Jeremiah Quick (18 page)

And it didn't matter if no one else wanted
in, if every one of the assholes dismissed him as unimportant. He
hit her radar of want. And what Pretty wants, Pretty gets.

"Yes?" she asked, quirking her lips at him
and batting her eyelashes.

"You were fascinated and delightfully
unafraid."

"You just said I was terrified."

"Not of me. You were terrified of being
different, of standing out, of being noticed."

He was too close to the mark. She had to
correct him. "Except I wanted you to notice me, so that doesn't
even make sense."

His eyes went flat. "Don't lie to me. Don't
ever lie to me. I wouldn't lie to you, what would be the
point?"

"Am I going to leave this place alive?"

He looked completely startled by the
question. "Yes. Of course. I can't believe you even have to ask
that."

She shrugged, looked down at herself, lines
and lines and lines, and for what? She looked back at him. "Well,
you said I've been kidnapped. It's a fair question."

He nodded, and his expression was
serious. "I didn't bring you here to kill you. I am going to hurt
you, though, and more than you can imagine. I'm sorry about that,
if it helps any."

A chill almost like a seizure tore through
her, and she raised her knees to her chest, wrapped her arms around
them, tucked her chin down, and rocked like a scared little kid.
She almost started to cry, but knowing he'd take her tears stopped
them. It was still… just so uncomfortable and weird, they way he
did that. It made him seem like a stranger.

He tugged the towel away from her hair and
finger combed it, then started braiding it.

"Why?" she asked, voice muffled against the
flesh of her arms.

"Why am I sorry? Because I love you."

A different kind of chill, quicker, more
straight into her heart. But that wasn't the question. "No, why are
you going to hurt me?"

"It's the only way to do it."

He was exasperating her now. "Do
what?
"

"Give you my Dark."

He wouldn't answer any more questions after
that, saying she would understand by the time they were finished.
He wouldn't even tell her
finished with what
, except his
eyes burned into her in a way that said
You know
.
This
.

But she didn't know, not really, and was a
little more scared than she'd been before.

She gave up. "You were telling me about
Corrie," she prompted, by way of subject change, her way of telling
him she was done struggling against his logic.

"No, I was telling you about
you
,
first. I'll get back to Corrie, trust.

"You were… so wide open to me, so
transparent, and at the same time so filled with shame. For me, it
was like being presented with a blank canvas and a Sharpie.

"You'd present your ideological ideas – none
of them your own, by the way, and you'd be all prepared with
arguments – again, none of them your own, and I'd ask, 'Cui bono?'
And your face would freeze in surprise as all your arguments flew
away like dandelion fluff on the breeze. Poof. Silence. It was
about the only time you'd shut up, as you worked it out in your
head, testing lines of logic against what you'd been told, what
you'd always believed. Sometimes your logic was flawed, but one of
my favorite things about you was that you always recognized when it
was, and readily asked, at that point, for more information. And
you never pretended to know something you didn't. Well, not after
you got used to me, at least."

"And never again, my whole life," she
said.

"Meaning what?" he asked.

"Meaning you taught me to stop pretending.
Maybe more than you taught me anything else."

He shrugged, but the corners of his lips
twitched up, not quite a smile but almost. "That look on your face,
the shock and surprise when you realized everything you thought you
knew about some big issue was wrong. Sometimes my only goal for the
whole day was to see that look."

"Mean bastard."

"It wasn't mean – I didn't think less of
you. You couldn’t help your life. It was… I enjoyed your openness,
your lack of defense."

Even as he said these things, Pretty's tight
little ball of rocking was loosening. Her arms had drifted further
down her calves, her knees relaxed and fell apart.

"I didn't get time back then to address your
shame, but I would have liked to. Some of this," he made a gesture
that encompassed the entire room, the entire place, perhaps their
entire relationship – "has been to correct that. Do you see?"

She shook her head, but it wasn't a 'no,' it
was that she didn't want to talk about it. In fact, she so didn't
want to talk about it that she wished he could finish this in
silence.

