Yeah, I should finish the stories I'm writing first, but what if I didn't? What if some other little bullshit story takes hold in me and I let it?
Anyway it's "Jonathan and Karen get high in the Wheeler backyard"
“We broke up,” he admits, the pain of it still raw, letting it show on his face
Karen considers him for a long moment and takes a puff. Exhaling and staring at the blunt in her fingers.
He blinks a few times, stunned by her obstinacy.
“Seemed pretty permanent to me.”
“You’re barely twenty. Everything seems permanent. Nothing is.”
Her declarations have blindsided him. Jonathan just stares at her in response, too distracted to notice that Karen is trying to pass him back the blunt. He takes it from her with a shaking hand.
“Nancy said she needed to find herself. And what she wants. I think I have to, too.”
He puffs from the shrinking spliff and exhales. Let the words he’s just uttered sit, without trying to grasp the enormity of them.
“Makes sense. You’ve both been through horrors I can’t even conceive.”
“That’s the problem, I think. Those shared traumas unite us. In the end, they define us. But is that all there is to me and Nancy?”
Karen Wheeler scoffs at him, shaking her head as if he’s just uttered something ridiculous.
“Shared trauma? Maybe. But it’s more than that, Jonathan, I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the way you two look at each other. That connection, that knowledge, it’s not going anywhere. You see Nancy. I mean really see her. That’s unusual. I’m pushing fifty and no one has ever seen me like that, Jonathan. No one has ever really known me like you know my daughter.”
The wind has eased and the smoke between them lingers, a haze forming around their eyes.
“She’s going to Boston. I’m not.”
He states it like it means anything, when it doesn't. It's a lame attempt at an excuse. Karen Wheeler sniffs it out and her face changes, hardens. For the first time since she sat down, he can see Nancy on her mother's face. Jonathan knows she's going to challenge him.
“So go somewhere. Make something of yourself. For Nancy’s sake, sure. But for yours, most of all. Get out of this shithole. God, Jonathan, don’t you wanna show all these awful people in this awful town how wrong they were about you?"
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