Observer

Pulled apart by the mania
And conflicting intentions
To want to touch
But to hate
But to love,
Also.
And it’s hard
Too hard
Pulled along by the mania
And this time
Its real
tangible
corporeal
And I pretend
That we’re more alive,
Now,
Than we are.
And remember how,
Before the booze,
Before responsibility,
Everything seemed like
Such a
Grand
Adventure?
You say come, come along
We’re taking back the night
I come
Because I want to believe
Because I want to believe
Refusing to look at the reflections
Of ankhs
In your frenzied pupils And I,
pretending
I’m just along
For the ride

Jason: a poem

I see you there. Your dead heart, icy fingertips. The
Diamond days, chained together like the cut marks on your arms.

Like ivy and a tree, we must have suffocated one another.

I picture your comic books, sometimes, covered in drugs and blood. Your
Lips pursed and your heart taped off like a crime scene. I see
Your vending machine emotions. I smell the rust around your eyes.

I see you there, calling from bus rides to Bell Square in your after-therapy voice.
“Ich Warter hier. Stirb nicht vor mir.”

I see you there, falling from the rooftop when the wind picked up.
Moments later,
we
Are trying to resuscitate you, calling 911. I see you there,
barely alive and finally smiling.

This compulsion you had not to be alive
It didn’t matter I asked you to stay for me
Most important was you needed to believe you had a purpose

I smell the rust around your heart. The sound of your bones being reset… the
Hospital magazines were the same as the last time.

Sixty Three

Living in half-truths. Cryptic. Open to misinterpretation. I sewed little pieces of the atrium of my heart into the pads of my fingertips; I wanted to create. Something in me saw the beauty, the cruelty of his apathy.

I’m angry that he never proved me wrong about him. I kept giving him the benefit of the doubt.

We are both right

one hundred percent

of the time.

       

The weather today was a mirror for how I felt; patches of rain, but mostly just gray. Angry, windy, Seattle gray. Ridiculous he made my face like this- wide, glass eyes, lips out and downward, stoic, pissed off, indignant, didn’t pluck my eyebrows because I liked the added sense of severity.

He could never tell the difference between my words and my actions.

He said, I’m sorry and I said No, you aren’t.

He said I Love You, once. I didn’t think he meant it. I said Thank You.

He can’t blame me for always having doubted him. He continued to prove me right about how little I mattered.

I let him put blades to my skin because I thought he needed it to feel okay with himself. I let him cut off all my hair, except for tufted patches along my scalp. I let us both believe he had any kind of power over me.

I didn’t get angry that time he was drunk and held a match to my skin. I was only a little bit pissed when he struck that second one, held it to the wound already starting

 to blister,

red hot,

on my flesh.

       

Violent music explained him. God damn, and he lived up to every expectation I ever had of him.

So I don’t wear my scars on my arms like he does.  So I never even pretended that I thought I was special to him.

It’s strange to me that he holds it against me that I was always exactly who I thought he wanted me to be.

I’m tired of being better to him than he is to me. I might have a smile on my face, but my posture is starting to get really bad from turning everything inward.

“Why should I? It’s not like we’re dating,” he said so many goddamn times. Lack of obligation was a fallback for everything. It was impossible to ask him for anything. I had to keep my mouth shut if I wanted something because I knew if I asked straight up he’d find a way to say no. It’s not that I’m not communicative, it’s that I had no room to be.

I want to tell him, “Jason, I’m tired of having to be the one to strain to see the good in you.”

“Your therapist

gets paid

to listen to your bullshit.”

It’s been so long. I’m tired of putting in more than I get out. There’s only so long a person will put up with that kind of selfishness.

 “Who are you all dressed up for?” he asked me, spite-tongued, all the time.

I don’t want to be what he needs me to be.

I did everything he ever asked of me. Of course I started to feel resentful.

I would be happy before he got here, but I would be miserable by the time he left.

“I still want to be friends,” he says because that’s what you say to a girl

        whose heart

        you just

        tore to pieces.

“You’re such a cunt,” I answer.

I always knew we’d fizzle out, I never expected to feel

explosive.

But he did it, he finally got to me.

We could be the ones who fall in love, but I dislike him too much.

