by Jen Finelli
Wow, nice, I didn't think of that.
“That's a common trick—they punish us for figuring out a puzzle.”
“I don't know how to get out of handcuffs,” I say.
“Can you reach into your pockets?”
I smirk down at my boxers.
“Alright, no pockets, so no little stick or hairpin or something,” he says.
“Why would I have a hairpin?”
“Girls have them all the time,” he grumbles. “I really prefer to be locked up with girls. No offense,” he looks back at me. His eye twinkles, and I laugh in response.
“There, that's the spirit,” he says.
That was a real laugh. Not fake. Not playing along. He didn't even say anything clever. What's happening, here? Dazed, I'm almost not acting now, as he starts to talk like he's talking me down from something.
“It's not easy, but it's possible. Anyone can do it, if they want it bad enough,” he's saying.
He's trying to get me to squeeze my wrist through the handcuff like I'm breaking my thumb. That's sick even for me.
“Don't look at me like that, man,” he says. “You don't have to break it. You can squeeze through.”
I stare at him. My hands aren't thin. I'm not a fat kid, but, well, I'm kind of a fat kid. Meaty.
“It would be so much better if you could find a wire, or a hairpin,” he says. “The guy who cuffed you left the lock facing up, see? That's amateur night. He probably didn't even double-lock it.”
'Amateur night?' WHAT. I start to look around for a pin, for real now, because no way am I breaking my thumb for this experiment.
Nope, no pin.
“Just take a deep breath. Fold your thumb and your pinky together. You can use your other hand to help squish 'em—you have room to move with the long chain. That's another amateur move. Smart guys use cuffs with only one link.”
Man, give me a break with this 'amateur' stuff, so everybody's a critic now? I glower down at my pasty wrists. Maybe he's doing this on purpose. Maybe he knows, and he's toying with me, and trying to make me break my hands, out of revenge.
“Mark, we can't both get out of here alive if you don't get yourself free.” His voice low, and soft, breaks me out of my reverie. “I'm so sorry.”
That's genuine pain in his expression.
I like that.
This is why I did this, I realize, or remember, one or the other. This is why I didn't build a failsafe. I wanted to test the hero the other kids worship and prove he's not any better than any of the other costumed psychopaths. He's just a sick psych patient releasing his need for violence by beating up muggers, him and his sick gross narcissistic or manic or schizotypal disorder—he's nothing special, just a freak, just a monster, just...
Like me.
It hurts him if I hurt.
I grimace and play it up as I contort; gasp, and milk every scratch.
“Don't freak yourself out like that,” he says. “The way it's slipping, I think you're double-jointed, so I know it's not as bad as you're making it look. Fear creates pain—it hurts because you think it hurts.”
Holy mother—this guy won't even give me the pleasure of that? So smart, so smug, so—
I slip out of the handcuffs, snatch the utility belt off the wall, and sling it across his face with a resounding TWHACK. He blinks, eyes wide for a second with the sting—and grins a little. He grins, with blood trickling down his lip: he's revealed himself, and I've revealed myself, how dare I reveal myself! Amateur night, he's making it amateur night. I stand over him with my fists balled.
“Why do you run around in a costume? Like a freak, why do you do that?” I growl.
He blinks. “Because what I do is illegal. It's necessary, but illegal.”
“Why do you do what's illegal? Why are you above the law?” I ask. Sociopaths often think we're above the law.
“The police exist to clean up after crimes, not to prevent them,” he says. “They never arrive in time.”
“Why don't you join the police, and just be the first police officer to arrive places?”
“They don't have the same code of honor I do. Not everything that is illegal is wrong. I do not exist to fight evil parking monsters,” he smiles.
“Where do you get your code of honor?” I hiss. “What makes you above the law?”
“Come to church with me, and I'll show you,” he winks.
Are you f'ing kidding me with this sh—
“Why does that make you angry?” he asks.
“Because you're a fraud!” I scream, suddenly out of control, searching for something to stab into his face. “I know you! You like hurting people, and being hurt! That's why you do what you do, and here you're playing some holier-than-thou church routine like God likes you—”
“That is enough.”
The cement cracks and dust explodes into the air, and water shoots out around us as he rips himself free. The room seems to shake as he stands. I punch him again, in the jaw, just to remind us both that he likes it, and he grabs me by the wrist, squeezing too hard. He rises through the ceiling, dragging me through the debris, and I can't see, and now we're standing on another floor as the basement below us fills with water, washing away my experiment as his grip tightens, tightens—
I claw at his forearm, thinking of drawing blood. I'm screaming, and I'm screaming at my dad, at my mom, at God who's sending me to hell, at the emptiness that slows down my heart beat and keeps me awake at night, at the whole damn world, and he just lets me.
I tire myself out. There's no screaming left. Wet sticky trails streak my cheeks where tears were. Tears. I haven't cried since she left. What's happening. What's happening.
He lets me go.
I breathe.
“I do not church because I am good, and I have never claimed to be anything other than what you know we are,” he says. “Have you ever wondered why the medieval cathedrals are laced with gargoyles?”
He's so much bigger than I am.
“I am a gargoyle,” he whispers, before a cloth falls over my face, and I sleep.
