O. S. King

You know, the thing about Trevor is he never liked to show he was like everyone else. If his friends said they liked listening to music, he would say he preferred theatre. When his dad said he enjoyed working as a teacher in the local school, Trevor countered with his ambition to never work at all for his money. He even told his friends he didn’t need any of them. They stayed by his side of course; he was considered a rebel and they desperately wanted to be around him. They would never have spoken back to their fathers especially one who was a teacher too.

Trevor’s contrarian nature made him popular and when a group from a neighbouring housing estate took up selling cigarettes and popping random home made pills, Trevor turned his back, doing nothing of the sort, saying it was a teen stereotype for losers. He unfriended all of them on social media and took to spray painting anti-drug messages on walls and stairwells of the block of flats he lived in. It made his part of the neighbourhood one of the few without a teen drug problem. It also confused the local police. Why was Trevor Two Socks being so helpful? He had always been a bit of a tearaway. Not only were the police startled but they realised their stop and search figures would plummet in the neighbourhood and they would need to do some explaining. This meant they harassed Trevor Two Socks to get him to change his ways – he didn’t and the local police won an award for effective community engagement . They didn’t thank Trevor Two Socks of course but they did leave him alone.

Trevor Two Socks didn’t care about much really, as long as he did the opposite of everyone. It’s what kept him content and happy. It was why he had his nick name. The gang on his housing estate only wore one sock on their feet. They were the Lone Socks. Trevor belonged to the Lone Socks but insisted on wearing both socks. So he became known as Trevor Two Socks of the Lone Socks gang.

The members of the Lone Socks gang worked shifts at a local warehouse after college packing home electronic items and shipping them all over the country. As for Trevor, he worked as an assistant at a veterinary surgery saying he had plans to leave the city and live in the countryside – again, opposite to the rest of the gang.

One Monday morning Trevor was in the surgery watching his colleague Lily work with a cat.
‘Can you help me with this? She won’t keep still. Look at this, there’s fur all over the place and I still have the other claws to do.’
Trevor stood laughing in the corner. He was holding the plastic cone that he was supposed to attach to the cat’s neck. But he couldn’t stop giggling while Lily struggled with the cat. It bit her and clawed at her, snarling and growling loudly. It was Lily’s first day on the job and she thought it would be easy to trim the nails of the petite cat. But the cat was having none of it, she clawed and bit and hissed. At one point the cat scrambled onto Lily’s chest, claws lodged on her overalls. Of course Trevor was still no help. He had switched to filming the chaos and offering it as a live feed on his social media account. More and more people joined the live event to watch Lily struggle with the cat with Trevor laughing in the background.

Lily craned her neck and twisted her torso, trying to pull the cat off her, but it’s claws sunk in even further, piercing through the overalls. She refused to ask Trevor for help this time and grabbed the cone off him, trying to fasten it on the cat. The cat did a flying leap onto Trevor, his phone crashing to the floor. Lily collapsed on the floor sobbing and it was only then that Trevor Two Socks realised the problem with always being a contrarian – sometimes you do want to do what everyone else is doing. He wanted to ask Lily out on a date – something all his friends were doing, asking people out on dates, something he had never done.

Lily remained on the floor, crying, while Trevor Two Socks had a crisis. To distract himself and try to get Lily to stop (her eyes were reddened and bulged and she was beginning to loose her appeal) he grabbed the cat, put on the cone and held it up to Lily saying, ‘Please don’t cry. I promise to help.’

Two weeks later Lily and Trevor signed up for a career conversation at their college about applying to veterinary school. Both were heavily discouraged, but they persisted. Afterwards, Lily agreed to grab a drink with Trevor, on the condition that neither of them called it a date.

As it turned out, Lily didn’t want to be like anyone else either – so the contrarian pair were perfectly matched but neither wanted to admit to it. Their friends would hear none of it. They cancelled both Trevor and Lily for falling for each other and becoming like everyone else, going on dates, holding hands, even pursuing the same career. This angered Trevor a lot and Lily too. It was a question of principles and love at the same time. According to Trevor he could make this one concession and remain the contrarian he was. For Lily, the only way this would work is if they either split up or saw different people while dating – both were unpopular with their friends and family. While Lily decided to see other people and keep meeting up with Trevor, he wasn’t so keen, although he did have to contend that he might need to shift his perspective and accept that he was in fact like everyone else if he couldn’t accept more unconventional ways of having relationships.

I’d like to tell you this story had a happy ending, but I leave it up to you to make your own decision.

Lily left the estate and went on to become a veterinarian treating only the most difficult cases. She became well-known for working in areas and with patients no one else dared to. She met another veterinarian, Alicia, at university and they fell in love. Secretly, Lily would have done anything for Alicia, including follow convention. Lucky for her, Alicia was similarly minded. So they both committed to spending the rest of their lives eschewing what they felt was the popular majority option of marriage, children, divorce, remarriage and another divorce. Lily told everyone she was perfectly content and I do believe she was.

Trevor Two Socks stayed on the estate. His gang left – some went to university and others built careers in the city. They were all successful in their own way and many elders in the neighbourhood put it down to Trevor’s influence. When his friends moved away, Trevor did some distance learning and became a community worker, writing poetry in his spare time. He remained a contrarian in the widest sense, campaigning against policies that hindered creativity and development. He continued to be known as Trevor Two Socks and when he died a large mural was painted on neighbouring estates reflecting the reach he had. Even today there are youngsters who live by the Two Socks code and Trevor’s estate remains the only one which is drug free with a cult of followers of the contrarian lifestyle.