Inherent Superiority
Chapter I: Burn The Bridges
DISCLAIMER: I don't own Peanuts, or else the strip would have ended with Charlie Brown going on a chainsaw massacre.
This is an attempt at something more real. No transmogrifier pistols. No divine intervention. Just human cruelty and bad choices.
This will be dark. Take it from someone who knows- after going through enough abuse, your mind can go places you don't want it to.
This is what it's like to be Charlie Brown, age 15.
It's just another day for you. You've gotten up even though you want to sleep another hour, maybe another day, to go to a school where nearly everyone either hates you or finds your failures and suffering amusing, because you have to and that's just the way things are.
You've sat through math where the teacher calls you up to do a problem you don't know how to do and he knows, because he just taught it yesterday, when you were sent to the principal's office by him for the crime of being hit in the back of the head with Violet's thrown textbook, an offense that got her not even so much as a "that wasn't nice" and you an half-hour long lecture about "passive antagonization." So you ask, rather politely, how to do it, and he goes on another half hour lecture on your stupidity, making you stand at the front of the class while he rattles off your lowest grades, never mind you made a B on his last test (by using pen so he couldn't change the answers, which he still took points off for.)…
You've sat through English where the teacher rips apart your paper verbally. Never mind that it was written exactly how she wanted it, the subject matter- that you are physically, mentally, spiritually tired of everyone attacking you and you have prayed, prayed for death at your darkest hour, and you don't think anyone should be subject to this- that proposition offends her, somehow. In a screaming rage she tells you that you deserve everything you get in and out of her class because you are a failure and always will be, and then she finally physically rips your paper up and announces your grade- zero. Then she tells you she demands a ten page apology to her and the class for wasting their time and that you accept your role as the failure of the class, or she'll make it two zeroes, ending her tirade so red in the face you think she may combust. And you're disappointed when she doesn't.
You've run through P.E., and that's all you did, running because the coach wouldn't let you stop. Not when someone you didn't see throws a basketball at your head, smashing your face and knocking you to the ground. Not when he 'accidentally' trips you. Not when the bell rings.
Now you home, bruised, weary, and exhausted in every sense of the term. Having walked home, because the P.E. teacher made sure you'd miss the bus, has not helped you one bit, nor has the parents picking their kids up from school, doing the same gag they've done a thousand times- driving along the sidewalk slowly, offering you a ride, then speeding off when you have one foot in the door. It means bruises and cuts for you and laughs for every passerby. Today the very same mother drove alongside you for a good fifteen minutes before giving up and driving off, flipping you the bird as she did, furious at your unwillingness to get hurt and humiliated again for her family's brief amusement.
And the first thing you hear from your mother, one of the few people who not only avoids hurting you but likes seeing you smile, as you all but collapse through the door, is this, with tears in her eyes.
"Honey, Snoopy got hit by a car."
You know what's coming. It happened before, when Linus was shipped off to military school, leaving you friendless. You close the door behind you, slump into your mother's arms…
…and cry.
It's a cruel, brutal, meaningless hell everyday, full of petty spite and broken promises, and now you're down one more ally in this war between you and the world you've always known. You've still got homework to do, busy work that will be thrown away by your teachers who will claim they never got it, an apology letter to write for daring to state you don't deserve this, detention on Sunday (specifically so you can't go to church and get some measure of comfort that there's something better beyond the grave) and there's not going to be a dog to pet or hug during those dark, bleak moments anymore, and yes he was a jerk, but he was the closest thing you had left to a friend…
But that's just the way things are.
For you.
Forever.
Because the world is a cruel, meaningless hell for Charlie Brown.
…
THREE YEARS LATER
The swelling in his left eye was going down at last, but he still couldn't see out of it, so Charlie insisted that he be allowed to sit on the left right of the office with his family during the family/teacher/principal conference. There was no way he was letting any of the other people here sit in his blind spot.
Two families, his- him, his mother and father, both taking a day off to handle this mess. Violet's, which consisted of her and her father, who was still busy talking on his cell phone. Violet's mother was in rehab again.
His senior english teacher, Ms. Stephner, a sleek black haired witch who looked down a long nose at him constantly, sat beside Principal Wayler, "Waylay" as Charlie had taken to mentally calling him, a balding rotund man with a squat, crushed nose and thin mustache.
The incident in question was Violet having paid her boyfriend- now ex-boyfriend, her attention span notoriously short and her devotion legendarily fleeting- to slug Charlie mid-speech as he read one of his papers for the class. The blow had blackened his eye, much to Stephner's amusement, and Violet had followed up by stomping on him as he tried to get up, busting his lip and bloodying his nose. When he had shoved her off him as she had scratched at his face as he tried to stand, Violet started screaming "RAPE" and swung a chair into his side.
