Jeremiah Quick (13 page)

She counted on her fingers the strikes to
the backs of her thighs, and there were ten – her ten from last
night's wail. Except for the first startled scream, she managed to
stay silent through number eight, but then a loud groan came out of
her on nine, and an actual shriek on ten.

Damn it. It wasn't fair that she took ten
and earned thirty. If he kept the rule of silence, he'd be
punishing her forever.

His hands smoothed something cool and
wonderful over the welts he'd just created and Pretty felt tears
forming again, the lump in her throat almost choking her. He came
around the bed and squatted, taking her chin between finger and
thumb and turning her head this way and that, staring at her. The
stare went on and on, but her tears didn't fall.

He waited a few seconds, then his
black-lined blue mouth smiled into her eyes, and his fingers
brushed her cheek. It was... as sweet as he'd ever been, maybe
sweeter, and Pretty tilted her face into his palm and no longer
felt like crying at all.

As if to prove his sweetness, his fingers
teased her lips open and placed a square of chocolate on her
tongue. After the dark-silence-pain, the smooth rich taste filled
her mouth felt like a reward. She didn't think there was any
accident in that.

A last little pat to her cheek, and he moved
out of her sight for a minute, returning to cover her with a
blanket before he left.

All this, and never a word.

Privacy and chocolate. An odd combination of
comfort.

She kept herself still on the bed and
listened to silence with no way to judge how long he was gone. She
tried to count one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand… up to sixty,
then one-twenty, one-eighty… but counting was infinitely more
boring than thinking of nothing. Except for the part where she
found it impossible to be still and think of nothing, in silence.
There was a cramp in her foot and her stomach felt both full and
hollow. The sheen of sweat between her skin and the plastic
mattress prickled her skin and made it itch.

She hated the silence more than the dark,
and was tempted to talk to herself or hum. Sound. Noise.
Company.

The stupid barn or garage or whatever it was
didn't even sway or creak or settle, or have mice, as near as she
could tell. Which was crazy – right? All structures have some sort
of sound. And then she tried to turn off that train of thought,
remembering that this structure did have sounds. Muttering and
sobbing and whispers of
Jeremiah Quick
. It was no sound that
came from the physical world, which really was crazy, and even
though she hated the silence, she thought she preferred even that
over creepy ghost whispers and crying.

She wished Jeremiah would stay, turn on
music, and teach her with words. She wasn't sure what she was
supposed to be learning like this, because when it was too dark and
too quiet, she could count or sing or hum or talk... and her mind
would still find a way to examine her regrets.

Like Drew.

Once Jeremiah rode away on his motorcycle,
there was no way to contact or keep track of him, only mourn that
he wasn't here, and hope he found what he was looking for. Pretty
didn't even know what that was, beyond his tossing out the phrase
Punk Underground
.

He didn't even say goodbye, at least not to
her. He was just…
gone
.

She heard from Chill once in awhile, by
letter, but he wasn't hearing from Jeremiah with any regularity,
either. His reports weren't much more than, "Last I heard he was in
Arkansas," or "He made it to California."

Pretty didn't know what Jeremiah hoped to
find in either place, or if Chill made it all up, just to have an
excuse to write her a letter.

Nothing. Nothing. Sometimes it was hard to
remember he was ever here at all, hard to remember he was real.

And then from the corner of her memory she'd
see a shadow of him, leaning against the red brick wall of the
school building, smoking, and using the pinkies of each hand to
hook the edges of his hair behind his ears, the rising smoke from
his cigarette reflected in his sunglasses, his expression somber by
way of his straight serious mouth.

Her breath would hitch, and her fingers
almost go numb with hurt and longing, and she hated being trapped
in high school with all of these people, but without him.

She could have asked the bohemian
girlfriend, she knew that. The knowledge was right there, teasing
her. The girlfriend probably wouldn't diss her.

