S1 Week 13 Bonus Story: Charlie Brown

While We're On the Topic of Love

Welcome to Trainwrecks, a free-to-read fiction serial that follows a group of six Seattle-adjacent friends from the year 2004 to the year 2015. Join Luna Cruz, Sebastian Velasquez, Dimitri and Victoria Hale, Duke Kingston, and Jasmine Nolan as they stumble their way from adolescence to adulthood, falling in love, making mistakes, overcoming their pasts, and staying together through it all.

Friday posts are for paid subscribers. For $5 a month or a discounted rate of $50 a year, readers will get four bonus stories that delve deeper into each individual character’s history or the narrative’s current events. You do not need this content to understand the main story.

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Content Warnings: CSA, substance abuse, internalized homophobia

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Love? Sure. Dimitri had been in love before.

When he was fifteen years old, his mother and aunt found one of those high school debate teams that allowed homeschooled and other alternative students to join. Something-something about him needing peers his own age, blah blah blah. Dimitri liked to argue, so the idea of a debate team intrigued him. It was better than spending all his time at home with his depressed, alcoholic mother and their hoarded, dusty knickknacks, anyway.

While on the debate team, he developed his first crush on a guy: a senior who was jock levels of attractive with a nerd level brain. But this was the year 2000. Dimitri couldn’t be gay. What would his family and friends think of him? He’d be reduced to nothing more than a punchline. So he suppressed and pined and suppressed and pined some more until he was sick with misery. It didn’t help that the guy was so obviously straight, too, reducing his chances with him to an astounding zero percent.

In hindsight, he would never call that love. Puppy love, maybe, but not the real deal. At the time, however, he’d needed something to distract himself from his feelings. Something potent. So he’d gone to beg from the one person who could hook him up.

“No way. I’m already letting you drink more than I should,” his friend Allen O said to him at a party one night. Allen O was Korean, with buzzcut hair, yellow stained teeth from smoking too much weed, a huge friendly smile, and a love of baggy clothes. His last name was Oh, but since his rich doctor parents had disowned him, he’d dropped the last letter in a halfhearted attempt to distance himself from them. He was taller than Dimitri then, and six years older. They had met at community college, and became friends when Dimitri offered to tutor him in Chemistry.

“Like you’d stop me,” Dimitri shot back. Allen O was a big believer in freedom. If people wanted to distract themselves from their shitty lives with alcohol and sex and weed, then he’d give them a safe space to do it.

“I’m just sayin’, man, who cares if you like dudes? Look at Elton John. He swings both ways and he wrote the most bangin’ soundtrack of the year.”

“What soundtrack?”

“Tarzan.”

“You’re thinking of Phil Collins.”

“Oh.” Allen O scratched his fuzzy scalp. “Is Phil Collins gay?”