Disclaimer: Jonathan Larson is the Supreme Creator of 'RENT' and owner of its characters and suchwhat. All of it, his.

COLLINS

One day in mid-February, I stormed into the house, slammed the door and threw my bookbag at the floor. It clattered, spilling books and supplies. An English essay fluttered to rest in the corner; a ballpoint pen knocked against the stairs. My pulse could not steady itself; my breathing was shallow and furious. I ripped loose the laces on my soggy boots, giving my fingers red marks that would soon blister up angrily. I kicked off the shoes, giving a pleased sound as they clashed against the walls. Dripping socks peeled away from my raw feet.

I stomped down the corridor, hugging my shivering body, too angry to form words.

The laundry room at the back of the house was freezing. My feet slapped the linoleum, sparking shivers from the cold. The linoleum was white, marked by small squares of beige at regular intervals and a series of less regular scuff marks. A similar pattern covered the kitchen floor when I was young. The sun pouring in, constant as water from the tap, scorched that linoleum. A stain the color of a peach pit spread across the floor, marking the constancy of summer.

I pulled my sweater off first. The thing had saturated completely and now weighed well over a ton. As I flung it to the ground, tears welled in my eyes. This was so ridiculous. This was so… so completely… so stupid!

I wanted to hit something. I was strong and knew it, and I needed to exert that. I needed to feel that in some capacity, I was in control. I wanted to make something hurt the way I was hurting, suffer as I suffered. Nothing could be done in defiance of winter. It was not good defying fate; a man may as well seek to change the stars in the night sky.

"I'll bring up the fucking Southern Cross!" I announced to the washer and dryer.

I tried abusing my shirt. I ripped it over my head roughly enough to scatter buttons. This did little to satisfy my rage. I need to harm something, not just tear thread. I was wet, cold and crying. I couldn't stop my body from trembling. Tears kept pouring from my eyes as my lips contorted strangely in silent whimpers and sobs. The noise built up in my chest until I needed to scream.

What I did then was spin. I spun my body like a dancer, like a top, letting broiling fury splatter onto the walls as it was wrenched from my body. Centripetal force stripped away those burning emotions, cleansing me. I spun and spun and spun, twirling around until the room blurred. I spun until my eyes rolled madly in my skull.

Then I collapsed to the floor, sobbing.

I don't know how much time passed between my arrival and my father's. All I know is that after my tantrum I was spent, sweating, shivering and panting as I curled around myself, hugging my knees to my chest. The waistband of my jeans chafed, crushed against my belly. The denim wore heavily against my skin. And I couldn't stop shaking. My hands twitched, rubbing against my legs. My shoulders shook. My head shook. Everything shook, everything hurt.

Dad didn't say anything damning. He did not take one look at me and exclaim, "Jesus, Tom." He did not shake his head, turn away, or blush at the sight of his sixteen-year-old son blubbering like a toddler. It made perfectly good sense to me. I wasn't supposed to act like a teenager. I looked like an adult, already stretching towards six feet in height, not lanky or puppy-faced like my friends. I came home to an empty house, came and went as I pleased, did my homework and studied. I did not act like and was not treated like a child.

Yet there I was, half-naked and in tears.

Dad sat next to me. "Hey, Tom." He wrapped an arm around my quivering shoulders. "You okay?"

I shook my head. "No," I sobbed. "No, I'm not okay. Nothing's okay." I couldn't believe the words had slipped out, but there they were. No, I thought, this is wrong. I don't complain. It doesn't bother me. I'm Thomas Collins. I'm the one who holds together. I'm sane. I'm healthy. I'm happy.

But I wasn't happy at all.

"What's wrong?" Dad asked.

In all my teenage bitterness, I wanted to tell him, Everything's wrong. The day last year clung to me, though, the day I treated him like a stranger. "I just want to be home," I said. It was not that I wanted to go home. What would that accomplish? Home wasn't home any longer. Even Jessie, who held me and wept and knitted secrets into a hat, had stopped writing. My last three letters had been ignored, after only half a year. She had moved on.

I had moved on, too. I had Mark and Roger. I had different routes home and pieces of sky I loved more than others. I did not, however, have the stain on the linoleum. I did not have the doorway with my height penciled in as I grew. I did not have the corner no one knew of where every year on my birthday I made a deep gash in the floor.

I wondered if the new people living in my… in the house I grew up in had found that yet.

"This is our home now, Tom."

"No, it's not," I countered. "It's not… we're not New Yorkers. We're Californians." Living in New York didn't change anything. We belonged in Los Angeles. I spoke Spanish and had been up to my elbows in masa harina. I was used to biking and blading down the boardwalks at the beaches. I never liked swimming in the sea or boarding, but I liked to sit and watch the ocean. I never tired of that, watching the sparkles flit across the surface of the water, because the moment they arrived they departed, so that I never knew precisely what the ocean looked like.

And now it was raining. For two solid weeks, it had rained. I felt like Noah, like I should be building an ark and gathering two of every animal, like the rain would never, ever stop. It was the rain that pushed me over the edge. Up to that point, I held together. I managed. I pretended not to notice that the peanut butter tastes different here and ice cream doesn't melt as quickly, that winter brought snow and there had been no winds in the fall. I laughed when Mark and Roger complained about the winds. A Santa Anas knocks cars off the highway. My nose itched from not smelling brushfires.