Charlie Brown had been arrested that day, with Stephner backing up Violet's story that he'd tried to rape her in the middle of class. It would have worked if someone hadn't had the cruelty- and idiocy- to post a cell phone video of the attack on the internet.
And now with charges against him fizzling, Charlie found himself flanked by his parents as a long campaign of abuse came to a head.
"Thank you all for coming here." Wayler spoke, hands clasped. "I called this little pow-wow to address some… retaliatory actions I heard about after last weeks little misunderstanding-"
"There was no misunderstanding." Charlie's father, Richard, snapped. There was no patience in his voice now, no fatherly gentleness, just pure, unadulterated anger. "She-" and he jabbed at Violet, who looked bored as she played games on her cell phone. "-paid a boy to attack my son- we have a written confession from him- and then attacked him herself while he was down, screaming rape when he shoved her off of her…"
"That's not what I saw." Stephner interrupted. "I saw a very antagonized woman reacting to someone who has been repeatedly counseled and lectured about his passive antagonization of other students…"
"How the hell is he antagonizing them?" Asked his mother Candice. "By… sitting there? By doing the presentation you required?"
"I think," Wayler spoke, fingers drumming against each other, "that the exact details of how he is antagonizing them are something Charlie needs to think about himself. In fact, I think your family time could be much better spent on finding a therapist who could help him be less instigating of these mishaps, rather than frivolous lawsuits-"
"I got assaulted, falsely accused of rape, arrested, and my teacher lied about me to the police. You've known about this stuff for years, Wayler, and you have done nothing but tell me that it's all my fault." Charlie growled.
Wayler frowned deeply, unaccustomed to Charlie questioning his methods. "Violet, what's your say in this?"
Violet sighed. "Charlie's a bitch and everyone knows it, so I treated him like one." She went back to her game as Stephner giggled and Wayler smiled.
"In all seriousness," Wayler spoke, still smiling, "this sort of thing is hardly new- surely by now you're used to this sort of teasing-"
"Fuck you."
Heads turned to Charlie Brown, Violet and her father snapping to attention.
"I… you… what did you say?!" demanded Wayler, reddening in the face.
"Seriously, if your response, after year after year of abuse from students and teachers ends with that bitch-" he pointed at Violet, whose mouth dropped open, "-accusing me of rape after clawing and attacking me like some meth-head stripper, is to say I should be used to this, then fuck you."
"How… how dare you." Hissed Wayler, clutching his chest. "I am the principal of the school, I am the founder of your education, you will treat me with all the respect I deserve-"
"I would, but you're too big to flush." Charlie countered.
A stunned silence fell over the room, broken by his mother's voice.
"I'm going to make this very simple. Between years of documented injuries, photocopied reports and letters to your school, Charlie's school assignments your teachers so thoughtfully scrawled "F for failure, just like you" on so many times, the Sunday detentions just so he'd be unable to go to church, and cooperating with a student's false claim of rape, our lawyer estimates the time a judge would take to decide in our favor would be mere days. That's just the school, by the way. You-" and she pointed at Violet, who was still dazed by Charlie's outburst. "Have devoted every day to making my son's life a living hell, and you-" she pointed at Violet's father now, Martin Grey, "have done nothing but laugh each and every time I asked you to tell your daughter to stop siccing her boyfriends on him."
This, at last, got the attentions of all Charlie's enemies. A lawsuit for the school would mean millions. A lawsuit against Grey would mean millions in damages money wise and to his company.
It was Martin Grey who seemed to grasp exactly how badly the situation could go first. "What do you want?" he asked carefully.
"I want straight A's for Charlie- he has earned them if only by virtue of tolerating your abuse for so long, and five million from you, Mr. Grey."
Both the principal and Grey were aghast, the principal more so. "Straight As?! Do you have any idea of what that would do? All the teachers he had would quit overnight!"
"I know. So you'll hopefully find what I am willing to compromise for much more reasonable." Candice continued. "I know that anything beyond the bare minimum needed for him to leave your school behind will result in you and your staff fighting us tooth and nail, and that you, Mr. Grey, would never dream of paying such a high price for your daughter's fun. So I'm going to set the bare minimum at a diploma and five hundred thousand so we can leave here forever."
At these lessened demands, everyone relaxed… save Violet.
"Him… leave?" she mouthed disbelievingly. "Why should he get to leave? Why should he get anything he wants at all?!" she shouted, becoming increasingly agitated.
"What?" Charlie asked derisively. "Afraid you'll be bored to death without me to kick around? Tough."
She looked to her father pleadingly. "Daddy, he's a loser who deserves this! You said it yourself! Don't do this to me-"
Martin frowned, very obviously weighing the pleasure of keeping Charlie as a punching bag for his daughter against the pain of what a lawsuit could do to him financially.