But Pretty never approached the other girl.
Not out of shyness, but because of some sense of humiliation that
Jeremiah had given the bohemian so much more of himself than he'd
ever given to Pretty, and asking her, begging for whatever scraps
she was willing to share, felt too much like sniffing under the
dining room table for crumbs.

It was bad enough that she'd almost stolen
the photograph. Bad enough that she wished she had stolen it.

It was on the dry line in the art room,
eight by ten, black and white, hair smooth along the sides of his
unsmiling face, tenderly vulnerable. She wanted to steal it, but
supposed it belonged to his bohemian girlfriend, and Pretty hoped
it was important to her – she who'd had so much more of him than
Pretty ever had.

Still.

It probably got thrown away.

Jeremiah was right. She had been naïve, and
in too many ways.

The photograph remained in her mind, and in
full-color, even, so it belonged to her in a way no one could ever
take from her.

Pretty had her own pride.

A week or so before Jeremiah left, Drew
arrived.

It was the middle of May.

Drew was delicate yet sinewy, dark, and
gentle. And filled with more pain than Pretty had ever seen in one
being, including Jeremiah. Unless it was just that Drew made no
effort to hide his pain behind anything other than pain.

Jeremiah had cynicism, anger, and what he
called Punk Underground, which offered him a sense of activism and
belonging to something bigger than himself. The "Punk Movement"
that embraced and enforced his personal belief system. It was
Jeremiah, oddly enough, the most isolated and angriest person
Pretty knew, who seemed more able than the rest of them to cast
clear eyes toward the future.

Drew was nothing like Jeremiah. He was… the
walking wounded. He had collar-length brown hair that whisked out
at the ends, and deep, dark brown eyes almost liquid with concern
and sympathy. He positively
bled
love for his friends, male
and female. He was the new arrival, and Jeremiah made no secret
that he was leaving, and somehow the group,
Pretty's group
,
pulled Drew in and shut Jeremiah out. It didn't seem to have
intent, more... self-protection. Or maybe it was because Jeremiah
was incomprehensible to them.

Whatever it was, by springtime Pretty found
herself standing on the periphery with Jeremiah and Chill, knowing
that all too soon they'd be gone and she would be alone.

It happened sooner than she expected.

She thought she'd have Jeremiah until
sometime after graduation, but he left two weeks before, not even
sticking around to help finish the mural they'd been working on in
seventh period all semester, dressing up the new weight room with
painted superheroes.

Pretty's group of friends closed around
Drew.

The seniors, including Chill, graduated, and
Pretty's sophomore year of high school was over.

The whole year had been Jeremiah, Jeremiah,
Jeremiah, to the exclusion of others. Pretty always clutching, and
Jeremiah always leaving. The definition of their whole
relationship.

An endless summer, a new academic year.

Jeremiah was still gone, and Pretty expected
he would be forever. She still saw him in the spaces of the
schoolyard, the wall he'd preferred to lean against, the nervous
and near-constant movement of his fingers hooking around his hair.
So beautiful. So alone.

She didn’t know what Jeremiah expected to
find, away from here, but hoped it was some sort of peace. The
empty knot where no information resided troubled her.

And now, it seemed, she was the outcast.

She leaned against Jeremiah's wall and
surveyed the red line and the people behind it.

The friendly bouncer who acted like
everyone's mother and made sure smokers stayed behind the red line
had returned, a familiar face in a sea of incomprehensibility.
Swirling colors, giggles and greetings, raucous back claps, and
loud hellos.

Her old group gathered, with Drew at the
center, and she watched them. He was beautiful. Ethereal. She could
see that they were enamored of him. And she could see, by the
proximity of their shoulders and the length of their glances, that
he'd been sleeping with one of Pretty's best girlfriends. An
interesting development.

She supposed she should re-insert herself,
or it would be a boring year. Perhaps she should have Drew; the
days were so much better with someone to look forward to.

It didn't take much. She wandered into the
group, said the right greetings, smiled into Drew's eyes, let her
face crumple, let a tear fall. "It's just not right for me without
Jeremiah."

