Jeremiah Quick

by SM Johnson

  "One more word and I'll gag you."

  Oh.

  She was surprised it would start like this. Somehow she thought there would be some kind of game –he would give her a… task? Assignment? With the threat of losing something or being punished if she didn't… complete, or pass, or learn. She didn't even know why she thought it would somehow be fair. Apparently she had some fantasy about what he wanted. Stupid. She didn't even know him. She hadn't known him well even back when they'd been friends.

  He drove along a faint track worn into the grass beside the house, around to the back. Set into the tree line, almost hidden, was a garage with an attached carport. He pulled beneath the carport, held one finger to his lips, and said, "Shhh. Now it starts. And this time we'll finish."

  He slid out of the car, pulling her with him, through a side door into the garage.

  It was dark.

  He stood behind her, the fingers of both hands curled around both her shoulders, holding her in place. "If you use your voice, you'll earn ten."

  Ten what? she almost asked, but didn't want to earn ten of something she didn't understand just yet.

  Was he a little bit evil? What if he was a lot of evil?

  She tried to remember. He'd always kept her off balance with his Otherness, but that was part of his appeal. Certainly he'd never physically hurt her. He'd never threatened her, or particularly frightened her, not on purpose.

  Of course, that was a long time ago.

  His Otherness was still part of the appeal.

  Why else would she have let Jeremiah Quick drive her away? She'd admired him, wanted to be like him. Had learned so much from him in a short time, and had never felt like they were done with each other. This felt like the last chance.

  His hands slid down her arms and then were gone. A soft light came on and illuminated a host of horrid things, a torture chamber, and Pretty gasped out loud, wondering for the first time, in all seriousness, if Jeremiah would kill her. If that's how this would end.

  She felt the blood drain from her face and head, racing to her legs and feet, readying her body to flee.

  Chains hung from the rafters, crude wooden structures leaned against the walls, a large upright, wooden X stood in the middle of the floor with straps and chains, a table, a bed… and gods, she couldn't even take it all in.

  "Jeremiah," she said, and couldn't continue, but turned her head to see him behind her. She didn't see any signs of violence, no blood spatters, no plastic sheeting. So… he wasn't exactly Dexter. She hoped.

  His grin was crooked. "That's ten."

  Her chin snapped up in shock, and she glared at him. She had forgotten, for one second, and now swore to herself she wouldn't speak to him again. Even if he wanted her to. Inside her head, but only inside her head, she stuck her tongue out at him.

  Hands on her shoulders again, turning her toward him, his hand coming into her view for a second, knuckles brushing along the flesh of her cheek. "Ahh, scared now. I kind of like that."

  She didn't know what to do. Some part of her wanted to bolt for the door, the car, her family. Home. Yet here she stood.

  There was this… something in her, a kernel, a hard seed… had always been in her, that wanted this descent into darkness. Craved it. Needed to let him do what he would do, because she deserved his scorn. She hadn't learned enough. He was disappointed.

  He was still touching her face, looking into her eyes. His were cold, serious, although now they looked beyond her, staring into space.

  "Once there was a beautiful boy," he said, his voice gently lyrical.

  And even though his eyes grew no less cold, she could now see pain in them.

  "This beautiful boy, the most beautiful boy in all the world, inherited a cabin in the woods. And he asked his lover for a playroom filled with deviant toys."

  He took his hand away from her face and made a gesture grand enough to encompass the whole space. "And I gave it to him. And we had fun here, oh, yes, we did. And now he's gone. And you're here, Sunshine Girl, just in time."

  Oddly enough, his little story made her feel better.

  He undressed her here as carefully as he had in her kitchen. She moved her limbs as he instructed her to, shivered as her skin was exposed to the air, his eyes. Her body had given birth three times, had fed three babies for a year each. It wasn't ugly, but it wasn't perfect, and she refused to let herself feel embarrassment or shame for her physical self. And still, fear lodged in her throat, and pride, and a sort of desperation to behave, to impress him somehow. As if being what he wanted her to be, right here, right now, could fix him in some way.

