Chapter One
The Introduction
"You'll be meeting him tomorrow at around six. You should be out of school by then, try to be home so things can go as smoothly as they can."
Jimmy stared at the ugly black splotch of water damage on the ceiling with a grimace on his face.
"Dr. Vargas will visit you at least once a week randomly until he can be sure that you're following the rules of your parole. He is in constant contact with your parole officer so make sure you're home by curfew or there will be serious consequences. But I'm sure the court judge has already spoken with you about what'll happen if you try to runaway again so we don't need to go over that."
There was a knock on his bedroom door that he ignored even as it turned into furious banging. He could hear his father yelling, his mother calling out behind him . . . open the door Jimmy . . . Jimmy, open the fucking door . . . God damn it Jimmy . . . he sat up on his bed and stared at the shaking dresser he'd shoved in its way.
He couldn't understand what they were so upset over. He hadn't left the house in three days outside of getting driven to school and back. Oh that was a bitch too, they'd taken his license and car along with his other privileges. The car he'd fucking paid for.
The banging stopped and his dad's thunderous footsteps could be heard pounding through the house to the front door.
"Jimmy, please say something." His mom called out quietly. He could see his dad wading through the dead bushes out front towards his window. When he got to it he mouthed through the glass and bars that his son was in for it when he came out.
"I'll be going now. Thank you for agreeing to meet with me and I'm sure you and him will get along just fine."
Jimmy smirked at the look his dad gave him. That asshole couldn't do shit and he knew it. All he'd need is one bruise, just one fresh one to convince a "Doctor" that he was being abused. He'd be out then, he'd have won the game and his parents would have to live with the brand of child abuser on their foreheads.
He scratched at the electronic ankle bracelet he had to wear until this Vargas guy and his case Judge agreed he was fit to have it removed. They told him that there was no point in trying to take it off either, they'd taken measures to make sure he couldn't mess with it.
As his dad angrily waddled away Jimmy looked at the white bandage that wrapped from his temple all the way back to behind the man's left ear with pride. He could remember in vivid detail the fight between him and his dad. Fuck, the adrenaline rush he'd gotten when he'd seen the look on his face, the dark look of fear, embarrassment and anger. Beating the shit out of that lying, cheating head was probably the biggest highlight of Jimmy's month now.
He sat on his bed for the rest of the night just thumbing through some magazines and only looking up when one of his parents would test the door before leaving again. At eight o'clock he heard his old man pull out his keys and with a click he was locked in for the night. Around three o'clock in the morning, it made him feel especially spooky, he got out of bed and sauntered over to his dresser. After listening to the sounds of his dad's snores he deemed the situation safe enough to do something that would really piss them off in the morning.
It took him at least twice as long to move the damn furniture out of the way. He'd scraped his knee on a rough patch of floor and gotten some sticky and burning paint chips lodged in his nail beds but eventually he was sitting in the living room picking at them with his teeth.
Fuck, damn shit-
He couldn't wait to see the looks on their faces when they woke up and found him on the front room couch. It was going to be so fucking hilarious.
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"So let me get this straight, he blocked the door to keep you out."
"Yes."
"And then you, using your key, locked his door from the outside. So he couldn't leave."
"N-no, I mean yes. Yes we did."
"Mr. Reeds?"
"He's got no business going in and out of the house at three in the God-damn morning."
"Honey!"
"Mr. Reeds . . ."
"Jimmy hit me over the head with a fucking wrench and I'm getting lectured over locking his door at night."
"Nobody is lecturing you, Mr. Reeds. I'm just trying to get the story straight here."
"Your son has problems." There it was, the side-stepped responsibility his dad always threw at his mom.
"My son. You mean our son!"
"Please calm down, the both of you."
Jimmy could hear tapping under all of the voices. Sounded like a pen, a nervous habit of this Vargas guy? He was already starting to seem like pushover.
"I'm gonna get a deadbolt, something he can't pick open from the inside-!" His father's voice boomed.
"Do you really think that's gonna fix our son? Locking him away until he does what you want him to do?" Mom, shaking with a suppressed rage of her own, everything was like that with her. He peeked around the corner.
"Okay, okay, that's enough!" All three of the adults were standing by that point. "Please sit back down." Very slowly, Jimmy's father sank into his seat, the legs of the chair making an angry hissing sound as he scooted away from his wife. She in response gave Edgar's pen a firm glare that it hardly deserved. A safer target. "Mr. Reeds, I'm sorry but I have to agree with your wife. I don't think dead bolting your son in his room is going to help this cycle you three seem to be going through."