All sympathy and cluck-clucks. "Oh, sweetie,
I know. Keith and Jason and Robert, too – they're all gone, don't
you see?"

An inward smile. Yes, they would have her
back.

She would never really
be
back in,
however, though perhaps she didn't know it at the time. She was
changed, too learned to buy into the group mind, too stubborn to be
a follower, yet still not brave or strong enough to lead. She would
learn to put on camouflage, smile appropriately, put on all the
good and pretty manners her mother taught her. Pretend to be
normal, though she knew it wasn't true.

She was twisted, bent out of shape, looking
beyond the surface at everything now, asking, "Who benefits?
Who?"

No more blind believer. Not Pretty.

So it was she hated each of them, just a
little. The girl who taught herself to faint. The one who already
hid alcohol in shampoo bottles like a closet alcoholic. The one who
liked everyone to think she was a witch, in an attempt to be more
spooky than the rest.

Pretty wanted real, even then.

She wanted Jeremiah. And he was gone.

Just once, she snuck into the weight room,
to lay her head and hands on the superhero mural, to see the
evidence that they had, indeed, been there together, that it hadn't
been a dream.

It took her almost twenty minutes to find
the secret pentagram, the words
fuck this noise
, her own
initials. Jeremiah's initials had been scratched away with a
ball-point pen that gouged the plaster. The words
I was never
here
printed in tiny, even letters underneath.

Oh, yes, they'd been there. Together.

Pretty wrote more and more poetry, terrible
and trite adolescent verse, begging Jeremiah to come back, drowning
in her longing for more than… this.

Drew watched her sadness. Once he hugged
her, a quiet, firm press of his body against hers, the wrap of his
arms almost the sound of solace. Gentle, his heart against hers,
infused with sympathy, empathy. They stood cheek-to-cheek, and he
was so comforting that he filled her up for long minutes. It was
the way he held her, wrapped just right, the way he smelled, like
clean rain, or melting ice, the safest place in the world.

Drew woke her up, convinced her to allow her
heart to feel again.

Pretty's heart sang to see him in the
morning. Everything about him was balm… his smile, his eyes, even
his sad.

He soothed her more than anyone else could,
because he was drowning right there in front of her, and so
transparent that Pretty could drown, too.

They could do it together.

Drew had a dead mother, a dead brother, and
an alcoholic father prone to drunken rages. He had more pain than
Pretty could wrap her head around. Foster care was his haven, but
his father wanted him home.

The days marched on.

In October, the judge sent Drew home.

Two days later, bam, he was gone.

Gun to the head.

Jeremiah sent a sheet of acid, three dollars
a hit, that looked like art, a pencil drawing. Three dollars to the
spooky girl for a tiny tab of paper that Pretty slipped under her
tongue on a Monday morning.

Did she think taking Jeremiah's drugs would
make him feel closer? Did she think she could understand him
better, commune with his spirit somehow?

Eh. Probably more spiteful than that.
Probably she knew he would hate the idea that she took his drugs.
C'est la vie.

Letters from Chill kept coming.

The acid-laced paper floated under Pretty's
tongue.

Jeremiah was gone.

Drew was dead.

Snakes writhed in the lines of her
hands.

All of Drew's seeming transparency was a
lie. He had three lives, at least, all hidden, one from the other.
No less than three current girlfriends grieved at his funeral, one
from each high school in the city. Dozens of people considered him
the center of their social group.

Drew in a casket. His head wrapped in
bandages, and when she looked close enough, Pretty could see the
corners of his lips were split. She wanted to touch him one last
time, but couldn't make herself do it. It was too much, too scary,
too gone.

Horror was floating, and hysteria, just
beneath the surface of her
I can handle it
face.

Acid took all of that away, made her laugh
out loud in math class, made her see funky colored cloud trails
across her field of vision. It put a safe and hazy distance between
herself and everyone else, like nitrous oxide, almost, numbed to
the realness of this shitty place called earth.