Chapter Text
GARY
They had given him a day pass.
Leave it to the over-washed, unsympathetic, starched white collars Gary stared at on a daily basis to hand him the piece of paper like it was a Christmas present. When they weren’t forcing his arm down on a cold table to stab him with a needle, or sending orderlies to rip him off the fence as he tried to scale it during outdoor hour, they were giving him an endless lecture. Why aren’t you taking the pills? Take the pills, Mr. Smith. Talk about your parents, Mr. Smith. Stop trying to set the nurse’s station on fire, Mr. Smith. Their mouths moved, and yet no actual meaning ever seemed to be derivable from the content. Gary just stared at them, the wrinkles around their tight-lipped frowns gathering in a disapproving pucker. Respect my position as your doctor, Mr. Smith. Stop answering questions with questions, Mr. Smith. Hold still, Mr. Smith. I can get them to strap you down like last time if you’d prefer that, Mr. Smith. He liked to imagine what they might look like if their teeth could somehow get knocked out… how futile their inflated medical-school-educated sense of self-worth was, and how quickly it could drain away if they were only given a simple disability. Gary imagined taking things from the immovably omnipresent orderlies and doctors. Peace. Security. (Whole limbs.) He spent most of his time considering how their skin would grow cold and slimy when forced to sleep on a bed wet with mildew, rain and snow coming in through the bars on the windows every day of the year. How quickly someone could be forced to lose their mind when put under the proper pressure.
It had been on a Sunday. (Or had it? Was it Tuesday?) The doctor had frowned at his patient, who sat tracing the stark white paper in his hands from his seat on his cell cot. Gary remembered looking up at him and thinking that, somehow, it had to be a trap. That this was all part of a grander scheme meant to fuck completely with what was left of his sanity. A day pass. A day pass? Who was ever granted a day pass from purgatory?
The Doctor had only said “Congratulations,” with a dead look in his eye and a dry handshake.
The day pass, it seemed, was for a wedding rehearsal.
The fact that the Smith family hadn’t entirely chosen to shirk off the knowledge that they had once given birth to a son was evident in what happened next. The unceremonious dumping of Gary’s person into a paid taxi outside took him quickly away from the insane asylum on the hill. The citizens of Bullworth Vale rumor-mongered that Happy Volts was a prison filled with aliens and werewolves. In fact, the real truth of it was much more frightening, but as the distance between boy and building grew farther, Gary looked back and felt for the first time why people were afraid to be institutionalized there, after a lifetime of convincing himself that he had never been afraid of anything at all. His fingers had found the lock on the back door, and he sat staring backward, repeatedly locking and unlocking it in systematic anxiety.
Gary had been raised by a rapidly rotating door of nannies and outsiders as he grew up, so when the taxi rumbled down the winding Vale driveway to the Smith Family Mansion and he was greeted at the end by a row of dead-faced servants, it came as no surprise. He noted with dull interest as he rolled out of the car still in his filthy scrubs, that they didn’t speak to him directly, and avoided eye contact. A pre-warning, most likely from his grandfather. Gary could only imagine it. The mentally unstable male heir to Smith Enterprises enjoyed torturing small animals and pulling things slowly apart. He would trick you into losing your job before you knew he had done it. He was not to be addressed. He was a dangerous liability, but for an absurd reason that was beyond even Gary himself, his presence was apparently required to maintain face in the community once in a blue moon. They washed him in silence, cut his hair back from a greasy tangle and into the pristine fade he preferred, and dressed him in the sharp black suit that had been meant for his graduation ceremony. Waste-not, want-not.
Rescued, dressed and clipped, Gary was finally beginning to enjoy the change of pace from listening to wailing patients plucking out their own eyebrows when the bomb finally dropped. Albeit accidentally.
On the desk of his father’s study sat a stack of wedding invitations. Gary had been perusing the dark room with a thought to purloin one of his father’s Cuban cigars when he had come upon them, a thoughtful finger dragging across wood and leather until it met a sharp edge.
‘The Smith Family Would Be Proud to Invite You To Attend The Joining In Matrimony of Mr. Warren Smith Jr. And Ms. Constance Hopkins!
Welcome With Us The Newest Members Of Our Family, Constance And Her Son, James.
We Would Be Pleased To Accept You At The Church Of Saint Jude On The Third Of January At 3 O’Clock, Parking And Valet Service Will Be Made Available.’
Gary arrived at Saint Jude for the rehearsal ceremony with both fists wrapped in bloody gauze. The mess he had made of his father’s study was frightening enough that three servants had thrown down their aprons and quit. The butler, Mr. Meadows, (a rather large man) had finally managed to sit on Gary until he stopped thrashing long enough to tape up his bloody hands. But the rest of the wait saw Gary locked in his room, with the staff picking shards of Mr. Smith’s antique greek pottery collection out of the ceiling panels. Gary heard nothing about the now piss-soaked invitations. Maybe that was for the better.
Seething rage might have been an improvement on Gary's condition that afternoon. Only a Hopkins could be responsible for this. James and his prostituting whore of a mother. Had she fucked her last husband to death already? Were those flapping lips waiting to suck in another man and his fortune?? Where had the money gone before now? How many men had she fucked? Had she shit out any other idiot gorilla children like Jimmy subsequently since the beginning of last year? Was she waiting to pop out a nauseating halfbreed between human and neanderthal now? Was that why his father was forcing this aberration on their family? Could she even make more children if her sand-filled reproductive organs were really that wrung-out? How had she come to be here? How had they even met in the first place? For what reason had his father even ~dreamed~ of looking at a Hopkins romantically? It was nauseating at best. And chaos-inducing also at best.
The stone steps to Saint Jude were cold underneath him as Gary sat down to observe the cemetery in the afternoon air. The day was bright, despite his current mood (somewhere between blackout rage and incredulous disbelief) and the blue sky was stripped in the distance by long, cottony swathes of sheer cloud. Hundreds of chaotic thoughts hammered at full speed through Gary’s (now much more kempt) head, despite his outward facade. His right toe tapped a nervous rhythm even as he reached into his pocket and produced, at last, one Cuban cigar. It had been a much needed minor miracle to be left out of his grandfather's hawkish line of sight, having begged off with a bathroom excuse.
In the distance, tombstones caught bright points of afternoon light, receding into the skyline. Gary saw them, and yet didn't see them at all. How could he even begin to corral so many thoughts at once? he snarled at nothing and at everything, unaware of his own expression as he sat hunched into his own shadow. Nothing else mattered, except this moment. Unbidden, memories of the previous school year returned. Of all the ways he had tried to change things. Russel. Derby. Ernest. Johnny Vincent. Everything lead back to Jimmy. It always had. Jimmy's obscene assertion that he was, somehow, impossibly, better than Gary was. But Jimmy was a disgrace. Jimmy did and said things that were traitorous, and ugly, and idiotic, and for some reason, people liked him for it. Jimmy’s slutty campus parade as he fraternized his way to the top with anything and everything with a pulse returned to throttle the point home; Hopkinses were dirty, indiscriminate monsters. And Jimmy would be here, soon. Much sooner than Gary was prepared for. Involuntarily, the scars on his back twinged. They hadn’t seen each other since the night everything had changed. If only Jimmy had stayed down, bloody on the ground where he belonged! But he had risen again and again in an unrelenting tidal wave, his stupid, dense face feeling heavy to look at, his thick, hammy fists hurting with a deep and resonant ache. He was a stupid sack of bricks. He was the bull in the china shop. He was a fucking unstoppable freight train, and it brought on in Gary a slow, fiery burn to utterly destroy anything and everything about Hopkins that had ever made him unique. Now more than ever. Especially considering out of all the names he had called James over the course of their relationship, loser, idiot, moron, he never thought he would utter the one being forced on them today.
‘Brother’.
With an agitated flick of his wrist, Gary brought the cigar up to his lips and lit the tip. These were different bells now from the bell tower where they had fought. Soon wedding bells would ring and Gary would go back to his prison for the criminally insane, secure in the knowledge that everything he had left behind, his decimated empire at Bullworth, his slandered reputation, wasn’t enough for Jimmy. It had to be more. He had to take more. Push father. It felt now as if James had to know that the last thing Gary possessed, his name, had finally been destroyed. The very last remnant of a shattered existence. A Hopkins was a Hopkins was a Hopkins.