Forty

School doesn’t seem to have much of a point for Jason or Riot lately. Jason hasn’t been able to focus, not even in math. Riot is finding it’s really hard not to burst out crying in the middle of class. It’s really hard for her to see people who she and Avery used to make fun of together, who used to be one of their many inside jokes. Riot looks at all her classmates and realizes that the only people she has strong opinions about are the people she and Avery knew together and she disregards the other portion of her classmates—people Avery wasn’t around to help form an opinion of.

Riot’s sick of people asking her why she cut off all her hair. Everyone feels they have to give an opinion of what they think of a bald girl; they think their opinion matters even now that she’s already gone and done it. She just answers, “Jason did it,” without giving them the context: that they were mourning, that they were angry and sad and exponentially more than usual, even. She doesn’t say that Jason is a natural force of destruction and she was the only thing around he could destroy. Or that she thought she needed something jolting and jarring to wake her up. That most of all, she thought she was helping him.

She thinks, How can I look like the same girl you knew if you’re not around to know me? No Avery, no Riot. Riot is a whole new person with a whole new appearance.

 Pre-loss and Post-loss. Is how she conceptualizes her transformation. Beautiful Girl scarred, now an Ugly It.

Jason says balance is important. And he says to Riot that now she’s more whole as a person rather than just male or just female. He shaved his head, too, right after he did it to her.

But it’s not fair. He looks more masculine, more hardened than ever. 

                Jason and Riot meet up at lunch and decide to skip the rest of their classes. Riot has learned that sneaking off campus is easy because the staff that go out and patrol don’t stop people from leaving.  Riot watches kids leave all the time from math class, where she sits right next a window that faces the parking lot. She often wishes she still had places to go. But sometimes, the hardest thing to realize is that she’ll be just as miserable no matter where she goes. 

                Today Jason is wearing tight black jeans slung low on his hips and a well-fitting black sweatshirt. Riot thinks that the way he dresses now is homage to Avery, and how cool Avery’s style was. Like he’s decided to carry Avery’s memory on. Maybe it’s just that now, every so often, Jason’s wearing something that used to belong to Avery.

                When Jason and Riot walk side by side, sometimes their hands bump into each other.

 Riot thinks, You and I were always holding hands. 

When she walks alone, even, she stares at her empty hand and how it still flexes out, out toward a phantom memory. She thinks of how Avery is supposed to be beside her, right there just an arms distance away. Something in her longs to blindly reach out and grab for Jason’s hand. Not because it’s him, but because it is awkward to walk around with bare palms like this. 

             If he wanted to connect, he’d reach out to her, right? 

He walks slightly ahead of her. She watches the back pockets of his pants, static on his flat, skinny-boy ass. He’s become quite tall. She’s seen him every single day for over a year, when did he find time to grow so tall?

             The first bus that comes to their stop isn’t the bus they normally take home, but they board it anyways. They have the whole day to find their way home if they get lost. 

            Sometimes Riot is still caught unaware by how easy it is for him and her to remain completely silent in each other’s company. 

                “Where are we going?” she asks, once they’ve been on the bus for several minutes. They’ve been staring out opposite windows for a few stops. 

                “Bus said Renton,” Jason says with a shrug. 

                Riot’s mind wanders. She thinks about mindlessness and weightlessness. She reflects back on how yesterday, she’d finally had the thought for the first time since Avery died What if I never find love again? She disregarded the notion as ridiculous when it first came to her, but now it’s sinking in. What if no one measures up? What if she’s not quite right for anyone else? Especially now, all bald like she is.

                But she can work with not being in love again.

                Conduit she repeats over and over in her head. I am a conduit of love. There will never be a time she doesn’t believe that she’s not some kind of reverse succubus—that she can give men positivity and light with her touch. Not meant to fall in love, just meant to be a vessel of love. How can she be anything else?

                Jason seems to be moving in slow motion today. He even blinks slowly. His languid, tired eyes are huge behind his glasses. With buds in his ears coming coiling down into his lap, he stares at his semi-tangled iPod headphones. He rolls the chord between busy fingers, mindlessly. Slooooooowly. He doesn’t try to untie any knots and, now paying attention to Jason’s hands, Riot can’t seem to help but really wish he will.

        Untie that fucking knot you dumb bitch is what replaces her romantic mantra as she watches him.

        “What are you listening to?” she asks. Avery would have handed her one side of the headphones; Avery would have told her the name of the song, given her a tidbit about the band, and then told her what he likes or doesn’t like about it.

