carry on.

The initial pop of excitement at seeing his best friend’s face after missing him all day quickly morphed into a frown when Johnnie jabbed Charlie back into the room. Charlie rubbed his shoulder, exaggerating the injury more than it had truly hurt him. 

Tristan wasn’t in the room - he’d said he was off to spend the night going over the ‘Sturbridge numbers’ with the rest of SWAT, whatever that meant - so Charlie opened the door wider, letting the tornado that was Johnnie burst into the dorm. Hopefully giving him an empty space to fill would make Charlie less of a target. Especially when he was sure he’d doing nothing wrong.

“Uh… wanking cow titties with Maria all day,” he said, his tone confused by the anger he didn’t know the source of. “You’re the one who ghosted me, dude. Where were you?” 

Johnnie blew into the room like a hurricane, all frenetic energy and hostility like his body was just regurgitating all the emotions it could to try and relieve the pressure in his chest. He paced the length of the dorm before whipping around to get into Charlie’s face.

His nostrils flared when Charlie turned the question around on him, the shadow of his brows doing a poor job of concealing the shine in his eyes where the light hit it. He inflated with bravado, his breathing deepening like he was about to yell.

“Why were you with Maria? You don’t even like Maria,” he spat. His posture was stiff and rigid, shoulders hunched in a poor approximation of anger and hostility over something he really didn’t care that much about. It was Charlie, his best friend. He didn’t think for one moment that Charlie would do anything to her or that Maria would’ve let him but he was scrabbling for purchase and jealousy was the first thing to catch. 

“I can’t believe you’d do that to me. You know I like her, man. What’s the matter with you?”

Ella felt validated by Johnnie’s assurances in spite of his lack of table manners. Anyone could have agreed with her and she would have felt a bolster of reassurance that Brent Harstine from Somerville High was a complete and utter douche-canoe unworthy of her time. “Seriously. So dumb.” She considered hopping in line for her own meal, but the look of Jaime’s dinner had done a good job of killing her own appetite. 

His compliment earned a smile from her. “Thanks. That’s sweet of you to say.” Even if she’d felt the outfit looked good when she left, it was nice to know the additional effort wasn’t a waste. Maybe it was anti-feminist of her to find the act ‘worthy’ only if it garnered the approval of someone else, but Ella didn’t see anything wrong with wanting a little recognition for her effort in the same way she didn’t see anything wrong with not caring what anyone thought. 

Why some people seemed to think both were inherently in conflict confused her.

Ella gratefully accepted the juice-box. Dinner might be a no-go, but she could never say no to sugar. She unwrapped the plastic encasing the straw and punched it through the lid. “Somerville High. It’s a public school a few towns over.” Not a long trek, especially if you had a car. Ella laughed, “Actually I think he may have run in the opposite direction. Especially if he saw you swing a bat in baseball.

“Hey, I don’t take my bat out for just anyone.”

Ella’s comment reminded him that baseball season was just around the corner and that he’d have to pull himself together real soon. There was no way he’d misrepresent his hometown by looking like some schlub on the pitch. Princeton had nothing going for it but coal and baseball after he’d tried the pizza bagels at Broadripple. It was just a matter of putting the guitar down and getting his head in the game, something proving to be harder than he thought it’d be.

“Somerville High, a public school. Oooh,” Johnnie teased, laughing a little at the way that came out of his mouth. He never thought he’d be one to look down on public schooling until he was no longer in it. “You were really tryna slum it with the normies, huh?” 

He followed suit and popped his juice box, taking a good sip to wash down tuna with strawberry punch. “No really, though. How’d you meet ‘im?”

“So. Plot twist. He stood me up. Like, just completely didn’t show.” Ella dropped her purse on the table in Broadripple’s dining hall. It was the only one she’d brought to the Academy with her, the only one nice enough to be deemed worthy of going out. But instead of a promised Friday night escape to one of the local restaurants just out of town, Ella was left waiting at the gates for a ride that never showed up. If she was being honest with herself, the first of many red flags had arisen when Brent kept trying to slide their texts into the realm of sexts. And optimism was always an excuse she fell back on when she knew she wanted something unrealistic. “Just so you know, the guys from Somerville High are lame. I swear, this guy didn’t even know Sappho was an actual person.” She definitely wasn’t bitter about it. She totally didn’t care. Even though she’d wasted an hour trying to recreate a make-up tutorial and slaving over an outfit that looked effortlessly cute. An hour that she could have spent on something meaningful. Like practicing lines or reviewing Griffin’s latest edits for Broadripple Uncensored.

