Chapter Two
"Should I open up my eyes or just ignore who you are and what you could have been? And should I open up my eyes and make believe you will change? So it's easier to not stay, to not stay."
Desperate people believe in desperate things and Jay wasn't any different. He needed to believe that change was possible, that at some point in time he'd stop being absolute scum, or else he saw no point in waking up in the morning.
A lot of people in the world would like that – hell, they'd have a party on his grave – but Jay didn't want to give them the pleasure. People hated him, his feelings were quite mutual, but until he stopped grasping onto the hope that man could change there was no way he would let anyone other than himself win.
So until he decided to drop dead Jay would stand just outside the carnival of life and look at the carnie goers through his black-tinted lenses and wish to be one of them; that care and burden free, that happy. He couldn't be one, of course, so he corrupted them, turned their values to rust and their morals to shit. They had to pay for what happened to him, had to give up their happiness because his was ripped from his hands. If he had to be miserable then come Hell or high water everyone was going to be miserable. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a goddamn tooth.
During his brooding observations he was usually completely ignored. He must've been like a scab to everyone around him, their mindset being that if they let Jay be and didn't pick at him he could fade away into oblivion without leaving behind an even uglier scar. So as they walked by Jay, resident prick, they acted as though he wasn't standing at the edge of their peripheral vision, casually leaning against the bulletin board near the entrance foyer.
Most people looked anywhere other than at Jay, but a few – as always – tried to steal discreet glances. For all the rumors, the facts and half-truths about him spreading much like wildfire through the halls and classrooms, Jay still attracted some of the youngins like a moth to a flame. The girls would walk by gripping their books with deadly force and stare at him with their heads angled down. They would blush something fierce when Jay would up-nod at them, maybe even wink.
Jay wasn't amused at all by most of the little teenies, but he loved the attention. It was a great ego boost, all of the shy smiles, flushed cheeks, nervous giggles. That's all it was, though, an ego boost. None of those girls turned him on – unless they went to the ravine and wanted to earn a bracelet from the bad boy. For the most part they didn't want one so Jay simply stood and let the girls goggle at him while he sneered at the world.
It was boring, always had been, and now that he had no one by his side it was even worse. He was left alone with his thoughts, thoughts even an insane serial killer wouldn't dare touch with a sterilized barge pole.
Sometimes his thoughts gave him mini panic attacks, gave way to a deluge of imagery chronicling his pathetic life full of mistakes, complete with a background score of some hack one's wrists to shreds Evanescense song. He often got migraines from the wave of emotion, sound and picture that crashed into him, which subsequently led him to numb the pain with the help of a case of cheap beer or whatever he had with him at the moment.
Currently Jay was front row center to this motion picture, screen being the throng of passerby in the hallway. Like always the snapshots flew by too quickly, the contrast spiked up so high the colors hurt his eyes. He could have shut them, banged the back of his head against the wall a couple times and drive push-pins into his skull, but he didn't; his episodes never lasted long, he was able to wait them out.
The nausea, lightheadedness and lump the size of a tennis ball in his throat took longer to pass, being that it had nothing to do with the million mile an hour flashbacks. Alex had just walked by and if looks could kill Jay would have died one thousand deaths right on the spot.
While he hardly had to work at his "Whatever, I couldn't care less about what you think of me" attitude most outsiders would assume, in actuality it was a complete and total front. Always on some level he was worrying about what people thought of him. It was almost humorous, his hypocrisy. Though Jay pushed people away, told them to go screw themselves and that he couldn't give two shits about their thoughts of him, he didn't want to be alone used to it though he was and he did care, very much in fact.
Right about now Jay did yet didn't want to know what Alex was thinking. "I tinkered with your car enough when you weren't looking that it'll blow up when you start it"? "I'm going to do everything in my power to see you'll never be able to show your face in this town again"? "Look at me one more time and I'll come over there and kick you so hard in the nuts your dick'll be hanging out of your nose"? He didn't want to know if his assumptions were correct: that Alex, newly filled to the brim with hatred from seeing her sleazy ex-boyfriend, would tell anyone and everyone that her aforementioned sleazy ex-boyfriend had a strong fear of the dark – her word that she wouldn't tell a soul meant nothing now.