  He walked her past the St. Andrew's Cross, the table, and the bed with its plastic mattress.

  Pulled her over to a large cage tucked into a corner.

  A cage.

  It was maybe four feet square, wire on all six sides. It had a hasp-style lock and a padlock, which he opened with a key from his pocket.

  "In," he said, and it was an order.

  Pretty balked, for a second, not because she was claustrophobic or anything, but merely because she didn’t want to be locked into a cage.

  “Don’t make me force you,” he said, and she didn’t know if it was a threat or an apology.

  He took a step that had him looming into her space, which felt exactly like a threat, so she crouched, stumbled, and then she was falling in. The metal bars of the cage bottom bit her knees when she landed. She let out a gasp and an audible squeak, but he didn't comment on either.

  The cage door slammed.

  The lock clicked.

  He squatted and looked in at her. "Do what I say when I say it. Don't think about it. Don't wonder if you should or shouldn't or if it's a good idea. Just do. And this thing we’re doing will go just fine."

  He left her.

  He left her for hours and hours, for longer than it took for her to need to pee, and then for longer than she could hold it.

  There was a heat source somewhere, because she wasn’t cold, but there was no comfortable position because the cage bars didn't allow for comfort. She dozed for short periods, and dreamed, except it wasn’t dreaming, it was remembering… remembering Jeremiah Quick, before, and how she came to love him.

  Chapter 4

  High school was a compilation of students from too many parts of the city. Jeremiah's friend, Chill, was in a class with one of Pretty's girlfriends, and she couldn't remember the hows or whys of the introductions, only that they happened in the first few days.

  Jeremiah was like no person she'd ever seen before in her life.

  He looked like, well, she didn't even have anyone to compare him to. He was thin and stretched tall, all long limbs, long black hair and brittle fuck-you eyes. He listened to Bauhaus and the Sex Pistols, idolized Sid Vicious, who, honestly, Pretty had never heard of. He was odd from head to toe, really. His feet encased daily in knee-high, steel-toed boots, black, that zipped up the back, twenty years before they would become a mainstream fashion statement.

  Only the misfits wore dramatic things like that.

  His leather jacket was the standard motorcycle variety, heavy, purchased from a thrift store, and supple after years of wear.

  He'd customized it, adding a British flag to the back, secured to the leather with silver safety pins and riveted chrome spikes. A hundred or more of the spikes dotted the jacket, covering the shoulders, sleeves, front and back of the thing. If ever something screamed keep your distance, it was that jacket.

  It wasn't Goth back in nineteen-eighty-nine, not in their conservative town. Nearest thing was punk underground. It was – from what she gathered from Jeremiah – anarchist, anti-Christian, political, and angry. At school, "punk" somehow equaled "freak", and Jeremiah got hassled something fierce. Punched, kicked, rolled into snowbanks. Often right in front of other students. In front of Pretty.

  Maybe Pretty should have been afraid of him, but she wasn't. She was fascinated.

  The urge to get close to him, the longing f
or him to see her, was irresistible.

  His friend Chill was... well. Chill was different.

  He was a quiet guy, soft-spoken, highly intellectual, probably genius actually – and had, in an Egyptian mourning ritual, shaved his eyebrows off. It was a thing, at school, that earned him all kinds of derision and harassment, although Pretty could never figure out why so many people gave a fuck about Chill's eyebrows. Perhaps just because he was weird – his olive green flak jacket, his lack of speech, his whole persona a lurking sense of strange.

  Later he would write her long, rambling letters from college that she would read as fast as she could, frantic for news of Jeremiah. She never knew Chill well, though, and when the letters started sounding depressed, she stopped replying.

  There were things she didn't want to know or take responsibility for. And yeah, how to save a life, and all that, but even if it made her a total asshole, Chill drained her emotional reserves, writing to her as if they'd shared some magic moment by the bonfire… as if the feeling was mutual, when it wasn't. And he'd never had any real news about Jeremiah.