Instead, she’d spent her open afternoon rifling through drawers, switching out her earrings, and trying on nearly every article of clothing in her wardrobe. Gwen would have a mouthful to say about the pile mounted on Ella’s bed when she got back to the room, but Ella considered that an issue to suss out later.

She looked over the food on her classmate’s plate. Ella frowned. “Okay, that tuna casserole looks expired.” Ella cracked a smile. “Does it taste as sad as it looks?” 

Johnnie wasn’t really one to spend his nights in but he was feeling under the weather lately and staying on campus on a weekend was kind of a treat when he didn’t want to have to entertain anybody. Post-punishment meant that a whole lot of students were just hankering to do something else other than look at brick walls and he didn’t blame them but he’d had enough of being around people (Charlie excluded). His head had become enough of a party on its own. A sad, morose party DJ’d by his own country twang he’d jotting down in the music room. 

He moved his guitar case from the seat next to him when Ella came barreling in and sat it between his knees. 

“Really? What an idiot. He’s missin’ out,” Johnnie said around a mouthful of casserole. His dinner hadn’t looked unappetizing until Ella sat down next to it. All her effervescence made him and his things look like a rain cloud. 

He shrugged at the comment and moved his food around. His tray, as always, was graciously loaded with extras from the cafeteria staff.

Johnnie plucked a juice box from his tray and offered it to Ella. “You look cute. Where’d you say he come from again? You should’ve let me talk to him first. Doubt he’d have stood you up if he knew what was comin’ if he did.” 

It took Damian a moment to collect his bearings, to get his thoughts in order and his breathing settled. When he came to, he shuffled over to where his AirPods fell and snatched them up, putting them back in their case. And then Johnnie opened his mouth. Heavens… It always went that way, didn’t it? Damian got himself together and then Johnnie opened his mouth, sending Damian mentally spiraling yet again.

After slipping the case back into the pocket of his joggers, he sighed a little, wondering just how to answer this question. It’s a bit of his own fault, really. Got rather curious about the state of the Wards when they were cleaning up the pool house, and an exchange that Damian couldn’t really wiggle himself out of took place.

“Something like that, yeah…” 

A non-mutual pact that Jamie would never breathe again. Ugh, the thought of it made him sick, chills forming up and down his arms as he felt the sudden urge to throw up the absolute nothing he had sitting in his stomach. He was tired of this. The guilt, the feigned friendliness… Maybe he should just tell Johnnie and set himself free.

“You know, Johnnie, your brother and I… we’re not really… like you think we were.”

Something about the crisp morning air and all the adrenaline made him want to talk and the vague approval from Damian seemed to be all the prompting he needed. There had been a lot stewing beneath the surface and bubbling in his head about the whole affair regarding Jamie. All the burying he’d been doing had done nothing but shake him up like a soda bottle until it all exploded everywhere he didn’t mean it to. 

Damian wasn’t really his best buddy ever, but it’d meant something that he was the first to know. The first person to have really seemed to care about any of it, even if Johnnie had gone out of his way to make him pay for that. (He was sorry for that too.)

“I just don’t get it, you know? He didn’t say nothin’ ‘bout any of this. You or that Griffin kid, this creek, his fuckin’ poetry. It’s not like I would’ve...” Johnnie trailed off, appearing to rethink where he was going with that. He would’ve definitely have made fun of Jamie, ridiculed him and made him cry but he was his brother. He was allowed to do that.

“No one would’ve said nothin’ ‘bout it if he’d just told me,” he finished, certain of that much. Johnnie didn’t do much to protect Jamie when he was alive but he hadn’t known he had anything to look after. Maybe that was the problem. He hadn’t thought of his brother as an entity of his own but a shadow he couldn’t detach. An extension of himself rather than something with a life and purpose of its own.