"…perhaps we could reach a compromise." Martin suggested. "Charlie stays for a few years after graduation, and I'll give him a job as my gardener. Once that's done, if he still wants to leave-"
"No deal."
"But you have to understand, Charlie." Wayler butted in. "Your role here is to serve a sort of schadenfraude comic relief, and if you up and leave suddenly, getting everything you want all at once, it's going to destroy everyone's morale-"
"I DON'T GIVE A SHIT!" Charlie roared, making Violet start.
Wayler looked to Richard. "Do you see this? He's willing to destroy the morale of nearly every student and every teacher here just for his own petty desires. Do you see what he's willing to do to get what he wants?"
"It's not what he'll do that you should be worried about," Richard said firmly, arms crossed. "It's what we'll do."
Wayler and Stephner exchanged nervous glances. Martin held his chin in thought.
"All things considered, is it really that bad?" Martin asked Charlie, arms spread and palms turned upward. "Sure, it's been rough on you, but it's taught you humility, and its benefited people like my daughter-"
"Your daughter is a soulless sociopath who has waged a campaign against any form of relief or comfort I ever had for as long as I can remember." Charlie responded, voice dry and tired. "I have learned nothing of value from this, other than that nearly everyone in this school and my neighborhood is capable of unabashed sociopathic behavior. I've spent several birthdays contemplating suicide. My teachers betray me because it's trendy. And now?"
He laughed hoarsely, gesturing towards Violet, who was only now understanding what "soulless sociopath" meant. "Now she's whining because I want to leave. Not because I'm asking for her to be punished- and believe me-" here Charlie's voice took a tone that made himself feel wretched, as Violet recoiled. "I want her to be punished. I want her to hurt. I want her life to be short and as excruciatingly painful as she's made mine, but that's not what I'm asking for. I'm asking to be given a pittance as compensation for my years of suffering so I can leave all of you behind, and she's treating it as if I'm asking her to be sent to prison."
"But we will." Charlie's mother spoke. "If you stymie us, if you do not accept this offer, and it is a fucking generous offer, we will do everything in our power to get her either institutionalized or imprisoned. Because knowingly and willingly falsely accusing someone of rape is a felony. That's before we get into all the other shit she's done. If you get convicted-" and now she addressed an indignant Violet, red in the face. "-your party girl lifestyle ends for good."
That got Violet off her high horse. The implication that there were consequences worse than losing Charlie as a punching bag seemed to horrify her on a primal level. It was that one thing she had taken for granted- her own personal freedom- being threatened that made her lose the indignation she had earlier.
"Mrs. Brown," snarled Martin, "I have shown uncommon patience listening to you and your son whine, but if you threaten my daughter-"
"I am not threatening." Retorted Candice. "I am giving you and the school a choice. Either agree to what are respectively very minor concessions, or we unleash a long overdue shitstorm of a lawsuit on both of you."
Grey sank back into his chair, looking at Wayler.
Reactions to the news that Charlie would be graduating and leaving the neighborhood and school that had made life hell for him were almost entirely negative.
Charlie Brown's teachers were in an uproar. They had started a betting pool on when Charlie would commit suicide and were bitterly disappointed to hear that they could not give him straight F's. Stephner herself was devastated, barely able to muster the energy to do the bare minimum of work for finals, and when she crawled into work she reeked of bourbon.
In most schools, there was a mix of students- the good, the bad, the merciful, the sadistic. In Wallstone High, almost the entirety of the student body was hellbent on making Charlie's life miserable. It had literally become a school tradition to inflict as much agony, physical and mental, as possible short of outright murder, on the boy, and the news that he was getting both passable grades and- unthinkably- compensation for what nearly all considered good, clean fun had the students- and their parents- in uproar.
Violet took the news with the same sort of reaction most people would take to a diagnosis of cancer.
Schroeder heard the news, grateful that some measure of justice had at last been done, and went about composing his latest work.
Peppermint Patty and Marcie, long since moved out, heard the news via a despondent Facebook posting, dumbstruck at how a community would devote so much energy to trying to drive a single kid to suicide.
The reactions by detractors to Charlie getting another chance were mostly limited to threatening phone calls and pleas to reconsider. The knowledge that both the school and Martin Grey were cowed into submission via legal threats made direct retaliation a choice that was seen as unwise for most people.
Most people.
Lucy Van Pelt was wheezing as she dragged her brother's old aluminum baseball bat, walking as fast as her pudgy body would allow her to move, on what she had perceived as a mission of justice.
As she was the voice of the mob, the one person who ranted loudly and proudly about Wallstone High School's virtues, teachers and students alike were willing to just say she was going through the "filling out" phase of her life, and that she'd be trim in no time, that this was just a transitory phase.
But the truth was that hours of sitting and writing poorly spelled rants for the school newspaper and chowing down on bags of Oreos had not done her body any favors, and so she wheezed as she grew angrier and angrier at the injustice that had forced her off the computer and on her mission to beat some sense into Charlie Brown's head.