Alex had tried to destroy Homochuk's boyfriend's campaign for Student Body President, after all, and he hadn't received blow jobs from countless other girls including her ex-best friend, not to mention that whole Gonorrhea mess. Sure, she hadn't gone through with it, but she hadn't been visibly filled with the urge to slaughter her contender when she looked at him, the way she was looking at Jay right now.
Though she neither said nor mouthed any words to him, though her hands stayed fisted at her sides so she couldn't make any rude gestures, the expression on her face said it all. The coldness in Lexxie's eyes dropped the temperature in the room by at least ten degrees, Jay expected the windows and tile floors to frost over at any moment.
Jay needed fresh air. He waited until Alex was gone before hurrying outside and standing on the concrete steps, closed his eyes too tightly and breathed in too deeply.
Fuck her, she hadn't been that good anyway.
Putting his head back, staring at the Autumn gray sky, Jay said a big "fuck you" to whomever could hear him. Times like these he wanted to believe that God really wasn't anything less than some figure a man created one day to give his life a little more meaning – a desperate person believing in a desperate thing – because he apparently wasn't happy with the simple fact that people live and then they die with absolutely nothing beyond or more than that. Had Jay admitted that there really was some higher power he would blame every bad event in his life, every last fuck up, on that bigger force. But that would be a little too wacky, a cop-out bigger than any Jay had ever created with his own hands. Jay was desperate, no doubt about that, but not nearly desperate enough to believe in any kind of god just to give his life some purpose, to have someone else to blame things on.
When it all boiled down to it, it was Jay's fault for everything anyway so there really was no point in directing the blame toward anyone else. That pissed him off a great deal, made his head start pounding, how he alone destroyed everything.
The breeze was picking up, hitting the back of his neck and arms, making him feel uncomfortably cool. After spitting on the ground, trying to get a foul taste from his mouth, Jay went back into the building and instantly regretted it. Greenpeace was walking right toward him.
Jay couldn't understand why he had ever let her into his life, clearly he had taken a little too much of something and the effects of whatever he had ingested lasted a great many days. She looked liked roadkill – worse, what roadkill wanted to be when it grew up. He hadn't taken enough showers, hadn't used enough steel wool and lye to get the feeling of her off of him.
Heading left, quickly trying to get to nowhere at all, Jay wondered how long it would take before Emma Nelson realized she was what she hated, that she had no idea what she was preaching to people about though she thought she did – a one woman PETA circus. How long before she grew one notch of smart? Jay would ram the intelligence right down her throat if he had to, as long as he didn't have to touch her that is.
Yes, he had liked the way Emma had virtue "or whatever" but that didn't mean he actually liked her as a person. She had been something pure and good to disease (in more ways than one). Jay had used her, no different than he had used anyone else, and evidently by the way she was hurrying to keep up with him she didn't realize that at all.
Maybe she was coming to tell him that she was the bad guy here as well. Emma had used Jay, that much was obvious, but no one seemed to want to realize that. She spouted crap about how she had watched someone die and had been thrown off kilter, just needed to get back on steady ground.
Any normal person would have never come back to the ravine after Jay first told them what people did in that van, slapped the green bracelet around their wrist and told them it was a prize in that tone of voice and urgency Jay had used. Emma hadn't done that, obviously.
Emma had been thrilled about Amy's reaction to her bracelet, the first one she didn't earn, and she wanted another. She had used Jay for her own personal gain, for a sense of worth and purpose – boy, did that sound familiar. Sean wasn't around and Jay was the next best thing. Perhaps this was Emma's way of subconscious payback for Jay helping the real Sean to come out, for Sean to be able to see just how stupid Emma Nelson really was and to be able to move on to Ellie, someone who understood him.
Greenpeace, just as unstable and dim on twisted facts as the organization of her nickname, called out Jay's name.
