Intentional Dissonance (9 page)

“He was killed in The End,” Jon says more to himself than anyone else in the room. He hasn’t talked about his father in a long time.

“Now you are incorrect, my friend. Your father was not killed in The End,” says the doctor. Jon’s muscles contract.

“What do you mean?” asks Jon. A spasm shoots through his body as he tries to launch himself out of the chair, some primal force driving him but the restraints hold him tight.

The doctor laughs. “You are quite the energetic one, my friend.”

“I’m not your fucking friend,” says Jon.

“No, but you will be. Take him away,” says the doctor.

“Tell me about my father!” screams Jon as the guards come in. The doctor shakes his head and looks away.

“All in good time; but first, you need to calm down,” says the doctor.

“You’re a liar! You’re a liar!” yells Jon as he’s dragged out of the room.

The doctor, oblivious to the wild animal Jon has become, mumbles under his breath, “All in good time.”

Jon is returned to the cell where he paces back and forth, thinking about what the doctor said. It can’t be true. His father is dead. He know’s he’s dead. He felt something die inside him when The End happened. No, the doctor was only playing games with him. Messing with his head for the sake of messing with it. Jon tries to sleep. He doesn’t. It’s not the whir of the machines outside, it’s the grinding of the gears inside his head. In the middle of the night, the guards throw open the door.

“Here’s your friend, you freak,” says Deformed.

A gasping mass of wood and sap is thrown into the cell with him. Edward. The guards slam the door shut and the rustling of leaves and shallow breathing is the only sound left. Jon quickly gets on the bucket of water and pulls some of the boarding off the cell window, letting the cold in but also some moonlight, enough to see Edward. Jon’s heart almost stops. Edward’s wooden body is covered in cuts and burns, thick gouts of sap weep from his wounds. He shouldn’t be alive. He probably won’t be for much longer. Thankfully, he’s only barely conscious.

“What did they do to you?” asks Jon, stripping his shirt from his back to turn into make-shift bandages, forgetting that this is the same person who called him a junkie hours before.

“Only the things I’ll be doing back to them soon,” says Edward through what must be exquisite pain. Jon rolls him over to try and cover the worst of the wounds, which is when he sees that one of Edward’s arms is gone; thin ribbons of wood are all that remain.

“Your arm, Edward, your arm…” says Jon.

“I know, son, it’ll grow back,” says Edward. He laughs and hacks up sap into his throat. Jon has never and will never meet a man or creature with the ability to laugh in the face of pain like Edward ever again. Jon shakes his head and continues to bandage him. It takes him more than an hour but most of Edward’s more serious wounds are covered, even the stump that used to be his left arm.

“The bastards didn’t even take my good one,” says Edward and that’s the last thing he says before his brown eyes close and he sleeps. Jon is almost thankful for the distraction, for something to take his mind off his father and what the doctor said. He too finally finds some sleep.

He’s woken up by the same two guards, kicking his body.

Chapter 10

Then

Two sets of initials in a heart, carved into the heart of a tree more than 100 years old, grown over with bark, keeping love a secret. Now hacked out of the wood.

Meanwhile, somewhere else in time, Jon is eating his breakfast.

“Where’s Dad?” asks Jon.

“He went to work early. Why?” asks Jon’s mother.

“No reason.”

“You know you can talk to me, too.”

“Uh-huh,” Jon says, into his cereal. Maybe not about this. And besides, he’s fallen into this trap before, he knows what happens: he tells her what’s on his mind and the next minute, he’s in the shrink’s office, having to explain why what’s on his mind is on his mind. She made herself an alien. Not him.

He finishes his cereal, gets his bag and starts walking to school. He doesn’t like school. He must hand in his recording for music class. He must write his test. He doesn’t want to write his test. He just wants to be alone. He runs a stick along the side of the fence as he walks and it makes a click-clack sound. He just wants to see Michelle again. He loves her. He loves her like every mushy, romantic song he’s ever heard has ever told him how to love someone.

