AN: Here's the second chapter. Thank you for the reviews they were greatly appreciated the comments quite flattering. Sometimes I think I may go overboard with the imagery a bit and I'm glad it didn't bother anyone. This is the first story I've ever posted and I honestly didn't think anyone would read it.

Solitary Dragon: Don't worry Zack is very much alive I was just trying to build a foundation for my characterization of him (which I hope is at least vaguely accurate) that left some sort of impression. The grammar mistakes are the result of the fusion of ADD and some wicked dyslexia.

Vaguely Specific: I think I've fixed the reviews problem but alas technology is one tricky transvestite.

Chinsky: Thanks for Zack's last name, I knew I was missing something, I thought there might have been an extra vowel in there somewhere.

Sorry about how long it took to update, violin lessons and Latin homework of all things…Anyway, grammar wise I'm afraid this portion is as about as worthy as the last and on that note, would anyone be willing to act as an editor for this story? If so that would be wonderful, the run-on sentences and other grammatical beasts need to be tamed! E-mail me if you're interested, any help would be greatly appreciated.

I don't think I like this chapter very much. I'm usually not this straightforward, not ever and this chapter seems so obvious. I have show-don't-tell issues and I think there's far too much dialogue. I wanted the passage of time, the concept of Zack as a character is just now unfolding in my brain, and I like that he's talking I just don't think that I should have him talking so much that he reveals himself entirely. Honestly where's the fun in that? This chapter is as hazy and incoherent as the first (I'm not even sure where it takes place really) actually it's just a bunch of dialogue which is strange because I don't think I've ever written anything so short yet so clotted with dialogue.

II

Walls and Bridges

"I can't be myself, then I don't want to talk

I'm taking the cure so I can be quiet whenever I want."

Elliot Smith "Needle in the Hay"

"So you passed out?"

"Yeah."

"And how was that?"

"Dark."

"And you stopped breathing?"

"That's what generally happens when you pass out."

"How do you feel now?"

"Like a virgin." Zack sighed. "Touched for the very first time.'

"Uh huh. And how did this come about, if you don't mind me asking."

"Fell down the stairs." He played with the laces of his dark blue Vans. "Shoes were untied, it hurt a lot I'm going to invest in Velcro can I go?"

"Your parents know about this?"

The stark white laces fell from his pale little fingers. "Sure they do. They wanted to sue I talked them out of it, told them it might be awkward what with teacher parent conferences coming up." "I really have to go."

"You keep looking at the clock."

"Funny, it keeps telling me the time."

"You're mother told me the sarcasm was a newly acquired taste."

"I'm glad she's paying so much attention."

"Where do you have to go?"

Zack sighed, blowing breath out of his cheeks like an asthmatic puffer fish.

"Do you have an appointment Zack?"

"Band practice."

"And how are you feeling about that lately."

"Unadulterated piles of ecstatic joy, just the opposite of right now actually."

"And what do you do in the band again, you're the…drummer?"

"Guitarist."

"Oh right, I was so close. And you like playing the guitar, its fun?"

"Actually." Zack sat up. "My parents use it as a slightly delayed form or hardcore torture. You see they used to beat me with vacuum attachments and hang me by hooks from the ceiling in the basement and use me as a sort of all purpose piñata when they're dinner parties got dull but now they've found a more…interactive punishment."

"So you think you're parents are trying to punish you…by allowing you to indulge in your hobbies?"

"It was cheaper than hiring the firing range and less messy than setting me on fire." He paused. "Mother hates to get the rugs dirty. You know, they had it tough, I really think they had to choose between letting me in the band or cutting me open and donating my body to science. I think the latter won out because I get to live and really bond with my torture."

He relished the look of his captor like a smoker relishes the first drag of the first cigarette. It was like chocolate.

"And where did you get the thought that you're parents were trying to torture you. Where did that idea come from?"

"The media." He said promptly. "The ad executives at Fox told me specifically that blaming my mother and father for every small inconvenience I suffer will give me not just validation for my tiny peruile existence but loads and loads of attention both from my parents and from fine professionals like yourself. I was thinking of suing them." He said seriously nodding. "Maybe making it a class action suit, you want in?"

"Zack your father told me you had issues with honesty, with being honest and expecting honesty from others. Why do you think that is?"

"Why do I think what is?"

"Why do you think you have difficulty talking to people? Talking to them honestly?"

"They think I have problems talking because I don't talk to them, if Zack doesn't talk it means he's planning to drown kittens or forget to return library books or write letters begging to be adopted by the Manson family."