Looking around at all the trees moving around them and the school’s silhouette strong behind them, Johnnie couldn’t help but think about how wrong he’d been about that.

“Who the fuck am I to tell someone who they can and cannot love anyway? Jamie wasn’t the kinda guy to go be slutting around and bein’ all fruity and shit. That’s all Frank’s afraid of, you know. Our uncle just wanted us to be men.”

  There were a lot of things that came easily to Cassidy Callahan, coordination wasn’t one of them. It’s why it had taken her until sophomore year to stop riding the bench in soccer. For an athlete she usually lacked agility when she needed it the most. Fortunately, soccer was simply a hobby, something she did for fun and not an avenue she was trying to pursue professionally.

  Perfectly sculpted eyebrows furrow together in mild confusion. Her gaze slowly lifting from the mess she’d made on the floor to squint up toward the person speaking to her. Try as she may, she couldn’t attach a meaning to his statement. Was he insinuating that the person who came up with dropped the ball….had literally dropped one of his balls? Or was she misinterpreting? 

  It felt too embarrassing to ask for farther clarification, especially when he was quite literally handing back her own tampon. Instead the brunette flashes him a smile instead, a nervous laugh escaping her as she reaches for the item in question and tucks it safely back into her bag. “I’m probably the last person the Sisters worry about being impure, so I’m sure I’ll be fine,” Cass offered with a nonchalant shrug of a shoulder.

 Gathering up the last of her stuff Cassidy doesn’t waste long on her knees before extending to her full five foot five inches. “I guess it’s safe to assume by your use of these people that you’re new here?” Odd, Cass thought, since she swore she’d seen someone who looked similar to him roaming the halls for years. Then again she barely had the balls to make eye contact with many specimens of the male species her freshmen and sophomore years. 

“I’ve seen people get canned for less,” Johnnie said. He shrugged like he wasn’t talking about himself and the perpetual sign on his back that said ‘I’m being naughty’. Johnnie stood by the fact that he didn’t go out looking for trouble but rather that it went looking for him, magnetized to all the chains and leather he wore outside of uniform. Not that he had much opportunity to change lately, but he was looking at her like she might give him one.

“Sorta. I’ve been here since the beginnin’ of the year. I just don’t think my people consist of fuckin’ nuns and Jesus is all.”

Johnnie gave her a crooked smirk, his posture slanting to the other side like it was trying to counter the weight of it. “What’s your name? I haven’t seen you ‘round before. I’m Johnnie. Johnnie Ward.”

Poppy jumped in her seat, smiling at the supervisor when his attention turned on her and pretending to scratch an itch. Immediately after she retrieved the note, Poppy twisted around to give Johnnie an exaggerated eye roll. Obviously, he was right there – she didn’t want to see his turnip dick in person, she wanted photographic evidence so she could send it to her friends and bully it.

“Excuse me,” she raised her hand. “I’m going to go change my tampon.”

Without waiting for the supervisor’s response, she gathered her bag on her shoulder and stood up from her seat, chair screeching across the linoleum floor. Poppy didn’t actually plan on coming back here, but men were stupid, and so nobody said anything as she made like Roadrunner and got the fuck out of that room. A note appeared on Johnnie’s desk.

u suck, it said.

And at the bottom, there was one simple instruction: figure something out. 

Johnnie stared blankly at the note Poppy left. It wasn’t that he couldn’t read. It was just that most girls didn’t act like sharks or try to get him to skip detention-- which, for all of his misbehaviour, he’d never done.

Punishment wasn’t a thing Johnnie evaded because the few times he had gotten caught, he felt like it was fair they’d finally did. More than that, he didn’t want to make matters worse because it never got better but he supposed detention that afternoon hadn’t warranted a real sentence.

He waited a little while after Poppy left before raising his hand. “Can I go to the bathroom?”

The supervisor looked at him, unimpressed. “Is it an emergency?” he asked.