All that was left of Gary's mangled desecration of a life was at last about to come crashing down around his ears... and all if it, thanks to one idiot mongoloid with red hair. Insufferable. Unacceptable. Impossible. It couldn't be allowed. Gary puffed on his cigar thoughtfully and began all at once to scheme a terrible revenge. Without much effort at all, the first whisper of an idea touched him, and faintly, Gary's mouth pulled up on one side into a menacing grin.
JIMMY
Jimmy's body was leaden in his cheap dormitory bed. He knew somewhere in the back of his mind that he had to get up—it must have been late by now—but his body just wouldn't move. This wasn't his usual teenage body's hormonal malaise, either. This was corpse-like. With herculean effort he rolled onto his side, scowling, and cracked one eye open to check the time. His clock was missing.
He propped himself up on one elbow and dragged one heavy hand over his face, trying to shake off the thick blanket of sleep still clinging to his skin. He slowly registered a faint tapping on his door, interspersed by Petey's anxious whisper.
"Jimmy, come on, you gotta get up!"
Blearily, Jimmy cast around the room and found the mangled form of his alarm clock wedged between his dresser and the wall. It blinked 11:57 at him despondently. He couldn't even remember throwing it. But for some reason seeing the time made something in his stomach sink. He'd missed first period, but that definitely wasn't it. It wasn't like him to oversleep, he was disturbingly regular, but it wasn't for love of class or anything. He skipped half the time anyway. No, it was something about today that he was forgetting. He sat up and rubbed his eyes to the increasing staccato of Petey's taps on the door, now almost like scratches.
"Petey, what gives? Come in, you weirdo."
"Oh thank god," Petey said, and slipped into the room. "I didn't think you were ever gonna wake up."
"Don't see how it's your business what time I wake up," Jimmy grouched. He felt mildly guilty about snapping at Petey, who only ever had his best interests in mind, but he was not in the mood. It didn't seem to phase Petey, who darted across to the window and looked outside.
"Listen, Angus is outside trying to distract her now but she's not having it. Come on, you've gotta get up, she's gonna kill you!"
"Petey, what are you—" Jimmy stopped mid-sentence as he remembered what it was he was supposed to do today, the sheer weight of which had kept his body glued to the bed for hours after his normal wakeup time.
Mom.
And with that thought she appeared in his doorway, as if merely by thinking about her Jimmy could summon her from whatever hellish plane of existence she usually inhabited. She gasped dramatically, one manicured hand held over her mouth.
"Jimmy Hopkins, get out of bed this minute! I told you I was coming to pick you up at noon! Thank goodness the ceremony isn't until three. You'll just have to skip lunch at this rate... who are you?"
Constance Hopkins paused her tirade to cast a skeptical eye on poor Petey.
"Oh, I-I'm Pete. P-Pete Kowalski. Um..." Petey looked terrified, his eyes darting back and forth between Jimmy and Constance, before Jimmy signaled to the door with a tilt of his head and mouthed "save yourself." Pete ducked his head and sprinted by her, down the hall. She frowned as she watched him go, then shrugged him off, returning to the business at hand. She swept over to the closet and began rifling through his hangers.
"Great to see you too, Mom," Jimmy said, pushing himself up out of bed. He padded over to stand beside her, arms crossed as she began yanking clothes out of the closet and onto the bed. "I've missed you too. I love all the letters you send me, and all the great input I had on your sudden decision to marry Mr. Smith, total stranger except for the fact that he's father to the biggest psychopath I've ever known."
She stopped there and shot him a glare over her shoulder before returning to her work. "Please, Jimmy, don't be so dramatic."
"I really loved the part where he sabotaged all my friendships and tried to kill me. That was super."
"I'm marrying Mr. Smith, Jimmy. It's not like I'm making you marry Gary. Anyway, he's in the asylum almost every day of the year."
Jimmy paused from half-heartedly pushing hangers around as he felt his heart sink into his stomach.
"Mom. What do you mean, almost every day."
She rolled her eyes. "It's his father's wedding day, Jimmy. They gave him a day pass."
"I can't believe this!" Jimmy said, throwing up his hands. "You've moved from trying to murder me by neglect to actually actively trying to murder me!"
"Aha!" she said as she pulled his old Aquaberry vest from the recesses of his closet. He didn't even remember he had that anymore. "Finally, something nice enough to wear to the church. Here, put this on, and those slacks." She tossed the sweater onto his disbelieving face.
He continued scowling at her as he pulled it on over his head. "Care to refute the charges?"
"Jimmy, don't be an ass. I'm madly in love with Warren and we're getting married and that's that."
"Like you were madly in love with Stepdad Number 5? I can't even remember his name. When did you get divorced, anyway?"
"We aren't... technically," she said, as she suddenly became invested in picking an invisible piece of fuzz off of her lime green blazer. "But the papers are supposed to go through this week. That is NOT, by the way, information that I want to hear you spreading around today. You are not going to ruin this for me, Jimmy Hopkins."
"Yeah, yeah," Jimmy said, waving her off while he ran his belt through his slacks.
"I mean it! Warren is very rich and he can do right by us! He could even send you to college if you wanted."
Jimmy snorted. "Yeah, okay, 'college.' Boy, you sure know me well, Mom."
"Well, a car then!"
That perked him up. "I'm listening," he said, tying on one white sneaker.
Constance examined her nails, apparently debating with what she was going to say. She was looking less trashy than usual, Jimmy noticed—there was a distinct lack of animal print, for example—but she still looked like herself. She looked good. Healthy. Possibly, almost happy. Jimmy sighed heavily. Even before he listened to her bribe, he knew he was going to do whatever she asked.
"If you behave today, and play nicely with Gary—no fights!—I will see what I can do about getting you a car. This is not a promise, mind you! A vehicle for a juvenile delinquent is always a hard sell, and while I have my charms," she smirked, running one matching lime green nail over the side of her breast while Jimmy gagged, "well, there are limits to everything."
"Alright, alright, I'll play the good son," he said. "Just don't do that ever again."
She gave him a brief, rare smile, and Jimmy could see on her face for a moment just how tired she felt, and how anxious she was for this day to go well. He shoved his hands in his pockets, fighting off an ancient urge to hug her, or hold her hand.
"One condition, though," he said, grinning.
As the car came to a stop in front of Saint Jude, Jimmy brushed futilely at his coat and pants, trying to get rid of the crumbs. He'd managed to get his mom to swing by Mr. Huntingdon's burger joint for some lunch after all, as part of the deal. Suddenly the car door opened, and he was greeted with a white-gloved hand, apparently held out for him to take.
"Jesus. Are these people so rich, they can't even be bothered to stand on their own?" He muttered, half to himself and half to the valet, who just looked at him with vague panic. Jimmy pushed his hand aside and hauled himself out onto the curb.
The winter afternoon sun was beaming directly into his eyes, and as he lifted one hand to shade them he thought he caught a shadow lurking amongst the graves. He checked his watch—they still had a little under an hour before the rehearsal. One glance at his mom showed her flirting madly with a group of admirers, one of whom was likely his soon-to-be-stepfather. That would keep her busy, hopefully, and give him enough time to slip away.
With one last look at the happy wedding party, Jimmy snuck across the churchyard toward the crop of weathered gravestones. As he pulled his collar tighter around his face, the thought occurred to him that this might be a terrible idea, to try and get this out of the way early. But Jimmy wasn't really the type to avoid conflict. And if there was going to be a fight, better not to get the blood all over the church.
GARY
The thing his hassled therapists kept trying to convince him of, kept repeating over and over again as if the exacerbating mantra could somehow penetrate his unbreakable shell, was that Gary was insane. They explained redundant concepts to him in small, simple words. He knew how to read, he understood the literature, but to them he had always been a dangerous, unpredictable child. They went through webster’s dictionary definitions, pulling huge medical tomes out and slamming them down on the desk to cite terms like ‘sociopathy’ or ’Antisocial Personality Disorder’. They wrote him prescriptions that did nothing, always circling back to the same prognosis that he was incurably demented. His own father had once even called him a malignant mistake. But listening and hearing were two different things entirely. Gary had spent a lifetime being accosted by the negative opinions of these so called medical ‘professionals’, and knew deep in his bones that they had always been wrong. At school he did his best to prove his superiority. Head boy, perfect grades, immaculate dress, extracurricular activities. Teachers always seemed to love him right before they hated him. But he wasn’t crazy. He wasn’t. Crazy. The answer was simple. He just… hated everyone. He had never in his life met a single person truly worthy of his valuable time and attention. And no amount of pills shoveled down his throat could wipe that disgusting reality clean from his permanently troubled mind.