*
I awake in a red room filled with black, statuesque furniture. Cushions, and a flat screen TV, and weird medieval paintings, and an iron tray of sweet-smelling foods I've never seen before...
“So, Mark, what are we telling the cops?” The Dark Denizen asks, pushing the tray towards me. I'm staring at some powdered goo-squares. “Turkish Delight,” he calls them. The man's poisoning me with fairytale candy.
Why not. I pop it in my mouth, and make eye contact with him. If I die, he'll remember my ghostly blue eyes staring into his soul.
He's not wearing his mask. High, thin cheekbones, and a hooked nose, and narrow brown eyes meet my stare. I was right. Indian guy in his thirties. North India or South? Ugh, his face is so naked.
“Put your mask back on,” I say.
“Put on yours, first,” he says.
There's a mask on the tray. Not my itchy stocking, but a mask shaped like his. I touch it: soft, sticky material bends around my fingers as I hold it.
“What should we tell the cops?” he asks me again.
“You rescued me, and we don't know the villain,” I say, staring down at the two empty eye holes in my hands. For some reason, his invitation isn't unexpected. Maybe he figures it's the only way to save me from myself, or maybe to get real superhero cred you've got to participate in a child-endangerment-program and take a side-kick. Who cares about his motives: this, maybe, was the real reason I hunted him down. An audition in twisted starlight.
“Mmm, no, we'll make it more interesting,” he says. “The truth makes a good mask.”
“We can't tell them the truth, they'll put me in juvie. Then I'll come out Ted Bundy or something.”
“Not if a rich software mogul adopts you and holds you to community service.”
“My dad wouldn't allow it,” I say. “I belong to him.”
“There's plenty of reason for the court to order otherwise,”
he says, in a voice without feeling, thank God—any sympathy from him, about bruises I'm sure he noticed, and I'd die.
I imagine living here, in this castle-room, with its view out a narrow window into the mountains, and then beyond that a lake...no sign of a small suburban window that a superhero might climb out of. I need my friend, my only friend, my very normal friend who also happens to be a superhero.
“I like my neighborhood,” I say.
“Then I get weekends, and after school,” he negotiates. “And your dad stops hitting you.”
“I like my dad.”
“That's fine, but that's going to stop.”
“Well I already know nonviolent ways to make him stop,” I say. “You don't have to teach me.”
“That's fine, too.”
I pop two more Turkish Delights. Holy cow, they're almost all gone. It's weird; they taste the way roses smell. I talk with my mouth full: “How's this: no court, you don't tell on me, and the rich software mogul gives me a computer science internship for troubled kids on account of my PTSD from this experience.”
“Yes to the internship, but I want the police to know you set this up. Don't waste their time with imaginary villains.”
I swear. “No, that's embarrassing!” No one needs to know I failed to defeat the Dark Denizen. I look around the room, grasping for psychological straws...“And they'll guess the software mogul's identity if everything's too neat and tidy.”
“Is it less embarrassing if you're just some kid who faked a bomb threat? We'll leave out the elaborate set-up that makes you look like a bite-sized psycho,” he smiles. He rises from his crouch, and takes an ornate black metal teapot off a glass-topped table. I watch him pour tea in this slow, measured, perfect way, and I look back at the mask in my hands. “Just a dumb kid prank,” he says.
His back turns to me. I could take the glass table and break it over his head. I could trip him, so he burns himself with the steaming tea. I don't.
Why don't I? Is it just because I know he can match me measure for measure? Or because I choose to enjoy the power I suddenly feel: the power to choose, because bad people can do good because churches have gargoyles in them. Everyone likes power. And hope. That's a thing I'm feeling, right? I'm feeling a thing.
We'll figure out the details. I'll create a terrifying persona, much scarier than the Dark Denizen, because for all our similarities I'm the scary one, and he's the positive one, and we'll save girls and kids from jerks. I'm gonna become a superhero, like my neighbor. Me, the monster. Wow.
It's a lot to take in.
But for now, it's nice to just sit on this soft cushion, stare out the window at the sunlight playing on the pine trees by the lake, and smell the fragrance of the tea brewing as I start to feel again.
I don the mask, and become myself.
~The End
Mental illnesses are actually more common than you’d think: stats from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration show as many as one in five Americans suffer from a mental illness, and interestingly enough, those numbers are much higher in the criminal population. Antisocial personality disorder in particular is associated with violent crime, and like many other disorders, often concurrent with childhood trauma and broken homes. It’s not some kind of a woo-woo fairytale joke: “hurt feelings” do cause real damage.
But damage doesn’t define who someone is. I’d like to get rid of the stigma associated with mental illnesses and start seeing people with mental illness the same way we see anyone else with the capacity to change the world: as broken humans who must fight our inner battles while we fight the outer ones.
If you’d like to learn how to help people with these kinds of disorders, you can learn more at http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/improving-care.aspx, and at https://www.mentalhealth.gov/talk/friends-family-members/, and if you need help yourself you can always call the suicide helpline at 1-800-273-TALK.
