We had last been in Arizona, and I swear it was hotter here.
Let that be your guide to how unreasonable the sweltering heat was. I stared blankly out the window, hand barely shielding my face from the sun, ignoring the world around me to the best of my ability. My father was as usual ranting and raving about something I preferred not to listen to – you've got to preserve your residual sanity somehow – and there was absolutely nothing in small-town Ohio that could hold my interest for long enough, which would pose a problem, I figured, when we actually ended up stopping in one of these towns.
How long would the drive be, again? I had heard something along the lines of five hours. Must be fucking miserable to live in Sherwood. Five hours from anything that doesn't make you want to blow your brains out. Then again, doesn't everything?
We'd been going for an hour and a half already and I was eagerly awaiting an end to the whole deal. I had nothing resembling an idea of what I wanted to do here. Every once in a while, I just ended up somewhere that completely failed to hold my attention and ended up spending a short time withdrawn from any kind of societal interaction until we moved on to the next, slightly less terrible hellhole. Sherwood, I reasoned, would fall squarely into that category. Another group of crazy fuckers and without the dignity to contain a single person who could hold my attention long enough. Maybe they'd be entertaining, but I wouldn't count on it. Even at that one school where everything was such a picture-perfect presentation of society's degeneracy, I never got around to what I meant to. They just weren't good enough to deserve it.
Maybe I just need to focus on things more. Like schoolwork. Friendships. Murder. General areas to work on. Oh, who fucking cares? The system left me behind long ago and the only answer left is to trash the whole damn thing. I had known this for ages, ranted and scrawled onto a hundred different pages that were mixed in with my stuff in the trunk of the car. And when I inevitably die tragically young because I'm a shameless James Dean/Sid Vicious/Every-Dead-Celebrity wannabe except without actual talent they'll find it all. "Oh, here's a teenager who hates society. How unheard of. How fucking unique."
Well, maybe, you crazy little fucks, just maybe if every outspoken youth is going to criticise all these things you do, you listen to them? Just maybe? Juuuust a shot in the dark here. Could be a solution. What do I know, I'm sixteen and my solution involves killing people.
He knows. I know he knows. We leave it unspoken that part of the reason we move around so often involves my homicidal tendencies. It never leaves me the time to see if they work.
Sometimes he acts as if that makes me more like him, and I prefer to drop the conversation when that happens.
The view outside the window was flat and dull, monochromatic – washed out dead browns to me, though they told me it was vivid green. They told me I saw colours just as wrong as I see everything else. It looked to me like I was the only one who saw those fields for what they really were, dead as whatever culture I could eke out of this place.
I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes, trying to shut the world out more. It wasn't like it could do anything good for me at this point, anyway.