"And you don't agree with this?"

"It's a misconception, but misconceptions only have to do with perception right? And everybody perceives everything differently so I think what they think about me is wrong, and they think its right because we aren't coming from the same place about it."

"And you're doctors? Your father says you don't talk to any of your doctors honestly. Now why is that? Why do you think that is Zack?"

He lifted his head and his brown eyes stared fearlessly. "Because you're the man, and I've been trained to resist you."

"Is that so?"

"Yes."

"I wasn't aware."

"You wouldn't be would you?" "It's just a fact." Heavy sighing against the air. "You shouldn't take it so personally."

"I didn't know I was."

"It's all over your face." He said softly. "It isn't an elitist thing you shouldn't let it get to you. They were kid lessons, a long time ago."

"A long time ago?"

"Yeah." He was quiet after that.

"Zack?"

"Yes?"

"What went wrong?"

"What do you mean?"

"Where did it all go wrong, when did it all change for you, for your mom for your dad, what went wrong?"

"It didn't change." His voice was even. "Nothing ever did, not really."

"Your father told me-."

"He says a lot of things." Zack interrupted. "Nothing ever changed. Not with them."

"Not with them?"

"Does the echo help you concentrate?"

"Just trying to see where you are Zack."

"I'm right here."

"I see now."

Silence.

"So you said nothing changed, not with your parents, not with your home. What about school? Did things change there?"

"Everything." His voice was so heavy.

"How?"

"Just waking up." He lay back on the white pillows of the sofa.

"Waking up? Explain that, explain waking up."

"I don't know, realizing that where you are right now, it's a box." His voice wavered like the shaky flight of a baby bird. "It's a box that you used to carry bugs around in, and you've been stuck in this box for god knows how long and it would have been fine if whoever put you in here had poked some holes in the top so you could breath. But they didn't and you just sit there in the dark waiting for your air to run out."

"I don't understand."

"Understand what?"

"You're statement, you're usually so clear about these things Zack. You feel trapped, like a bug?"

"Yes."

"And you don't have any airholes."

"Yes."

"And this is a problem."

"I can't breathe."

"I don't understand."

"It isn't astrophysics or anything, what's so hard to understand about not being able to breathe?"

"Well I wonder is this just at school?"

He shook his head. "No."

"This is at home as well?"

He nodded. "Yes."

"Its safe to say you feel like this everywhere you go?"

He nodded.

"And what is it you've learned about school?"

He sighed against the creamy white pillows. "That it's a pot that skins everything that's you off of you and puts you in this box naked so you can be clothed with all the same fear and panic and paranoia and loves and hates of every other person stuffed in that box with you." His breath came out in shallow little waves that punctured the air as he spoke to the ceiling. "And when you finally come out of that womb, all warm and bathed and clothed you aren't you, you're them or us or they. You're your friend's friend or that one guy who can do long division in his head, or the growth on a sports car or the rich kid from Manhattan who no one talks to except to point out how queer like he's looking that day,

because they think he thinks he's better than all of them"

"You're a label. You're smart or dumb or pretty or ugly, a know-it-all, a fag, a retard, a delinquent, a pothead, a jock, a genius, a shut in. You're part of the team, or the league or the squad only it isn't you it's a whole group of yous same make and models same finish same result."

His breath got thinner as he spoke. "And if you aren't part of a league or a team you're a leper and they throw rocks when you're little and when you get older they call you a queer and shove you into lockers because you're a constant reminder that things don't have to be this way. There doesn't have to be so much sameness and they can't handle it so they kick your ass and call you a fag and hope you've learned your lesson about sticking out."

"So you think its conformity, the need for everyone to be the same that's changed?"

"Its more than that."

"How? How is it more? I just summed up your entire problem in one sentence Zack."

"It's more. Resistance and stuff." He glanced up again. "You're the man right? But your only one little branch of it, see your boss he's the man, and his supervisor he's the man too, and his supervisor and his supervisor and his supervisor. It keeps going higher and higher, all the way up."

"So the man helps instigate the conformity as you see it?"

"Don't take it personally, He said voice thick with a morose webbing that clotted in his throat like blood. "It's your destiny."

"My destiny? And how would you be inclined to know about my destiny Zack?"

The boy shrugged. "I don't know."

"And you say destiny, you mean the Man has to exist?"

