Hello again, everyone! First and foremost as always, thanks for your patience. I have been very, very lazy this break but getting ready to go back to school means much more room for procrastination (i.e. writing) so hopefully things will speed up.
I wanted to give a specific shout out to a couple of people who have been consistently awesome: x0xalexis8, ddbddb123, Vienna98, iamnumbernine, this_guy_doesnt_have_a_clue, SparkleInTheSun, asesina, the finchelshipper, cribellate, and finally, danceintherain. Can't give you enough thanks for the feedback, you guys a particularly awesome.
Also, whether the next couple of chapters are happy or not is completely dependent on my mood which is completely dependent on how the Giants do in the playoffs this weekend. So for spoilers, just watch the game :)
Chapter 14
Quiet In My Town
(Jacob and Suzy – Part II)
In the most lament terms possible, Jacob Ben-Israel had been born the product of an unplanned one night stand.
He had never known his grandparents; they had kicked his mother, Rebecca, out of their home long before she so much as became pregnant with him, and at a mere seventeen years of age, she had found herself on her own; gone without so much as a second thought otherwise, never looking back once as she moved from the esteemed town of Lima, to the less prestigious ghetto of Lima Heights to live with her boyfriend Abe.
The night of Jacob's conception had begun typically enough; Abe's best friend at the time had been a boy by the name of Isaac Israel; a kid who had had two rich parents who cared more about their jobs than they actually did their son, leaving him, for weeks at a time, home alone with a couple hundred dollars cash to spend at his leisure.
The poor boy didn't have a prayer's chance of ever becoming anything other than a hopeless drug addict.
To this day, Rebecca Ben didn't remember much about the exact night in question; the only thing that she truly did know for certain was that the next morning, after she had woken up naked inside of Isaac's bed she hadn't thought twice about it until weeks later, after daily bouts of nausea began crippling her to the point that she could barely so much as lift herself out of bed in the mornings.
Her boyfriend had gone with her to the doctor in an effort to evaluate the cause of this sudden, mysterious illness, and when the older woman had come in to meet them with a clipboard in her hand and a serious look written upon her face, Rebecca knew in an instant, that she couldn't be bringing her good news…
When she told Rebecca that she was seven weeks pregnant, Abe had told her flat out, right in the middle of the doctor's office that he didn't want anything to do with her, or her bastard child… The problem was that when she had turned to Isaac, his story was more or less the same.
Neither of her child's potential fathers wanted anything to do with this baby currently growing inside of her very body, and so she'd suddenly found herself completely, and utterly on her own, struggling to make ends meet through the majority of her pregnancy.
She was six months along when she, like so many others before her had managed to find her solace in religion; salvation coming in the form of a Christian charity that had been paying for her ultrasounds since day one finally roping her into attending one of their services so that she was instantly hooked from the first day onward…
Had she actually spoken to her parents once in the year since they had kicked her out, she was certain that they would be disappointed with her conversion into Evangelism… just as they were with everything else that she did.
Her father, the local Rabbi, and her mother, the stereotypical Rabbi's wife had named her Rebecca after the prominent Jewish matriarch; the wife of Abraham, the mother of Isaac…
She had been named after one of the original founders of her religion as a whole, but not once in the entirety of her life had she ever felt anywhere even close to holy…
She could only hope that luck would see things differently for her son.
The second that she'd discovered her child to be a boy, she had decided to call him Jacob.
A prominent prophet from the Book of Genesis, Jacob had been the son of the prophet Isaac and his wife, Rebekah, renamed Israel later in life by an angel straight from the heavens above... Under her belief system, it seemed, her son had picked out the name for himself straight from the very beginning.
In the Bible, Jacob had been a twin; he'd had a brother by the name Esau and was born destined by God to always be a server as opposed to a leader; the weaker of the two brothers…
Esau had grown up to be a hunter, a warrior by nature while Jacob existed as a mere simpleton; one who enjoyed his time spent to himself, lost inside of his own thoughts…
But one day, without anybody so much as seeing it coming, Jacob had gotten the better of everybody… He'd been a cunning man, he'd just had to wait for his opportunity, and when it came, he acted upon it.
Jacob's father, Isaac, on his death bed had wished to grant his birthright to Esau, the younger of the twins as opposed to Jacob… But Jacob had deceived his father, deceived his brother… he'd easily tricked Isaac into passing his birthright onto him instead of his brother.
After living his entire life at the bottom of the pyramid, Jacob had gotten the better of everybody; and for the rest of his life, he thrived off of it, living peacefully with his wife Rachel and their thirteen children until his death, which came peacefully at the age of one hundred eighty.
Jacob Ben-Israel had been a perfectly healthy baby boy at 10:46 a.m. early on the morning of Friday, January 20th, 1995; and the second that Rebecca had seen her child for the first time, with his deep brown eyes and enormous tufts of curly red hair, she knew Isaac to be his father; although deep down in her heart of hearts, she had known that all along…
Rebecca had decided to give the boy both of their last names; her maiden name, Ben, attached to Isaac's Israel in the hopes that the second that Isaac actually laid eyes upon his son, he would come around, accept the child that was rightfully his, fall in love with the boy just as she had done nine months ago to the day….
