Chapter Seven
"Broken face and broken hands, I'm a broken man."
It was simple: Jay wouldn't go home. If he didn't go home he wouldn't have to face his parents and as long as he didn't confront them his parents wouldn't be devastated, hurt beyond repair. They'd be upset because he wouldn't be going back to the apartment or near his father's house, but not nearly as crushed by Jay telling his story. But there was no way Jay would be able to go through with it. This was a lose-lose situation and nothing he could do would make it any better.
Like staring through the windshield of his car at the pavement before him, that didn't help what was sure to come. He could study every crack in the road, every dimple and discoloration all he wanted, but he would still have to go back to the apartment eventually. His father was most likely starting over to it by now, steam pouring out of his ears and sewing a patchwork of obscenities that would hang in the stratosphere for decades.
No, Jay could run away but, he'd come home to stand in front of the firing squad sooner or later. If he spared Alex punishment akin to Jay's even though he kind of hated her he would run home with his tail between his legs.
Maybe it wouldn't be that bad.
Maybe it would be worse.
Jay couldn't tell them, but at the same time he had to. There was no way out of it, he had been expelled and because of that he needed to tell them everything, more lies wouldn't be able to explain anything at all. He was on the Titanic, doomed to sink, but hitting the iceberg head on was better than trying to go around it, then maybe he wasn't doomed to the frigid depths of the ocean floor after all.
That slight reassurance of staying afloat didn't make Jay start his car any faster, he remained sitting in the vehicle with both hands on the wheel and the engine off. He just needed time to think, that's all. He needed a few moments to grasp onto what he was going to tell them.
The looks on his parents' faces were going to kill him. No matter how he broke it their reaction was going to be the worst kind of death.
What had he done to deserve a life like this?
He was about to answer that question by reciting his laundry list of screw ups when he smiled, seeing Ilse jog down the front steps of the school. She looked extremely unhappy.
Jay stuck his head out of the open driver's door window. "I really am psychic. I totally called that! How long?"
Ilse lifted her head, looked toward him and scowled. "For the rest of the day no thanks to you," she said coolly. "What are you still doing here, anyway?"
"I was waiting for you," Jay lied. "Do you need a ride?"
She scoffed. "Like I want to get into a car with you of all people. I can walk."
"I'm sorry okay? At least let me make it up to you, the longer it takes me to get home the better."
"Self-centered too. Nosey and self-centered."
Jay smiled at her. "I'm also shallow, a closet masochist."
Ilse was at the Civic now, meaning to pass through the parking lot to get to the public bus stop. "That makes the two of us."
"It's suppose to rain soon, you know. We wouldn't want that dress to wrinkle now, would we? Do you have enough paid there? People could use you as a black-and-white picnic blanket."
"Well, I like it. It's a swing dress, haven't you ever seen one before?"
"In my grandmother's pictures, sure. She didn't have the quarter length sleeves, though, and she couldn't blind anyone with the fabric."
Ilse rolled her eyes. "You honestly thought I'd agree on you giving me a ride home?"
"I won't run us off a cliff, you have my word, and no more cracks on your fashion sense or what little of one you have. I mean, really, you look like something from I Love Lucy, it's that bad."
"I'm walking away now," Ilse stated sharply. "Have a nice life."
"Come on, don't you have a sense of humor?"
Turning back Ilse leaned down into the open shot gun window. "Of course I do. For instance, I could make the observation that your face looks as though it collided with the floor at birth, but I choose not to only because I'm not that rude a person."
"Not that bad, doll face. Needs a little work, but not bad."
"Stop calling me that," Ilse demanded, her entire body outside of the car again.
"Let me give you a ride and I will, doll face."
She didn't get in.
"Please, doll face? I'll just follow you home if you say no, I think we're going in the same general direction. Doll face? Doll face? Doll face, doll face, doll face?"
With a sigh, Ilse opened the passenger side door and got into the car, slammed the door shut. "Shut up, shut up, shut up. I'm only doing this because I don't want to stand at the bus stop for twenty minutes." She straightened out her skirt before putting her seatbelt on. "Try anything and you're hamburger meat."
Jay nodded, put the key into the ignition and started the car. He turned down the radio when it come on at full blast, a song he hated flowing through his many speakers. Neither of them said anything as Jay drove out of the parking, then he struggled for a conversation.
"Which way?" he asked, waiting to enter the street.
"Left. Garfield Avenue."
Jay smirked, turning left and starting the journey down the near abandoned suburban roadways. "I live down that way."