This had not been the first insult the Brown family had dealt her.
When she had her brother sent off to military school so she could use his room as a "writing office" for her career in the school newspaper, she had come to understand that she was in fact a goddess trapped in a fleshy cage, and one day her wisdom would overflow and she would be reborn into a new celestial form and would be worshipped as she truly deserved. But in the meantime she was trapped in her mortal form, and she needed a replacement slave.
Rerun wasn't enough, though that hadn't stopped her from running him ragged. Her parents understood where Rerun's place was at least- punishing him when he failed to show them or her the proper respect and demanding he do the chores Lucy had once done- but she needed a personal slave to wait on her hand and foot, and she had found one in Sally.
The first half of the plan, inviting Sally over, binding, and beating her to break her into submission had gone smoothly enough with her parent's help. Lucy had then sent a polite but firm letter to the Brown family informing them of their daughter's new lot in life and demanding monetary compensation for feeding her.
Then the Browns had gotten the cops involved.
Explanations of "it was a joke" or "we felt she needed a lesson in humility" fell on deaf and uncaring ears. Her father, fortunately a friend of the judge presiding over the case, had managed to do fast enough talking that they were hit with a steep enough fine to cancel two vacations and a restraining order for the next twenty years, and the judge had made it clear that was an unfathomable gift.
But to Lucy, this was an incredible, unforgivable insult.
Sally would have benefitted in a way that was too late for Charlie to learn- her place in the world and how she was meant to be a footstool for Lucy, the soon-to-be wisdom goddess. She had taken that opportunity and thrown in her face. That went beyond insult, and into blasphemy, and it had only been out of her merciful compassion for her mother and father that she had not exacted righteous retribution then and there.
But now… now Charlie had crossed a line that could not be uncrossed.
She knew, somewhere in her soon-to-be-divine mind, that her apotheosis would only be accomplished when Charlie Brown was completely broken and degraded into a perfect, utter shell of a man who existed to be hurt. It was a law of physics, to get something you had to give up something in return, and it stood to reason her ascent to something more than human must be balanced by Charlie's further descent below… whatever he was already.
She was at the Brown household door. Knocking was for plebeians. Ringing the doorbell would indicate a politeness that she would not spare.
That left one route of entry.
The impact of the baseball bat bashing against the door was not as effective as she hoped. The shock painfully wracked her arms and hands, and after the first five blows she began to tire.
"CHARLIE BROWN GET THE FUCK OUT HERE AND TAKE YOUR MEDICINE!"
Wham. Wham. Wham.
"I SWEAR TO GOD… IF I HAVE TO BREAK THIS DOOR DOWN I'LL KILL YOU AND YOUR WHOLE FAMILY!"
Surely someone as cowardly and loathsome as Charlie should have quailed by now from this display of wrath. She thought of going through the windows, but they had been barred after one incident where two teachers had broken in attacked Charlie while he was home alone. (The official reasons for which boiled down to 'we were drunk and bored') The door was battered and splintered, and as she struggled to catch her breath, she spied the faint glint of metal beneath fractured wood.
They had reinforced the door.
They had the gall to bar their true goddess from entering.
This…
Lucy felt bile and rage boil in her throat.
This was un-fucking-forgivable.
Every single person in that house had to die now, Lucy knew in her heart, as she screamed and attacked the door, shouting her rage and her threats as her vision turned crimson. Then she would kill the people who installed the bars and door that dared to defy her divine mission to reassert her authority over her sacrifice.
She did not register the police car screeching to a halt behind her as she attacked the door and bellowed her new testament of wisdom at Charlie as it formed in her throat.
Charlie had watched Lucy's rage from upstairs with disbelief and revulsion.
His mother had called the cops as soon as they had seen her waddling down the street with a baseball bat, and they had instructed Sally to hide in her closet just in case.
They needn't have worried. The door, cosmetically battered, held firm.
What baffled Charlie was how, for a solid fifteen minutes, Lucy had flung herself at the door, screaming "ME, ME, ME, ME, ME" over and over.
Lucy had never been rational, or anything approaching kind, but he had thought, somehow, the threat of incarceration would hold her rage in check.
That was not the case, it was plain to see, as one cop tasered her and she still kept bellowing, throwing herself against the door, only falling after being doused head to foot with mace. Whatever disease or malevolence made her the way she was had not lessened with age, if anything it was increasing exponentially.
There was something viscerally satisfying about watching her, bloodied from her own assault, scream and flail blindly as the two officers struggled to get cuffs on her.
She had sent one of his best friends to what amounted to prison, and now she was being hauled off too.
Martin Grey was a difficult man to work with, to say the very least.
In Vincent Klein's mind, serving as his lawyer, he was becoming impossible to even reason with.
