The Second Coming

by J. Fritschi

  “Who wants to go first?” She asked in a soft, southern accent and seductive raise of her pierced eye brow.

  “Go ahead,” Chris encouraged her politely with a nod of his head. “Ladies first.”

  Jenny took a deep breath and exhaled as she readied herself and then leaned her platinum covered head over the stripes of cocaine. She lined one end of a rolled up $5 bill at the tip of a line and stuck the other end decisively up her nostril as she inhaled the white powder deliberately with a suction sound like a vacuum. She raised her head and threw it back as she pinched her nose closed in an effort not to allow any of the intoxicating powder to escape her now burning nostril. Her eyes watered as the numbing chemicals dripped pleasingly down her throat. Blindly, she held the bill out across the bar and Chris grabbed it and eagerly repeated the process with the same results, handing the make shift straw to Mark who inhaled his line and then let out an audible sigh of relief.

  A moment of silence followed as they tweaked their noses and took hard swallows of their beers as the rush of cocaine seized a tightening grip on their hearts.

  “That’s good shit,” Chris said appreciatively with a voice that sounded like he was holding his breath.

  Jenny smiled proudly in agreement, her young angelic face littered with silver piercings that stood out against her black eyeliner and lipstick as she sipped from her pint glass.

  “No shit,” Mark said impressed with blinking, squinty eyes. “Thanks Jenny.”

  “You’re welcome darling,” she replied with a sassy, country twang in her voice.

  Jenny moved the mirror with the pile of cocaine behind the bar and the three kids resumed their game of liar’s dice as they smoked cigarettes and drank pints of beer incessantly.

  Eventually the conversation turned to their youths and Jenny’s mood quickly changed from enthusiastic to somber.

  “Where did you go to high school?” Mark asked curious about her accent.

  “Dallas, Texas,” Jenny answered matter-of-factly as she crossed her left arm over her Motor head t-shirt, using her hand to support her right arm at the elbow as she held the cigarette to her thin lips and took a deep drag with a slightly trembling hand.

  “I knew your accent was from Texas,” Mark exclaimed unconvincingly.

  “How did you end up out here?” Chris asked sensing her apprehension.

  Jenny stood with a stern glare as she smoked and fiddled with her cigarette. “It started when I was a freshman in high school. One of the mother’s of one of the girls trying out for cheerleading started a rumor that I was doing drugs and hanging out with a bad crowd because I was friendly with a girl who dressed differently than all of the preppie cheerleaders.” She paused and took another drag from her cigarette. “She knew I was a better cheerleader than her daughter and she figured her daughter would have a better chance of making the squad if I was out of the way. The next thing I knew, I was being black listed by all of the mothers of the girls trying out for cheerleading.”

  “She made all of that shit up just so her daughter could be a cheerleader?” Chris asked with disbelief.

  “None of it was true?” Mark asked skeptically. “You weren’t doing any drugs?”

  Jenny shot him a tight lipped look of disdain. “No,” she replied emphatically.

  “Why didn’t you tell someone that it was all bullshit?” Chris asked as he leaned his elbows on the bar.

  “That’s what my best friend Amy told me to do, but I was already so bitter about how these shallow people had so easily cast me aside for no reason other than their own petty prejudices that I told her it wasn’t worth it. I didn’t want to spend my High School years worrying about what people were saying about me or having to defend myself because of who I was hanging out with or what we were wearing. Why should I have to justify myself when I didn’t do anything wrong except not conform to their rules? I despised their ignorance and their superficial attitudes and I wanted them all to know that I didn’t need their approval or acceptance to enjoy my life.”

  “Fuck no you don’t!” Mark agreed angrily as he slammed his glass on the bar. “I know exactly what you are talking about. I hate people like that.”

  “We’ve all had to deal with fuck-heads like them at some point in our life,” Chris acknowledged regretfully.

  “Yeah, but you shouldn’t be subjected to that when you’re just a kid,” Mark reminded him as he sat erect on his stool with an air of disbelief as he firmly gripped his pint glass.