Ilse was looking out the window, didn't turn to look at the driver. "Just my luck."
"I'm not that bad, not once you get passed all the stuff about me you hear in the halls."
She didn't reply.
Frowning, Jay tried to think up things to keep awkward silence at bay. "How's your jaw?"
"Not broken."
"Yeah, the Spinster never had much force behind his punches."
Again, Ilse didn't say anything in response.
"How's your letter coming? Got a sentence down now?" Jay chuckled, but quickly stopped when he noticed that Ilse's face was set in anger.
Four blocks later and the quiet was gnawing away at him, pointing and laughing at his inability to carry on a conversation with a pretty girl. "So…. Where do you shop for your wardrobe?"
"You mean what garbage bin I raid at night?"
"No, I mean what stores? Salvation Army or whatever?"
Ilse shook her head, but kept staring out the window, her hair dancing in the wind the car created. "Sometimes that or the Internet. Mainly I fix up my mother's and grandmother's old clothes that I got from the closet or attic. Once I made my own cocktail dress from a pattern, but it came out deformed. It was suppose to look like the black-and-white one Grace Kelley wore in Rear Window, but it wasn't anywhere close."
"Why, though? Why aren't you happy wearing jeans and a t-shirt?"
"Women were beautiful then, that's why," Ilse stated earnestly. "Just so plain, so simple, beautiful."
"I take it you've never seen Brooke Burke."
Ilse laughed. She actually laughed. "She is kind of hot, isn't she?"
"Totally."
Ilse smiled, shook her head. "All the same, you can't watch a television show from the '40s, the '50s, the '60s and say the women weren't beautiful."
"All right, I'll give you that one, but aren't you warm under all of that fabric? In the summer you must be shoving ice cubes down your back."
"You'd be surprised. It's the yellow one," Ilse said when they finally reached Garfield Avenue, "the one with the blue shutters."
Pulling the car over to the curb in front of the house Ilse had just described, Jay unlocked the doors. "That wasn't so terrible, was it? And, look, about that date…."
The door was already open, Ilse had one leg out and her seatbelt off. "I'm not interested."
Jay glared passed her, at the small front yard of the house. "Most of what you hear about me are rumors and the stuff that aren't, well…I can be a good guy when I want to be."
"I find that hard to believe. You serial cheat on your girlfriend, you steal things from the school, you cause some poor kid to get killed. Even if you hadn't done those things, if you were Mr. Squeaky Clean Good Guy I wouldn't be interested."
"Why not? I thought women love bad boys."
"That's the thing," Ilse replied calmly. "You're a boy."
Jay's lips curled. "You're a fucking lezbo?"
"Well, when you put it like that…" Ilse gathered her things off the mud mat and got out of the car, shut the door. "Remind me to add jerk-off to that list of mine, would you?"
"You don't know what you're missing, doll face," Jay spat.
"Actually, I think I do: an STD passing sleaze ball." Ilse smiled wryly at him and then turned on her heel, walked up the steps cut into the small hill her home was resting on.
Nothing was going right for Jay today. He pulled away from the curb and drove the few blocks home in perturbed silence. The girl he had a crush on was a no good dyke. What else was going to go sour? What else?
The icing on the cake would be his parents disowning him, kicking him out of the house because Jay was no longer their son – just a water stained photograph of what their son once was. Yes, that would be absolutely perfect.
So that wasn't the best chapter I've written, but it's only really there to create some padding between the last chapter and the new one. To the reviewers, I thank you.
barelyalive: It is sad, isn't it? But this is really the only thing I could think of that would cause Jay to be as…well, as Jay as Jay is – in my mind at least. I'm glad you like it, though.
DegrassiGirl: He isn't my favorite. I'll admit I like his eyes and he's very easy to write about, but he isn't my favorite. I hope you keep on liking this.
crashet: I don't mean to sound like a know-it-all so, please, tell me if I start coming off as one. "Until recently heroin…almost exclusively was injected either intravenously, subcutaneously…or intramuscularly, but there is now a high number of people snorting the drug…The availability of higher purity heroin has meant that users can now snort or smoke the narcotic. Evidence suggests that heroin snorting is widespread or increasing in those areas of the country where high-purity heroin is available…This method…may be more appealing to new users because it eliminates both the fear of acquiring syringe-borne diseases…and the…stigma attached to intravenous heroin use." (source: Heroin Addiction – Helping Addicts – Heroin Overview) Short answer: people do snort heroin. It may not be as popular or as Hollywood (save Lost) as injecting or smoking, but it's there.