It's Not Fake, It's Pre-determined

 

Ah, Bobo, you were one of Gramp's favorites

 

I'm twelve years old, sitting in the high school gym on a Thursday night, and a large, sour-smelling man in a red, white, and blue singlet is threatening to kill me.  

Growing up rural, Overture: Stay in the lines

Not actually from back home, but fairly representative of most county roads

Rural Ohio in the early 90's was a pretty orderly backdrop for a teen's life. Roads that connected the places you started from with the places you were going to all ran in straight lines, north-south or east-west, letters one way and numbers the other starting from the northeast corner of the county.  This orderly grid system made navigating very simple for 16 year old me, as I only had to know that there was a party on, say, Road 5 between G and H, in order to find my way there with about 8 friends in tow.

The occasional diagonal road was given a bottom-of-the-alphabet letter, and short spur roads (sometimes paved, but often only gravel) got an alphanumeric designation (F-6, I-9, you sunk my Battleship) depending on where they fell on the county grid. Those spurs were where we ended up many nights; thirty-odd cars on the roadside with knots of kids standing, talking, drinking, smoking, dancing, kissing, and occasionally fighting under dark skies to the tune of car stereos blasting from open trunks. We lived our nights on the straight lines between other straight lines.