  Jenny looked at Mark with a smile of appreciation as she put her cigarette out in the ash tray. “That’s when I decided that if they were going to black list me, then I was going to dress in black every day as reminder to them that this is what they wanted me to be,” she explained with a mischievous grin. “Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t feel sorry for myself; I did it because it empowered me. I enjoyed sticking my finger in their face and telling them to fuck off.”

  “You fuckin’ rock Jenny,” Mark said fervently as he wagged his index finger at her.

  “That took a lot of balls,” Chris agreed with a nod of his head.

  “I started hanging out with the kids that dressed in dark clothes and listened to dark music and found that they were really smart and dressed the way they did as a form of rebellion. They weren’t bad kids at all. They were just misunderstood and trying to establish their own independence.” And then a dark sneer came across her lips. “My old cheerleading friends made fun of me and my new friends. Amy, my best friend on the cheerleading squad, tried to convince me to come back and try out for cheerleading again the following year, but by then I despised everything the cheerleaders represented and I told her that she needed to reevaluate who she called a friend and what that word really meant to her. We never spoke again.”

  “Was that because she didn’t want to talk to you or you didn’t want to talk to her?” Chris asked

  “It was because she was murdered,” Jenny said calmly as she grabbed a cigarette from the pack on the bar and lit it. “Everyone thought I did it,” she said as she exhaled casually.

  “Why did they think you did it?” Mark asked confused.

  Chris glared at Mark with disgust and then back to Jenny with compassion. “Did they have any proof or evidence that you did it?”

  “No, they didn’t have any fucking proof,” Jenny told him with an annoyed tone. “They just needed a convenient scapegoat to pin it on and I was the most obvious.”

  “How was she murdered?” Mark asked.

  “She was stabbed multiple times with a large carving knife,” Jenny said plainly and then took a drag from her cigarette with a trembling hand and lips.

  “Why did they think you did it?” Chris asked indignantly.

  “They said that the killer picked Amy up to take her to a party, so the killer must have known Amy and had to have a motive, which they argued I had both. The police said that Amy would have got in the car with me because of our prior friendship and that I wanted to kill her because I was jealous of her.”

  “What did they think happened after Amy got in the car with you?” Chris asked with discerning eyes as he tried to piece the whole scenario together.

  “They said that I told her that we were meeting people in this church parking lot to go to a party with them and then I parked the car so that I could confront her about abandoning me as a friend. Supposedly Amy became uncomfortable and felt threatened, so she got out of the car and ran to a neighbor’s house to ask if she could use their phone to call her parents because, she tells the couple, her friend is ‘acting weird’.”

  “So the neighbor’s testimony is how the police came up with that theory,” Mark said as he rubbed his chin with his right hand.

  “Amy obviously didn’t tell the neighbors who the friend was that was driving the car,” Chris postulated.

  “Evidently Amy didn’t think she was going to be killed,” Jenny continued as if she had relived the story many times in her head. “The neighbors even offered to driv
e her home, but she declined after she spoke with her parents who were coming to get her.”

  “Didn’t she tell her parents who the friend driving the car was?” Chris asked confused.

  “She didn’t think anything of it and just asked them to pick her up at the address of the house next to the church,” Jenny explained. “The neighbors were having a dinner party and Amy told them she would just wait for her parents outside, not wanting to be a disturbance.”

  “What the fuck did she do that for?” Mark asked incredulously.

  “Dude, Amy didn’t think her friend was going to kill her,” Chris explained perturbed with his stupidity. “She just thought her friend was acting weird.”

  “Exactly,” Jenny confirmed pointing at Chris with her cigarette clinched between her first two fingers. “As Amy waited for her parents out on the front porch, the couple who owned the house watched from their kitchen window as her friend approached from the darkness of the street into the shadows of the front lawn. The couple couldn’t see her face, but they later testified that she had long blonde hair. The couple could hear the muffled voices of the two girls talking and watched as Amy walked into the shadow of the front lawn and approached her friend. At first the couple thought they were reconciling, but then they heard their muffled voices turn to angry shouts and they watched in disbelief as they saw the glimmer of the blade as the girlfriend began to mercilessly stab Amy.”

