"In the story of my life, the scrawny Scarecrow will win in the end - and the last laugh, I swear, will be mine!" –Jonathan Crane, New Earth

AN: For Pierides, since I missed the Sherry Squires contest.

WARNING! Rated M for sexual content and language.

I'm dying.

Shitty way to go, too. Rubber hoses and tubes everywhere, damn IV pole buzzing and the only comfort I got left are the hard drugs. They got me on a drip. Morphine drip 'to ease the pain.' The docs think it's merciful. Well fuck them. Thirteen years in a wheelchair, two months in a hospital bed, they drug me up, feed me through a bag and change my goddamn diaper…and they think some hard narcotics are gonna make a difference? Hell no. Give me the dose. The whole dose. It'd be easy. It'd be mercy. Be like falling asleep.

But if I got any proof there ain't no forgiveness for me, it's this: I'm alive. And modern medicine's gonna keep me that way for a long, long time. I've got weeks left still. Maybe months. It's not good enough for 'em that I'm gonna die. I gotta suffer first.

And I seen it, too. Been in this damn facility long enough to know. The docs get cold and distant. The nurses all teary-eyed. Call you shit like 'dear' and 'hon' while the administrators suck their pens and wait for you to kick it. They send the social workers to talk about 'making arrangements' while you sit in piles of shit and piss and pus as the bedsores rupture on your ass and ankles. You can't eat or drink or you'll aspirate so they hang up more bags, poke in more tubes in your mouth, your nose, your dick…and then your veins go bad and they keep finding new places to prick you.

…and this ain't even Hell yet.

Dying. It's a nice word. Nice and short. Comes easy off the tongue. And that's how it should be, not this sadistic circus here. If you're gonna die, you'd best die quick. Best die fast. Best die like Sherry.

Sherry Squires. Sixteen. Cheerleader. Nice mouth-she could do great things with those cherry-red lips. She probably called herself my girlfriend. Probably thought she was, too. None too bright. Much too naïve. And pretty in all the wrong ways. Her face wasn't much to look at, but with tits like that no one paid much attention to it nohow, not that it much bothered her, and not that she didn't know it. Her daddy was never really in the picture. Some said he walked out when she was just a kid. Some said he died. Some said he killed himself. I was never too sure. I never asked.

I never cared.

But for whatever reason, the old fart was gone. And that's all that mattered. He left her and her hag mother to fend for themselves…and fend they did. Sherry's mom fended with booze. Lots of it. And Sherry? Sherry turned to men. The sort of girl that wound up hanging with the wrong guys in the wrong places on the wrong side of town doing all sorts of wrong things.

That's how she wound up with me.

Sherry Squires. Sixteen. Great girl. Sexy and anxious to please. She wasn't nearly the first. But she was the last. Not outta any piety from me, mind. It's just when you got bilateral lesions in your spinal column things don't always work right after, if you take my meaning. Things like your legs. Things like your bladder. Things that make you feel like a man.

But for one glorious summer she was mine. Mine. Sixteen and too stupid to know she could say no, and too stubborn to take advice. And for a senior in high school with only one thing on his mind, she was Aphrodite for sure.

Don't mind dying. Know I deserve it. I done some bad things in my life. I done some bad things to Sherry. I mighta slapped her around some. Mighta slept with others girls, too. Some of 'em mighta been her friends-if a girl like Sherry could really have any. Mighta taken advantage of the fact she was 'just a kid' but hell, any girl woman enough to know how to do the things she done sweaty and naked in a pick-up bed and like 'em ain't a kid anymore. Sherry weren't a kid. She was a woman, and a curious one at that. Some states may've called it statutory rape but I never forced her to do anything she weren't willing to try…

And I dead fucking certain didn't kill her, neither.

You can believe me. The cops never did. When you've got a record like mine and that much alcohol in your system, it don't matter none who's behind the wheel when somebody dies. Jury didn't believe me either. Called it man one.