“I might need the nurse, actually. You see, I’ve got this rash and it’s just really burnin’ and hard to concentrate,” Johnnie started, moving his hand towards his inner thigh. He didn’t get a chance to put on the performance he was prepared for before being frantically waved out of the room by a man who looked like he needed a new job.

 Let it never be said that he ever skimped out on the pursuit of ass. Johnnie grabbed his bag and the note before slipping out the classroom door.

STARTER FOR: Anyone. TIME & LOCATION: Mid-afternoon @ The Cloisters.

   There was a certain pep in Cassidy’s step as she wanders through the academy. She weaved through groups of students, edging through the dense with her vintage backpack swinging from it’s place precariously hanging over her shoulder. It doesn’t take her long to get her destination, the cloisters. For months now it had been too cold to study at her favorite place on the Broadripple campus but it had finally started to warm up enough to risk moving her study sessions outdoors once more. As she settles herself against the wall the brunette can’t help but notice the fragrance of reawakening vegetation perfuming through the air around her. Her hair caught in the perfect post-winter breeze. The ghost of a smile subconsciously places itself against her features while busy fingers take to rummaging through her bag for a biology textbook.

  Preoccupied with the task at hand Cassidy accidentally knocks the entire thing off of her lap. Emerald hues watching in quiet horror as the contents of her bag spill over the cobbled stone. In a matter of mere moments everything’s sprawled across the walk way for anyone to peruse through. “Shit,” the junior muttered under her breath, quickly following behind her displaced belongings on the floor to collect them before anyone stumbled across anything too embarrassing. She manages to shove a couple items back into her bag before noticing a pair of feet approaching. “You’d think as an athlete I’d be less clumsy but evidently that’s not the case.” 

Winter meant that the cloisters were decently vacated due to the cold, which also meant that there was enough privacy for him to light up one during breaks and afternoon activities. With the steady increase of stress brought on by recent revelations, Johnnie found himself outside more often in search of relief in a smoke and sunshine. 

However, it was Massachusetts so it was mostly all smoke and no sunshine.

Johnnie noticed a girl come out looking like she was going to study, half-dreading the company (in case she was a snitch) and half-curious (in case she was cute). He watched her clumsy fumble through a thin veil of cigarette smoke. She was a one girl tornado and his amusement piqued at the sight of her on her hands and knees. Eventually, Johnnie took some pity on her and got up to help her after flicking his cherry into a shrub.

“Don’t worry, there’s still the guy who sucked so much he coined the phrase ‘dropped the ball’,” he told her. His accent was a long, lazy drawl that seemed to match his posture.

Johnnie offered her a tampon that had clearly fallen out of her things. “You oughta be careful with these before a Sister catches you with it and makes you attend bible study ‘til you’re ‘pure’ again. These people are fuckin’ weird as hell.”

Poppy squinted at the paper, trying to make sense of the question. Turnips? What, was he implying that his dick was short and bulbous? Weird flex, but it did pique her curiosity. She wondered if she could cajole him into showing her, so she could take pictures of it and laugh at it and thank her lucky stars God had blessed her with a vag and not a turnip dong.

What? Poppy was getting bored in here. 

She flipped the note over and hastily scribbled out a reply, craning her neck to make sure the supervisor wasn’t looking before passing it back to him. It read:

send pics xox ###-###-####

Johnnie furrowed his brows at the paper when he got it back. He wasn’t the best at reading but he was pretty sure it was asking for pictures and Johnnie wasn’t exactly a sexter. He was impatient and horny and enjoyed the instant validation of having someone in front of him and one belt buckle away from having their mouth on his dick. There wasn’t a need for photos and incriminating evidence for someone to find later scrolling through all the vanity shots on his phone. Call him old fashioned but he didn’t have the privacy for personal porn growing up in a little trailer.

‘Y PICS? IM RIGHT HERE. WHAT ARE U DOING AFTER?’, he wrote.  ‘COME HANG.’

Poppy’s reason for being stuck in detention was much simpler – she told Mr. Knapp his bald head looked like a shaved ballsack with genital herpes. And she would have been sorry for it, if it weren’t the truth.