  “Holy shit,” Chris whispered with bulging eyes as if he just witnessed the whole thing.

  “That is un-fucking-believable,” Mark said.

  “The husband rushed out to save Amy as his wife dialed 911 and as he held Amy bleeding to death in his arms, he watched in shock as the friend’s car went speeding off in the darkness.”

  “Did he see what kind of car it was?” Chris asked riveted with shrugged shoulders as he held his hands out, palms up, as though he was balancing the pros and cons of his question.

  “Not only did he see what kind of car it was, but at that moment, as he held Amy dying in his arms, Amy’s parents came driving down the street and were almost run off the road by the killer’s car.”

  “So her parents saw the killer’s car too,” Mark said proudly.

  “I’m guessing it was the same type of car you drove,” Chris deduced with a knowing nod of his head. “The police made you their prime suspect because you had blonde hair, drove the same type of car and were jealous of Amy’s popularity.”

  Amy nodded silently in between drags of her smoldering cigarette. “The cheerleaders at school started whispering to each other and glaring at me,” Jenny recalled with a look of distress in her distant eyes. “After a couple of days of spreading rumors, kids started calling me a murderer and throwing stuff at me. It was a total mob mentality and I was told to go home by the principal for fear of my safety. But it didn’t stop there. People called our house with death threats and vandalized our home. It was a really scary, horrible thing to go through,” she said with wide unblinking eyes as smoke from her cigarette trailed off from her hand. “The community as a whole didn’t want to hear that my Jetta was a dark color when the witnesses said the killer’s car was a light colored Jetta and that the husband said the killer had long blonde hair and I had short platinum hair. They just wanted someone to blame and who better than the jealous ‘loser’ friend,” she said signing quotations with her hands. “They all said I did it because I didn’t become a popular cheerleader like Amy did. What they failed to realize was that I didn’t want to be like every other little miss sunshine, preppie bitch cheerleader. I didn’t blame Amy for who I was. It was my choice.”

  “What did your parents do?” Mark asked concerned.

  “They tried to protect me, but there was no way to stop everyone from convicting me in the court of public opinion. Our attorney told us that we should move away until the police were ready to press charges, so we moved to the Bay Area. That’s when my mom became the motherly caretaker, constantly worrying about me and telling me everything was going to be alright and my dad became angry and drank a lot. I could hear him in his study on the phone, cussing and threatening to sue everyone, but after a few weeks, when he realized there was nothing more he could do to protect his little girl, his study fell silent.” She exhaled a cloud of smoke. “There were no more phone calls, no more swearing. The only sounds were the TV and his feet shuffling on the hardwood floors as he smoked and drank himself numb. One night I went to say goodnight to him and I was about to knock on the study door when I heard him sobbing.” Jenny stopped as black tears ran down her face. Her chin quivered as she sniffled. “My dad is a big, strong, Texas man and I had never heard him cry before, but the fact that there was nothing he could do to stop what was happening to me made him feel helpless and in his mind, worthless as a father. It broke my dad and he aged 25 years in those first two months,” she said with a trembling voice as she wiped her tears and then took a gulp from her beer as she composed herself. “The morning after I heard him sobbing in his study, I came down to the kitchen wearing faded jeans with a white t-shirt and no makeup or any of my piercings. I wanted to show him I would do anything for him as well. When he asked me why I was dressed like that, I just shrugged my shoulders and he knew what I was doing. ‘Fuck that.’ He told me in a loving tone. ‘You be who you want to be, not who they want you to be.’ And then he walked over and gave me a big hug and for the first time since it all started I felt safe,” she explained with a glowing face. “He looked down at me with eyes of admiration and said, ‘I know what you’re trying to do and I appreciate your concern, but I love you because of the way you are. Don’t be something you’re not. Be strong for me.’” Jenny paused and reflected. “It had broken him, but he didn’t want it to break me. That was the only way he knew how to protect me; just by being there for me and not letting it break me.”

