“The wrong side of the highway”

The wrong side of the highway is Simon Brinks’s shorthand for a poorer part of Sowell Bay where he and Daphne Ann Cassmore once lived. Recalled in a conversation with Cameron Cassmore, the phrase joins a personal account of friendship to a changing picture of the town: what was once a neighborhood on its economic margins is now, in Brinks’s telling, part of a place beginning to recover.

The phrase in context

Brinks introduces the phrase while explaining how he and Cameron’s mother became best friends. They lived in the same “crappy apartment building” during part of their junior and senior years, on what Brinks calls the wrong side of the highway. His account gives the expression a concrete local reference: it describes a side of Sowell Bay associated with a shabby building and limited circumstances, rather than a literal boundary that Cameron already recognizes.

Cameron admits that he had not known there was a wrong side of the highway in Sowell Bay. He had not given much thought to how Brinks and his mother met; even when he imagined that they might have been together, he assumed they had met at school. The phrase therefore accompanies a small but meaningful correction to Cameron’s assumptions about his mother’s past and Brinks’s connection to her.

From shared hardship to redevelopment

Brinks identifies himself as another person from Sowell Bay and describes the apartment building as their shared setting. When Cameron responds with surprise, Brinks laughs and revises the scale of the description: these days, he says, the whole town is sort of on the wrong side of the highway, though it is turning around. The joke broadens the phrase from one neighborhood to the town as a whole, while his qualification points to a change in its fortunes.

That change has a material counterpart in Brinks’s work. He says that development has increased in recent years and that he is building waterfront condominiums in Sowell Bay. The contrast is pointed: the former resident of a “crappy apartment building” now describes new, attractive units as part of the town’s revival. The phrase thus carries both memory of local hardship and the language of a place being remade.

Personal history and economic contrast

The exchange also reveals the unequal paths taken by the two young men who shared that setting. Cameron has just remarked on Brinks’s wealth, and Brinks answers that he worked hard, his voice edged. He then turns from his own success to the story of how he and Daphne became close. The conversation places the phrase between those subjects: past hardship is not merely background to Brinks’s present wealth, but part of the history he chooses to share with her son.

Brinks says he arranged to meet Cameron at the bar rather than his regular office because he thought Cameron might enjoy seeing it; he adds that he made the place for Daphne. Against that personal gesture, the phrase’s economic geography remains unsettled. Brinks speaks as someone who remembers the town’s poorer side and now participates in its waterfront development, while Cameron briefly wonders whether he might be hired for the project but doubts he could provide references. The same conversation therefore sets Brinks’s movement from a precarious neighborhood to wealth beside Cameron’s present lack of a straightforward route into work.