Jeremiah Quick

by SM Johnson

  A week or so before Jeremiah left, Drew arrived.

  It was the middle of May.

  Drew was delicate yet sinewy, dark, and gentle. And filled with more pain than Pretty had ever seen in one being, including Jeremiah. Unless it was just that Drew made no effort to hide his pain behind anything other than pain.

  Jeremiah had cynicism, anger, and what he called Punk Underground, which offered him a sense of activism and belonging to something bigger than himself. The "Punk Movement" that embraced and enforced his personal belief system. It was Jeremiah, oddly enough, the most isolated and angriest person Pretty knew, who seemed more able than the rest of them to cast clear eyes toward the future.

  Drew was nothing like Jeremiah. He was… the walking wounded. He had collar-length brown hair that whisked out at the ends, and deep, dark brown eyes almost liquid with concern and sympathy. He positively bled love for his friends, male and female. He was the new arrival, and Jeremiah made no secret that he was leaving, and somehow the group, Pretty's group, pulled Drew in and shut Jeremiah out. It didn't seem to have intent, more... self-protection. Or maybe it was because Jeremiah was incomprehensible to them.

  Whatever it was, by springtime Pretty found herself standing on the periphery with Jeremiah and Chill, knowing that all too soon they'd be gone and she would be alone.

  It happened sooner than she expected.

  She thought she'd have Jeremiah until sometime after graduation, but he left two weeks before, not even sticking around to help finish the mural they'd been working on in seventh period all semester, dressing up the new weight room with painted superheroes.

  Pretty's group of friends closed around Drew.

  The seniors, including Chill, graduated, and Pretty's sophomore year of high school was over.

  The whole year had been Jeremiah, Jeremiah, Jeremiah, to the exclusion of others. Pretty always clutching, and Jeremiah always leaving. The definition of their whole relationship.

  An endless summer, a new academic year.

  Jeremiah was still gone, and Pretty expected he would be forever. She still saw him in the spaces of the schoolyard, the wall he'd preferred to lean against, the nervous and near-constant movement of his fingers hooking around his hair. So beautiful. So alone.

  She didn’t know what Jeremiah expected to find, away from here, but hoped it was some sort of peace. The empty knot where no information resided troubled her.

  And now, it seemed, she was the outcast.

  She leaned against Jeremiah's wall and surveyed the red line and the people behind it.

  The friendly bouncer who acted like everyone's mother and made sure smokers stayed behind the red line had returned, a familiar face in a sea of incomprehensibility. Swirling colors, giggles and greetings, raucous back claps, and loud hellos.

  Her old group gathered, with Drew at the center, and she watched them. He was beautiful. Ethereal. She could see that they were enamored of him. And she could see, by the proximity of their shoulders and the length of their glances, that he'd been sleeping with one of Pretty's best girlfriends. An interesting development.

  She supposed she should re-insert herself, or it would be a boring year. Perhaps she should have Drew; the days were so much better with someone to look forward to.

  It didn't take much. She wandered into the group, said the right greetings, smiled into Drew's eyes, let her face crumple, let a tear fall. "It's just not right for me without Jeremiah."

  All sympathy and cluck-clucks. "Oh, sweetie, I know. Keith and Jason and Robert, too – they're all gone, don't you see?"

  An inward smile. Yes, they would have her back.

  She would never really be back in, however, though perhaps she didn't know it at the time. She was changed, too learned to buy into the group mind, too stubborn to be a follower, yet still not brave or strong enough to lead. She would learn to put on camouflage, smile appropriately, put on all the good and pretty manners her mother taught her. Pretend to be normal, though she knew it wasn't true.

  She was twisted, bent out of shape, looking beyond the surface at everything now, asking, "Who benefits? Who?"

  No more blind believer. Not Pretty.

  So it was she hated each of them, just a little. The girl who taught herself to faint. The one who already hid alcohol in shampoo bottles like a closet alcoholic. The one who liked everyone to think she was a witch, in an attempt to be more spooky than the rest.