  Mark and Chris’ eyes were watering as they drank from their pint glasses trying to hold it together.

  “Your dad sounds like an awesome guy,” Chris said with a splintered voice.

  “Yeah, he is,” Jenny agreed with a smile.

  “Did the police ever press charges against you?” Mark asked despondently.

  “They didn’t have any evidence against me,” she reminded Mark as she filled her glass under the beer tap. “There was nothing they could do.”

  “Did they ever find the killer?” Chris asked intrigued.

  “It turned out that the police were right,” Jenny explained coyly as she reached across the bar and grabbed Chris’ glass and began to fill it up. “The killer was someone Amy knew that was jealous of her. It just wasn’t me.”

  “Who was it?” Mark asked impatiently.

  “It was Deidra, the girl whose mother spread the rumors about me so that I would get black listed from cheerleading,” Jenny said with a sinister smile of satisfaction as she filled up Mark’s glass with dark foaming beer. “Deidra’s mom put so much pressure on her to be better than the other cheerleaders that she snapped. She couldn’t handle her feelings of inferiority and resented Amy for being better than she was so she stabbed her with the family Thanksgiving carving knife.”

  “That fucking bitch!” Mark said passionately.

  “How did they catch her?” Chris inquired earnestly.

  “A few months after the murder, a boy at school noticed that someone had written ‘I killed Amy’ on the desk he was sitting at,” Jenny recalled with amazement. “He thought someone with bad taste wrote it as a joke, but showed it to the teacher who reported it to the police. The police interviewed every kid that sat at that desk each period and when they interrogated Deidra, the stupid bitch confessed. She couldn’t handle the pressure of listening to people talk about the murders every day knowing that she did it.”

  “It almost sounds like she wanted to get caught,” Mark replied with disbelief as he lifted his full glass of beer to his lips and took a large gulp.

  “What happened to her?” Chris inquired through clenched teeth
as he lit a cigarette.

  “Because she was under the age of sixteen she couldn’t be convicted as an adult. She could only be held in a minimum security prison until she is 25.”

  “When will that be?” Mark asked appalled.

  “In about two years,” Jenny replied.

  “What about you?” Chris asked. “Did anyone ever call and apologize to you?”

  “The police contacted us through our attorney and apologized for the inconvenience,” she said under her breath with disgust. “Can you believe they referred to us being run out of town as an inconvenience?”

  “Didn’t you want to go back and...”

  Jenny cut Chris off harshly. “And what?” she asked perturbed. “Tell them all ‘I told you so’ and expect them to welcome me back with open arms? They didn’t give a shit about me to begin with. Nothing would have changed. They would have still judged me because of the way I dressed and the friends I had.” And then she said something that was disturbing to both of the young men. “They were all such bitches. I wish I had killed her.” Jenny saw the look of shock in the boys’ eyes and realized how she sounded. “Not Amy you stupid fucks. I mean Deidra. Then Amy would still be alive.” She put her cigarette out and took a sip of beer. “You know the thing that really gets me is all the families that have had their lives turned upside down by Deidra’s callous act of jealousy. Amy’s family, my family, the family of the people who owned the house where it happened, the guy that held Amy in his arms as she died, the dinner guest at the house, all of Amy’s friends and even Deidra’s family.” She paused and took a deep breath. “I know that it is the hardest on Amy’s family and I feel terrible for them. They are such nice people. I can’t imagine what they’ve been through.” Jenny paused as her eyes welled with tears. “I’ve thought about reaching out to them, but I wouldn’t know what to say. The last time I talked to them I was thirteen years old, but I feel like we have this sad connection and maybe something positive could come of it.”