Everyone at this school, no matter differences in age, sex, race, or religion, had one thing in common: they all got on her last effing nerve. Not a day passed her by where someone wasn’t doing the absolute most to annoy her, and today, that someone happened to be her American History teacher. Whoever said that teenage girls were sensitive had clearly never met 60-year-old white men named Angus, because when Poppy told him exactly how she felt about him, he’d gone so purple she thought he was dying of a heart attack.

She was kind of disappointed he wasn’t.

The wadded up ball of paper hit her desk as she was checking her nails. Poppy opened it, glanced over her shoulder for the message’s sender, and pressed her lips to the paper. When Johnnie got it back, he’d find her cherry lipstick smeared around the box for no, along with a scribbled note in pencil that read: sry allergic 2 baby carrots lol.

This was detention, after all, not a penitentiary. 

Johnnie might’ve been more disappointed in the response if he’d given it his best effort but a cut-and-dry note in the middle of detention wasn’t even half-hearted at best. It was a mediocre attempt at finding a distraction. Maybe he was a little disappointed that not even Poppy Rodrigues could give him something interesting to engage in.

He tapped his pencil on the desk, deliberating a response as he looked at the note. A part of him loathed the cycle his days had become at school, recognizing his own exhaustion for the first time in seventeen years as he raked his brain for something to reply with that wasn’t resignation. Johnnie didn’t give up on anything. He wasn’t like his brother.

Johnnie tossed back the note with:

U LIKE TURNIPS?

He meant ‘turning up’, but Johnnie wasn’t the wordsmith in the family either.

Johnnie couldn’t climb over his pride to admit what was going on so he took the L without much complaint, but it was a wake up call. He had to get back on track fast before anyone else noticed his fraying edges for the sake of his place in school and also his reputation.

Surveying the classroom like a lion looking for its prey, Johnnie found the selection scarce. Kids were staying out of trouble those days and the usual suspects were missing from the crew. There were a couple seniors he knew and some juniors he didn’t. Nobody looked particularly appetizing but Johnnie didn’t think about whether that was because he wasn’t all that hungry.

Noticing Poppy Rodrigues a few seats in front of him, he took that as a sign from God that he in his corner so Johnnie pulled a sheet from his notebook, jotted down a message and balled it up before tossing it over her shoulder.

Micah closed his eyes and tried to count to ten, a practice he’d seen Sister Michael utilize on more than one occasion when she wanted to astral project out of a service. At this point, it just seemed like Johnnie was fucking with him. As one did. He didn’t know why he bothered explaining it for as long as he did when his reactions only made him look like a touchy bitch who couldn’t handle the locker room talk BBC guys and their kin were so accustomed to.

“Forget it,” he said on a deep exhale, his anger fizzling out in the cool air. Micah was a lit match put out by a measly gust of wind, and he resented himself. “Forget it, it doesn’t fucking matter. I’m gonna go pet a goat or something.”

There was a joke to be made there about a goat he could’ve been petting if he’d just stopped being weird and judgy but Johnnie’s mood and motivations had collapsed pretty quickly on top of the flimsy foundation he’d built them on. He was confused but more than that, annoyed.

Johnnie rolled his eyes, easing up on where he was on the wall in search of another outlet. 

“Whatever, man. Fuckin’ weirdo.”

It didn’t mean Charlie had to go and talk to Maria or abandon him to pie-making duty with Goldilocks. 

To make matters worse, the bus back to campus was one long, torturous test of patience. The tension in his body had only folded and tripled with every passing minute that he was forced to remain still in once place, leaving him to stew in his thoughts about Jamie and what a fucking asshole he was because his anger seemed to be the only thing that kept him together anymore. 

Jamie’s parting words were a bomb, each word shrapnel that lodged itself inside his chest and he refused to operate on the wounds. He deserved it, for all he knew. For letting him feel alone. For letting his brother down so hard that he was six feet underground.

By the time they’d gotten back, he was ready to combust and he knew exactly who could take it.

Johnnie blew in like a storm, pounding onto Charlie’s door with one intention. When he answered, Johnnie jabbed him so hard that his knuckles cracked on his shoulder blade. 

“You have a good time, asshole? Where the fuck were you?”