He had explained that with the legal situation as it was, there was no possible way to prevent Charlie Brown from leaving town. (He had refrained from asking why it was necessary to antagonize the poor kid any further, considering what they had done already…) That the bargain set up between them, the school, and the Brown family was legally binding, and meant that any attempts to prevent him from graduation or leaving would result in a judge stepping in.
A sane client would realize just how close they were to losing everything and backed down before the opposing party changed their mind and went for the jugular.
Mr. Grey was not this type of client.
It wasn't as though Grey didn't have a number of things that could be legitimate stress factors in his life. His wife was in and out of rehab, barely presentable in public. His daughter was a party girl at best. There was the considerable weight of running a multi-million dollar industry as well.
It would seem, by that train of thought, the logical and practical thing to do would be to avoid meddling in the affairs of others until your own problems were sorted out. Gnats and camels, specks and beams in eyes came to mind.
Mr. Grey did not see things this way.
He wanted, with a fervor Klein rarely saw, some loophole found in the legal agreement made by the Brown family with the Grey family and the school to, in layman's terms, provide what was a pittance of compensation for years of injury and one very major case of slander and the grades to leave High school and never look back. He wanted a loophole that would keep one Charlie Brown here, in this neighborhood that Klein had heard had become a living hell for the same boy, so Mr. Grey's daughter could have a victim.
"Sir, I'm not sure what you want me to tell you." Klein sighed. "The agreement was signed by a judge. If you violate the terms by in any way trying to coerce any member of the Brown family into staying or provide resources to another party to do so, the Browns will sue. And as it stands, with the false rape accusation and the history of assault, your chances of defending against a lawsuit are almost nil."
"Okay, Vince, worst case scenario- we try to keep him here and it goes to court. What kind of damages are we talking?"
It was as if the black-haired bastard hadn't heard him.
"Millions. A lawyer would have a field day with this case. You would probably be looking at jail time. The damage to your company would be severe, too. Investors do not like backing a company led by a man who tries to turn a boy into a punching bag." Klein allowed his subtlety to slowly fade away. He was on Grey's payroll as a personal lawyer, which was a good gig, but that only lasted as long as Grey could write the checks.
No, going after Charlie Brown would be an unmitigated disaster for all involved. Aside from the legal ramifications, trying to keep a kid in a life of a scapegoat was never good for one's PR. The way Klein figured it, if Charlie Brown had done anything, anything that really and truly deserved the amount of shit Violet Grey and now her father were dishing out, he would have been called into the matter for offensive purposes long, long ago.
He frowned as he imagined trying to form a counter-argument if this debacle went to court. Violet Grey had bribed some boys to attack Charlie Brown in the middle of a class, then attacked him while gloating about it, he had shoved her off in clear-cut self-defense, and that had her bashing him with a chair and crying rape. And the whole thing was caught on tape because the students there weren't just monsters, but idiots as well.
If it hadn't been uploaded to Youtube, if it hadn't gotten over a million views and thousands of outraged comments, maybe, just maybe, they would have a faint glimmer of hope in… whatever Grey wanted to accomplish.
"Sir. The terms of the agreement are clear- if you do anything to hinder Charlie Brown or any of his family from graduating and leaving, or if you assist anyone in the same, you stand to lose millions in a lawsuit. Judge Barrens is not the kind of person you want to play games with."
"I'm going to make it very simple, Vince." Grey turned around slowly, wearing his Italian suit like it was armor, cold blue eyes boring into the air. "If you don't find me a way around this legal pothole by tomorrow, I will find someone who will."
Vincent Kline assessed his situation. If he stayed, he would be pulled into the same toilet Grey and his family had thrown themselves in, and flushed down with them as well. If he left, he'd be fired. Unpleasant, but not career ending.
"Mr. Grey, on that note, let me give you one last bit of advice." Vincent rose, cracking his neck, keeping his voice even. "You. Will. Not. Win. This. It's going to end badly- legally and business wise- for you if you so much as blink at the Browns funny. Your best bet… your only bet really, is to let this drop. What the Browns are asking for is chicken feed compared to what anyone else would have sought-"
"You have five minutes to get off my property before I have you forcibly removed." Grey said coldly.
Vincent shrugged and showed himself out, the butler icily opening the door and closing it no later than he had gotten both feet out the door.
Fine, he shrugged, as he decided to see if that offer to join his college buddies' firm was still open, your funeral, asshole.
This is what it is like to be Lucy Van Pelt, age 18.
Despite what a certain nearly bald headed loser of a shitstain and his family have suggested, you are not devoid of a sense of other people's feelings.
It's just that you enjoy Charlie's pain so much, you can't see living without it.
So when this… punching bag rebels against what you know is your divine plan, when after years on years of breaking him emotionally and softening him up for the physical and mental abuse of others to break him even further he decides to throw your plan out of alignment… how can you not be angry?
