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.