  She hoped he hadn't done anything awful. She'd never looked for him. The fact that he was laying his depressed shit on her, who didn't particularly even know him, was a tremendous burden. There was a saying that that once you've saved a life, you're responsible for that life forever. Well, she didn't want any part of that, didn't want to earn Chill's undying gratitude. The fact of the matter was that even though Chill was always around, he didn't talk. So the most Pretty knew of him was from his piteous, whining letters, and by then she was too damaged to respond.

  All she ever wanted from Chill was some link, however weak, to Jeremiah.

  Jeremiah's dyed-black hair went past his shoulders and was, technically, a Mohawk, but Pretty didn't know that until Halloween, when he spent his sleeping hours making it stand up in eight inch spikes.

  Pretty and her friends were shiny-faced tenth graders, new to the school, while Jeremiah and Chill were seniors. It might have given Pretty and Co. status, except Jeremiah and Chill were outcasts.

  They were so interesting it made Pretty want to be an outcast, too.

  When schedules got smoothed out, Pretty didn't have a single friend who shared her lunch period. Except Jeremiah.

  So she offered him little rectangles of chocolate, and he took them.

  Bait.

  Jeremiah was so polar opposite of every other person in her whole world that Pretty couldn't stay away. Even when he was mean to her.

  "Why are you here?" he asked the first day, baffled or irritated that she followed wherever he went.

  "I don't know anyone else," she answered.

  "You don't know me, either."

  "But I will," she'd said, ever the optimist, although she understood his "ha" in response was not intended to be funny.

  In the mornings before school, and during break time, he stayed as far away from her as he could, while still behind the red smoking line. Red-liners, they were called, the people with cigarettes, trapped behind the wide line painted on the black pavement. It was laughable, but surely better than the tobacco-free schools of now. Jeremiah's friend Chill made eyes at one of Pretty's friends, and so in between his infatuation with that girl, and Pretty's infatuation with Jeremiah, the group just… kind of drifted around them.

  Jeremiah didn't join Pretty's group of friends so much as he was enfolded.

  And Pretty didn't make friends with Jeremiah so much as she forced him to be her friend. He wasn't always mean, so there was something about her that he couldn’t stay away from either, even if he wasn't about to admit it.

  Pretty spent her lunch money on cigarettes and bought Hershey bars from the vending machine for lunch. A peace offering. Just one candy bar, for the two of them to share. She'd open it and break up the rectangles, doling them out one piece at a time, one for him, one for herself. Nothing so simple as halving the damn thing at the outset, no, and she wasn't even sure why. They ate the small pieces slowly, letting them melt away in their mouths, maybe because it was easier than talking. Once in a while, she'd break the last neat rectangle in half, offer it to him, and they'd quibble over who should eat the larger of two tiny pieces.

  Every day, one Hershey bar.

  Until the day she didn't bring one, because she thought the candy bar didn't matter. Thought they were friends without sweet treats.

  His facial expression fell into sheer disappointment, as if she'd ruined his birthday.

  She never let it happen again.

  She thought maybe he didn't eat lunch because he couldn't afford lunch.

  She tried to buy him food from the school cafeteria, once, but he was angry or hurt or insulted and disappeared for the rest of the day, so she never made that offer again. But perhaps she should have brought him sandwiches.

  The bars of the cage press into her flesh, and it makes her lie first on one side, then the other… but no effort to get comfortable results in actual comfort.

  Her skin remembers, has always remembered, the feel of the spikes on his jacket pressing and poking into her. November. Homecoming. Skip the game, skip the dance, get drunk in someone's yard and walk to the victory bonfire.

  She must've been at her most sparkly that night, because her best friend's ex-boyfriend, who was so much taller than her that the idea of dating him was ludicrous – asked her out. Chill said she was pretty. Jeremiah kissed her.

  It was the strangest night of her life. She'd never before been the girl they all wanted.

