As a kid, Sandy was just a city boy. He grew up in Harlem, in Upper Manhattan, not too far from central park. He learned to measure distance in city blocks before he learned how long a mile was. He was just one of many kids in the public school system, and generally a quiet sort that stayed to himself. He went to school at P.S. 154, and stayed at the top of his class for most of his life through Elementary and Middle School.
At the time the school had a tendency to try to entice students to have good behavior by giving them awards. Sandy got a lot of those, from being top of his class in grades to having perfect attendance. Of course, perfect attendance wasn’t hard to get, all you had to do was show up… but it did encourage a culture where being sick was not an excuse, as you would still lose your award. Looking back, those awards were not healthy, and not conducive of a peaceful and good learning environment. If nothing else, it was certainly a waste of paper printing them out every single month.
Despite being a rather smart kid, and having near perfect grades, Sandy did have a few problems. He wasn’t able to keep control of his emotions. In kindergarten they seemed to treat it as just a part of the school experience, but even in first grade they became concerned. Sandy continued to throw tantrums into middle school, and it became a problem. It eventually led to bullying, and then to fights.
Eventually Sandy’s mom enrolled him in martial arts classes. It turned out to be exactly what he needed. Not only could he protect himself better and more safely, but he also became much better at controlling his own emotions, due to the teachings and discipline of his sensei. It may not have been able to stop the bullying, but it helped him endure it, and became one of his central focuses.
Sandy only had three friends by the end of middle school, but it was when Sandy was ready to transfer to High School that he and his mom had the talk. He had two choices, both of which would require him to see a therapist. The first is to put all of his effort into getting a scholarship to a good school in Manhattan, keeping his friends, and working to make himself a better person. The other option was to take a break from the city, and go live with family for High School. After much deliberation he ended up taking the cowards route, and left the city his home.
So, on that fateful evening in the late summer, about half a year before his fourteenth birthday, Sandy went across the country. From his big city life in New York, he traveled over and landed in Oregon.
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Years later, now an adult, Sandy once again flew over to Oregon. He was flying to return to where he’d ended up going to school all those years ago, a little town called Paisley. It would be a lie to call Paisley a one horse town, no matter what people might say. In fact, there were quite a lot of horses. What the town was really lacking was actually people. Around a hundred lived there when Sandy first arrived, and little towns like that didn’t have huge amounts of growth.
Honestly, he’d never understood the term one horse town. In the past it might have made sense, when horses were the primary source of labor, but in the modern day it was a much more likely thing to see horses in small towns than big ones. Honestly, the ratio of Horses to Humans could have been close to one to one in many towns out west. Sandy supposed it’d be better to call Paisley a one road town.
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Of course, in reality, it wasn’t. There were old roads all over the place, but the way the town was built was a common sight in many rural towns, especially out west. The town had one major road, called either mains street or, in many cases, just the name of the highway that the town was a part of. Paisley was one of these towns, the kind that was accurately pastiched in Pixar’s Cars. There was even a hot spring not too far away, one that made for a great trip for angsty teens, at least if your intention was to watch them fumble over themselves.
When Sandy went back he considered flying into Paisley directly. There is a little airport in the incorporated area, but it was little more than a lit up dirt road. It would have required too much in his opinion. Instead he flew into Portland, his favorite airport. Even the dirty old carpet was his favorite, it always reminded him of arcades, those sort of geometric patterns that were always on the carpets.
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Sandy’s Mom was from Oregon, so he’d gone quite a few times. He’d gone to see his grandparents, and on trips to all her old friends. It was always nice, but it did strike him that Oregon was a weird place. Maybe it was growing up in the two thousands, but the media always presented Oregon as this odd place where anything could happen, and after going there he certainly believed it. Shows like Eureka and Gravity Falls presented Oregon as this mystical place where cryptids and fringe science alike could share a state.
When he went back, Sandy wasn’t going to live with family or his mom’s old friends. No, he was going to live in a small town called Paisley to go to boarding school. To be honest, he felt like he was going to Gravity Falls when he left. But when his grandfather drove him down that way it wasn’t exactly what he expected. If nothing else, the desert air was nice but completely different from the deep forest he saw in his favorite shows.
Those shows treated Oregon like it was some kind of Hellmouth out of Buffy, a portal to attract and trap the supernatural. But Oregon was weird in other ways instead. Having a massive mountain range and active volcanoes made its landscape varied and unique, having most of the beautiful vistas in the US in miniature. It was nice, having one of the largest bookstores in the world, taking up an entire city block.
He was a little bit proud when he left. Felt like an adult as he grabbed his luggage, his entire life packed into that small bag. He’d been across the country plenty of times, but being an unaccompanied minor was a different experience. When his grandparents picked him up, he was silent, contemplating what life would bring. They didn’t give him grief for listening to his audiobooks, they just listened to music or radio and left him to do his thing. It was a nice drive over a couple days.
As they traveled through the desert Sandy was happy. It was beautiful, a high desert like the Mojave to the south. The scraggly trees and sagebrush always reminded him of games. There were beautiful vistas of red volcanic stone that made his heart sing, and wonderful little butes that were little bubbles in the land that any East Coast native would call a mountain. Looking out the window at the trees and brush was nice, and Sandy loved it as they stopped to climb on rocks.
He moved in, and it took him a while to make friends. He kind of just led a solitary life, going to the bar to eat food and drink non-alcoholic drinks. He tried to go to the river, but never picked the same time as other kids. Even going to the fair he was always in different parts, different rides, it was eternally frustrating. He tried to make friends, but he simply had trouble socializing, especially with all of these new kids and their different personalities.
Sandy ended up as a loner, a bit of a quiet kid, focusing mostly on his studies. He got good grades, and got more addicted to the internet. Playing games, reading fantasy, becoming more and more addicted to audiobooks. Those moments would affect him for the rest of his life, and eventually afterward.