"Yeah." He rolled over on his side. "The Man isn't so much a person as like a force, I mean whatever's pissing you off whatever's standing in your way that's the man and eventually you're going to have to fight it."

"So the man isn't a person?"

"Chico tell him what he's won."

"I'm just trying to understand. That's all."

"The Man isn't you, not really, what you represent, what you stand for that's the man."

"I see, and one day you'll have to fight the man? Is that what you mean?"

"Figuratively speaking."

"So not literally."

"No," A quick glance over his shoulder. "I don't fare well with hand to hand combat."

"What do you imagine this fight to be like?" "Figuratively speaking."

His voice sounded so far away, a lonely little echo of broken speakers out to sea. "Like fighting something that isn't real, internal maybe."

"Internal, something from inside yourself?"

"A thousand agent Smiths."

"I imagine you're looking forward to that."

"Like I look forward to becoming a eunuch."

"So school, school's changed. What about the people, you talked at length about people last time Zack what's happened to them?"

His voice had lost all its heat, all its terrific weight. "Nothing, they haven't changed."

"Oh they haven't?"

"No."

"But at the beginning you implied that things changed you went back a bit to that first Friday and since then things have changed, people have changed haven't they?"

"Maybe a few, I wasn't paying attention."

"But you always do, don't you? You can't help it sometimes."

The thick black velvet folds of his brain were crashing into each other like awkward waves, broken walls caving into the warm hearth of his mind. His voice was long and slow, a short walk in the dark. "It isn't always what I think it is."

A pause. "You're speaking about Summer now?"

His breath beat against his lungs in quick whispers. "No."

"No?"

"I never said anything about-."

"You didn't have too, you never have to do you?"

His breath was on fire puncturing his docile lungs, beating his heart into sleepy submission.

"What's different' Zack, what's changed about Summer?"

"I don't-I never."

"Where did it go wrong?"

"Murphy's law." Zack shrugged, faint breath resting at the roof of his mouth, lying his head back staring at the ceiling.

"That's a pessimistic law don't you think?"

"Realistic."

"And that's what you need realism?"

"Yes."

"That's what Summer says."

He nodded. "I really have to go."

"You just got here."

"Forty-five minuets ago."

"You're parents paid for an entire session."

"Tell them to bill me."

Almost to the door so close, so close-

"Zack?"

"Yes?"

"I'd like to hear more about your band."

He shrugged.

"This may surprise you but I'm a large music fan myself."

He had seen the Kenny G poster in the lobby. He wasn't going to mention it because he only went after the musical taste when the novelty of the shiny new doctor wore off

. "Kenny G isn't music, He said bluntly. "It's the equivalent of being taken out back and shot, only without the most rewarding part, which is getting shot so that you won't have to hear it anymore." "That's noise pollution dude."

"I would think you're statement about perception and misconception would apply here."

"Not if the other party in question is tone deaf." He paused, feeling his breath rattle round in his ribcage. "I'm going now."

"You'll walk home?"

"Yes."

"Is that safe?"

He shrugged. "Probability I get hit by a pinto with an exploding engine versus the chances that I get picked up by a homicidal maniac who likes his steakburgers with a side of human flesh. About fifty-fifty."

"I see."

He was at the door, had his hand on the knob and everything. Turned it round and heard it snap and felt the smile wrinkle across his face.

"What about you Zack? Are you safe?"

"From what?"

"Telling me all these things, sharing what's in that head of yours with the Man."

A ghost of a grin stole across his face as the black haired boy with dark eyes leaned against the white wall with his hands on the golden knob. "I haven't told you anything." He said and he was grinning.

He ran from the white steps of the building shielding his face from the burning sun. He climbed a dry brown fence and skipped down a back street out into a field that ran the narrow lane to his house. The flowers and trees, cuffs of his black suit jacket were outlined in drowsy pale sunlight that slipped across the hills like a shawl. Grinning, he hummed a little Morrisey to himself, getting louder as he kicked the rhythm into the fence beside him with his worn old dark blue vans. He grazed the white wash fence as he ran and then the dry brown ran out and he found himself in a dull green field with sunlight plastered all over. Pale flowers coming up to meet him dolefully.

Then he was attacked, by waves of shaky laughter and a morning hale of paper bullets that shone in the sun like Inca treasure.

AN: It seems like an idiotic place to end I know but I'm honestly still trying to figure this thing out. I think I know what to say I'm just not quite sure how to say it. Anyway, don't ask me what the following exchange meant because I haven't any earthly idea. Hopefully chapter three will make a bit more sense.