And yet, there were moments he still didn’t like to think of. Moments where he lost track of himself. Most times he convinced himself that they had never truly happened at all. Dominantly, they were moments of anxiety bubbling over, where a sudden unquenchable tremor for violence would make his hands tremble, and his feet shuffle in a perpetual motion machine of chemicals. He didn’t like idle time. It brought on a desire in him for chaos. He wanted to have his fingers in all the pots, a need for control and respect mingling dangerously with his sometimes extreme problem with authority. He wanted respect, DESERVED it even. He needed to take action to see those things happen, needed it to put the world back at its rightful angle. But Happy Volts had done the one thing he was entirely sure he didn’t need; it had given him countless days of idle time. They never could fucking understand. Why couldn’t they see? Why did they hate him so entirely without ever really knowing him? If Gary had had his way, he would have run Bullworth tighter than a battleship at war. He could have been a truly great king.
Gary’s self-congratulatory theories at the moment, however, meant precisely dick. He knew he was the smartest person in the world, that wasn’t up for debate, in or out of the asylum. But his current predicament seemed once again to be how to best corral a herd of morons. Or, even more precisely, one moron in particular. King of the idiots, or some other pithy insult like that. Jimmy ‘shit-for-brains’ Hopkins had probably spent the morning shoving football players into lockers and sticking his dick in toilet tanks. Gary continued to sit on the church steps as he imagined the first half of Jimmy’s day, scoffing as his imaginings solidified as fact. Had he spent the night with that townie twat with the huge tits? Typical. If Eunace was any gauge for Jimmy’s taste, (or lack thereof?) it was that he liked large things. Too bad he was too stupid for a napoleon complex but too short to meet a girl eye-to-eye.
In the distance, Gary watched the immediate wedding party arrive along the far side of the church. He saw his widowed aunts arrive together in a shuffle of over sized sun hats and handbags. The young man thought idly about what they would do if he threw their lapdogs down a well, and then stubbed out the cigar he had been half-heartedly smoking on the stone step beneath him. His family he could handle. They were prepared for him, and he was prepared for them. He had groomed his relatives into adopting a certain cold kind of distant familiarity that Gary liked. It meant they were slightly afraid of him, and therefore more malleable.
It really was that Jimmy was the only problem, then. The biggest short-statured problem of them all. Gary stood up, and took a moment to meticulously sweep the wrinkles out of his sharp black suit. Long fingers ghosted up to his thin tie to cinch the knot, and brush over the immaculate silver tie clip just above his jacket’s top button. He shook his sleeves out, and buttoned the jacket up with careful dignity.
Gary stepped into the graveyard and wandered in a semicircle around the church, seeing the tombstones and yet not seeing them at all, their presence entirely inconsequential.
Of course he had seen Jimmy, before. At the asylum. Sometimes he thought he heard him in the walls, thick fingers scrabbling for purchase. Gary had spent an eternity in the rec room staring out of the filthy windows at the tall pine tree in the corner of the yard. The orderlies were unforgivably stupid, but it had been almost fun to watch them stare at the sneaker prints in the snow and wonder about where they had come from. Gary recognized the earmarks, a nurse complaining about uniforms going missing, a crushed can of JOLT soda tossed carelessly in a wastepaper bin. Once, the man that licked the painting of a duck by the rec room doors had said an orange ghost had visited him in his room. Gary speculated on why James might want to traverse this old territory. Was he trying to figure out how to perform an abortion on his industrial park trailer trash girlfriend? Was he looking for proof of extraterrestrials he might be related to? Was he attempting to sign up for a lobotomy? (too late, it wouldn’t do any good.) But it seemed almost pointless to puzzle over the inner workings of an animal with the approximate intelligence of a sea cucumber. …Almost.
Gary rounded the edge of the yard, seeing red hair flashing in the distance for the first time. He came to a halt by a tombstone marked ‘PHILIPS’, and his eyes dangerously narrowed. One couldn’t say that he had been waiting for Jimmy, exactly. If Gary had been the victorious one, James would have been the expelled disgrace that he visited on the weekends for a quick shoe polish and a good knife-dig. (Because in this fantasy, Jimmy was homeless and living in a dumpster in the tenements.) Anything to put Hopkins on his knees. But saying he hadn’t been thinking about Jimmy was also… somewhat...entirely... innacurate. The harsh reality was that thoughts of the red haired abomination descended often on Gary’s unwilling mind, like a plague of locusts. What was he doing? (it was wrong.) How was he managing the school? (he was doing a crap job.) What did the teachers think of him? (Jimmy’s first mistake was trusting anyone at all to begin with.) Even thoughts of his parade of sexual promiscuity offered strange interest for Gary, as if he were clinically examining the mating habits of a particularly stupid breed of primate. He didn’t think about Jimmy constantly, by any means. But he did think about him often at night… And also during the day. And during his weekly therapy sessions. As Jimmy’s lumbering figure closed the distance between them, Gary felt a strange wave of apathy wash over him, dreamlike in this initial surreal reunification. The sudden thought of shoving a butter knife hard down Jimmy’s right eye socket came and went with minimal lackluster reaction. Gary moved towards the other boy, one hand absently scratching at the puncture wounds beneath cloth at the pit of his elbow. (WHAT had they injected him with, yesterday?)
With deceptively uncaring feet, Gary met Jimmy toe-to-toe at the edge of the graveyard, and stuck his hands gracefully into the partially stitched pockets of his slacks to keep his hands from trembling. Briefly, he even forgot about his plan for exacting revenge, instead staring down at the shorter boy with cold, dead eyes. Was this real? Was James really here? Happy Volts had done Gary zero favors, mentally or physically, and dark circles rimmed his eyes now, his strong cheekbones jutting even more sharply out from consistent malnutrition. Ghoulish, a slow sneer gradually crept across his waxy face.
Jimmy came to him nauseatingly ill prepared. What was this? Had he given any detail literally any thought at all?? The Aquaberry travesty he wore pulled too-tight across his thick chest, and his dirty slacks bunched up at odd intervals. It was a look that screamed ‘low-rent incognito yacht club wannabe’, though nothing in the world could erase the blue collar thuggish glint from his beady eyes. His presence alone was so bafflingly inconsistent with the wealthy Smith family parishioners that he might as well have been a brick with a turd on it in the middle of a stack of cash. Jimmy’s buzzcut revealed a myriad of new scars, no doubt from slamming his head repeatedly against a concrete wall with Russel for no reason whatsoever. And looking at his face was painful, like listening to somebody flatlining. The auditory reaction came, then the memory of the sound of rain on school bells, of thunder rumbling in the distance, and then the hard, sharp shattering of glass.
Gary swept his dead gaze up and down the shorter figure, and snorted derisively. “What happened, did your whore mom get knocked up by a baboon and now she needs somebody to pay for her to pop it out?”
JIMMY
Jimmy clenched his fists and stepped haltingly forward, barely containing the urge to just leap onto Gary and start beating. He should have been expecting this sort of welcome—picking up right where they left off, with Gary insulting his mom's alleged (primarily by Gary) promiscuity. It had worked well enough on the roof that fateful night; it was the straw that broke the camel's back and sent Jimmy grappling Gary off the roof in a rage-fueled murder-suicide. Jimmy was stronger today than he'd been then—free of the stresses of that night (brought on by months of torture from said psychological terrorist) and bolstered by his mother's bribe—but still he had to practice extreme restraint. To get the car meant playing nice, and that probably meant no blood on the Aquaberry.
So he forced a laugh, and gestured exasperation with his hands to get them to stop clenching.