"You should put on music," she suggested.
"But quieter, so you can tell me who the bands are, what they mean
to you."

"You're changing the subject."

And yet… he walked away from her to put on music,
turning the volume down to a level they could speak over. If they
wanted to.

He had her move to a chair and sat behind
her, his pen drawing what felt like dozens of intricate lines in
the tiny, ticklish space at the back of her neck.

He turned her chair, drew on her
ear, of all places, and behind it, then her jaw line, the left side
of her neck.

At first he talked about the music.
And he talked about Corrie.

Chapter 17

S
he.

She's a bit wide-eyed, looking at me,
waiting.

I think she's ready to listen, but I can't
stand her eyes on me, so I roll my chair behind her.

The back of her neck... might be the most
perfect canvas of skin as any I've seen.

It's cruel of me to make the lines this
fine, to draw this many of them, but I can't seem to help
myself.

I'll be glad of it, after I tell her about
Corrie. The lines there will remind me that punishment will come,
that there is a price for her listening, and that she'll be making
noises of sympathy soon enough.

A sigh. Yeah, she needs to know. This.

But am I ready to re-live this? Corrie leads
to Jamie, and Jamie leads to now...

They'll never meet, Corrie and Sunshine, and
I'm sad about that. They weren't the same, no, but they were both
important to me.

Corrie saved my life.

Sunshine - well, I can't say she saved my
life, but perhaps my sanity, and she can learn my message and carry
it forward. Teach it to her children. Sunshine could be my
immortality.

"Corrie," I say out loud, gathering my
thoughts, trying to decide where to start. "I guess she was
something of a legend in juvenile detention."

I meet Sunshine's quizzical look with my own
solid stare. "Four weeks in lock-up, yeah, when I was fifteen. But
Corrie fixed me. Or more... taught me how to navigate my life so I
could stay out of the system, at any rate. She taught me new masks
to wear, socially acceptable ones.

"How did you land in juvenile detention?"
Sunshine wants to know.

"Funny story, that."

But no, it isn't funny at all. But I'm going
to tell her.

This would be everything she'd always wanted
to know, everything I couldn't tell her before. When I was young,
it was all too close, too humiliating. I wanted her to believe I
was a pacifist on purpose, not because I was powerless. But
powerless was closer to the truth, back then.

I tell her all of it: How my dad got
reported to social services because there was no food in the house
and my clothes hadn't been washed in weeks. How I attacked the
social worker who tried to pick me up from school, and landed in
the juvenile justice system rather than the foster care system.
This was all in the three or four months since my uncle first raped
me, and I felt like I was living in a nightmare. At least my father
didn't do that, and I was getting pretty savvy at finding ways to
avoid him.

They told me when I'd finished four weeks in
Juvie, I'd go live with my uncle, since he'd expressed an interest
in keeping me out of foster care.

That time, I didn't react at all. I didn't
attack anyone, not even the social worker who brought the bad
news.

It was a co-ed juvenile facility, but the
girls and the boys stayed in separate wings and only interacted
during meal times and staff facilitated groups.

Our wing had a TV room and a commons area.
The TV room had a slew of one-armed chairs. When we pushed them
together, each chair arm formed a barrier between it and the next
chair, naturally prohibiting physical contact. They were orange and
blue and hideous. The majority of them were plain orange and plain
blue, but a couple were a compilation of the colors in a paisley
design. They smelled like bad onions and old body odor. The carpet
was baby blue, the walls faux-painted, rag rolled or sponged, in
different versions of blue and orange. The TV was on all the time.
It was loud to the eyes and the ears.

One foot in the doorway and I wanted to run
away screaming. It assaulted all my senses. No way was I going to
spend any time in there.

The commons area, which was also the dining
room, wasn't better, with its tile floor and glassed-in staff
office. Voices carried and echoed, as well as pen-tapping, and, at
the far end of the room, the nerve-wracking crack and slap of an
air-hockey table.