                “iPod’s dead,” Jason says.

                “Why do you have the buds in?” She asks. To shut me out.

                He takes them out of his ears and pockets it with the tangled knots wrapped haphazardly around it.

                Jason pulls the string for the next stop. The bus opens out in front a strip mall with a Starbucks, a tanning salon, and one of those stores that sells vacuum cleaners and sewing machines. Jason seems to know where they’re going. Riot follows close behind, off the bus and down the street.

                “You walk like Avery,” Jason points out to her.

                Riot laughs, “This is how I always walk.” But now she’s conscious of it, so she tries to change it up. Riot wonders what it is, is it the way she moves her limbs in a languid manner, the way she tries to be poised and catty. The way she tries to look receptive with all of her limbs? Which of these mannerisms were her own and which had she adapted from Avery when he was still alive.

                When she forces herself not to walk like him, not to walk the way that comes naturally, Riot feels like she’s slumping. Her feet move in a quick, awkward shuffle. She almost trips over her own feet.

                Jason and Riot laugh.

They can’t really laugh at things anymore; not unless they’re things that are tiny and not that funny, or things that are so dark that their laughter may turn to tears. Those have somehow become the rules.

“Follow me,” Jason says. They turn a corner off the street down a dirt path. Soon they’re in a wooded area. They cross a small bridge.

“I found this place last Saturday,” Jason informs Riot, and he looks pleased with himself.

“We should have bonfires here,” Riot says. “Or a wedding. Or a séance.”

It’s a perfect little clearing with a serene, shallow creek and fallen logs arranged around the bank like seats. Except for a few crushed beer cans and some old yellow, white, and brown cigarette butts, there’s minimal litter around. While mostly they’re surrounded by conifers, there’s a cluster of winter-dead Japanese maple trees scattered down the hills that lead down there like a spiral staircase. The side of the clearing opposite the creek was blanketed almost completely by a romantic curtain of willow tree branches.

“I thought you’d like this place,” Jason tells her. “Because it looks like a fairy tale.”

They sit shoulder touching shoulder on a log and they stare at their reflections in the creek.

Riot pictures that sometime, far into the future when their hair has grown out to the point where they both look like fairy elves, she and Jason will wake up naked here: wake up to streams of warm sunlight beaming down and staining their skin. Jason’s and her body would be freckled with the shadows of swaying leaves.

With a sideways look at his stiff shoulders, and the fact that Riot thinks he’s like an android –always plugged in, she lets go of the image. It’s only a stray thought, unless she continues to think on it.

She sees their hands, right next to each other on the log. She starks picking away at the bark, peeling strips off the tree. She starts to hum Somewhere Only We Know, because it’s stuck in her head now. Jason turns to her and eyes her from the edge of a cold profile. She doesn’t notice, really, and keeps humming.

“What the hell are you singing?” he chuckles. “Shut up.”

She tells him the name of the song and shrugs, “I thought it was relevant.”

“That song is so gay,” Jason says.

“So’s your dad,” Riot retorts lazily. She doesn’t care that he’s politically incorrect, or at least she tries not to because she doesn’t want to get into another tedious argument with him.

“Hey, remember back before you two were dating?” Jason says. Riot remembers, of course, that there was such a time but she isn’t sure what he’s getting at. Maybe she doesn’t remember what he remembers.

“What about it?”

“Well, that’s when you and I met.” Jason continues.

“Yeah.”

“And me and Avery and you were always hanging out with Ryan LeBor?”

“That kid with the rat tail?” Riot asks, trying to recall his relevance.

“He told me you had a crush on me.”

“I never told him that,” Riot says with a shrug.

“But you told Lonnie, who he was friends with.”

“Oh yeah, I guess I did.”

“So?” Jason says.

“So… what? Why do you mention it?”

“So like, just a little bit before that, Avery had told me that he was going to ask you out.”

“Yeah?” Riot grins.

“I guess I thought you’d say no to him.”

“He was nice to me and you were mean to me,” Riot says, but it’s a poor explanation. It’s true, but it’s not the whole truth. Not really.

“Childhood romances are precarious, I guess,” Jason lights a cigarette, inhales, and then holds it stable in his hand. The smoke ascends through a thick layer of fog toward the similarly gray sky.