"Yeah, fuck you too, Gary" Jimmy replied. He never was able to hold up to Gary in an insult war, so why even try. It frustrated him beyond reason. Sure, Jimmy wasn't the smartest knife in the crayon box, but he'd developed a pretty healthy repertoire of insults and sarcastic retorts. It had helped him deal with the never-ending parade of bullies in his life, in school and at home. But being around Gary always left him feeling like a troglodyte—a word he'd learned from Gary, in fact. Gary's insults had the potency and military-grade intelligence of laser-guided missiles. Jimmy's felt like scattershot in comparison, like BBs.
Gary seemed somewhat disarmed by Jimmy's refusal to engage, and an awkward silence fell between them. Jimmy sniffed a few times, his nose starting to run in the cold, and gave Gary a once-over. Gary looked, well—he looked gorgeous, and that only served to infuriate Jimmy further. Standing among the tombstones he had all the grace and colorlessness of a viscount vampire. He looked right here, in his finery and the cold winter light. So much better than seeing his face, wan and chemically sedated, through the foggy window at Happy Volts on one of Jimmy's secret check-ins.
But whereas normally his eyes would have held a glint of sadistic mirth, today they had the glazed-over look of a corpse, and they were rimmed with circles dark as bruises. It was enough to give Jimmy pause, and his pale brows drew together in unbidden sympathy. His jaw jutted stubbornly. Might as well try to parlay, Jimmy thought. Maybe Gary was drugged enough to be reasonable.
"Listen, Gary, you and me... we got a lot of bad history. Honestly, I don't know what the hell our parents are thinking with this, since they supposedly know about what happened, but whatever. I want the next few days to go okay for my mom, and that means we put that shit aside until after the wedding. Deal?"
Jimmy shifted his weight and stuck one hand out in an invitation to shake on it. It... wasn't the strongest of reconciliation attempts, but it was a start.
GARY
In his pockets, Gary's knuckles burned. The ripped flesh pulled hot and tight as his bandaged fingers clenched slowly into fists, tension raking across his shoulders in mirror angxiety. He peered mistrustfully down at Jimmy's palm, and for the first time, Gary experienced an impulse he truly considered to be actually insane. For less than half a second, he had almost taken the offered hand of the repugnant Jimmy Hopkins.
The palm being offered to him was slick with sweat. Meatloafish. Cumbersome. Animals had hands like those, not humans. They were clammy boulders, ripe with potential for violence. The minor, inconsequential detail of the condition of Gary's own hands kept them hidden, stuffed deep in his pockets, and a scowl grew to cover his complete physical disregard for the peace offering. But as his eyes swept up again to Jimmy's attempt at a human face, a thought struck him.
James had no reason to make peace. If his excuse was that soon they would be, dare he breathe the repulsive word, "brothers", it was a sorry transparent lie. And there it was. Jimmy was a terrible liar. He lied constantly. He had lied about wanting to be friends in the first place, just like he had lied about not wanting control of the school. His lies had turned Petey against him first, and then all of Bullworth, staff and students falling like dominoes, one after another in a staggering kind of complete victory which Gary still had trouble wrapping his sizeable brain around. It was a victory which had ultimately taken so much more than just Gary's education, or his reputation. In the end, it had taken his freedom.
Jimmy had all the power. He wouldn't want to relinquish control. And he certainly wouldn't want to be friends. Jimmy was lying right now.
Gary's scowl twitched up at the corner into an amused smirk, and he rolled his gaze theatrically up and down James's entire figure in obvious judgement. Did this mongoloid think he was anything close to an intelligent human being? Granted, his aggressive but hamfisted approach to things sometimes had it's uses, but now was not one of those times. The day Jimmy sincerely called for a truce would be the day Edna learned how to fly. This had to be about something else. Something Jimmy wanted. Something he could force Jimmy to bargain for. Anything to put him on his knees.
Anything.
A predatory glitter lit Gary's face as he advanced a step towards Jimmy, forcing him back a step as he invaded the redhead's personal space. "James, there was never a 'you and me'. First it was me, and then it was you. You are an invader. You're a virus." Gary's breath came sharper as he thought of Jimmy's footprints in the snow, of the missing uniforms, of the soft swish of sneakers in the dark. "And If you think I'm going to stand around and wait for your family to infect mine with your idiot genetic code, well, then you should be the one up that hill, Jimmy-boy, not me. I know you've been up there. I know you're thinking you've got it made right now. But you don't, James. You really don't. And do you know why? Because I'm watching you. Believe me, I am going to tear down every flower arrangement, knock over every tray, and slash every tire I can. And you know what? I'm going to make it look like you did it. I'm going to bring so much heat down on your idiot skull that your whore mom is going to lock you in a dog crate and ship you off to live with a reformed rapist in federal prison for the rest of your life before my father has her set on fire to prevent her from spreading AIDS to the rest of the town."
It was in that moment that Gary realized just how close he had brought his face to his rival's. Jimmy's snotty frown hovered inches away from his own, lingering heat from his whispery threat dissipating slowly in the cold air. Gary froze there a moment in strangely clinical revulsion, taking in the smatter of red freckles blown across Jimmy's cheeks, before leaning back again with a toss of the hair and an effortless shrug.
"Unless--!" he amended lightly, then turned on a heel to sling an elbow casually around Jimmy's neck, pushing them towards the church. "--Unless you do whatever I tell you to do. Remember? You and me? We can do things."
JIMMY
One of the funny things about life, Jimmy thought, his nose not two inches from Gary's, was that it never stopped happening to you. You'd think that once something happened it was done, it was in the past. But no. Even after something happened, it was still happening, and echoes of its happening would sound across his entire life, sounding just as lifelike and realistic as the day they happened in the first place. For instance, Gary was in his face, and Jimmy's face was stone but his heart was in his freckled throat, beating with rage and hormonal lust and a tiny bit of fear just as it had back when they were together in school, in the dorm, on the roof. He and Gary meeting like this wasn't just a onetime thing, it echoed itself across his life, now and in the car and in the shower and in bed, waking him up in the middle of the night with a cold sweat.
It was these echoes, in fact, that fueled his nearly bimonthly trips to the asylum. Seeing Gary there in his rightful place helped Jimmy regain a sense of control that was stolen from him when he heard those echoes. It helped him divide the past from the present, dream from reality. Sometimes he would pull on an orderly costume and roam the halls, pausing outside Gary's door to see if he could hear him breathing. After a particularly nasty dream, he'd snuck into the cafeteria and included a little present in Gary's mashed potatoes. After a particularly... good one, he'd slipped him an extra jello cup. It was all about staying on top of things, staying in control of the present moment. A control that he could now feel draining from him, pried from him with Gary's clever fingers and wicked mind. He'd showed his hand, somehow, and his attempt to get on top of the situation had somehow ended up with Gary holding all the marbles. Again.
The closer Gary's face became, the stonier Jimmy's got, and he even shuffled forward a bit, tilting his chin up in a bulldog attempt at a loom. The only physical manifestation of his internal reality was a brief twitch of his coal-black right eye. Oh and a slight flush when Gary mentioned his check-ins. He really wasn't supposed to know about those. With any luck they wouldn't be brought up again—he sure as hell wasn't going to offer an explanation unbidden. They hadn't even begun to fight and already he'd lost. There was so much to say to Gary in response, about how fucking wrong he was about everything, their friendship, his whole assessment of Jimmy's character—but his tongue was too thick, his head swimming with rage and stuttering panic.
Gary was right, of course, about his mom—he wouldn't have to do much at all to make her believe it was Jimmy behind whatever psycho-plot he had hatching in his villain brain. What could he say to make her believe it wasn't him? No mom, I wouldn't hurt you? Please.
He briefly fantasized breaking Gary's teeth with his forehead. He could just bounce, after all, with nothing much lost. Make Gary eat some well-deserved concrete, give the finger to his mom and walk home. What did he owe it to her anyway? A car? Who needed a car when he was already king of this town on skateboards and stolen bikes?
But there were all sorts of echoes. Echoes of her voice calling after him from another room, cooing at him in a high chair, sleeping next to him on soft, sweaty sheets after he'd had a nightmare. These memories were far less conscious and far more dangerous even than the ones of Gary. You couldn't even call them memories, exactly, since not one of them happened after the age of three, when she'd found a new husband and a new object of affection. But these were the oldest echoes he had, and the most powerful—they exerted their control over him in mysterious ways. Jimmy jerked his chin in a barely perceptible nod, his jaw clenched in anger.
