have a house? Like, teachers and school people? Or the police, or something?”
“They know. And they don’t care. There’s probably hundreds of us in the woods.”
“Hundreds?”
“Yeah. And they ain’t about to start giving away houses for free.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I stood there and said nothing. Dylan poked at the coals with a stick, trying to revive the dying fire. Wet embers hissed puffs of white smoke. “What are you doing out here, anyway?” he asked. “And why are you bleeding?”
“I, uh—I’m lost. I got locked out.”
A rogue grin bent his mouth. “You’re the one that set off the alarm?”
“Yeah.”
“You got locked out of your own house?”
“Yeah,” I said, and shook with a fresh shiver.
Dylan’s mirth vanished, and he resumed his poking at the coals. He snapped some wet twigs and tossed them onto the fire. “I swear,” he said, “I was gonna turn your jacket in to the Lost and Found next week. It’s just getting cold, that’s all, and school’s the only warm place.”
We were quiet. A wet juniper branch hissed and popped in the dying fire.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Sorry I made it smelly.”
I stared at my jacket on the ground between us, and I despised it. As much as I wanted to tell him to keep it, everyone at school knew it was mine, and charity might embarrass him more. Or, worse, he might assume that I gave it to him because he had made it smelly.
No, there was only one option. I picked it up, shook off the beads of water, pushed one bare arm through a sleeve, then the other, and zipped it up all the way. It smelled a little, sure, but I didn’t flinch. I then ripped the top page from the notepad and crumpled it and tossed it into the smoldering coals. Black spread across it slowly, like ink, and we watched it dissolve into ash.
I found my phone in the pocket where I had left it and turned it on. Eight panicked texts and six missed calls from Mom. I texted back Im ok home soon. I scanned the clearing for the exit, forgetting which way I’d come in. What did it matter which path I took? Between these tents they all looked the same. I chose one.
“Max?” Dylan said.
I turned and faced him.
“Your house is that way, dude,” he said, pointing the opposite direction.
“Oh. Yeah. Heh.” I strode back across the clearing and vanished into the thicket, leaving Dylan, the fire pit, and his sad, wet dog behind me. What looked like a trail led me to a dead-end a couple minutes later. I retraced my steps. Or so I thought. Another dead-end. I pulled up a map on my phone and it just showed me in the middle of a big green blob. Fantastic. “Hey, Dylan?” I called out.
“What’s up?” he replied from the opposite direction I expected, and much closer.
“I think I’m lost.”
“Again?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You think you could show me how to get home?”
He whistled at his dog and appeared through the branches moments later. “I know the way,” he said. “Follow me.”
Russell Wilson is a TV news journalist in Portland, Maine, and is in his second semester at Stonecoast. In previous lives he has been a middle school teacher, football coach, ski bum, and summer camp counselor from Texas to Oregon to South Dakota to New England. He tends to write YA fiction and always chooses a window seat when he flies.