"Well Dr. Vargle, I wasn't raised to believe that letting him run around, doing whatever the hell he wants was the right way to go about things either. The boy is lucky I didn't crack his head open after he attacked me. I know for a fact if I'd attacked my father this way, getting locked in my room for a few months would be the least of my worries."
"And though I can appreciate the obvious discipline and structure your own father has instilled in you through the fear you've just confessed to having of him, I doubt that now would be the best time to introduce anything on that level, what with the attack being fresh on everyone's mind. Today I'm going to briefly speak with all three of you to gauge how you interact with one another and then I'll talk to Jimmy alone." Haha, burn.
"You said something earlier about us leaving the house during these sessions," Mrs. Reeds spoke up, "why is that?"
"Uh, well, to be honest most patients have a hard time really opening up about what's bothering them if they feel they have no privacy to disclose it. For that very reason we usually hold them at the clinic but after talking to the judge and his parole officer I came to the conclusion that doing them here would be a good way to really asses what kinds of problems he might have at home. If I get any indication that this setup might do more harm than good I'll move them to my office at the clinic instead. Transportation will be arranged as well to help alleviate any stress it might have on your schedules." The Reeds blinked at him, but before they could really dig into the implications of what he just said Edgar called for him. The teenager sauntered in, "So," Jimmy dragged out the last syllable past the point of sincerity before he collapsed into the only chair left between his dad and the Doc, "In my own defense I'd like to confess that little pink men dance around my bed at three o'clock in the morning." His mother heaved a sigh while his father looked at him in disbelief. "This time they had on these really tight sparkly pants . . ."
"Jimmy, that's enough!"
" . . . they make the most interesting noises at night, like two silverback gorillas fucking . . ."
"Is this really the first impression you want to give-?" His mom pleaded but whose voice was lost in the boom his father made.
"Jimmy Reeds!"
" . . . and no matter what I do to block them out they just get louder and louder, one even stole my God-damned headphones so I had to listen . . ."
"Watch your language, you little shit!"
"Coming from you? Of all the people in this house to tell me to watch myself-"
"Stop." But their father/son shouting match cut the man off immediately. Jimmy watched as Dr. Vargas had to jump up to keep Mr. Reeds from trying to throttle his own child while he cackled behind them, "Let's just calm down." The man gave him a look then, and Jimmy couldn't understand why but it quieted him. He felt, just for a moment that they were sharing secrets, like this guy just knew.
"Sit so I can explain of few things and get this done without the possibility of throwing and or breaking something." The tension in the room was thick. If the he could take a picture he would, just to savor the moment later. Once everyone had settled down, by the patronizing and somewhat irritated doctor, the man pulled out a paper of guidelines about Jimmy's house arrest. He started off on what sounded like autopilot, as if he'd done this so often he didn't really even need the paper. "Now, Jimmy you know that by wearing that security ankle bracelet you cannot leave the perimeter of your home, that means that stepping within two feet of the sidewalk will alert the local station to the breaking of your parole. Do you know what'll happen if you break parole?" He looked at Jimmy again and more secrets were exchanged.
Feigning boredom he replied, "I go to jail?" The man had the nerve to smile that condescending smile at him. He could wipe it clean off his face if he wanted to, wouldn't take much more than the greasy pan his mother had left on the stove that morning. Just four feet away and he could do it.
"That's right, you'll go to jail. That being said, am I correct to assume that you don't want to go to jail and eventually prison? You won't go to Juvie, Jimmy, you will go to prison like an adult." As if he didn't know that, as if he could pretend that the entire time the Judge was explaining the terms of his house arrest he wasn't breathing sighs of relief. Vargas cleared his throat, waiting for an answer to a question he'd assumed was rhetorical. He looked up from the table, first at his parents and then at the Doctor.
More secrets, too much. Too many.
"Yeah." Unenthusiastic, reluctant but justified agreement, the Doctor seemed satisfied. He'd seen this movie at this guy's house once. The killer in it reminded Jimmy of his new psych doctor, all innocence and normalcy until she jammed needles in your skin and cut your balls off.
"Good," Everything got really quiet then, and Jimmy thought maybe Vargas was staring at him. His parents took this as their cue to leave and when he looked up he was relieved to see the older man was actually taking notes in what he assumed was his file. Something about it didn't feel right, their house was too dirty for a doctor to visit on a weekly basis. "I'll be honest with you Jimmy, it's okay if you don't want to go too far in detail about anything in particular. I'm really just here to assess how things are going with your parole."