But you can. Dying man ain't got no reason to lie. Only thing I got left is the truth. And the truth is I deserve to die, just the way I am. Deserved to be paralyzed to. And if I believed in penance or something I guess 13 years of celibacy ain't even close to covering the ass I got when I was young. But I never killed Sherry.

…Scrawny little Jonathan Crane did that.

What we did weren't right. Weren't wrong, neither. We messed him up good, yeah. But the twerp didn't need to go killing nobody. He just needed to learn his place is all. Sniveling scarecrow always hanging around…and the way he looked at Sherry. Like a hound after a bitch in heat. Always had his ugly head in a book and his creeping eyes on her chest, but who didn't? She dressed it to show it, and show it she had and did. Never would've had time for Crane if he'd stayed outta the way. But he didn't. He wouldn't. Other kids knew better but Crane had to go and make himself visible. Had to be so damn scrawny, had to wear such ratty clothes, had to come to school smelling like crow-shit, had to try and talk to Sherry, become her tutor. He wasn't just asking he was begging for trouble.

So I let him have it.

Sherry almost let him have it, too. Her skirt hiked up to her perfect hips, panties slipping down her sculpted thighs, sucking his face as he pulled off his belt. He was close. Closer than he'd ever been before. Probably as close as he ever got, the stringy scarecrow. Unless he's found some bitch willing to give him a pity-fuck, that is. And then only if he could get it up again. I scared the piss out of him with that Jack-o-Lantern in the dark and he tore out of the school basement like a bat out of hell, tripping over his pants and screaming.

We weren't the only ones that laughed at him, trying to hoist his pants back onto those scrawny hips and failing. Hell, the whole school got a great sight of his dick. A great laugh out of it, too. And he just stood there, crying and bawling in shame, shouting back at all of us. Never did know what he said. Never did care-leastaways not until it was too late. Never figured him for the revenge type-never figured he'd have the balls. His type, those skinny twerps, they need to get put in their place when they get uppity. We thought we'd have a laugh and he'd learn his lesson…

How was I supposed to know he thought he could teach us one?

But looking back at it, looking back at that nasty shitface beanpole, we all should of known. He weren't right. Not at all. The type of kid you vote most likely to go to prison. In fact we did vote that, come to think of it…

Sherry mightta felt bad about it. Leastaways she stopped laughing after I threw that pumpkin and he was just standing there crying, with slop all in his hair and slime running down his clothes. People started throwing stuff-all kinds of stuff-after that. Soda cans. Bottles. Shoes…whatever was handy. We gave him a few good hard punches, too. Couple of kicks. And a good hard one to the groin to remember us by. She mightta even screamed for us to stop. I mightta told her to shut the hell up, bitch. Don't remember right, cause I wasn't paying her too much attention. But she wouldn't never laugh much about it again. Can't tell you how many times I called her a dumb bitch, feeling sorry for that sucker. Not that it did her any good. That Crane, there was something wrong with him. Always was. And he didn't forgive nobody, nohow. Especially her.

But he wasn't just content to pay us back in kind. No public humiliation for him. To him this was personal: he didn't want me and Sherry embarrassed, he wanted us scared. He wanted us dead.

He came for us on prom night. It was all too easy. The little bastard was invisible, and we was damn easy targets, me letting all the boys know where we was heading, and what we was doing. But you can't expect an 18 year-old not to brag he was about to get a blow-job done by the best-looking girl in town. All I could think about was that back-parking lot and those ruby-red lips of hers and what they could do.