Dad shook his head. "We're Americans. Remember your thesis in eighth grade?"

I nodded. That had been a proud essay in my United States History class. "To be an American is to be of the air," I wrote. "Migration is the nature of the Americas. We are a young country without history or culture to bind us and are thus transitory. Our earth is thick as clay, so we sink our roots into the people and around us."

"It didn't work," I said. "It didn't factor in… that we sever those roots, anyway. That we can't take the people with us." A fresh wave of tears battered my eyes as I realized that, angry with dislocation, I had submitted myself once more to the same misery. Why leave for college? Why go when I could stay?

---

I gathered my belongings once more and showered. The rain had brought on my tantrum and the shower washed it away. There was a statement here, an irony concerning the improvement of man on nature, the solace of universal technology, and of course the problem of a clean water supply, killing tens of thousands each year.

But those were battles and thoughts that would have to wait. This was my night to be a child, not a thinker, not even an adult. I dried myself off and pulled on my pajamas. It is strange that even those, which should have been the most comfortable clothes I owned, were uncomfortable. They were new and thicker, heavier than my body was accustomed to. In Los Angeles, I needed a sweatshirt a couple times a year. More often, the heat pressed so heavily I kicked my quilt to the floor and slept under a sheet, only for the comfort of being wrapped up.

Things are different in New York. I knew that would be true. The difficulty with fate is that no matter how thoroughly one struggles to be prepared, there is no preparation sufficient.

I joined Dad in the kitchen, and couldn't help but grin. We couldn't bring Los Angeles with us, so we sat together at the table and ate tacos for dinner. In Los Angeles, there were tacos everywhere. I hadn't seen one since coming to New York, and the sight made me grin.

"Ironic, isn't it?" I asked.

"What's ironic?" Dad asked in return.

I tore a piece of tortilla off and stuffed it into my mouth. "Well… we're evoking the California spirit with Tex-Mex. We're… it's a comment on the immigrant culture of the nation."

Dad rolled his eyes at me. "You're too smart for your own good, Thomas," he said. "Be careful. You'll get into trouble one day, without me and your mom there to bail you out."

He spoke pleasantly, so I returned the favor, keeping my voice buoyant as my heart lurched drunkenly across my chest. "You mean, pick my battles?" I asked. People told me so often to pick my battles. Dad nodded. "I've picked 'em already, Dad."

"Hm?"

My face cracked wide open with the silliest of grins. "Every single one, Dad. Those're my battles."

"You'll burn out," he predicted. "Thomas, please be careful."

I nodded. Today must have scared him. "I will," I promised. There's one thing about tacos: they're not really a cold-weather, indoors food. Tacos are messy; they're finger food. Tortillas should be cooked on a grill, leaving them cracked with lines of black, chewy and smoky. The ones we ate that night had been cooked in a pan. They tasted little of anything, certainly not the woodsmoke air of Southern California at dusk.

Trying to turn the mood up, Dad asked, "Why don't you have Mark around some time? Or Roger, you've been to his house so many times but I've never met him."

Introduce Roger to Dad? Why don't I just hit myself over the head with a frying pan? "I'll invite Mark over," I said. "But he's a little crazed right now." In the library, he snapped at Roger for telling him a joke. "He's taking his SAT next month."

Dad nodded. He understood that, though my SAT had passed fairly unremarked upon. I simply rolled out of bed one morning, arrived at school and plowed into the exam. My math score was close to perfect; my English score was not poor. I decided to be satisfied if my score was closer to 1500 than 1450. It was.

Mark, contrarily, had hit the books fairly hard. He was constantly studying: studying at lunch, studying in Library Practice, studying as he walked between classes. "When'll you take your test?" I asked Roger one day, as we walked to English.

He shrugged. "Same day as Mark." Roger hadn't opened a book yet--at least, not for the SAT. At the time, that was expected. "So, anyway, I was thinking, for Drama…" which was his attitude towards just about everything: if you wish it didn't exist, pretend.

"Well, I'd like to meet Roger," Dad said. "He seems like a nice boy."

"Roger's… Roger." I would not have called him 'nice'.

"He made you that hat," Dad reminded me.

I nodded. He had made me a hat, and tossed it into my lap with a cry of, "Merry Christmas! Open your present!" It was a knit hat, blue with a blue-and-green brim. "I learned how to knit," he had announced, grinning. "My brother's pregnant."

Mark, sitting beside me, had unwrapped a lengthy scarf, midnight blue and white stripes. He smiled. "Aw, Rog…" Roger blushed and shrugged it off, but he was grinning. Mark had tears in his eyes, and he had barely removed the scarf since. NowRoger was rarely seen without his needles. We called him 'Needle Boy'. He just can't keep his hands off needles anymore. It's not a hobby, it's an addiction.

"I'll invite Roger around after the SAT," I promised my father. He nodded, satisfied. "He's kind of strange," I warned.

Dad laughed. "What do you call yourself, Thomas?"

TO BE CONTINUED