Johnny's lips parted with surprise. He fell to his knees, releasing a ragged breath. "This is…" He murmured, overcome with…
Memory.
He was seventeen. Or was he sixteen? …We'll say sixteen and a half. Johnny was sixteen and a half.
He was dark. They said it made him cool. It was just how he was. They just taught him how to dress like it: black, stripes, boots. And then he was cool, apparently.
And then they were his friends, apparently.
The girl in the picture's name was Genesis. They all called her Genna, or sometimes just Gen. Like all the rest, she didn't realize how well she fit in, with her combat boots and hair dye and facial piercings. Only how much she was shut out. It was that that Johnny hated about his friends.
But Gen was different… There was something that had drawn him to her.
It wasn't the piercings, the hair, the clothes, or the tattoos. If it were that, Johnny would have been attracted to every single one of them. It wasn't the dark poetry, or the thick eyeliner, the fingerless gloves or her taste for loud, angry music.
He couldn't remember the exact trait. That piece of the story escaped him. But…
She had called him, "different from the others." The best thing anyone ever said to him in that hell people called adolescence. Maybe in his life. He wasn't another one of them, their boots and hair and piercings. He wasn't just another human, wallowing in selfishness like a pig in slop. He wasn't, he was different.
And then he moved.
And that was all he could build on from the picture.
But that was not the end of that. Memory was not the only thing the photo had brought on. Johnny… upon remembering her, also remembered how he felt about her, and then he was feeling it. He was actually feeling it, wriggling inside him like a hungry worm.
Forgotten, reawakened… Affection.
That had to be it. Affection. Imagine that! Feeling affection for a girl he hadn't seen in… Well, who knew how long? Johnny wasn't one for calendars. It was like a countdown to the day you die, and Johnny was through with wanting to die.
Johnny took another glance at the picture, this time really looking at this girl… Her eyes were black as coal. Her hair as red as flame, but not naturally.
She wasn't thin. Wasn't fat, either, but she definitely wasn't thin. She was… Thick, he supposed, had a healthy amount of meat on her bones, though one could say she looked like a walrus next to Johnny, who was incredibly scrawny in that picture, though not as scrawny as he was now. That was back when he was a lean, skinny boy, as opposed to a gaunt, boney man.
But back to Gen. She had two piercings in the top of her left ear, as well as two on the back of her eyebrow and one on her nose. She sported a black t-shirt with a familiar band logo printed across the chest. She was almost unnaturally pale, but that was coming from Johnny, who was also… Unnaturally pale, so you should probably disregard that last comment. Her thick black eye makeup stood out against the pallor of her skin, and her lips… Those lips brought him back. They were red like blood, and if Johnny remembered correctly… Cherry-flavored.
It was like the worms in his intestines had blossomed into the butterflies in his stomach. Or maybe they were moths. Johnny didn't care.
In fact, he wanted his stomach fumigated. All these feelings, these insects inside him. They weren't his. They belonged to teenage Johnny, who he'd lost long ago. That's what he kept telling himself, but his mind lingered on her, his eyes on the picture.
He'd try to think of something else, to look away, but his mind, his eyes would always flick back.
His hands shook a bit. A drop of water fell from his hair onto the photo. "No!" He cried, and tried, frantically, to wipe it off. It had ruined the ink, left the circular splotch where the droplet had landed on Gen's face with a bleached look, the area around it dark with smear.
Frustrated, Johnny hurled the photo to the floor and crushed it beneath his foot, causing the photo to stick to his wet heel. He'd forgotten that he wasn't wearing his boots. Johnny swore, tore the photo off his sole and ripped it in half, throwing it at Meat in defiance. "Fuck you!" He cried, stomping his foot for emphasis. His towel slid off his hips onto the floor.
And with that his eyes snapped shut; he threw his hands over them for extra coverage. The tears still seeped through his fingers.
He wasn't sure if he could hear Reverend Meat's laughter, or if he was imagining it. He was always imagining it, though, right? Meat was just a voice from his subconscious, laughing at his tears, his frustration… His nakedness. But when he gathered up his towel and opened his eyes, Meat was only mocking him with his silence.
Dazed and somewhat warily, Johnny left for the bathroom, for his clothes, leaving inky footprints as he went.
Sorry for the kind of crappy chapter. I'll try to make the next one better, I promise!
Also, a mistake I notice with the last chapter… I accidentally said, "one eighth," at one point where I meant to say, "one third." Whoops. Anyway, thank you everyone for the comments, and for reading my story! It means a lot.