  Pretty wanted real, even then.

  She wanted Jeremiah. And he was gone.

  Just once, she snuck into the weight room, to lay her head and hands on the superhero mural, to see the evidence that they had, indeed, been there together, that it hadn't been a dream.

  It took her almost twenty minutes to find the secret pentagram, the words fuck this noise, her own initials. Jeremiah's initials had been scratched away with a ball-point pen that gouged the plaster. The words I was never here printed in tiny, even letters underneath.

  Oh, yes, they'd been there. Together.

  Pretty wrote more and more poetry, terrible and trite adolescent verse, begging Jeremiah to come back, drowning in her longing for more than… this.

  Drew watched her sadness. Once he hugged her, a quiet, firm press of his body against hers, the wrap of his arms almost the sound of solace. Gentle, his heart against hers, infused with sympathy, empathy. They stood cheek-to-cheek, and he was so comforting that he filled her up for long minutes. It was the way he held her, wrapped just right, the way he smelled, like clean rain, or melting ice, the safest place in the world.

  Drew woke her up, convinced her to allow her heart to feel again.

  Pretty's heart sang to see him in the morning. Everything about him was balm… his smile, his eyes, even his sad.

  He soothed her more than anyone else could, because he was drowning right there in front of her, and so transparent that Pretty could drown, too.

  They could do it together.

  Drew had a dead mother, a dead brother, and an alcoholic father prone to drunken rages. He had more pain than Pretty could wrap her head around. Foster care was his haven, but his father wanted him home.

  The days marched on.

  In October, the judge sent Drew home.

  Two days later, bam, he was gone.

  Gun to the head.

  Jeremiah sent a sheet of acid, three dollars a hit, that looked like art, a pencil drawing. Three dollars to the spooky girl for a tiny tab of paper that Pretty slipped under her tongue on a Monday morning.

  Did she think taking Jeremiah's drugs would make him feel closer? Did she think she could understand him better, commune with his spirit somehow?

  Eh. Probably more spiteful than that. Probably she knew he would hate the idea that she took his drugs. C'est la vie.

  Letters from Chill kept coming.

  The acid-laced paper floated under Pretty's tongue.

  Jeremiah was gone.

  Drew was dead.

  Snakes writhed in the lines of her hands.

  All of Drew's seeming transparency was a lie. He had three lives, at least, all hidden, one from the other. No less than three current girlfriends grieved at his funeral, one from each high school in the city. Dozens of people considered him the center of their social group.

  Drew in a casket. His head wrapped in bandages, and when she looked close enough, Pretty could see the corners of his lips were split. She wanted to touch him one last time, but couldn't make herself do it. It was too much, too scary, too gone.

  Horror was floating, and hysteria, just beneath the surface of her I can handle it face.

  Acid took all of that away, made her laugh out loud in math class, made her see funky colored cloud trails across her field of vision. It put a safe and hazy distance between herself and everyone else, like nitrous oxide, almost, numbed to the realness of this shitty place called earth.

  She never touched the drug again. She didn't dare.

  After that it was all fake smiles and poetry, a friend or t
wo to tell stories to, and that series of pathetic boys who would never know her, never love her, never care.

  Chapter 12

  The door opening, and Jeremiah's hands stroking her back, her hair, and again she cried tears for his tenderness. And again he wrenched her head back and ate them, before leaving ten stripes of pain across her buttocks. Yes, Jeremiah, punish me. I deserve it. Oh, you don't even know how I deserve it.

  Chocolate again.

  More water.

  More alone.

  More silence.

  This couldn't go on. She would fucking lose it.

  His silence was killing her.

  She would go crazy without noise. She didn't want to remember these things, these hurts, these losses.

  Sulking in the car with Drew – sad, sad Drew, who was slipping further and further away. Come back, please. I can fix you. I can love you enough to fix you. I promise.

  But like the birds of her childhood – the fucking fragile baby birds she killed over and over again trying to save– she was wrong.