“All romances are precarious,” Riot argues. “Do you think I should’ve said no?”

“No… I was just thinking about it.”

Riot nods. Now she starts to reflect back to that time, even though she knows hindsight will give her a different perspective than anything she could’ve known at the time.

“Thinking about it how so?” she deflects.

“In the context of correlation, causation, and coincidence,” he doesn’t elaborate. She doubts he could.

“Well at the time, I thought Avery was out of my league. You know, he was my friend. He was a nice guy. We just got along really well. But you and I had this clash, this conflict. I wanted you to like me so much.”

Their serenity is broken, suddenly, by sounds of something wailing. Confused, Jason and Riot raise their heads and listen really hard. The wailing continues. Riot stands up first and Jason follows suit.

“Oh my god!” Riot exclaims. “I think that’s a kitty!”

The cat was probably fat at one point, given how long it’s body is. It has one eye, it is soaking wet, and upon closer inspection Jason sees that it’s covered in grotesque sores. One of its feet has been hacked off, and it has a messy stump that seems swollen, dirty, and potentially gangrenous. Kitty smells like mud and pus.

“Ugh,” Jason frowns. “Gimme your jacket.”

Riot takes off one of her layers, and hands it to Jason. He tentatively lifts up the cat and wraps it in Riot’s sweatshirt.

“We should take him somewhere warm,” Riot says. “At least until we can contact an animal shelter. Or a vet.”

“Your house?” Jason asks.

“Your house?” Riot asks.

“Mine?”

“Yours.”

Jason strokes the injured animal’s head, hoping to comfort it. It doesn’t struggle. Is it comfortable, now? Does it sense that it’s safe? Is it just too pained, too tired, to give a fuck what happens next?

Riot wants to pet it. Jason has it all to himself.

Jason gets home from the vet with his new cat. He spent the whole time texting back and forth with Riot, throwing around potential names for the thing.

Lately, Jason just feels hot. His blood boils under his skin. He feels the sort of quiet rage he feels when he’s drunk or when he’s losing at Halo 2. He normally laments over how numb, how cold he is. That’s the depression. But this isn’t happy, like when he’s on the other side. On the one hand, each day since Avery’s death is harder and harder.  On the other hand, Jason kind of likes the intensity of the emotions he’s feeling right now. At least it’s more cerebral than numbness.

He wonders, if he could see a graph of his moods if this would be a high point or a low point in its fluctuating peaks and valleys?

He feels heated when he’s alone, he feels heated around Riot. She makes the hairs of his arms stand on edge. She makes his knife wounds tingle, like they’re still healing.

Jason holds the injured animal to his too-hot skin.

Riot gives him these helpless looks sometimes. He wants to beat them off her face. He wants to shout at her, I Loved Him More Than You And My Loss Is A Greater Loss Than Yours.

When she scoffs at the things he says, when she’s just being a bitch, Jason wants to shout Why Do I Like You More Than You Like Me? But he doesn’t, because he’s not certain if that’s the case or not. His menacing mood swings at least have a biological explanation.

 Sometimes, when they watch TV together, Jason ponders whether or not it would be too hard or too easy to seduce her. He could just reach out and touch her. She’d probably respond.

He could get her. He could.

If he wanted to.

One thing he’s certain of is that Avery was balls deep in love with her. One thing he’s not certain of: if Riot felt quite the same way. And that’s the only variable that would even matter.

Thirty Eight

Jason says my name all the time. Like, all the time. My parents don’t call me by name unless they’re scolding me or referring to me to a friend. When my daddy is talking to me, he calls me Kiki, which was our old cats name. My mom calls me Possum Pie. I don’t think I call her anything, I just say something and she answers as if she’s who I’m addressing and sometimes she’s right and sometimes she isn’t.

        You would say my name infrequently—you saved it, precious, for special moments. You handled it carefully.

        Jason  and I read the same article in Psychology Today—or maybe it was a Cosmo or a Yahoo! News dating article—that said using someone’s name makes you more endearing to them. It was an article about getting what you want from people. I don’t know how to interpret the action when he does it. Is it to be endearing or manipulative?

        I guess its just weird to me that Jason plays so lax with my name. Somehow, when you died, I expected never to hear Riot again. Each time he says it, I feel invaded; manipulated.

