Jess sat alone in his apartment, taking a drag on a cigarette. He hadn't smoked in two or three years. It soothed him but at the same time, he could feel coughs wracking his body and he felt like crap. He had left Jennifer, but he had still gone to her home city, a couple thousand miles.
He was blasting "Bank of Boston Beauty Queen" while smoking and reading Howl for about the fifty-thousandth time while sitting on a crappy bed in a bland Bostonian apartment. The phone sat beside him. For the past few days, he had considered calling her.
"It's getting dangerous Amanda…" he sang along with the CD as he turned the page. A knock came on the door. He sighed, dropped his cigarette into the dish beside him and dog-eared the page in his book.
"Hello?" Chrysalis knew someone was on the other end of the phone… she could hear whoever it was breathing. The past few weeks she hadn't felt like she was capable of getting up and getting dressed, but she needed to or she'd loose the store. "Hello?" she repeated, annoyed.
Whoever was on the other end hung up and Chrysalis sighed. The front door opened and in walked Luke.
"I need to talk to you."
"What?"
"I need to talk to you," he repeated, pissed off. The two shoppers attempted to hide their interested looks, and were obviously eavesdropping. Chrysalis rolled her eyes and pulled him behind the counter, turning up the speakers so that the other two people in the store wouldn't hear.
"What's going on?"
"I know that he called you before he went back to Boston."
"Wow? So?"
"What the hell did you say to him?"
"I'm assuming we're talking about Dodger here."
"Dodger? I'm talking about Jess."
"Who the hell is Jess?"
"Look, I'm pretty sure we're talking about the same person here, Chrys. Just, you know, different names. Anyhey, what did you say to him?"
"I told him to stay out of my affairs."
"Do you know what the hell happened to him?"
"No."
"He's staying out of your affairs then?"
"And I his."
"Fine. Listen. His roommate, I think he called himself Magico or something, said he shoved a bottle of pills down his throat one night and was in the hospital for two days."
"That's amazing Luke. I don't care." It was a bluff. She cared.
"I was just staying with him in Boston for the past week and he's been mumbling crazy things, mostly about a girl named Jennifer and Rory and you."
Under her breath she said, "Way to be redundant," but Luke did not hear her.
"He took up smoking again and he's really not in amazing shape, Chrys. Seriously, you need to talk to him 'cause my staying there did no good whatsoever."
"Luke, get this through your soddin' brain – I don't care about Jess or Dodger or whatever it is he's calling himself these days. I get it, you're his uncle, you have to care. It's your obligation, not mine. Now get the fuck outta my store." Luke huffed and left. One of the two people purchasing goods came up to the counter and avoided eye contact with me. "Heard it didn't ye?" She nodded. "I'm sure that you are overly confused." Again she nodded.
She left the store, and the other patron, who bought nothing, soon followed. Chrysalis was alone in the store, with Crass blasting in her ears. She looked over at the phone under the counter. She bent over to pick it up and dial, but it rang as soon as she had moved, causing her to jump.
She didn't pick it up. She knew who it was.
"Jennifer, darling, it's me. I'm sitting here in my office thinking, 'I wonder where my daughter went. She just disappeared.' Then, I remembered, I kicked you out of the city, essentially. No job, no home, nowhere to go. Except you found somewhere to go. I know I can't touch you in Stars Hollow, but be prepared. I will make life a living hell for you. The other day, somebody asked me…" Jennifer unplugged the phone before he could continue his story. To some it would seem impossible to have parents who truly hated you. To Chrysalis, it was a reality that she lived with every day.
She fought the urge to kick the phone as hard as possible and bit her hand hard instead. Blood drew from her cut where she had bit and a drop landed on the floor. Chrysalis didn't care.
She didn't seem to care about much these days.
Maybe, if she tried, she could not care about Dodger… Maybe, if she tried, she could not care about David leaving her… Maybe if she tried, she could not care about her father wanting to get her out of the country.
He had succeeded twice, after all.
