Thanks for the reviews, glad someone is interested in this story
CHAPTER 2
There wasn't anyone there when he got home. There wasn't usually anymore, not with Janet dead and his mother working more. He suspected that she'd taken more hours to cut back on the time that she had to share the house with him. The time they spent together was awkward and sad.
He knew that he should move out, just get the fuck out of the whole town; there was nothing to stay for anyway. Take his old car and pack all the stuff he didn't mind leaving behind (not much) and just drive until the engine died or something. Instead, he kept going to work at the grimy gas station during the day and coming home to the smoky trailer and his computer and comics.
He dumped his jacket on the couch and walked straight to the bathroom, pulling his shirt over his head as he walked. He had been going to take a bath, but when he saw the scummy tub, he changed his mind and started a shower, hot as it would go, until there was steam gathering, trapped just under the ceiling.
He only stopped shivering when he stepped under the cascade of water, leaning against the cool wall of the shower and watching the water flow around his feet.
His thoughts were running in circles, looping themselves into a maze, and he was so tired that the thoughts only came in pieces so that by the time he got to the end of one, he'd forgotten the beginning.
They were all scurrying around the face that he saw, and even when he tried to stop thinking of it, digging his fingers into his palms, he couldn't. The face was still there, dark eyes staring out from the blank walls of the shower, looking through him and into him. Those eyes knew the whole story and they knew that he had come back for more.
He turned off the water and grabbed a towel, sitting on the bath mat on the floor, hugging his knees to his chest.
He knew that that night, he'd go back again.
He always waited until dark. Sometimes he'd go after his shift at the gas station; other times he'd get off work early and drive aimlessly until sunset or go home and watch TV or surf the web until it got dark.
It was always the same: sitting, in the dark, on the hill, staring into the blackness until his eyes started to play tricks on him and his sight danced with a million tiny points of light. He never saw any faeries, let alone the one that he wanted to see.
In the morning, just before it was light, he would stumble back to his car and go home before anyone noticed that he'd been gone.
His web history was a horde of links to sites about faeries and the Seelie and Unseelie courts. He found that all of his web searches went in circles—it was the same information over and over again, presented differently.
The forums on faeries were crawling with thirteen year old girls with words like "night" and "black" and "goth" in their sreennames (A/N: don't be offended if this is you, I have seen it done tastefully) and the "L" and "O" keys worn out on their keyboards.
The basic thing that he found out was that he was a fool for thinking that he could get into one of the courts without a faerie guide—and he already knew that Kay wouldn't take him, she'd done "enough damage the first time."
And then there were the jokers that would come to make fun of the freaks who believed in faeries. He tended to get a couple emails a month from them, usually calling him stupid; a fag; a freak. He read them before he deleted them. Some masochistic desires kicking in, that he had to listen to every insult that got thrown at him. He thought maybe he read them because he knew that they mostly were true.
It was a few weeks after Halloween that he logged in and found David's message, sitting innocently in his inbox, titled "fairy."
He noted the spelling and clicked on it suspiciously, his forehead bunched into a scowl. The scowl turned puzzled as he read:
Hey, I found your address on a message board. If you really know all this shit about fairies, I need your help. Last night, this guy with wings showed up in my backyard. I thought they were fake or something, but they weren't. Then he passed out on my porch. He keeps blacking out, but when he isn't unconscious, he doesn't want me to tell anyone about him, and they'd all just think I was crazy anyhow. Any suggestions?
--David
There was an address after the name, some town in Ohio. Corny didn't even think about it, he just stared at the screen for a minute, then scrabbled through the piles of papers around his monitor until he'd found a scrap piece of paper. He scrawled the address down, then stood up and flicked off the computer all in one motion.
A duffle packed with his stuff and fifteen minutes later he was ready to go, standing in the kitchen, debating whether or not to leave a note for his mother. She probably wouldn't notice he was gone; they often went several days without seeing each other. And besides, what would he put as a reason, anyway?
He went out to his car without leaving anything.
His heart was beating hard in his chest as he started the old car. Could-be-a-joke, it said. Could-be-a-joke-could-be-a-joke-could-be--.
He reached for the radio and noticed that his hand was trembling. He fumbled through the jumble of things on the passenger seat until he found a cigarette, relaxing a little at the first breath of smoke. Poison medicine. Could-be-a-joke, his heart beat. Could-be-a-joke.
He kept driving.