This place might be tolerable when buried
beneath music from my headphones, and I wasn't allowed to have
them. I wasn't allowed to have anything from my backpack, and all
my best stuff was in there, and if I never got it back… well, I
couldn't even think about that. The idea of losing everything was
as intolerable as the thought of sitting on a smelly chair in that
obnoxious room.

It didn't take me long to get a ball-point
pen.

It was nothing fancy, just a plain blue Bic
or whatever was standard in institutions back in the day.

I took it apart and broke it in half, so I
ended up with a piece of plastic with a jagged edge.

I'd never tried to kill myself before, but
we all knew someone who slashed at their wrists and didn't get the
job done, right? So. I didn't go that route.

I tore open my own throat.

But I'd underestimated how tricky it would
be to rip my own jugular out. I had no idea how hard it was to rip
open skin with any precision using a broken pen. And I hadn't been
much prepared for the layers of flesh between dermis and major
veins and arteries.

They didn't even take me to the hospital,
just the facility nurse, who patched me up. Then came a quick and
dirty march down a long hallway, no pleasant chatter, no laughing,
no reassurance. Just a muttered comment from one supervisor, 'Now
you've done it. You're Cory's problem now,' and a sharp bark of
non-laughter from the other along with a verbal rendition of music
from the Twilight Zone and a whispered, 'Good luck.'

"What?" I asked. "Cory deals with the bad
kids?"

"Oh, ya'all bad," the first supervisor said.
"Nah, Cory deals with the special kids. The ones that need a bit
more than the others to straighten up. You'll see."

I didn't like the sound of this person.
Didn't like the sound of being a 'special kid', not at all.

The supervisor opened an office door and
pushed me through it.

The nameplate on the desk read 'Corrie M.'
followed by the letters 'MSW.' Not Cory, but Corrie. Not that that
made any difference. He had one of those corner desks like half an
octagon, only it was set in the middle of the room, so the person
sitting in front of the monitor faced the doorway. There were four
low bookshelves under the window behind him.

This Corrie guy was doing something on a
computer, and didn't even look up at me. Probably playing Tetris.
All I could see of him from around the monitor was short black
hair, narrow shoulders, and damn fine gym-buffed arms. He was
white, but that was no surprise, because so was I and ninety-five
per cent of the rest of everyone who lived in this town.

He didn't look at me, say anything, or
acknowledge me at all, just kept doing his computer thing (that was
probably Tetris). And he
kept
doing that, as if I wasn't
standing just inside the door, waiting. As if he didn't even know I
was there. But he had to have heard me get shoved into the
room.

I waited. There was a chair beside the door,
and after what felt like half an hour of shifting foot to foot, I
sat down. More time went on, and even more, and I started getting
pissed off. It didn't help that my fucking neck was throbbing and
nobody gave a shit. They offered me a Tylenol and an ice pack. I
took the Tylenol and turned down the ice. What I wanted to do was
go to bed, trace my five stitches with the pads of my fingertips
and wallow in self-pity for a couple of hours. Then I'd regroup and
figure out a new plan.

And I wanted – no, needed – my walkman,
headphones, and cassette tapes. I needed to turn off my brain for a
few hours or I was going to freak right the fuck out.

I cleared my throat to get the guy's
attention.

Nothing. Not even a flinch. Except for the
sound of clicking keyboard keys, he might as well have been a
mannequin.

I waited as long as I could stand, but
pissed-off finally won.

I said, "Are you going to ignore me forever?
Fuckin'-a, dude."

Before I became a pacifist, I could be
pretty tough when someone pissed me off.

The chair slid to the side, his head now
visible, and he – no, SHE – said, "Oh. It's you. Yeah, I figured as
much."

And then, no kidding, she slid the chair
over so the monitor was in front of her face again.

Get the fuck out. "I can't believe you get
paid for this. Playing video games while a client waits? Pretty
sure I could get you fired."