Chrysalis sat on the edge of her bed, her head in her hands. She was high and drunk and various other things. But here, she wasn't Chrysalis, she wasn't Jennifer, she wasn't Magdie. Here, she was nobody. Nobody knew her name, nobody cared about her art, and the only person who seemed to notice her was the landlord of the apartment complex. And she didn't understand him. He knew very little English and she knew very little German.
It seemed like she was alone in this alien country without a friend. She knew nothing about the culture and spent all her weeks pay within a night at the bars. It was a catastrophe. She was a catastrophe. Everything was a catastrophe.
She fell back on the bed, clutching a bottle of beer in some of her long, graceful fingers. Three of them were broken, bruised, and bloodied. Her other hand was bandaged up to her elbow. What she had wrapped it with was a makeshift bandage – an old ripped up teeshirt that smelled like smoke and wine.
Her bed had no covers so she was cold at night. The teeshirt she had torn up to use as a bandage, or what was left of it, was tossed on the floor, and she lay there in only a bra and panties.
This was not the world she belonged in. It was the world that had sucked her in. She couldn't remember why she had come to Germany in the first place – she could barely even remember her own name. It had taken her six years to forget her name, actually. She had meant to forget her own name. Then she had met him.
He was dark, repulsive to her completely, but he was real. He was the first real person she had met in all of New York. He had shown up in her gallery about a month after she had moved in and opened it. He introduced himself as Dodger.
She had asked why he called himself Dodger. He said something about a girl. He asked to know everything she knew. She had smiled. She had an apprentice. Unfortunately, she didn't know he'd steal everything she had worked for.
He stole her title, he stole her gallery, and he stole her life. And he wanted more. All about a girl that wasn't her, she knew, but she wanted to be that girl. He had dug his own grave and buried himself in missing this girl. Chrysalis didn't know who that girl was, but she wanted to kill her for not being able to forgive poor Dodger.
He had done the last thing. He had told her father what she was doing. He had found her father and told him what was happening in her life and she could not go through with ever seeing either of them ever again.
The moment her father showed up in the gallery, she had lost it. She left her friend and ex-partner Alyce to the gallery and turned and ran. She ran from her father, her mother, her homecountry. She ran from her friends, her life, her Dodger, her art.
She ran away to the best place she could think of. The place her father would never find her. Germany. And she had buried herself deeper than Dodger had.
She needed help. She knew it. When you have ripped up your only shirt for a bandage and you go to sleep on a bed without covers and you drink yourself half to death, you need help. But she couldn't realize that.
She stared up at the ceiling and brought the bottle to her lips. She was waiting for something to take her away – drunkenness, euphoria, denial, death. Anything. Just so that she wouldn't have to go home to New York.
Alyce had died. Dodger was taking care of the gallery for her. More for Chrysalis than for Alyce, but that was what his story was. He knew she'd come back someday, he just didn't know when.
Chrysalis stared blankly at the snapped fingers of her right hand. She thought about how she wouldn't be able to work. With her non-broken hand, she stroked several bruises on her thighs and winced when she touched her broken ribs. She could feel blood pounding in her black eye and the pain between her legs.
She was pregnant. But she didn't know.
Luke sat in his apartment, drinking a beer silently. Jess had called him up two weeks prior and had said that he was in Ireland and was going to Boston. Next thing he knew, Jess was in the hospital from a suicide attempt, presumably because of Chrysalis, or Jennifer, whoever she was, or Rory.
Luke stared at the empty bed on the other side of the apartment. He had no clue why he had kept it. It was Jess's. Maybe he had expected Jess to come home at some point. Except now, Boston was his home. It was also Chris's home, he thought bitterly.
He had remembered something he'd seen in Jess's apartment. He hadn't said anything, it still boggled his mind completely.
A bag of whitish-yellow powder under Jess's pillow. He knew what it was, unfortunately. It wasn't crack or heroine, like he had thought at first. It was meth.
Jess was a junkie and alone with a possibly worse junkie in a strange town, going insane over these three girls and Luke could not do anything about it.