  She didn't remember the exact rules of the game they played, kind of flashlight tag with a twist. Whoever was "it" slammed a tumbler full of hard liquor and fled into the woods behind the house. It wasn't a forest or anything, just green space in the city, in the middle of a neighborhood with no real way to get lost. The others would come crashing through the underbrush and bushes, and the "it" person could surrender by taking a drink of straight Peppermint Schnapps from a canteen, or keep running until they were caught and physically subdued. Then the whole crew would return to base and pick the next person to be "it." The girls were outnumbered. It was... hide and seek with an exciting element of possible date rape.

  When Jeremiah was "it" he went into the woods, and the rest counted to fifty and then were off, but Pretty tripped and fell, and spent a few moments rubbing her ankle, so she ended up behind everyone else, walking gingerly into the woods alone.

  Two steps into the woods, she heard his hissing whisper: "Sunshine Girl..."

  He was only a few feet away, standing behind the weeps of a willow tree, the unlit cigarette at his lips bright white in the dusk. "I'm supposed to subdue you," Pretty said, and he made a weird noise, something between a cough and a laugh, and took her hand. He led her around the tree, and out the other side, to what pretended to be a proper trail, branches snapping and grabbing at their clothing.

  A small clearing, then, and somehow Jeremiah's arm around her, pulling her to the ground, jerking her brown bomber jacket off. A hand sliding under her shirt and over her ribs. His weight heavy on top of her, the jacket spikes biting, a hundred pressure-points dimpling the memory into her flesh.

  She can taste the fall air in the memory, the sharp but lovely smell of woodstove and bonfire. A Jeremiah smell.

  She remembers… his mouth against her lower jaw, teeth pressing in firmly, testing, before his lips found hers, his tongue surprisingly cool in her mouth.

  Still remembers the awkward crush of the thick leather between them, a feeling like claustrophobia, a moment of pure physical discomfort and wanting to get away.

  But his mouth – and those spikes – they were delicious.

  And before the kiss could be savored, there was a crashing through the bushes, and flashlight beams spiking the dark, and exclamations of Hey! Are they really doing it? Giggles and more crashing around.

  "Quick!" He said (Yes, he really did say that, but the comedy here is not unintentional). "Light a cigarette. Everybody smokes after sex."
>
  And then she and Jeremiah were giggling, too, and running away from the flashlights, until they pushed through a hedge-line and found themselves on a root-heaved sidewalk.

  And then they walked, choosing steps carefully, the flat of a foot against a crooked angle of pavement, stepping over roots and across cracks that had widened into fissures that could turn an ankle. He took her hand as if to help her balance.

  They walked. Hands linked, fingers folded together, companionable.

  Pretty wondered if this was to be her next thing, and knew her parents would flip right the fuck out. Like Judd Nelson playing John Bender in the Breakfast Club and how outstanding he would be for getting back at Claire's parents. Jeremiah was so anti everything normal, and her folks were so attached to the appearance of propriety… just the thought of the three of them interacting made the hair on her arms stand up in nervous anticipation.

  Anyway.

  They rounded the corner, and there was a huge old oak tree grown up in the median between the sidewalk and the street, and its massive, gnarled roots had burst through the sidewalk.

  Jeremiah sat down against the massive trunk, hips cradled by those roots on either side. He pulled Pretty down, maneuvered her so she was sitting between his outstretched legs, and wrapped his arms around her belly, resting his chin in the hollow between her neck and shoulder.

  "There are three important people in my life," he mused, rocking his chin a little bit, causing a flare of nerves in the space just above her collar bone.

  "One saved my life, and I will never be able to repay her. Another holds my heart in his hands, and the moment I find him, I will take it back, and punish him soundly for stealing it. And then there's you, you with your bright light shining on all my Dark, smiling at me like everything's going to be okay. I have no idea where to fit you in."

  The answer was, of course, that she wouldn't fit in his world anymore than he fit into hers.