Instead, the bells ring and he’s late. He sprints around the corner, into the school playground and there’s Gregory Ashcroft, resident asshole, who’s good at sports and does fairly well academically. If you didn’t talk to him, you’d say he was fairly good looking but as soon as he opened his mouth, everything about him screamed asshole. Right now, for example, Justin Pearson, resident geek, who’s not good at sports, kind of pale and doesn’t do that well academically, is sitting down on the edge of the low wall in the playground at the front of the school, doing his best to ignore a crowd of children who have gathered around him and Gregory.

Gregory is saying, “Justin, if your parents had a little more money, you could go for plastic surgery, you know. You wouldn’t have to live your life being ugly. Come on guys, let’s start a collection for Justin’s plastic surgery.”

Gregory’s cohorts and henchmen chortle to themselves and snigger at his unsurpassed, at least in their eyes, wit.

Jon knows he shouldn’t be involved but fuck it.

“Yeah, Greg, but at least ugly can be fixed, stupid is forever.” The playground laughs, hard, not at Justin anymore but at Gregory. Gregory slowly turns to Jon, his face red. He regains some of his composure by swallowing some air, at least by the looks of it and stares straight at Jon before smiling and very slowly, drawing his hand across his throat, like a blade. The message is unmistakable. Jon may have won the battle but the war is never ending. Fuck it. Justin, pale as he is, is a decent kid and doesn’t deserve this kind of shit.

“You’re all late!” comes the shrill voice from the entrance to the school and a teacher rings a bell, scowling at the children as they file past her.

Jon makes his way through the noise of the school halls to his first lesson, music class. Minutes after he enters, Jon’s teacher has taken him outside. She has long, flowing black hair and Jon and every boy in the school has had a crush on her at one time or another. Each student was assigned the task of making a song. They could sing. They could play a guitar. They could run their finger over the lip of a glass. It didn’t matter. It was supposed to be fun. Jon’s recording is nothing but noise. Static. Thirty minutes of static. The kind you’d hear if you tuned the radio to a station that wasn’t there.

“Why did you do this, Jon?” asks Jon’s teacher.

“I thought we were allowed to do whatever we wanted,” says Jon, kicking the ground.

“You were, but it had to be a song.”

“It is a song,” says Jon. He tries to get up and walk away, but she grabs his arm to stop him.

“Sit down, Jon. I’m your teacher, you’re supposed to listen to me. This is really your idea of a song?”

“Yes.”

“Ok, Jon. What are the words to your song?”

“They’re whatever you want them to be.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean if you listen to it for long enough, you start to hear words.” Jon’s teacher is staring at him. Jon’s teacher hasn’t been trained for this.

“I made it white noise on purpose. That way, anyone could find what they were looking for in it.”

“Go back inside and sit down,” says Jon’s teacher, sighing. She makes a note in a book. Jon’s teacher doesn’t know what to do. After music class, Jon is outside the school building five minutes before the start of his test and Gregory Ashcroft and several of his goons, including one who’s particularly covered in acne, Jeremy Shaw, are slowly backing him into a corner by the lockers. Jon regrets nothing.

“What kind of retard makes a song out of noise?” says Gregory, slamming his fist into his open hand again and again.

“You’re a bit of a freak, aren’t you, Jonny boy?” asks Jeremy, who has the privilege of being Gregory’s second in command. Jon turns around and faces the wall, not even acknowledging them. He’ll just keep staring at the wall and they’ll go away. Instead, it makes them angry.

“My name’s Jon, not Jonny boy,” says Jon quietly to the wall.

“What did you say, faggot?” Asks Gregory.

One of the goons grabs Jon by the shoulders and shoves him towards Gregory. Gregory catches him with a fist in the stomach.

“Did that hurt? Jonny boy? Speak up, faggot,” says Gregory.