"Jimmy! Jimmy! Where are you, boy, the ceremony is about to start!" his mother's shriek echoed across the churchyard as Gary led him toward the church, one slim arm hooked around Jimmy's neck like a noose.
GARY
Mrs. Hopkins was a woman with a shrewd face. Gary admittedly hadn't been expecting that, instead picturing some lowgrade bag of flesh resembling what had once perhaps been an attractive woman in the very (very) distant past. Her face wasn't even square, which Gary had assumed must be the case if young James was any kind of legitimate representation of a first generation of DNA. Naturally Jimmy must have spawned from a duo of rock trolls. Either that or heavy-browed cave dwelling neanderthals. Instead, as she met them at the stone steps, she looked down at them with a sharply pointed chin and a glittering glare that could cut through brick. She was orange, like Jimmy was. But brighter. Harsher. Over-saturated.
"There you are! Please, Jimmy, I am at my wit's end with you, why do I always have to chase you around when it's time for something important? First you sleep past noon and now this??" Mrs. Hopkins clicked her tongue disapprovingly, before looking over to Gary. The disappointment faded, soon replaced with the slackjaw blank stare which Gary understood must be her thinking face.
"And you must be the son, am I correct? Gareth? Gary?" She finally drew the line between two dots. Gary sucked in a snort. Maybe she wasn't as together as all that, after all. She WAS a Hopkins, and that was a devastating blow unto itself.
She settled a hand on one saggy hip. "Well, I'm certainly glad to see you boys getting along, more trouble is the last thing I need right now."
If she had cared to look further into the history of her soon-to-be stepson, Mrs. Hopkins would have been more suspicious of the steadily growing grin on his angular face. Gary positively radiated, absorbing the moment of parental chastisement like a flower turning towards the sun. His grin practically twinkled in the bright afternoon light. Had this woman never laid a hand on a single piece of paper, a report, or even a summary, of the events which had transpired over the end of the last school year? Did she have no appreciation for the kind of lifelong bloodthirsty revenge campaign her idiot son had inadvertently triggered?? No. Of course not. Clearly, her head was full of cotton. (Or used condoms. Either/Or.) The gap between Gary's front teeth drew the eye to his infectious expression, which soon spread throughout his entire body. With a particularly gleeful jerk, the youngest Smith pulled Jimmy in closer, elbow circling his neck like a vice.
"Yes ma'am! I certainly am sorry if I might have given you the wrong impression from a distance. Jimmy and I are best friends!" His grip painfully tightened. "Gosh, I guess our pranks got a little out of hand last year, but I hope you'll forgive me for any trouble we might have caused you. Surely, you must remember what it's like to be in high school. When was that again, ma'am? Five years ago?"
The saccharine flattery practically dripped on the church steps. Mrs. Hopkins flushed a pretty pink and ~giggled~, her hands fluttering to smooth down the front of her dress. Mother easily won over by flirting, check. Gary's grin faded, but by no means died away. Casually, he traced Jimmy's adams apple with his bandaged fingertips. He could practically smell the other boy's anxiety. (Or was that the smell of mothballs? His clothes were certainly secondhand.)
"Well aren't you the polite young man!" Mrs. Hopkins cooed, before lazering a glare at her own son. "Jimmy, you could learn a thing or two from this intelligent friend of yours. You should be grateful you're going to have him in the family starting from tomorrow on, that way you two can really spend some quality time together! Maybe some of his good manners will rub off on you. Now, inside please, both of you!"
The church was small in floor area, but grandiose in scale. The stone walls tapered up into elaborate points as wooden support beams ran throughout the building. It was a nice place to face the ruination of an entire family name, Gary mused. Hawkishly, he followed in Jimmy's shadow, who in turn tailed his mother. The three of them were passing through one of the smaller rooms, the meeting hall with a low ceiling where cookies were served after service, when opportunity struck again. Just as they passed a tall stack of folding reception chairs, Gary checked the other boy in the shoulder, sending him crashing directly into the pile. The room was overwhelmed with the metallic clatter of chairs falling chaotically to the ground, and a large crowd of adults turned to stare first with alarm, and then with condescension.
"JAMES HOPKINS, clean this mess up this instant!"
Gary fell back, sucking in his grin, as Mrs. Hopkins thundered backwards to steamroll her struggling son.
"Do you really hate this arrangement that much? Is one weekend for myself too much to ask for? I give birth to you, I raise you, I pay for you! I send you to school after school after school, and all you do is cause trouble! Enough, young man! Pick these chairs up quickly, and come to the chapel!"
"I'll help him, Mrs. Hopkins!" Gary stepped forward helpfully, unseen until the right moment.
Mrs. Hopkins glanced at him, her face growing soft. "Oh, bless you, sweet boy!"
She laid a hand on his elbow and Gary barely reigned in an exterior expression of revulsion, though his eyes did flicker unblinkingly down to where her fingers lingered. He didn't like being touched. By anyone, much less the idiot heifer that had shit out his greatest enemy. He did the touching, if that sort of unnecessary thing had to happen.
"Both of you then. Ten minutes!"
Her high heels clacking sounded her exit, and the few milling adults remaining began to again softly chatter, quickly forgetting about the momentary scene. Gary swaggered over to the chair pile, and looked down at Jimmy's prostrate figure.
The mongaloid's face was flushed. With anger or embarrassment, it was difficult to tell. Not that it mattered. They were both attractive expressions. GOOD expressions. He wanted to smear more looks like that across Jimmy's face. (Or mud. Smear actual mud, also an option.) Gary stuck his hands in his pockets again, clearly intent on not helping. Pleasure surged through him as he gloated without saying a word, a smug grin twitching at the corner of his mouth.
Jimmy's angry stare rolled up to meet Gary's, and unsummoned, unexpected, the youngest Smith felt a hot jerk in his briefs.
His grin vanished instantly, though his body continued to freeze in the same gloating hover. For a few breathless moments he stared unblinking at the freckled boy on the ground.
How long had it been since he had...? Was it... even possible...? But the pills they had him taking, the injections... didn't they... ?
When was the last time he had even felt like...
Rain on the roof, striking the bells. Lightning in the distance. Broken glass digging into his back.
No... Absolutely, irrevocably NO. Gary's face turned sharply into a frown, and without breathing, without even thinking, he reached down and hauled Jimmy up by the wrist without fully realizing what he had done.
He was NOT being turned on by Jimmy dumbfuck Hopkins.
"...Well?" He demanded sharply after a beat. "What are you waiting for?"
JIMMY
"What the hell, Gary," Jimmy snarled, and his thick fist was halfway to Gary's lower ribcage before he checked himself, realizing the startled looks and gasps of nearby adults. Quickly he unfurled his hand and placed it around Gary's waist, turning the violent motion into a friendly if awkward side hug, and forced a smile and wave to the group of nearby church ladies. They gave him a look like he smelled like garbage, but otherwise went back to their chatter, satisfied (or disappointed?) that there would be no violence in the house of God, their brightly colored hats bobbing as they gossiped.
When their attention was turned away he let go of Gary but stayed in his space, his black eyes glittering with anger.
"I said I'd go along with your stupid plan! Enough already. Quit being an asshole," he said in a harsh whisper.
Gary said nothing—extremely unusual for Gary, not to have something to say—and Jimmy noticed that his body had gone completely rigid, a strange look on his face. He looked kind of queasy. Maybe he had a stomachache.
"Whatever," he said, physically waving him off as he turned to his task. Jimmy busied himself with re-stacking the chairs, pausing every now and then to shoot Gary a pointed glare.
His mind wandered as he moodily completed his task. Of course Gary already had his mom wrapped around his little finger. All it took was a little flattery and she was putty in his hands. He wouldn't be surprised if she tried to marry Gary next, though the thought gave him a little shudder. Not five minutes with him and she'd probably pick him to save over Jimmy if they were both falling off a cliff. That phony over her own kid. Like always.