  She slammed her head against the shit-brown plastic mattress, wishing Jeremiah had tied her to the table. Fuck. Fuck. Wanted to slam, to feel the thud, the hurt wash over her, into her – hurt, hurt for Drew, for the birds, for the fucking bitch in college who broke her heart and killed her.

  I want a lover I don't have to love. The band called Bright Eyes. The metallic notes clanged in her head, one, two, three, four, ding, ding, ding, ding… you write such pretty words…

  Oh, Jeremiah, don't make me relive it, any of it. Please.

  That bitch in college, Laughing Girl. Fuck. Pretty loved her – beyond sense, beyond all reason, wormed into her heart, her blood, the very fiber of her fucking soul, part of her, existing under her skin, filling the hole… perfectly.

  That was the trouble.

  Laughing Girl filled the hole. All by herself. And that NEVER happened – before or since. Not ever.

  And when she left, ripped herself away – she tore a brand new hole inside of Pretty, one that never stopped bleeding.

  In the silence she could hear it. Drip. Drip. Trickle.

  The longer the silence, the louder the bleeding, until it was snow melting and rushing downstream, the roar of a waterfall just out of sight – the crashing ugly noise of her fucking bleeding soul.

  She stopped trying to slam her head and instead curled her hands into fists, forcing fingernails into palms, wishing they were longer. Ahh… hurt, hurt, hurt so pretty.

  In the silence Pretty could hear Laughing Girl's laughter, see her mischievous blue eyes laughing, laughing – she always laughed the hardest when Pretty was so exasperated she thought she would explode. A daughter, two young sons, Pretty's life threaded through their grasping little fingers – need you, need you, need you… the girl she was, the woman she wanted to be, sinking in the quicksand of need.

  Pretty's husband – the saint – he knew how intense Laughing Girl was, and so, so carefully asked for nothing that Pretty took his love for granted. She did that even now sometimes. Otherwise how could she have left them and gone off with Jeremiah Quick?

  She counted him too stable, too steady, too unemotional, and didn't give him credit for his own pain.

  Stupid.

  The silence was screaming Laughing Girl's laughter now, and Pretty could see her pause to catch her breath, her lower teeth capturing her top lip, dragging it just enough to stretch the scar, pull, chew, and then another laugh.

  Laughing Girl was… so much everything Pretty wished to be that she could hardly think about it. Brutally honest. Bold. Brave. Pretty didn't want to even think her name, in case it seared into the silence and refused to leave, ever. But too late.

  CallieJo CallieJo CallieJo.

  There you go, Jeremiah. Now you have her name. Summon her. Please.

  Take the dark magick, all your heart and all my heart, the darkness between us, and make her come back. Beg her to come back, if that's what it takes.

  In Pretty's imagination, CallieJo smiled and laughed and loved Pretty back.

  But that's not what happened.

  All Pretty ever did was love with her everything, and trust and risk.

  She gave Laughing Girl everything, and… used her up.

  Because that's what happened. It was always what happened.

  I am destruction.

  Birds. Drew. Laughing Girl. Jeremiah.

  And more, but Pretty's mind rebelled and threw up barriers, stopped the assault. But that didn't stop Jeremiah from being next. Wouldn't. Couldn't.

  Why can no one, ever, be content?

  Why couldn't Pretty be content? Is it the human condition to be always seeking the next thing? Is that why she was here with Jeremiah?

  The only one Pretty never crushed was the one she left at home. Something about him was stronger than her need, stronger than her obsession. She didn't know what made him strong, or why she never used him up, wore him out. Was it… their ability to separate and come together again? Or that he pushed her to be more? He not only expected her to be herself, he demanded it. Don't lie to me, Letty, ever, because then what would be the point of any of this? He didn't say that out loud, of course he didn't. But it was there, in every interaction, in the curve of his arm around her belly, the brush of a kiss on her shoulder, the way his tongue traced the lines of her tattoos. My wife. Mine.

