"Hey, Sweetheart! What'd your boyfriend say when you told him you were moving to Sherwood, Ohio?!"
Kurt's words echo and rebound within JD's skull. Like some sick version of a stubborn brain freeze that just won't go away. Words unsaid from Kansas catch in his throat as the jock slams his arm around JD's body, squeezing hard on already raw shoulders from the tight and thinly-stretched binder he wore for what was more than considered "safe" binding time, so to speak.
Ram comes up beside his better half, Kurt, and smacks JD's head with each syllable, "My buddy Kurt here just asked you a question!"
JD's smile grows wider with each smack, memories of Kansas flooding back. And then, without so much as a protest, he slips into the world of dissociation. The book he's holding becomes flat against his palms; ridges and edges of the tape he'd so delicately placed to keep the old thing together now melting into the cover of the book. His fingers ached and the words on the page blurring, his mother's scribbled annotations of the Baudelaire poems within turning into black ink stains, rather than the words he had heard in her voice each night. Mind foggy, JD only focuses on their words as best he can, trying to keep his breathing rate at a normal pace.
"Hey, Ram?! Doesn't this Cafeteria have a "no fags allowed rule"?"
There it was, the pin drop, the final second of a countdown before the inevitable KABOOM.
Fag: the disgusting word that had caused Dwight to bawl his eyes out and JD to press one more cigarette to his skin when it was yelled at them from a passing car. The word that had made them distant; had made them less like lovers and more like friends, had driven Dwight to go to more protests and JD to hide in the shadows like a coward. The word that had driven an unmistakable wedge between the two, had stopped the onset of 'I love you's' that he had intended to slip out unnoticed from cracked lips, had motivated Dwight's parents to kick him out, had forced JD's own parents to pack their bags and never look back.
"Seem to have an open door policy for assholes though, don't they?"
The words aren't his. They are, but he's not saying them. He can't be. Admittedly, not one of his best comebacks, but all he could manage as his thoughts drifted to better (or worse) times, and before the anger took over.
Veronica thought he was fighting for her; a common misconception. JD was fighting for memories never had and words never uttered at 2am in old service stations as they hid together from the rain, for goodbyes never allowed by hectic and desperate parents, for secrets never shared, promises broken and never made, for futures that were never going to and could never happen.
If JD's sanity was a countdown, then he had hit zero. And countdowns end, as all countdowns do; with chaos. JD had decided long ago that he, himself, did not create chaos; that rather he was the embodiment of it, and he intended to explode.