Maybe she was coming to give the bracelets back or maybe she had come because she pitied him. Ah, Emma. Emma, Emma, Emma. The Great Pitier Emma. Jay smiled inwardly at the thought of stating the fact that her pity caused a lot of problems. Like Rick. Had she not pitied him and led him on to believe that she was in love with him, things would have turned out differently.
Maybe that's why she had gone down on him like some kind of whore and not a very good one at that: guilt. She knew just as well as Jay did that she had a hand in what had happened. Yeah, Jay had made Rick believe that Jimmy was the mastermind behind the tar-and-feathering when it was really Jay, but Emma helped Rick go just that more farther over the edge. Emma was the one who had abused Rick by ostracizing him – the irony was she was campaigning against abuse and that's just what she was doing, abusing. Emma had gotten so many people against that kid it wasn't even funny, had humiliated him and degraded him.
If Emma had just ignored Rick like any decent person would instead of going on that quest, had she not tried to strip Rick's civil liberties away, none of this would have ever happened. She wouldn't have seen Rick commit suicide because he would not have cracked as severely, thereby never trying to connect with Jay, never going down on him, never getting that STD. Everything would have been different.
No, Jay didn't agree with what Rick had done, he didn't think he should have been let off without any kind of punishment, but looking back on it no one had ever asked Rick's side of the story. Funny, coming from the guy who killed Rick. Jay didn't pull the trigger, he did worse than that. But it wouldn't have happened if Emma knew to leave well enough alone.
She still hadn't learned.
Acting like Jay didn't hear her was foolish, like a mouse pretending a lion wasn't roaring in its ear. He kept his head up anyway, eyes forward, and thought that given enough time Emma would get the point. Hopefully her head wasn't as thick as Jay thought it was.
Think about something else.
So far Jay had one class with Ilse Miller, his doll face. He'd only seen the back of her hairstyle – how many bobby pins were even in there, Jay wanted to ask her, though he was sure the amount of pins holding the rolls up were enough to fill every crevice of the Queen Mary – or glimpses of her polka dotted dress since first hour, which disappointed him highly. But not as much as Emma trying to get his attention.
"What is it, Greenpeace?" Jay asked without looking in her direction, without turning around or stopping walking.
Emma didn't say anything for a few seconds, but she was there, Jay was simply walking a little too fast for her. "I just wanted to say that I'm sorry about all that's happened."
"Yeah, well, I don't care. Everyone's always sorry about something, the word's lost it's meaning."
"I don't think you mean that."
"You never think, do you?"
The men's bathroom was at Jay's immediate right, he pushed open the door and walked inside. It wasn't much of a hideout, but a least Emma couldn't come in after him.
Pity, that's what Emma was going to give him. Jay didn't need her pity, didn't need anyone's pity. He'd much rather have no one than have Emma. That's not what he let her believe, but it was the truth. Let people believe that Jay had thrown something clean away, but they should know that Emma hadn't been all that clean when she'd gotten to him. She wanted it, for whatever reason: revenge, guilt, closure, a means to an end. Jay had wanted to watch her crawl around, kind of like if he had pulled the wings from a butterfly. Now that was done and she wasn't what he might have liked in the beginning, why would he want her back if he had ever wanted her in the first place?
Disgusted with himself, just like he always was, Jay walked into the farthest toilet stall from the door and closed and locked the forest green metal slab behind him. He didn't need to use the toilet, didn't even need to take a piss, he just needed the privacy.
With his backpack set on the ground, Jay squatted down and checked to see if any other sets of feet were in the room. None.
He zipped open the medium sized compartment of his backpack, then opened the zipper to the narrow hideaway buried behind a few instruction manuals, a calculator, pens and some random junk, painted black to match the fabric it was attached to.
Jay's savior was stashed away at the base of an overflowing pile of old Doublemint gum wrappers, notes, phone number tabs ripped from advertisements he'd never called about, in a small, cloudy zip-lock bag.
He wasn't addicted, wasn't in denial about not being addicted either. It just took the edge off, he only took it when he needed to and never much of it.
So this is what he had been reduced to, black tar heroin.
When he was a little kid his dream was to become a fireman. That had been too much to ask for, far too much.