This is my version of Jonathan Crane's first taste of revenge. It was inspired by the pre-year one telling of Crane's background, hence the lack of Granny Keeny etc. Hope you enjoy.
I'm sure summer nights were never meant to be this way. How many other people can recall a prom night like this? Certainly a night to remember. If not for the right reasons. They were all so happy. Dancing. Smiling. It was a strange evening. A fancy dress prom. A theme that the sickening superficial cheerleader types had fought against fervently, and lost. They found their peace in coming as princesses, dressed as closely to their original prom outfits as plausibly possible.
Of course to attend my own prom would have been suicide. Surely my oppressors would have taken the secretly alcohol-soaked occasion to have one last stab at making my life a fearful misery. All the abuse. The teasing. The mind-games. The beatings. All in the last year, crystallised by the angst of teenage evolution, had writhed and twisted inside my head. Distorted into a new and smouldering sensation; revenge.
I tried my best to make myself invisible. Folded up against the wall of the school hall, peering in through the windows. I could see them, all flirting and laughing. They didn't miss my presence. Oblivious to how cold it was on the other side of that stony partition. My long arms encompassed my Hessian-draped body like the branches of an old decrepit tree. Awkward wiry legs bent, I hunched back against the wall. This costume would be my final stand. Terribly poetic, don't you think? A chance to go out with a bang after all those years of torment. Aside from the idiot in the Cadillac that had tried to run me off my bike on my way home, I had so far managed to avoid their attentions today. I ran my slender fingers over the raw graze on my face and winced.
After untangling my bent and shaking limbs and picking myself up from the road, my vision cleared enough to see the Caddy speed away, its passengers leering out of the windows and laughing, calling something about a scarecrow. The front wheel of my bike was buckled too badly to ride. I picked it up and began to walk it home, leaning on it as a crutch for my twisted ankle, now pulsating with stabbing twinges of pain.
Finally reaching home I locked the bike in the shed and stooped inside. I was a ghost in that house. Something I could only wish to be at school. Kneeling down in my room I took a chest from the back of my closet and unlocked it. Carefully I unfolded the layers of sacking folding in the box, dropping clumps of straw onto my floor. Finally I lifted a small handgun, nestled inside my homemade canvas mask, and held it in my hands. It looked so tiny, laid like something perfect and delicate across my palm. So beautiful, and yet so deadly. The perfect anecdote to my bookish appearance, now clothed in tattered rags.
Slipping the gun into my belt, I looked over my costume one last time. The face that had twisted in terror so many time as I was hunted down like an animal my the banes of my childhood, was now hidden under a layer of sackcloth. The fabric had been slashed, its jagged edges haphazardly sewn back together to leave a gaping, half stitched mouth. The same had been done with the eyes, now small menacing slits just large enough to see through. Finally, a saggy straw hat sat on my head, the same rough material as my ill-fitting sacking shirt and pants, bound with string to pull it closer to my lanky frame.
I no longer felt like the feeble, tortured victim I had been just hours ago. I felt…stronger, securer. I felt like something inhuman. Something far more powerful than a mere mortal. I was a phantom.
"What do you think would happen if you set a scarecrow on fire, Crane?" He leered at me. One hand holding my screwed collar, forcing me against the wall, his knuckles pressing into my throat. The other brandished a lighter, the flame dancing close to my face, and I squirmed under the searing heat of it.
"No answer bookworm? Well then, what do you say we do a little experiment?" Clearly a rhetorical question, but I cried out anyway. And I hated myself for it. For giving them what they wanted. But I was afraid. Just like always. His muscular arm moved down slowly,
"Now let's see just how fast a scarecrow'll burn." My heart pounded out of my chest, my body rigid with panic. My stomach felt like it was suddenly full of cold air, rising up my throat and swelling. I heard the click of the lighter, and suddenly a burst of agony as the front of my sweater went up in flames.
He let go of me, and I fell to the floor screaming, rolling violently and thrashing at the flames until it finally abated. My sweater now had a gaping hole, frayed and curled at the edges, revealing the pale flesh of my stomach which had now turned a sore and fierce red, the skin scalded with blisters.
I panted and whined in pain, and rolled over onto my back to see him standing over me, his face smirking in brutal enjoyment at my terror. His cronies where stood behind him, too busy setting fire to my books to observe my whimpers.
I walked the twelve blocks home with my arms wrapped around my stomach, trying to cover the hole in my sweater, grimacing every time my sleeves touched the burn.
Now, I watched him stumble out of the doorway, a typically pretty girl on his arm. I could barely believe my luck. Perhaps this was going to be easier than I thought. He was dressed a cowboy, his lady friend some kind of fairy. The walked into the parking lot. He lights a cigarette, then starts making out on the bonnet of his car. I emerged from my spot behind the bushes and stalked up to them. It was the girl who noticed me first, and he turned to see what she was staring at.
"What do you want?"
"My adolescence back. Or at least something to make up for it."
"What the hell? Go have a drink pal and lighten up."
"Fitting costume, don't you think?" I posed dramatically, showing off the ragged layers of sackcloth tried around me.
"Listen freak, I'm warning you—"
"After all those years the nickname kind of stuck, so I thought, 'why not embrace it? They want to see a scarecrow? I'll give them one.'"
"Crane?"
"Well done Sherlock."
"Shouldn't you be at home reading geek? It's a little late for you to be up."
"I just have one last thing to do, then I'm sure I'll sleep easy. Are you afraid yet? You should be."
I pulled the gun from my belt, and his face…his face was so beautiful. His eyes wide, mouth open. I could almost hear his heart hammering. It was extraordinary. I felt so alive.
"It's an interesting thing, fear. How easily it can be turned on those who use it as weapons." I lift it, cock it.
He scrambled for the car door, leaping in, followed by his girlfriend. Slamming the keys into the ignition, struggling to get it started. Nothing is as efficient as usual. His jock muscles are useless when fear takes over. He grasps for the gear stick, panicking. I stand by the car and watch. Enjoying every second of it. His fear pulsing through my veins like new life. Like a drug.
Finally the car lurches to a start, screeching forward. As it tries to tear away, I step out. Standing in front of it like an effigy. I point the gun at him, shaking behind the wheel. I don't even have to pull the trigger. Fear does its job. He swerves. The car spins onto the grass and flips over, rolling into a ditch in a baptism of broken glass and crippled metal. Standing one the edge of the verge I stare down on the wreck. The front windshield is buckled in, the roof of the car crumpled under the weight of the vehicle as it lies upside down. I watch the wheels spin until they stop completely, and I'm absolutely sure they're dead.
Then I walk home. I sigh, and feel the relief of exhaling as if I'd been holding my breath for an age, the hot sweltering fog in my lungs finally released, like a weight off my chest. Funny, I thought I'd at least feel just a little bad. After all, it's only human.