He slammed a particularly rusty chair closed and tried not to think about Gary's hand brushing his Adam's apple. That was a weird form of psychological terrorism that he was really not expecting. Of course, it made sense for Gary to stoop to the lowest of the low, the basest of the base... but for some reason he thought that kind of stuff didn't occur to Gary. Of course, maybe he was mistaken—it was just a slip of the hand, or at worst a quick reminder of his own mortality. He set his face further into a thick, square scowl and swore to himself never to let Gary know the kind of effect he could have on Jimmy. That would be a disaster.
"Done. Happy?" he asked, spreading his arms wide.
"Ecstatic," Gary replied, the smirk having made its triumphant return to his face over the course of his labors. Jimmy's heart felt a little lighter to see Gary back to normal—he almost looked like his old self. God, what the fuck was wrong with him.
Jimmy rolled his head side to side on his shoulders, squinting and sighing up at the dark ceiling of the church. He was standing at the end of the line of groomsmen as his mom and Mrs. Smith giving their vows. Each of the other groomsmen was taller, darker and handsomer than the next... until you got to Jimmy, a full foot shorter than the guy next to him, the colors of his hair, cheeks and sweater booming "I DO NOT BELONG HERE" out into the proud and storied nave.
The pastor was droning on and on, his words buzzing together in Jimmy's bored ears. He clasped his hands over his crotch, then unclasped them, then put them on his hips, then clasped them again. He wasn't sure why they had to go through all this for the freaking rehearsal. It was really trying his "possible ADD" (Mrs. Crabtree, 4th grade).
He finally stuck his hands into his pockets and tipped back on his heels, trying to steal a glance at Gary. He had to keep tabs on him, after all.
Gary was staring forward into space, a look of dull boredom on his face laced with undertones of contempt. The contempt probably wasn't visible to anyone else in the church, unless they knew to look for it. Jimmy probably would have missed it himself, before everything happened.
He did notice that the other groomsmen gave Gary a pretty wide berth. There was a full two feet of space on either side of him, resulting in the groomsmen closer to their parents being bunched up like a herd of nervous sheep. And this one poor schmuck between the two of them, clearly unsure who to stand farther away from—the pauper or the psychopath. His aquiline nose practically quivered in distaste. Jimmy wanted to mess with him pretty bad... but no. He was here to behave. If tonight, and tomorrow, went well, then he'd be back at school, Gary would be back in the asylum, and things would be back to normal—with the notable exception of a new car, that is.
Jimmy sighed, and his stomach rumbled. He wondered what was for dinner.
GARY
Normally when Gary got in a mood like this, there was always an orderly around to yank him back down off the fence he would be trying to scale. Somebody would be there to shove a fist full of cherry red Secanols down his throat, and then they would lock him in a room. His room, technically, if any of the cells could be differentiated from one another. But for all intents and purposes they were the same, a bed, a toilet, and four damp walls being the only things separating him from the outside world.
At the moment as he stood holding two lukewarm rings in his palm, Gary wanted, very sincerely, to murder someone.
HOW had he looked down at Jimmy Hopkins, furiously mussed and on the floor, and felt such a repulsive physical sensation? He thought on it in repetitious disbelief. Jimmy Hopkins. After months of nothing, it hadn’t even been a girl at school to trigger a response. It hadn’t come from some idle crush, or a day dream, or a wet dream, or even a teacher. Or a salacious woman in a magazine with thick hips and a candy nickname. It had been JIMMY HOPKINS. The livestock. The trash. The muscle. James. IE, Gorilla-In-Chief. The Backstabber Extraordinaire. How? How?? No. It couldn’t be.
The question dogged Gary throughout the rest of the rehearsal ceremony, painting disdain on his face and distracting him from the sights and smells of the farce of ingrates milling in a semicircle around him. The ignoramuses soon to be his real family only saw the expression of a bored teenager, but the surface disguised a much more sinister undercurrent. Gary had…reacted… physically… to James. The point echoed back in indignant disdain again and again. He felt somehow infected by proxy, as if he had been given some kind of idiot germ, as if Jimmy’s very DNA had seeped into Gary’s pores through a fine mist in the air. And yet, it had happened. The thought hovered an inch above Gary’s head, like a stormy cloud. Gary had looked down at the other boy, James brimming with anger, dirty on the floor, with his comical aquaberry sweater pulling too-tight across his barrel chest, and he had felt it. Bothered. A hot twitch. A stir.
And it had felt…. disturbingly good.
“Do you have the rings?” The reverend asked in a dull voice. He repeated the question twice more before Gary’s father, a sharp, cruel-mouthed man with a salt and pepper high fade, coughed sharply. Gary jerked his gaze up and emotionlessly pushed past the other best men to the front. He brushed roughly past Jimmy in particular, sending him a scathing glare before wiping his face entirely clean of all emotion in front of the altar. He passed over the rings and the soon-to-be happy couple paused in the official rehearsal to discuss a few extraneous details. Gary shoved his bandaged hands back into his pockets and turned again to look at Jimmy.
Jimmy looked bored. Or was that just his regular expression? That hollow, flat lining look he got when absolutely nothing was happening in that lunkhead of his? After so long, it was admittedly hard to tell. Gary stared unabashedly, looking mildly villainous.
It shouldn’t be possible. How had Jimmy managed to pull such a surprising feeling out of Gary without even trying? It was just one more piece to futilely try to fit into the peacemeal puzzle that was the young king. Gary hadn’t even given those feelings a legitimate thought in months, considering the cocktail of drugs his maniac doctors forced up his veins when he refused to swallow his regular daily cup of plastic and chalk. The cold logic of the puzzle was his immediate first problem. Gary milled over his drug regimen, recounting every time he tongued his pills for later, or when he managed to alter the nurse’s logbook so that they would forget to come for him sometimes. Had it been enough? Certainly it was enough if just to hold on to some small semblance of individuality at the end of the night. When everyone else moaned in their cells in the dark, or slept like the living dead, Gary remembered who he was.
So. What was it, then? Gary wracked his eyes across the ruddy pink of Jimmy’s cheeks, choosing now to imagine pushing him down in a different context. Immediately a hot trill shot through his body, and his jaw clenched hard enough to crack a tooth.
Was that it? Was that really the answer? He just wanted to see Jimmy on the ground. That was all Gary had ever wanted. To see him sorry and begging, subservient and ashamed like the dog he was always meant to be. And if he was already on his knees?? Well, there were certainly other... useful.... things he might use his mouth for other than apologizing.
“I do!” said Mrs. Hopkins, and the room erupted into polite applause, all except for one pair of young hands, clenched with thoughts of violence.
They filed neatly out of the church just as the distant horizon was flickering with one last strip of sultry orange. Night swept over them and headlights twinkled along the road as the Smith/Hopkins party departed on their various ways. Most of the aunts and uncles retreated to their out-of-town lodgings, or in the case of the local family, back to their plush hillside mansions in Old Bullworth Vale. Mr. Smith headed up the procession which returned the immediate wedding party to the Smith Manor at the very top of the Vale, where a valet met them at the gate and everyone was ushered into Gary’s family home for a formal dinner with close relatives.
A maid was visible from foyer where they stood removing their coats. She squatted by the far entrance to Mr. Smith’s office, furiously scrubbing what looked like blood out of the fringe of a Persian carpet. Nobody met Gary’s gaze directly.
The dinner was a nightmare. That is, if nightmares had elaborate china dishes and a silver candelabra collection valuing in the $40,000 range. The first half proceeded relatively uneventfully, Gary mouthing ‘your mom is a whore’ beneath passing gravy boats at Jimmy at every available opportunity. Jimmy sat, conveniently, directly across from him at the narrow, but very long dining table. But when talk turned towards the children, the evening took a turn for the worse.
“-best institutions on the east coast. Truly! Why, I’ve half a mind to write to that Crabblesnitch fellow myself and have a word!” The elderly Smith Senior Senior jabbed his salad fork in the air to accentuate his point. Gary’s grandfather had always held a soft spot for, if not Gary himself, then definitely the concept of familial lineage. The family didn’t discuss Gary’s current lodgings, but his expulsion from school was still a very hotly contested subject.
“Why, the old goat went to school with your brother! He should have a care for funding if you ask me! Who paid for that auditorium? Who pays for the sports equipment that takes our boys all the way through the season? Expelling a Smith… pah, it’s a death sentence! The nerve!”