“No! What? How are you completely missing the point, I’d rather not talk about it at all!” You should stop talking, his thoughts nagged.You’re not one of the guys. You’re a fag. You’re fucked up, you’re fucked up. And to his thoughts Micah replied, shut the fuck up, it’s not weird that I want to keep some things to myself.

It’s not. It’s not. It’s not.

He laughed – not because he found the situation funny, he didn’t. It was one of those I’m-on-the-brink-of-sanity laughs, all breath and no humor. 

“It’s not as though we’re friends having a chat about our weekend plans. I – barely know you, for one, plus you just insulted me like, twice. Do we not see the problem with your approach, here?”

Johnnie narrowed his eyes when Micah started laughing at him, the familiar air of condescension making his blood combust.

No, he didn’t really get it. It wasn’t like he was asking anything about anything serious like whether he slit his wrists in the bathrooms or what he saw himself in five years. The concept of boundaries were lost upon him when the foundation of his social grace was taught to him in profanities and fists. As a kid lauded for his ability to be crass and profane, Johnnie took to those values as his baseline for normal. He went and got what he wanted.

There was rarely a question about what his motives were and as far as he knew, he hadn’t been anything but friendly. Being questioned made him second-guess himself. He didn’t like that.

“What’s wrong with my approach?”

“–Huh?”

Anger dissipated into vexation into confusion. What shit was he talking about now? Micah’s gaze flickered back and forth between Johnnie’s, brow creased, mouth agape. A light switch. Johnnie turned his personality off like it was a light switch, and the face he wore beneath the mask gave Micah pause.

“Because – you’re – ” He shook his head, wracking his brain for words that wouldn’t come. “It’s just invasive, to ask those fucking things. Like…you don’t just go up to people and expect them to tell you personal shit like that, what the hell.” 

Johnnie narrowed his eyes at Micah’s aborted sentence. Because he what? What was fundamentally wrong with him that no one wanted to say shit until they were bleeding out in a swampy wooded area? It wasn’t about the sex anymore, his aggressive attempts to escape thinking about it all just circulated back to Jamie with a vengeance now that he was alone with nothing it bury into.

“How the fuck else is anyone supposed to know anythin’?” he demanded, annoyed.

“What, am I supposed to write a fuckin’ poem about it? You rather exchange some fancy big words and have me sit down and parse the fuckin’ meanin’ from some goddamn metaphors?”

His vision swam as he trudged along the gravel path, yanking open the top two buttons on his stupid cotton shirt so he could at least fucking breathe. Anger wasn’t his thing. He lived a life on the defense, not the offense, shutting himself inside this cage of nerves and hormones to shield himself from harm. It took a lot to get him upset, much less this worked up, but, well. The narrow list of emotional triggers that actually set Micah off was the only 1% Johnnie would ever belong to. 

He ignored Johnnie’s attempts at reconciliation – if he one even call them that – and kept storming forward, clinging to the hope that Johnnie would eventually grow tired of him and find someone else to bother. Some guys had the attention spans of fruit flies. So far, Johnnie hadn’t given him any reason to believe he’d be different.

In hindsight, this was Micah’s fatal mistake.

Micah didn’t need a mirror to know that his face was splotchy and red, anger blooming in patches under his skin. “What are you gonna do, then? Huh?” He got in Johnnie’s face, used the distance between them to his advantage – Micah wasn’t intimidating in stature, but he was nearly six feet tall and could be damn forceful if he needed to be. “Hit me? Call me names, take your fucking dick out? Can you not see I don’t want shit to do with you?!” 

Johnnie didn’t really get it when people got upset with him but he took their anger in stride. He grew to know it and accept it and enjoy it without question because more flexible he could be, the easier it was to absorb the blows and he was tired of being hurt by things. But Jamie’s death was a wound that wouldn’t close, leaving him gaping and bleeding joy and infecting him with curiosity that made his hobbies so much less fun.

It was like no matter how far or fast he ran, Jamie’s ghost was right there asking him...

“Why?” 

Johnnie’s expression was blank, unreadable. “What’s it about me that makes people not wanna tell me shit?”