When he calls the police on you, how can it not be anything short of some foreigner strolling up to the holiest of a nation's temples and throwing their shit at the representation of the holy goddess of wisdom?
This is beyond pagan ignorance. Those who have not met Lucy Van Pelt do not know her glory, her perfect style of writing, raw and passionate, her cocoon like body which would one day undergo metamorphosis into a being as beautiful as she was wise, because they have the excuse of never understanding her magnificence.
Charlie Brown had looked on her inherent superiority, and somehow arrived at the insane conclusion he was above it…
…and now, the goddess of wisdom, the voice of authority, Ahura Mazda, Allah, Jesus, Yahweh and Buddha rolled into one complete perfect feminine form…
…was sitting in a holding cell that reeked of urine.
To the outward eye, it would seem Lucy had calmed down, at long last, after the burning inferno of mace had lessened into a dull sting and her adrenaline had worn off. Her neutral face might have given the idea to a random onlooker that she might even be contrite.
Lucy was, however, not calm.
She was about as removed from calm as an ice cube is from the core of the sun. She had gone far, far beyond the usual fury being told she was wrong induced and had blossomed into an iridescent white heat mania, motionless only because there was no motion, at present, Lucy Van Pelt, Goddess of Wisdom and High-Judge of Charlie Brown the Living Cancer, could make to properly express her wrath.
He…
No.
And her wisdom gave her a moment of crystalline clarity. Charlie did not deserve a gender pronoun. It did not deserve that.
She decided that if she had to specifically refer to it, she would use the term "The Cancer".
Even as she was released to her parents, apologizing as they should to her for the police's stupidity, she chided herself for not seeing something this obvious sooner.
It would be forced into its place, broken and in agony, and then her apotheosis would truly begin.
Graduation day.
It should have been an energetic affair, the transition from minor to almost-adult, a new chapter in the lives of hundreds of students.
Instead there was a solemn air, even more than a funeral would call for, almost the kind of oppressive taint in the air one could expect if a town hero had committed some great atrocity, say, burning down an orphanage, and the people who had loved the hero had gathered to hear him or her account for his horrific behavior.
The families that had sent their children to Wallstone High were all in various stages of grief, sans bargaining and acceptance.
It, as Lucy Van Pelt had pointed out repeatedly, did not deserve bargaining. It did not deserve compassion, It did not deserve to even be asked why it was refusing its calling as a punching bag and waste dump for the community's sadistic urges, It did what It did because It was nothing more and nothing less than hell-bent on dragging everyone else down with it.
It had become a Satan-figure, with nothing to gain from its rebellion against the Goddess Lucy but the satisfaction of dragging others down with it. It would give everyone who had demonstrated to It how worthless it was cancer if it could.
And had Charlie Brown heard this argument, he would have to agree, that with few exceptions, he would like to give everyone there cancer.
Massive, gangrenous, tumors that necrotized the flesh and crushed organs and leeched nutrients to further poison the body, leaving their victims as hideously deformed as he viewed them to be spiritually…
These were the kind of thoughts that got Charlie Brown through the darker moments of his life.
Everyone here hated him, as he walked in, cap and gown clad, but no one was brave enough to strike the first blow now that there was a definite threat of repercussion.
So Charlie was relatively free to sit and cogitate on the disturbing fact that maybe using the fantasy of people getting cancer to power through tough times wasn't exactly healthy.
Charlie had been a church goer, and it had given him the fortitude to endure, if just barely enough to avoid slitting his wrists. Then his teachers had found out and suddenly it was decided he would serve every Sunday detention, 7 am to 1 pm, every Sunday, for the rest of his high school career.
Being cut off from a place of sanctuary probably didn't help his mental health either…
He decided, as people shuffled in and around him, murmuring darkly and angrily, that he would seek a good therapist to ensure he, at the very least, wouldn't become like these…
…could he call them people?
His own suffering aside, it seemed almost blasphemous to say they were like the rest of God's creation. Hell, at several points, he would not have been surprised to see horns and cloven feet on his teachers and classmates. It might have even made sense.
He felt validated that he was damaged. How could anyone go through his life, something that would have nauseated Kafka, and not be damaged…
…or was that vanity, and maybe he was martyring himself…
He resolved that between a pastor and a shrink he could reach some sort of conclusion as to what was wrong with him, when he realized the commencement speech was beginning.
Typically, a speech was made by a valedictorian. No such luck here, Lucy Van Pelt, freshly out of jail in time to attend graduation, would be making the speech.
The years had not been kind to her.