“And such a sweet boy!” Mrs Hopkins cooed in, still clearly not over her fresh infatuation with her better replacement son. “It must have been some kind of terrible mistake! Education should take priority above all other things, don’t you think so, Warren?”
Gary’s father nodded shrewdly from the head of the table, one hand resting on Mrs. Hopkins’s wrist. “Hmm. Yes, this is marriage is a fresh opportunity. What do you say to that, son? We’ll see if we can’t work this Crabblesnitch nonsense out for the fall. You can thank your new mother for that.”
“Thanks.” The reply was terse. The pressure of the conversation had very clearly pulled the color out of Gary’s face, and he sat now, wraithlike, in his electric chair waiting for someone to finally throw the switch. Especially in the diminished candle light, the dark circles beneath his eyes sunk shadows deep into his skull.
Mr Smith glared disapprovingly. “‘Thanks’ what?”
Gary coughed into his napkin and sat up a little straighter, as if heeding his father’s condescension. “Thank you for making me a new family. And maybe this time, you’ll come home often enough to catch this mother before she drinks an entire bottle of bleach. What does Grandfather always say? You shouldn’t keep a pet if you can’t take care of it.”
There was a stunned silence.
After a few moments of complete quiet, Mr. Smith carefully settled his palms on the table and pushed himself up.
“Gary, will you help me carry the parfait in from the kitchen?”
What little color, if any, drained completely away from the sitting boy, and his face grew brittle as he rose to accompany his father from the room.
“Well sometimes I’m a bit of a grump if I can’t have my dessert fast enough either!” Gary’s grandmother broke the ice when they had left, and there was a smattering of chuckles. Mrs. Hopkins, whose face had been tense, smoothed out as well, and conversation renewed afresh. A few minutes later, the father and son returned, each bearing a crystal bowl which they sat at either end of the table. When Gary settled down in his chair again, he kept his eyes low, and a hand distractedly went out to wipe at the corner of his mouth, now freshly split and meticulously mopped clean of blood.
If Gary seemed cowed though, it didn’t last long. Like a violent storm rolling in from a long distance away, his focus settled at last, decidedly and fixedly on Jimmy. He said nothing, letting the chatter rush over them, and beneath the table nudged his shoe off. Without needing to lean much at all, his toes breached their distance and he brushed the inside of Jimmy’s sitting thigh, locking eyes with him and raising one sour eyebrow.
“So, James. What are your plans after you graduate from the Academy in the next few years?” Mr. Smith questioned. The bloody corner of Gary’s mouth gave the smallest grinning twitch.
JIMMY
Jimmy's brain was having trouble piecing together the chain of events and sensations that were currently unfolding. His eyes were having trouble moving past the little trickle of blood dribbling from the corner of Gary's mouth. Someone was talking at him. Something—a dog or something, was touching his leg under the table. Gary was bleeding. Gary was looking at him the way Jimmy imagined a cat looked at fat three-legged mouse.
"Son?"
The voice came again, sharper this time, cutting through the fog, and suddenly everything snapped into place. Jimmy leaned forward and began to violently fake cough into his mouth, leading the grandmother to gasp and hold her napkin to her heavily lipsticked mouth. He surreptitiously spit the gum he had been hiding in his cheek into his hand and reached below the tablecloth to stick it to the underside of the table, at the end of a line of four or five other pieces of gum he'd placed there throughout the course of the evening. It had been kind of gross to chew gum through dinner, but totally worth it as an act of subtle vandalism. He then reached his hand to feel for what he already knew was there.
"Jimmy, stop it," his mother hissed as he finished up his coughing fit. "I-I mean, are you alright sweetie? Do you want some water?" she self-corrected, smiling nervously around the table. A server appeared and began doling out small crystal bowls of parfait with dainty little spoons stuck into the cream.
"Yeah, sorry about that," he said. "I had a tickle," he said sharply, cutting his eyes at Gary.
"What's that you were saying, sir?"
His soon-to-be stepdad fixed him with a semi-suspicious look, but repeated his question patiently while Jimmy hooked his fingers around the silken-socked foot between his legs. He ran his hand slowly down the side of Gary's foot and shifted in his chair before he replied.
"Oh, uh, yeah, after school. I was thinking I could get a job at a garage or something in town. I'm pretty good at fixing cars now. And I know some guys who could hook up—I-I mean, hook me up."
"What Jimmy means to say," his mom blurted out, "is that he wants to work for a year or two so he can save up before going to college. Isn't that right, Jimmy?" she said, her simpering tone taking a harsh, familiar turn.
"Yeah, mom. That's what I meant," he sighed. Gary's toes ghosted a little farther along the inside of his leg, in a gesture he wouldn't let himself believe was comforting, no matter how much a younger, stupider version of himself wanted it to be.
"Well, I see nothing wrong with that," Gary Senior Senior grumbled, now gesticulating with his parfait spoon. "It's a rare thing among today's youth to have that sense of responsibility. In my day..."
The old man began to ramble, and Jimmy settled his eyes back on Gary, whose face remained cold and white but for a flush at the very tops of his ears. Damn, he was hard to read. Jimmy was trying to turn the tables on him by actually encouraging this harassment but was having trouble gauging the effect. Meanwhile Gary took up his spoon and began placing dainty servings of parfait between his full, dark lips, as if they weren't totally feeling each other up under the table. It didn't escape his notice that Gary seemed to hold the cold cream in the side of his mouth that was beginning very subtly to swell.
It was almost cute, really. Gary, the almost-certain virgin if not complete asexual, trying to wage erotic war on Jimmy Hopkins? The same Jimmy Hopkins who had now made out with half the school, and felt up half the rest? He shifted forward, and Jimmy felt Gary's foot slide further up the inside of his thigh, now dangerously close to the part of his pants that was beginning feel uncomfortably tight. Okay. This had been a fun exercise and all but enough was enough. No need to show his, uh, hand, so soon.
Without warning, he took Gary's pinky toe between thumb and forefinger and pinched as hard as he could, eliciting a sharp cry of protestation. The foot withdrew from between his legs. Jimmy's thigh tingled where Gary's foot had been, and he could almost feel heat rising off the spot. His crotch throbbed uncomfortably.
"Gary, what is it boy?" his grandfather asked, half rising from his seat out of concern for the lowest and most crooked branch of his family tree.
"Brain freeze, must be," Jimmy interjected, struggling to maintain a look of friendly concern on his face. "Be careful, Gary, you can't just wolf it down. Can't blame him for trying though, right? This parfait is delicious, Mr. Smith."
Jimmy beamed around at the table. Was he laying it on a bit thick? Probably. But if it drove Gary crazy it was totally, totally worth it.
GARY
The look which spread unchecked across Gary’s face was somewhere between entertained and livid. His grin became a grimace, then swung back around to a grin again, hedging the farthest possible edge of an acceptable reaction. Finally he managed to reign his displeasure in, and ‘amused’ took final precedence. He could sit there and spit venom in everyone’s faces, in Jimmy’s face, in his mother’s face, without much thought at all, but that sort of thing had already put him at the other end of his father’s knuckles once this evening. A second time might be pushing his temporary freedom unacceptably far, even if this whole situation made him seriously consider committing arson to his own home. He looked down at his bandaged hands instead, and even though all eyes were focused on him, he felt a sudden spike of loneliness. The feeling was confusing, and almost immediately his brain began working to smooth it over with glassy charisma.
“I’m fine! I apologize, I’ve just been…ah…” He held his hands up to his grandfather with a demure smirk to prove he had legitimate injuries. “…I’ve just been a little… overzealous today. Stings a bit. The parfait IS wonderful, Jimmy is right.”
Jimmy. Right about something?? Those indeed were words Gary truly never imagined coming out of his mouth. But it was needed to smooth over Jimmy’s little… prank. His grimace fluctuated to the surface for one more moment as he swallowed the bitter spit of the lie, toe throbbing. But soon it was gone again in favor of something possibly more dangerous than anger… he cast Jimmy a dark smile. Mr. Smith’s forehead grew a deep furrow between his brows.