  They chose each other, every time. Through hurts and happiness and flirtation and infatuation.

  The ghosts of the lost were loud in this silence. The inability to use her voice to influence Jeremiah Quick was part of it … all the thoughts building up, filling her brain, spinning and spinning.

  She was wishing she could turn them off when Jeremiah Quick returned. She didn't know it, but he would turn them off for her, in the most unimaginable way.

  She would be frightened, but she'd learn something important, too.

  Flogger tails thud, and sting, but the rhythm also soothes – and pain makes the brain stop thinking, settles the thoughts until the thoughts can do nothing but think about the pain.

  It was just another tool, but one that Jeremiah wielded well.

  And those people Pretty lost and all the regrets she had would fade away until there was nothing except the thudding of her own heart and the flick of whiptails against her skin… and somehow all of this becomes… bliss.

  Chapter 13

  She.

  She hates my silence.

  Hates that we are both silent.

  She thinks we're not communicating.

  Yeah, this could make me laugh. I remember sometimes being frustrated with her, that she talked so much, such endless and inane chatter, that she didn't stop to listen.

  My silence is hard for her, frustrates her. I can see that. I wonder if it's harder than her own?

  Silence seems to keep her off-balance. I will keep it a while longer.

  I have to hurt her, more and soon, because I can't throw her into the ritual without preparation, can't be that cruel. Sometimes I wish I could explain it to her, but I think the magick will be stronger if I don't, if she figures it out and comes into understanding it on her own.

  I know this inherently, and accept it as truth. I will know the right times to give information and the times to withhold. I have to trust myself about this.

  She.

  She's Light, not stupid. Not even ignorant, I don't think.

  I'm not cruel, and I don't want to hurt her, but on some deep level, I know I don't have a choice, and on an even deeper level, I will enjoy it. I will.

  I need her dependent, grateful, trusting.

  I need to teach her how to take pleasure from pain.

  I need to show her a lot more Dark than she's ever seen before.

  Chapter 14

  The next time Jeremiah came back, something was different. He brought a smell with him, something warm and comforting, wholesome, sweet.

  But first a trip to the bathroom. Pretty was surprised how weak her legs w
ere, how much she had to lean on him, depend on him.

  How quickly it happens, yes? Did he know that? She supposed he did.

  It didn't even seem strange anymore that she was naked and he wasn't.

  He was in makeup again, reds instead of blues, a swoosh of glitter beneath his right eye, different, and yet somehow the same.

  After the bathroom he walked her past the bed and across the space, right up to the St. Andrew's cross, a standing X made of wood that was taller than both of them. It was on a base of some sort, free-standing in a large enough space to allow for circling around it. There were cuffs and straps, and a mirror opposite, so Pretty could see her face, could see Jeremiah standing behind her.

  He directed her with pressing, pushing hands, and she was obedient. He secured her to the wood, wrists slightly above her head, her upper chest pressed against just the spot where the beams crossed, her back and backside exposed, available for his torture. A part of her felt detached, as if she stood off to the side, or viewed these goings on from a chair in a quiet corner.

  She knew the exact bunch and crack of his knuckles, found familiarity in the curl of every finger. There was a surreal sense of knowing, a feeling of déjà vu that had no context, as if she'd lived this exact moment before, but had forgotten it, and needed to learn this lesson all over again.

  She had no idea what to expect, now, and was at first startled when he held the spoon to her lips. It was… some kind of grain cereal, warm and sweet, comforting. She didn't know how many days she'd been here, didn't know how long it had been since she'd eaten anything other than bites of chocolate. The emptiness of her belly grew into a loud, growling need.

  He fed her a few spoonfuls, less than she wanted, but probably all that her empty stomach could handle. He had another bottle of water, and this he let trickle into her mouth, and she swallowed and swallowed until it was gone.

  He turned away, set the bowl on the table, and rattled around behind her for a short while, and the sound of his footsteps on the floor, the opening and closing of drawers, was so much better than the endless silence that Pretty almost gave him more tears.