Jon finds himself thinking of Michelle. The thought of Michelle makes him happy and he can feel the blood rushing through him in the same way it did the night before. Then he thinks of superheroes. He thinks of superheroes smashing through buildings, throwing cars. His mind takes him somewhere else. It tries to take him somewhere else. It doesn’t quite work. Gregory is pulling Jon’s hair. Tears are streaming down Jon’s face. It hurts. This hurts. He wants to hurt them back. Suddenly, he feels Gregory’s grip on his hair loosen and he hears Jeremy and the rest of his goons gasp.

“Look what you’ve done,” whispers Jon.

He can feel the air thinning around him, like it did in his bedroom the night before. A giant creature made of fire and thorns looms over Jon, growing out of him, howling, clawing at the boys, reaching out for them. Gregory, Jeremy and his friends run, screaming, not knowing or understanding what they’re seeing. The monster becomes mist just as quickly as it became real but not before looking Jon straight in the eyes.

Jon sits in the corner, panting. Everything is red and he’s covered in sweat and just as scared of himself as the other boys are. He just wants to be normal, but this sure isn’t it. He still doesn’t want to write his test and that at least, that not wanting to be at school, feels like it might be a normal thing to feel.

Jon, remembering what his father tells him about working hard and getting through things, remembering his father telling him that school doesn’t last forever, walks towards the exam hall, trying to forget the monsters. None of it’s real. None of it’s real. None of it’s real. He tries not to think about what’s happened over the last twenty-four hours. He goes inside the hall, sits down and they hand out the paper. He takes out his pencil and tries to think of numbers, of how they fit together and he finds it hard. He’d find it hard even if things hadn’t started jumping out of his head into the real world. He’s good with words. Bad with numbers. Bad with directions. Good with pictures. He wonders if anyone is good at everything. He tries to stop wondering and focus on the test. The teacher, his music teacher, is walking up and down amongst the desks, moderating the test. Jon is pushing his pencil across the paper, across the symbols. Symbols that represent quantities of things. No specific things, just abstract things. That’s what he finds difficult. Just things.

He tries to focus. He tries to drown out his thoughts. They cannot be drowned. They float to the surface. He’s yelling at himself inside his head and just about to start crying when he feels a cold hand gripping his leg below the desk.

He freezes and looks down. A dark figure made of static and shadows is lying on the ground, staring up at him. The child behind him isn’t in his desk anymore. No one else has seen the creature made of shadows gripping his leg yet. The hand slowly grips tighter and the dark figure starts to hiss. He thinks it’s happening again, what happened the night before and with Gregory outside, it’s happening again but it doesn’t feel like him. This doesn’t feel like him. He remembers what it felt like and something tells him he hasn’t made this.

Someone else has made this, whatever it is. The shadow slowly starts trying to pull him from the chair. He grips onto the desk and holds on as tight as he can. A girl in the desk across looks up and sees what’s happening and her faces freezes in pure fear. Jon looks at her, unable to scream, unable to do anything, holding on as tight as he can as the creature strains against him. She opens her mouth and screams for him. The silence in the hall is shattered and everyone turns as one. The figure leaps up and throws itself at the exam moderator, Jon’s beautiful music teacher, tearing and ripping, blood spraying across the room in violent arcs. As if it were an encore of last night, bright light pours through the window, the air thins and everyone in the exam hall starts to scream louder, and then a blast wave hits and everything goes white.

Chapter 11

Now

A fireman’s axe, found in the ashes of a burnt out building.

“Look at that, the lovers have been cuddling,” says Deformed.

“Put some clothes on, you freak,” says the shorter one, the one who’s quiet unless he’s sure big Deformed is somewhere near. They throw a bright white jumpsuit at him and watch him get dressed. Edward’s chest is rising and falling, which reassures Jon that he didn’t die during the night, although the collar around his neck is still cutting into him, still making him weak.

“Don’t worry cupcake, we’ll finish him off tonight,” says Deformed. Jon looks away. He will not let them know he cares about anything anymore. They’re just toying with him. Trying to make him snap. Fuck them.