"For real. No ink blotches and personality quizzes?"
"Nope, just the attack. I will have to hear about it before you can have that," he pointed to Jimmy's misshapen pant leg, "removed." But, to go into that he'd have to go into everything. Shit.
Very suddenly he felt cheated by manipulative wordplay.
"Is everything alright? You turned green for a second there."
"All good, thanks."
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Three weeks. Three fucking weeks and each meeting seemed to get more and more disastrous. Every time he started talking about something completely irrelevant Vargas turned it on him so they started on about his parents.
"So, Mrs. Ferguson starts on about how I never listen to her and how she's tired of me fooling around at the back of the room with Ester . . ."
"Ester?"
"The chick with red hair, the one who's also with me in chemistry."
"Oh, okay. Please continue." Jimmy gave him a funny look but all he got was a brief upturn of Vargas's mouth that in no way resembled a smile.
"Oh, well, she goes on and on until finally I got sick of hearing her and start pulling out my mp3 player. The look on her face," He paused briefly to fight back a maniacal giggle, "I thought she was going to shit her panties."
"Ear buds or plugs?" The question threw him off for a minute.
"Plugs, they block out more sound." They were in the kitchen, every session seemed to be held there and the older man made it very clear that it would probably stay that way unless they were going to be in the clinic. Jimmy'd tried to joke about the living room but Vargas had only looked at him like he was crazy.
"They the only ones you have?" Jimmy wasn't sure what they had to do with the story but he answered the seemingly innocent question suspiciously.
"Yes." The face he was staring at warily was blank until for a brief moment it changed and like x-ray lasers those dark brown eyes seemed to zero in on the almost invisible wire running around the back of Jimmy's neck and down into his shirt where his cheap 1 gigabyte SanDisk was tucked into his jean pocket. He leaned back into his chair and the moment passed. Vargas had yet to write anything down on his pad of paper, he stopped doing it while the teenager was talking because it seemed to have a negative effect on how truthful he was.
They stared each other down for a while until finally the older man's eyes dropped down to the table, offering a concession to Jimmy who didn't seem to appreciate it much.
"What kind of music do you listen to?"
"Hmm?"
"Do you like a certain kind?"
"Not that I can think of right now."
"I like this song called Waking Up."
"Didn't figure you the type. That's by that one guy with the dreads?" Vargas smiled for real at him this time and he leaned in again. This seemed safe to Jimmy, nonsensical and irrelevant topics couldn't go into detail about his dad taking his only headphones so he'd have to listen to him and his mother having sex. This Vargas guy knew, Jimmy could tell because of the way they seemed to dance around the subject. The Doctor hadn't asked if maybe Jimmy was overreacting about it, that maybe his father had taken them because Jimmy'd done something wrong because he just seemed to know the truth. It was confusing and he couldn't describe exactly how it worked but he could feel it.
"He doesn't have dreads anymore."
"Really? I liked the dreads. He should have kept them." They went along that vein for about fifteen minutes until once again Vargas drew them back.
"How many hours a day would you say you listen to music?" Jimmy was across the kitchen, pulling a beat up carton of Saltine crackers from the cupboard and pouring some into a plastic bowl. When he sat back down he looked at the other man with eyes that glittered all sorts of implications.
"I hear the average is three to four hours. Is that true Doc?" Vargas nodded, his expression helplessly lax in the face of Jimmy's complete disregard for his profession.
"But what about you?" Jimmy graciously offered his bowl to the Doctor who declined.
"A little more some days, a little less others." He was trying to be cryptic but the way the older man's eyes seemed to disappear behind his glasses when the light hit them a certain way made him wonder if it wasn't obvious he'd dug his own grave.
"And at night? Do you listen to music when you should be sleeping?"
"I like having something to block them out, yes." He felt cheated again, and angry.
"Does it seem like they try at all to hide what they do from you?"
"I figure they don't give a shit, I know they aren't doing construction work in there. I'm old enough to go to prison after all." Vargas didn't flinch, didn't react to the attack on their very first conversation. The bowl of crackers was being hugged to Jimmy's chest while the other stared at the skinny arms that gripped it so tightly.
"Have you told them it bothers you?"
"Not in so many words."
Vargas's watch beeped and for a moment time seemed to stop. They sat there quietly not speaking until they heard a car door slam, letting them know that the Doctor's job for the week was done and Jimmy was free to go to his room, which he did. That night, with music in his ears to muffle the sounds of the house at night, he wondered how long he could really avoid the subject of the attack on his father before Edgar forced it out of him.
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End Chapter One