Lucy was never what Charlie would consider cute, but at least at a glance in her youth she could have passed as a decent little girl. Overindulgence and a sedentary lifestyle meant she waddled instead of walked, and anything as strenuous as walking up several flights of stairs left her winded. She was a heart attack waiting to happen, and when he was forced to get downwind of her, there was a… odor. He wasn't sure what it was, but his own personal theory was that Lucy had never mastered the art of thoroughly wiping herself after using the toilet.
The damage to her body, however, was minor compared to what years of self-exaltation and people pandering to her ego had done to her mind. In her earlier years, the kindest thing that Charlie could have called Lucy was insensitive.
Nowadays, the kindest thing he felt could be used to describe her was "Narcissistic Sociopath", that it was an inability to consider the damage her actions did.
But there was too much deliberate action, too much devotion to… evil, for lack of a better term, to be able to grant her the excuse of being unfeeling. He had always had the suspicion that she enjoyed hurting him, and the years had given him not one iota of evidence to contradict that theory.
Beyond the sadism was the narcissism. Lucy, for as far as Charlie could tell, did not think herself capable of doing anything wrong. She acted as if she was above decorum, above rules, above the standards of society. Her writing style was something barely fit to grace internet troll forums, much less a school newspaper, as the numerous spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors her articles possessed made reading her hateful diatribes all the more painful. The only thing she had going for her was that, with the exception of Charlie Brown, she told people what they wanted to hear.
Like now, for example.
"Ladies and Gentlemen," Lucy began with the solemnity of someone doing a funeral service, "this should be a happy day. We should be glad to move on to the next stage in life, taking our successes with us and leaving failure…"
And here she deliberately paused and glared directly at Charlie for a solid thirty seconds…
"…behind us."
Real subtle.
"There have been developments that have left us feeling cheated. That justice has not been done." Lucy continued sadly. "We are owed a debt of servitude. Of obedience. But we will not get that."
"We are owed restitution for being cut off from what we deserved. We will not get that, either. We are owed an apology, but we all know that It is so far gone, that it will not apologize."
I hope you die of a heart attack you stupid cow
"For years we have tried to assert our places and It's place. The two could never be the same, the two should never be the same. It-" and she emphasized 'it' to make sure her audience understood what she meant, "was never meant to succeed. It was never meant to leave. It is a failure and deserves to be treated as such."
She glared briefly at Charlie before turning back to her audience with the same sorrowful face one might expect from a doctor with a cancer diagnosis to give.
"But the world does not see it that way. The world does not understand what we, with our inherent superiority over It, have understood. So black becomes white, up is down, right is wrong."
Goddamn you bitch five years with a football and now this you soulless whore I hope you get cancer
"I want to make it right. Right here, right now. I want to break It, so It understands we are not to be defied. But I can't do that without hurting the school more than it already is. But take heart, my friends. If you leave here with nothing else, be reassured: Justice will be done."
There was thunderous applause.
Of all the places not to be attacked by terrorists God I can smell the shit on her from here
Charlie Brown felt his guts churn and a red haze began to cloud his vision. If Satan were to show up now, this instant, and offer him a machine gun for his immortal soul, it would take God himself coming down and offering a personal apology to get him to reconsider…
Why couldn't there have been a school shooting here why why why WHY
Unbidden, the dark fantasy of such a shooting hit him, and he imagined gleefully pointing out to a hypothetical shooter where the others were hiding…
…and clarity struck him like a slap in the face, that there was something very wrong about having these sorts of fantasies…
Normal people didn't wish cancer on everyone.
Normal people didn't regret not having a school shooting occur in their town.
Normal people, the devil on his shoulder reminded him, didn't get bags of rocks for Halloween or cheated out of grades by their teachers OR beaten up daily by teachers and students OR accused of rape and told it's all in fun-
"Charlie Brown."
He felt himself stand up.
He was prepared for the boos, the jeers, the shouted wishes for him to die of multiple things, that he was worthless.
He stepped over twelve different attempts to trip him on the way to the stage.
He picked his diploma up off the ground when Wayler threw it at his feet.
He was going to go back to his seat, as it was expected of him, when he realized…
It was just another football they expected him to kick.
They felt he deserved to stay there and be hated as much as they could hate in the few hours they had left.
So Charlie Brown decided to take the first step in claiming his life back from the tyrants.
In one deft move that someone as clumsy and as worthless as Charlie Brown was said to be shouldn't have been able to make, he whipped off his gown and hat as he strode to the exit, and flung them into a trash can.
The screaming, the booing, the jeers stopped with a hush.
The next noise that filled the auditorium was that of the door closing behind Charlie Brown.
It took a solid five minutes for the people who had made a pseudo-religion out of making one boy miserable to realize that he and his family were now gone, and not coming back.
Moving away right after graduation, as in the very same day, might seem paranoid or rushing to some. It was not to the Brown family.
The movers had been loading everything into the trucks that would get them away from that community of vipers during the graduation, and when Charlie and his mother got back, Sally and his father were waiting, ready to go.