        I feel uncomfortable calling people by name. It feels so personal. I called you Avery, sparingly, like your parents did and Jason did and everyone else did; mostly I called you Baby Love, which was special only to me. I called you by a million pet names over the years. I called you any number of pet names based on whatever I was thinking about at the time.

        In Scottish mythology- mythology concerning the Kingdoms of the Fey, to use someone’s given name is to control the very actions they take. I didn’t want to control you.

I called you Peaches, I called you ‘my hot Blonde Asian boy’ to my girlfriends before we were dating, I called you Pet when I wanted you to let me coddle you, I called you Baby with desperation in my voice when your fingers were teasing me somewhere else and I wanted them where they were supposed to be-- stroking me to finish.

        I called you Dodecahedron, Koala Bear, Sexy Bitch. I called you Patrick Star, I called you Doctor, I called you Thunder Boy, Kitty Kitty. I called you Fervor, Piglet, and Cloudling. You were Slut Monkey, you were Professor, you were Pharaoh, you were Chaos Theory, and you were Wiggum when you said something particularly dumb and adorable.

        I called you Ai Sama, Master Love, when you were irritable. I called you Captain, Angel, Doctor, Professor, or Lord depending on what show we were watching together at the time.

        When I was a feminist attacking the social messages of Disney movies, you called me Beauty and I called you Beast and I pretended that we’d have a happily ever after with some grotesque half beast children that I would feed raw meat and train with shock collars.

        When I was balls deep into High Fantasy, I called you Handsome Prince and you called me Queen Bee and you said you had a dream about me where I was a Drow maiden with black skin and white hair and you were a forest elf slave but you loved me and there were guns and cakes and a harp-man with a harpy hard-on.

        When we were writing a comic together, I called you Ace of Spades and you called me Six, like Six of Hearts and we never explained it to anyone.

        I called you Sensei and you called me Grasshopper. When the sex was vanilla, I pretended that you were my art teacher and I was your student and we weren't supposed to be doing this but we fell too hard for each other and you had to have me even though you'd lose your job.

        We were nerds with superpowers. I was Quantum Leap and you were The Mathemagician. I could teleport.

        You were every food, every sweet treat, every synonym for Darling.

        I was named I Love You and you were named I Love You Too.

        But saying Avery… that was saved for whispers, like “Shhh, Avery baby, it’ll be okay”, or “Ohmygod Avery harder”.

        You put all sorts of flowers in both of our hair. I pretended you were a merman.

        But I didn’t call you by the name on your birth certificate, which was Jun, which was such a perfect name. It either meant innocent and chaste or genius, depending on the character that was used, only I didn't ever know that.

        Because Riot was sacred, a prayer, an incantation, Avery was sacred too and Jun was therefore so sacred it was forbidden. Jason says that they threw it around at your funeral: Jun Sakamoto Jun Sakamoto, and no one said Avery.. it was like that whole part of you didn’t exist. 

        Sometimes—only sometimes way back when—you would say Riot outside of a certain context and I would fall so hard for you all over again.

        I remember. It was summertime and we spent the whole day in my back yard, soaking up sunlight and reading library books and tearing apart big crisp leaves and ripping up handfuls of mossy grass and watching the bugs crawl across each other’s skin, taking pride in how the other wouldn’t freak out because it was just a bug.

        And you said, “My God, Riot, just look at this,” and we were both so giddy, elated with the freedom afforded to adolescence, popping raspberries and malted milk balls into our mouths and kissing and giggling.

        Each name I called you had its own power over you. I called you Fairy King. I pretended you were a spell, you were glamoured human—maybe exiled, but maybe you just loved me enough to live the lie Ironside.

       

        I call Jason man, bro, and dude alternately. I call Jason by name when he calls me by name or when I’m trying to be poignant.

        “Riot, what are you doing?” he’ll ask me with disdain, for something totally innocuous. Something that does not call for First-Naming. I’ll reply, “Jason, I’m peeling this goddamn orange,” or whatever it is because it happens a lot.

        “Riot, you wanna go to Value Village? I want some sort of  80s tanktop, a UPS jacket, and a tacky wooden carving. A figurine like of a messy Geisha.”

        “Jason, put the knife down!”

        “Riot, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

        “Riot, I’m serious, don’t talk to that guy anymore.”

        “Riot, give me your phone. Who are you texting? Give it here!”

        “Riot, you can’t talk to these guys! What are you thinking?”