But inside of her heart, she had known from the beginning that that would not be the case, and she had been correct… Jacob and Rebecca had grown up together, just the two of them; Jacob never receiving that father figure in his ear to tell him exactly how to grow up to become the bigger, the better man…
Jacob had never had a father to warn him of all of the terrible things that man could grow up to become, leaving him destined from the beginning to become nothing more than the very worst of himself.
Suzy Marie Pepper had been raised a southern bell trapped inside of a Mid-Westerner's body.
Both of her parents had been born into the deep, rural Texas lifestyle, and despite their physical location, their hearts had remained with their home for their entire lives, leaving them both relentlessly bitter towards the idea that Henry Pepper's promotions through the armed forced had left them with no choice than to move out of their beloved South and into the cold, desolate, overpopulated territory up North.
Her mother Jeannine had spent the entirety of her life in The Woodlands. The first time that she had ever so much as stepped foot outside of her home county, she had been well into her twenties and she had hated every second it…
After all, her identity, her beauty, her life had been with her home…
In her hometown, Jeannine Beauchard had been considered an uncanny beauty, a stunning miracle of a woman who's mere appearance turned heads with every step forwards that she took… And an avid competitor across prized beauty pageants throughout the state, Jeannine had found herself receiving the honor of being awarded with the coveted title of Ms. Texas so that in her bid towards the largest beauty competition in the country, she had quickly become the favorite to win Ms. USA…
Her victory hadn't been a question… it had been an inevitability.
But ultimately, her dream had been brought to end before it had even begun; the day before the big competition, she had snapped her ankle in two practicing her talent so that the following day, as she lay in surgery having eight screws and two plates inserted to hold the bones back together, her runner up was called in to take the title that she knew she had always deserved…
Meanwhile, in a complete opposite fashion, her father had been a hard man his entire life… He had been born to become a Marine, he always told her, and him and his mother used to constantly joke that their stark differences was what always made their love for each other so strong…
It was a mere two days following him and his wife's learning that Jeannine was pregnant that he had been deployed to Kuwait in the midst of a raging Gulf War… A month later, his entire platoon had been decimated after his Apache had been bombed mere moments following its takeoff… He had been the only survivor of the attack – albeit barely – and after he returned to the United States in order to enter a military run rehabilitation facility with a missing right leg and a severe case of post traumatic stress, nobody, including himself, could have ever possibly anticipated what the future would have in store for him and his family.
The night terrors had begun immediately following Henry's return home, five months following the accident that had nearly killed him, and despite the couple's best efforts to do what they could on their own, it was only a matter of time before they began to get violent…
And exactly as expected, the days of simply ignoring an increasing problem eventually did catch up with them in a reality check that Jeannine was met with harshly during the early morning hours of one not so particularly special day, after she had woken up with her husband on top of her, screaming in his unconscious terror with his hands around her throat, squeezing as hard as he possibly could…
It didn't matter that he was fast asleep; she just couldn't seem to get him off of her, no matter how hard she tried.
By the time Henry Pepper had finally awoken, it was only to find his unconscious wife limp between his muscular arms, and for several long, gut-wrenching minutes, he had honestly thought that he'd actually killed her…
She'd been in respiratory arrest for fifteen minutes; or at least, that's what Henry had been told by his lawyer as he sat on an isolate bench in his solitary jail cell… And at eight months pregnant, doctors had informed Jeannine that they had managed to find a fetal heartbeat on her child, however, it would be impossible to tell whether or not the baby would suffer any long term damage until after she was born; likely not until after she truly began developing…
The years would eventually prove that their daughter had gotten lucky despite such a vicious attack; however, Jeannine hadn't experienced the good fortune that had befallen her child…
The extended respiratory arrest had left her permanently brain damaged; an injury that had manifested itself in a physical deformity to which Jeannine Pepper, ex-beauty queen, would have preferred death… The left side of her face would remain paralyzed for the rest of her life; a malformation that in Jeannine's opinion, left her flawless features unbearably hideous, unworthy of anybody's stare, including her own…
She refused to subject her hideousness onto the world, and in her bid for constant solitude, she'd spent the final month of her pregnancy locked away inside of her home with her doors locked, shades drawn, and phone shut firmly off…
She was mortified by her disfigurement, mortified towards the idea that she had been left to fend for herself as her husband spent the next year locked away inside of a clinic that specialized in soldiers struggling to cope through the horrors that they had seen at war, mortified at what people might say, what they might do if they found out…
When Susanna Marie Pepper had been born on May 24, 1992 fully to term yet severely underweight and unable to breathe on her own, Jeannine hadn't told a soul… Instead, she'd spent the night following her daughter's birth much like she had the month leading up to it; by herself, wide awake yet unmoving beneath the faint glow of her hospital room as she waited on the news regarding whether or not her child had survived the night…
And when the nurse had come in the next morning to inform Jeannine that her daughter was born a fighter and inquired as to what the girl's name would be; Jeannine hadn't even hesitated before deciding to call her Susanna after the woman who, ten years ago to the day, stole a crown that Jeannine couldn't even dream about calling her own anymore in the hopes that her daughter would find more success, more happiness in achieving her dreams than the girl's mother had ever had.