The Story of Russell, Part 1.

This story was another that ought to have been prevented.

Russell’s mother had walked out years ago, and – if his father was to be believed – robbed them blind.

The truth of it was, they’d never had very much, to begin with.

He was raised in the country, surrounded by rather fanatic ideals that didn’t quite sit well with him. It was a country upbringing like any would expect; he could count their neighbours on one hand, and use the other hand if he wanted to count how many people he knew, in total. Their house was more of a cabin, which made escaping the man’s tirades almost impossible, and Russell usually coped by locking himself in one of the trucks and going for a drive.

They were big enough that he practically could have lived in the back of one, and had the same amount of room. He’d learned to drive without a license, and helped his father with his business on days he didn’t need to catch the early bus to go to school. The job was simple enough, trucking supplies back and forth, and Russell couldn’t stand it.

It was a mindless life. School was the only thing he felt passionate about, and he learned everything he could, determined to get into a school in the city. Preferably one more liberal-minded.

Russell got an acceptance letter to Queens, and departed the second his bags were packed.

All the studying in the world had not prepared him for people, however. He was told he was attractive, and his studies fell somewhat to the wayside as he was told a great many other things, as well.

He was easy to overwhelm, and just as easy to manipulate. There were several nights in which he slunk back to his residence, almost dizzy after spending the night with girls he thought were after something more than a drunken night of passion. Dizzy, and a little sick, feeling like he’d been left in the cold or abused, in some way.

His roommate, who was good-natured enough when it came to everything but women, often accused him of taking advantage. They weren’t sober, he argued; they didn’t know what they were doing. When Russell weakly defended himself by explaining that he hardly knew what he was doing, either, he was scoffed at.

Russell was the man; nothing else, apparently, mattered.

He called Russell a rapist so often that he became honestly terrified of being in a woman’s presence, convinced that he was using them, even when he was the one being pressured.

His solution was to avoid contact as much as possible, almost afraid to leave his room for anything but class. Russell kept to himself, until graduation, and didn’t intend to break his habit in ‘the real world’, either; he got a job at an architectural firm, and kept his distance from his female co-workers for the most part.

Once or twice, he tried dating. He wound up becoming so wary of using them that he would break it off before the relationship could blossom.

It wasn’t for several years that he realized it wasn’t only women he ought to have been avoiding.