        “Riot! How can you be such a slut! Avery just died.”

        First Naming me like he even has the fucking right. But he’s right, right? I shouldn’t be so disrespectful. You deserve better from me. I’m disgusted with myself, twirling my hair when I talk to boys all flirty-like. It’s sick. I cut my bangs, first, uneven. Then I start chopping at the rest of my hair. Wild. Mad. I look at the mess I’ve made of myself.

         “Riot, shhh,” he leans and wipes something off my forehead. “Shh, I’m sorry. C’mere, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean whatever you think I meant.” He looks me over and he says he can fix it.

 

        “Riot, oh my god,” he chuckles and inhales really deep. His face says it all.  “You look so stupid with your hair like this,” he laughs cruelly.

        I am bald and he has just cut off all my hair.

        People who are mourning, they cut their hair.

        I was depressed because it was exactly a month ago today that you died, and I cut it bad. It is irreparable—patches against my scalp, long strands like I was literally a schizophrenic and my hair was some sort of painful delusion that I had to attack away. Jason cut his skin, I cut my hair and I did more lasting damage.

        Jason razors off the excess so it can grow out new.

        “When your hair is long, Riot Girl,” he takes my hands in his and strokes my skin. “When your hair is long again, that’s when you can be happy.”

        He tells me "it’s cute, you're like a blind mole rat." I recede into my sweatshirt hood and draw my knees upwards. I’m out of tears. But he knows I'm still pissed. Somehow he always knows.

        “Hey hey, shh, Riot. C’mon, I’m sorry. Seriously, you look fine. I still love ya, right? No one else matters.”

        Jason shaves off his head, too. The garbage can in my bedroom is tagged with grafitti from our Street Art phase, and now it is filled with so much black and brown hair.

        Jason looks beautiful and pure, like a monk. It isn’t fair. I look like a Cancer patient.

        I look decrepit,

        broken,

        like I am inside.

        I touch my fingers to his bronze temples. His hairless head is pale. I can feel the muscles there move as he swallows. I touch his throat and his collar bone, brushing off the hairs that cling there. I blow on them and watch bumps rise on his skin. It isn’t fair. He still looks like himself, but he looks stronger. I don’t even look like a person anymore.

        “You can tell people that you lost a bet,” Jason says with a shrug, noticing the way I avoid my own reflection but can’t seem to leave my head alone.

        My fingers go up to my head, instinctively. I can’t even twirl my hair. I pick at my skin instead. I bite all my fingernails and pick at my skin and scratch at my baldness and rip apart my cuticles with my teeth. I can’t twirl my hair and if you are looking down at me or up at me or out at my world from within my heart, you wouldn’t recognize me.

        I am marked, two dots by you, but I no longer look like the girl you took on dates to Tatami-filled sushi restaurants. I’m no longer the girl, wild and sexy, that took your virginity. I no longer look like the girl whose name you would whisper like a charm against my throat. I no longer look pretty or lovable. I am just a sad rat, a sad rat named Riot and no one calls me Baby Love anymore. No one calls me Beauty, Pixie or Six or Jane Lane or Buffy or Who like you did.

        My mom stops calling me Possum Pie, because she doesn’t want to compare me to a rodent, she doesn’t want to compare me to something that plays dead.

        She calls me Riot, in a gentle voice, a stern voice, a concerned voice, like I’m always in trouble.

        “Riot, you look fine,” she says, handing me the car keys so I can start unloading groceries.  I juggle bags filled with baguettes and produce and heavy cartons of milk and organic sweets. “You’re such a free spirit. I’ve always loved that about you. Not many girls your age would be willing to experiment with their look like that.”

        I don’t know how to explain that I am not a free-spirit. That I feel trapped, now. Bound, even. Cursed. I can’t be happy until this grows out. Jason said so.

        “Riot, I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Jason tells me.

        “I’ll be here,” I shrug. Bound. Trapped. Not your girl, anymore, Avery. Some weird new girl, fashioned and controlled and evolving next to this completely different person. This person who doesn’t know how to handle me. This Jason person, bald like me, who knows how I tick and how to control me but not how to care for me.

        “Riot, pick something to watch,” he says, and I do. I do everything he says.

        I call Jason by his first name, his given name. But I only call him by that one name. You had a million names, Avery, Baby Love. You were a million different things to me.