It was spring, and that car was hot and sweaty. It was raining, too. We was so far back away from school no one could see us, but that big-band music was still faintly playing. We was parked, and I had my hands all over that hot body of hers. And no matter how many times I'd do her she'd still feel like a goddess. Only two things a man really remembers in decent detail: and that's his first time, and his last time. And that first time is usually so damn awkwardly painful and embarrassing you tend to lie about most of what happened. You get in, you get out, you don't really know shit about what you're doing and the whole time she's making faces, says you're hurting her, or lies and says you're so good, baby, and she really likes it because that's what she's expected to say. Then it's over too quickly-or not soon enough- and you're naked and sweaty and too ashamed to even try to catch a last glimpse of her as she starts to cover up. But you brag about it anyways to the guys. Say you've become a man, go off on how much she liked it as all the stupid cocksuckers nod and believe you, swat you on the ass, whoop and holler…and the next time someone tells their tale you snigger to the guy next to you, shake your head, know the dumb sap was just as clueless as you. Only two things a man can exaggerate on and lie about and make bigger with every telling and no one calls him on it cause they all wish it was true: catching a fish and his first fuck.

But his last…now that's one you won't forget. Won't exaggerate, won't lie about, don't have no reason to change.

Maybe I was stupid. Maybe I was reckless. Maybe I should of protected her instead of just using her like a whore. Wish I could say that's what I was trying to do, see? I didn't goddamn panic, I tried to drive away. Thought that gun was real. Thought it was loaded. Thought whatever the hell that thing was in rags and tatters, straw and burlap…thought it was coming after me. I was drunk. Maybe a bit high, too. And that thing, whatever that thing…God. So I gunned it. Gunned it as fast as I could, Sherry screaming as the back glass broke and them bullets peppered the side of the car.

That shot-gun was real enough. But those bullets wasn't. Cops found traces of rocksalt. Made some lame-ass excuse about the highway department. Wouldn't believe a word I said about a shooter. Why should they? I was a troublemaker, truant, that pain in the ass prick always doped up on liquor and pot. Cops had been looking for an excuse to put me away for a long, long time. And Sherry? Sherry Squires was just the tramp-daughter of the town drunkard. No one gave a shit about Sherry, not even her mother. When her husband left she started to drink, and with her daughter gone the bitch didn't even have the decency to drink herself to death. No, she got goddamned sober enough to marry for the first time in her life to a rich old man just old enough and just rich enough to leave her well off.

The police didn't care. The town didn't care. Kids at school didn't care a lick, all those teenage whores lining up the next day outside the school office to see who'd become the default prom queen and take Sherry's spot on the cheerleading squad.

But the thing that really gets me is how it doesn't even matter any more if I was guilty of not. Sherry Squires never meant anything to me, not nothing, until the moment that she died-and then she became the rest of my goddamned, miserable life. Prison's not so friendly to a man who can't defend himself, and the only consolation is for a man with no sensation below the waist rape is just like another palliative medical procedure: meaningless and inevitable.

Sherry Squires was sixteen. She lived and died, and no one ever gave a shit about her. Not her rat bastard of an absent father, not her drunken gold-digging mother, not even the man who fucked her, not even the man who wanted to. Not the man who killed her and not the man who got her killed. Hell, in her sixteen years of sex, drugs, and rock'n roll, it mighta been the damned nicest thing anyone'd ever done for her.

Leastaways it spared her this. I'm dying in prison. Official sentencing was 'life', but I always knew what it came down to. The jury might've called it man one, but their opinion never really mattered none. I knew better: Crane was the one who did the sentencing. Crane was in charge. And that little shit sentenced me to death a long, long time before he ever pulled that trigger.'Cause 13 years later it's my turn to die, and it don't matter none if I'm guilty, innocent, the victim of a cruel prank or just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I'm dying nohow, and that scrawny twerp's finally got his wish-I'm terrified, humiliated, and the whole world's got to have a great, long laugh at my dick.

Jonathan Crane, you're nothing but a Scarecrow: you've got no heart. Inside it's nothing but burlap sacks and stale, moldy straw. Even now, 13 years later you won't forgive and you won't be forgiven.

But before I go remember this-I got the last laugh. The last, goddamned, bitter laugh, you hear? That's all we ever did, you worthless fuck. All anyone ever did. Just laughed-but you went and you killed the only person who might've even cared. There's only the two of us that'll ever know it, but it's enough. 'Cause I never once gave a shit about Sherry...

You did.

…Guess that makes us even. Guess both of us get what we deserve.