The rest of the table seemed disinclined to question the youngest Smith any further on the source of his injuries. Surely, Mr. Smith knew. His office was still full of busy servants attempting to pick pottery shards out of his medieval tapestry. The distinct lack of followup solidified Gary’s hypothesis. His …. ‘minor incident’… must have already been discussed behind closed doors. His relatives regarded him uncomfortably now, and he leaned back a little in his chair, feeling some of his anger legitimately ebb away in favor of strange pride. He cut through the silence with a laugh, his teeth flashing brightly in the muted room.
“It was a beautiful ceremony today! I can’t wait to see the happy bride tomorrow!”
As if a portcullis were slamming down, Mr. Smith arrived suddenly and irrevocably at his limit. “Indeed. Gary, why don’t you and James clear the desert dishes, and I’ll have Bowman call you a cab.”
“A cab? Why would I need-?” But the answer dawned on Gary hard, and he bit down on the rest of his sentence. For a third time that night, the color left his face, and he stood automatically and began silently gathering the fine dishes to carry back into the kitchen. Once again he looked truly ghostlike, mirroring the moment when he had first met Jimmy in the graveyard.
How could he have allowed himself to forget? The dishes chimed against one another under his numb fingers. Even for a moment? An instant? What single space of breath wasn’t full of the sound of screaming in the distance? What smell wasn’t soiled floors and burning hair and sour piss? Sterile chemical bleach? Blood? Vomit? Desperation?
How had he come so far in one day, only to be pulled back into the hellish hole that had consumed every spark of his waking brain over the last year of his life? How could he have forgotten where he lived? And how had he forgotten who had put him there?? His hollow eyes swept across the table to where Jimmy was also collecting plates, and a deep, resonant sense of betrayal echoed through his body.
The kitchen was empty when they finished depositing the finery in the general area of the sink. The room was hot-white, with immaculate tile work reaching all the way up to the ceiling. A bright, minimalist chandelier burnt six high voltage bulbs above them, illuminating the space so brightly that hardly a single shadow could be seen. Gary looked waxy under the light, his eyes as hollow as a scarecrow’s. In silence and troubled thought, he trailed Jimmy’s broad shoulders back across the room. This was NOT how he had foreseen their reunification going. He had wanted to spend so much more time pushing Jimmy farther, testing his limits, aggravating him. Harassing him… Instilling in him the kind of fear that he should appropriately be feeling. Fear… not exasperation. FEAR. Not dejection. Instead, through sheer force of family, somehow, Gary now found himself in the losing position. Again. James had had the last laugh. AGAIN. He had the respect. The title. And in about 15 minutes, he would have the house. Gary would go back to Happy Volts and stare at a moldy spot on the wall until the sun came up again. If Jimmy didn’t voluntarily return to his throne room in the boy’s dormitory, he would be sleeping here on 1,000 threadcount Egyptian cotton sheets.
It was too much. The pressure was unbearable. With his father, everything about his father, everything… and the church, the chairs on the ground, and the hot burn of broken shards of pottery cutting his hands, ripping white invitations into a thousand thousand bits…and his face, God, his jaw, pounding sharply enough to chisel a hot icicle of pain up into his skull… Gary boiled over just as they approached the kitchen door. His fingers flexed once, twice, three times as his body systematically prepared itself.
He couldn’t let the night end like this. Not like this. Not with the feeling of Jimmy’s hand sliding past his ankle hammering in his stomach, and the memory of Jimmy’s fists aching in his brain. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t RIGHT. WHY did Jimmy always win?? WHY did Gary ALWAYS lose? His hand shot out to grab the back of Jimmy’s humiliating travesty of a vest and he swung the boy up against the wall, smirking cruelly at the sound of his rival’s skull making sharp contact. Using his height to loom down over him, one bandaged hand flat against the tile, he shoved his free forearm roughly up against his rival’s chest.
“You know, you breathe a word about this, about tonight… to anyone?” The threat was sharp and hot, close to Jimmy’s face. “You’ll be begging to be in that cell instead of me. You tell anyone? I’ll set you on fire.”
JIMMY
As he listened to Mr. Smith sentence Gary to another night in the asylum, Jimmy felt a sinking in his guts. Somehow, throughout the chaos of the day, he had managed to forget about that place. That Gary was going back suddenly seemed wrong, even unfair—and Jimmy had more reason than anyone to want Gary behind bars. Watching the color drain from Gary's face, he saw another face transposed atop of it—waxy and greenish under flickering fluorescent lights, covered with layers of unwashed sweat and a chin dotted with stubble. He had forgotten about that Gary—the one he had visited dozens of times in the past year had been excoriated from his mind upon seeing him again in the sunlight. For a moment at least he had glimpsed the old Gary, the one he remembered from semi-sadistic machinations on October nights. The first one who'd even pretended to give a shit about him at Bullworth. The one he would have followed anywhere.
He had been terrified of seeing Gary again outside the cage, but tonight had been so much different than he'd imagined. Tonight had been fun. Sure it was horrible in all the ways he'd known it would be, surrounded by hordes of idiotic "adults", repulsive as they were disappointing. But Gary's persistent torment had somewhere along the line transformed into a kind of secret game, shared only between them. They communicated on a frequency that other people couldn't hear. Pushing each other farther, testing limits, boundaries. It was the kind of challenge, the kind of connection, that he'd been missing.
Sure, this past year had gone really great for Jimmy. Other than a few minor challenges from new kids and disgruntled greasers, his reign as de-facto king of Bullworth had been relatively undisturbed. He was friends with everyone he wanted to be friends with, and he'd easily ignored or subdued the ones kids and teachers he didn't care for. He'd had a regular series of flings and admirers, and a pretty steady FWB situation going with Zoe. For the first time in his entire life, Jimmy Hopkins had everything under control.
But he was bored.
Now, his eyes glazed with shock, the crown of his head throbbing with pain, he was anything but.
His eyes finally managed to focus again on that horrible corner of Gary's mouth, niggling at his mind all night like a loose tooth. The little trail of drying blood brought on a slow burn of anger that turned the edges of his vision white. He brought his hands up to ball in Gary's shirt, trembling between shoving him away and drawing him down, down. For a long moment they just hung there, the only sounds their labored breathing and the rustling of Jimmy's fists wringing the fabric in a confusion of anger and hatred and barely concealed lust.
Finally he laughed, but the laugh didn't reach his eyes and his eyes didn't move from Gary's mouth.
"Tell them? Tell them what, exactly? That your dad beats the shit out of you? Or that you went for my cock in front of your grandmother, under your dining room table?"
Gary let out a strangled cry and moved to slam Jimmy's head against the wall again, which was exactly what Jimmy was waiting for. He put one foot between Gary's legs and swung him around against the tiles, reversing their positions. Now instead of being back-lit by the fluorescent chandelier, Gary's face was illuminated, almost blinding white as he stared down at Jimmy in momentary confusion and fear. Jimmy pulled Gary's face down less than an inch from his own.
"You fucking moron," Jimmy breathed, and leaned forward to lightly suck on the corner of Gary's mouth, lathing off the dried blood.
"Didn't I already say I'd do whatever you told me to?"
Suddenly, the sound of approaching footsteps sent the boys scrambling away from each other. Jimmy picked up the nearest dish and pretended to scrub it, while Gary disappeared into the hall, without another word or glance exchanged. As he heard the cab door slam closed and the sound of the tires on gravel, he hurled the plate at the floor, shattering it against the tiles.
Jimmy pulled the huge, fluffy comforter up over his nose, leaving his eyes exposed to glare at the ceiling. This used to be Gary's room, but Gary's father had converted it to be a third guest bedroom probably the same day he'd dropped Gary off at Bullworth. Jimmy tried to imagine what the room had looked like when Gary had lived here, if he'd personalized it at all. The only sign he'd been able to find that Gary had ever been in here was a tiny crown etched into the bottom left side of the headboard. He imagined a young Gary, his weapon an unfolded paperclip, scratching a mark of his existence just small enough that it would be allowed to stay.
Jimmy wiped the cum off the tip of his dick onto the underside of the thousand thread count Egyptian cotton sheets, and fell asleep imagining he was walking the expansive grounds of the Smith mansion, searching for a place to hide Gary Sr.'s body.