To their credit, Richard and Candice Brown had made sure everything besides actually leaving was taken care of well in advance. The house had been picked out and bought. The job transfers had been made. The house had been put on the market and cleaned, a realtor would take care of the rest. Everything that had been done was done for the sheer sake of leaving as soon as possible.
It still wasn't going to be enough.
When the Brown family saw cars, several of them, approaching from both up and down the street, blocking them off, and more coming, emptying out in a mob of furious rageaholics, there was no confusion.
Lucy had rallied her army.
Lucy had not wasted a second of time once she had realized what was going to happen.
Charlie had no intention of giving them any window of opportunity. The second he had walked out that door, he started to slip through their fingers.
If he left…
They lost their punching bag. They lost their entertainment. They lost their scapegoat that kept the community from tearing itself to pieces…
…and Lucy would lose any shot at apotheosis.
There was no time to apologize for interrupting the remaining diploma handouts to tell all in attendance it was time to act, then and there, lawsuits and agreements and legal bogeymen be damned.
And she had put forth the ultimatum they would present The Cancer with.
It would strip naked and bow to them in submission, and await its punishment, or its family would die.
They had rallied around her and took off at full speed for the Brown residence. There wasn't a single soul she saw that hadn't taken the call to arms seriously.
Least of all, one Perry Wiggins, aka "Pig Pen."
He had tried to be a good friend to Charlie Brown, and had failed miserably. To be fair, throwing himself in front of Charlie to take the brunt of the daily injustices was little more than suicide in slow motion. He had, at the very least, refused to contribute to Charlie Brown's daily suffering.
That he couldn't do anything, the idea that he was helpless to help someone who everyone hated, is what he has been telling himself.
But he hears Lucy's ultimatum and he realizes that if he refuses to act now, he'll have the blood of Charlie AND his family on his hands…
No one saw him duck into the restroom, or at least no one cared enough to slow down to ask him what he was doing.
No one heard him make several calls in rapid succession.
And so, when Lucy waddled to the front of a hundreds-strong mob with a bat in hand, prepared to bellow her demands as her personal army stood ready to kill for their almost-goddess, she was surprised to hear sirens.
The upshot of it all was that her "Operation Blockhead" was a stupid plan to begin with, and her valiantly leading the charge at a team of officers and swat members was no stroke of genius or courage.
It took two idiots with handguns firing on the assembled officers and the rest of the idiots charging with whatever weapons they could find to spur a retaliation in the form of flying rubber bullets and tear gas. It was not a battle so much as it was a total and complete farce- no one had come prepared to deal with opposition.
Martin Grey himself took two rubber rounds to the chest before falling down screaming.
Parents who had pulled the car gag on Charlie dozens of times ran coughing and gagging from clouds of irritant gas.
Wayler tried to punch a sheriff and got both arms dislocated for his trouble.
Lucy, in a moment of what she felt was bravery, tried to rush several SWAT members at once. That earned her being hogtied with zip-ties and left face down as chaos ensued.
To the credit of the responding officers and SWAT members, there wasn't a single fatality, just a massive number of injuries and arrests.
This was the end result of Operation Blockhead…
Hundreds were arrested and charged with various misdemeanors and felonies, the least of which was inciting a riot. Those who were found to have weapons were charged with conspiracy to commit murder.
Martin Grey would find himself in front of a very angry judge, looking at a fine with far too many zeroes…
Charlie Brown felt Christmas had come early…
And Perry "Pigpen" Wiggins, notorious son of a garbage man, famous for attracting dust and debris with no regards to weather or the laws of physics...
…was the only person besides Charlie Brown to come out with a clean record and a clean conscience.
"Charlie," the man said after the tale was recounted, "I don't know what to say."
The man Charlie had hired to sort out his mental short circuits looked baffled and horrified. Who could blame him? Who wanted to believe a community could be that evil? Who wanted to consider people could sink that low?
"Cases like yours, where the abuse is from that many sources and that severe, are rare. Rarer still are people like you, who manage to overcome it without falling into suicidal depression or substance abuse."
"That's what I'm trying to avoid, doc." Charlie sighed.
"…there's no magic technique I can use to fix you. I can prescribe some pills to help with the anxiety, but healing from this…" the psychiatrist, Dr. Grass, sighed. "This will take time. A long time, I'm afraid. As it stands, getting help before you fall into depression is a good sign- it shows you're thinking rationally."
"What about the things I said I thought about?" Charlie asked. Surely those were abnormal…
"If you went through that and weren't incredibly angry, there would be something very wrong with you. That being said, holding on to that anger is, like you said you felt, unhealthy. High blood pressure, depression, etcetera." He paused.
"Have you considered writing about this, Charlie? To help put it in perspective?"
…it couldn't hurt.