You can also volunteer to help stop and prevent child abuse. Go to volunteermatch.org and type in “child abuse” to find opportunities near you. Child abuse often results from a cycle of poverty and parental mental illness—parents are often suffering, too, and one way to prevent child abuse is to try to deal with poverty, lack of education, and lack of resources for stressed parents. To find more ways to help deal with poverty in your area, go to Rhah.org.
When the Thunder Rolls
Natasha James
When I was six, I put Mama's underpants on my head and anointed myself the neighborhood superhero with the “Imported from Israel healing power” oil Mama bought from a televangelist with a big mouth.
It must've worked, because today I'm wearing a mask and sporting bruises. With a price on my head. Tied to a chair in a gutted construction van with some other girl's long blue hairs clinging to the static of my tights.
Burly jerks cower around me out of arms reach, clutching their weapons. They don't speak to me. I'm known for a stare that can metaphorically pierce lead, and silences that make people spill secrets. Squirm, maggots. They've learned not to talk at all.
“Smells like blood,” I say, with a p-p-p-p-Lady Gaga face. Everyone stiffens, alert. Some are ready to smack me if I say another word; others prep like they're gonna dive outta the van. I don't say anything else.
The handcuffs behind my back clink against the metal chair with every jolt of the swaying van. Zip ties squeeze into the flesh of my arms like a bikini on a fat woman. (I can talk because the doctor says I'm slightly overweight. She doesn't know a good booty when she sees one.)
They really should've shot me already. I don't say it, of course, because I do like my skull served without a side of bullets. Still. This guy must want me for my brain. It's sweet, really: you know you've got a true fan when he's willing to lose all his men and take all that time to torture you, just to find out how come your knuckles can blast holes in 18-wheelers.
So how'd I get from arguing with my history teacher to bashing in buildings?
This is my montage.
*
Mask: Three months ago
I locked the door to my bedroom and plopped down on the carpet, cross-legged, clutching scissors. A torn black strip of t-shirt cloth stretched in my hands as I pulled it over my face. Ugh, forget these eyeholes, they gave me the peripheral vision of a cyclops with glaucoma! Almost got me clocked in the head with a lead pipe last night.
And if I got clocked in the head with a lead pipe, I'd need rescuing, and that would cancel out my one save.
One save. I leaned my head back against the wooden post of my bed, staring at the back of my door. All my yellow detention notes from history class fluttered there like war trophies. My own special support-the-troops. I hate history class like a fish hates rolling in dry desert sand.
I sighed, and spat my gum into my trash can with disgust. Shoot, sometimes I wondered if Mama was right: “Natasha, if you don't stop fighting your teachers how do you think you're going to get into college?” Maybe with my 5.6 out of 4.0 GPA? Yes, 5.6/4.0. Because of all my weighted AP classes, “A”s actually brought my grade down. That was how lit my brain was.
But I was still bored. Not bored like a kid with nothing to do: I had more than enough on my metaphorically-recyclable paper plate, what with my physics internship, and my service club that everyone else refused to call the Knights of Compassion on account of fear it sounded cult-like.
No, my boredom sat in history class thinking about everything this guy didn't say, everything tomorrow's historians will fail to say about us, and the forty thousand kids that will starve to death tomorrow. My boredom was restlessness, aching like a man in prison with a lady waiting on the outside. Someone needed me! I needed someone! Something inside somewhere needed to freaking break free!
I just didn't know the someones, or the something, yet. They'd always haunted me, those shadows of something more.
Now the shadows had faces.
I threw the failing eye-mask on the floor and stood up to scratch my thighs—
bare thighs on carpet get itchy as a flea-bitten hound dog with a soap allergy. I wandered my room looking for some other mask. My fingers rifled through my clothes drawers, feeling for material that wouldn't get so sticky and sweaty.
One save, and the shadows had faces now. I'd always prided myself as someone ready for anything, but it turned out your service club only ran across human trafficking when you didn't expect it. Just giving hotdogs to the homeless, and then bam, around the corner some bird-nosed guy and his buddies loaded girls with their mouths duct-taped shut into a van. I did the “right” thing, at first. Called the police, sent the rest of the Knights of Compassion away fast.
Then I did the “wrong” thing, and followed the van, trying to get plates.
We all learned back in the stone age that the wheel trumps the runner.
Oh hey! Back in the moment, in my bedroom, my fingers found something silky. Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner! My work-out panties: nothing could wick away sweat like work-out underwear. I almost laughed out loud. Six-year-old me had been on to something.
*
Gloves: Two months ago
My freezing fingers clung to the back door handle of the suspicious van as it sped through town, and I cursed myself for my terrible fashion sense. It was cold enough to freeze the balls off a pool table, as Mama would say, and my power rings pinched my skin. Only the threat of horrible pavement-burn sustained my vice-like grip through the pain.
Note to self: you need gloves.
Still only one save to my name, but as flickering streetlights whooshed over me and the van swerved out into the highway, I had hope. After two weeks of “casually” polling our homeless friends at service club events, I'd finally found a tip on a van. The van.
My tennis shoes dug against the bumper as I crouched to keep my head below the back window. I'd do this quiet-like, hidden: my new mnemonic was Finding fiends forces finesse.