thanatos

Her eyebrows arched.She didn’t know that Micah had the emotional range to sound disgusted with someone.She thought he was permanently beige and didn’t feel any kind of strong emotion.“I doubt Johnnie would just keep wriggling and looking for people to fuck if you chopped him in half but alright…Cool”

Isobel’s eyes popped out of her head.“Holy shit ,those are some interesting questions."Was this how people felt when she blurted out weird shit without any context?At least she never mentioned serious topics."Potentially."She wished there was an underground squad of lesbians.Maybe there was and nobody thought to invole her."I’m not a boy expert.Like I’m really not a boy expert."She raised an eyebrow while saying the word really and overenunciated it in a way only a drama kid could."But I do know that you can get away with a lot shit when you hide in plain sight and gay people are everywhere.Kind of like spiders.”

Gay people and spiders was an analogy Micah had yet to hear in his seventeen years as a Catholic, and trust him, he’d heard them all. He thought about what she’d said -- about how much shit you could get away with if you hid in plain sight. Micah concluded, in that moment, that he was very bad at picking up on subtext. 

“Then...” He picked his pen up again just to fiddle with it, gesturing around with it like a conductor with a baton. “So you think it’s possible that one in six people at this school are gay and like, hiding in the kitchen cabinets?”

Sebastian visibly cringed at Micah’s words, “What the fuck are you talking about?” he spat out with disdain, not humoring Micah’s suggestion for even a moment. “God, you say some weird shit,” he spoke as if it personally offended Sebastian and maybe it did. “I’m just saying- he’s fucking with you to fuck with you and fucking with me to fuck with me, get over it,” he was slightly impatient, less amicable now. 

“You know, he’d sooner pummel you into mincemeat, Chief. You’d be lucky if you got away from him a little short of breath instead of shitting into a bag and eating liquid lunch for the rest of your life,” he noted, thinking he was pretty on the money with his assessment of Johnnie. It wasn’t that Johnnie seemed particularly violent as far as Sebastian was aware, it was just that Micah was a soft target and Johnnie did have a sort of wild card vibe about him. “-and he really loves that car, he wouldn’t get your guts sprayed all over it, even if he was that pissed at you,” he added. It was a sweet car for an old thing and it was definitely better without Micah Shaw smeared all over it.

“Wow,” Micah said after considering Sebastian’s words for a moment longer than was comfortable. “That was...disturbingly vivid.” 

It seemed like all of their conversations, at least as of late, ended up at a standstill. Sebastian said some backhanded-slash-outright mean things to him and Micah thought why are you the way that you are and it sort of just fizzled out naturally from there. He figured he could be less of a nuisance and leave, but all the talk of Johnnie had him rethinking the way he came off to some of these BBC guys. Maybe this was like, a good opportunity to rekindle what little amount of goodwill he had with Sebastian before the first time he opened his mouth around him. 

“You’re the one that brought him up.”,she was quick to point out.”But it’s okay.I’ll forgive you for your crimes…for now”,she teased in faux menace.She was excellent at holding grudges over petty things but she wasn’t offended.Micah was only trying to make conversation and it was hard to be mad at him.He was like a mangy stray cat that needed a good home.”I thought the most important stuff was at the bottom of the triangle thingy?”,she asked.Isobel was known for many things (for example doing jazz hands at inappropriate times and the ability to make scrunchies appear out of thin air)but her intellect wasn’t one of them.However she’d seen the triangle thingy in enough memes to know that the most important things were at the bottom.”Wait is that your point?Are you saying that Johnnie fucks to survive?”,her eyes widened with realisation.That made sense and would be a funny comment to make.”Don’t female praying mantises bite the head off of guys after fucking them?”,she asked.She was no David Attenborough but she vaguely remembered it happening in a nature documentary a substitute teacher showed her class in sixth grade.“I wonder if that’ll happen to Johnnie.I hope it does ”

He shrugged and shook his head, yeah, maybe, Micah wasn’t Bill Nye the Fucking Mantis Guy. Later, he’d apologize for being so pissy with Isobel, but it was hard to keep his head straight when he was still processing the very surreal and very bizarre interaction he had with the senior that weekend. There was so much shit he didn’t understand, and he had nobody to talk about it with in earnest except for maybe Griffin but probably not Griffin because he didn’t want Griffin to think he was a total psycho, although Micah had a feeling that, in the words of JoJo, it was just a little too late on that front.

“I don’t think a beheading would do shit,” he murmured, scratching the side of his nose with his pen. “Some people are like roaches, they just keep going.”

Sebastian was surprised to hear that he hadn’t been correct in his assumptions, though he’d jumped to them swiftly and without any reasonable thought at all. “Bro, I don’t think people think about you at all,” it wasn’t as if Micah’s name came up all that often in conversation, though there was an occasion recently that had made Sebastian’s blood boil as he grit his teeth and clenched his fist, willing himself not to shove in through Johnnie Ward’s nasal cavity.

“You talkin’ about Ward?” he asked fairly obtusely, “Whatever he said, he said it to get a rise out of you, don’t take any notice of it. The guy runs his mouth cos it’s the only way anybody pays any attention to him,” he explained, under the genuine impression that he was entirely correct as he advised his roommate. “He did the same thing to me after the party- he saw us talking and whatever and thought he could make a gag out of it. It’s not like we were making macrame dream catchers for each other, we were talking.- I don’t know what his deal is but don’t sweat it. If that’s the best he’s got on you, I think you’re doing pretty fuckin’ well for yourself, enjoy it while it lasts,”

His brows jumped as though to say fair enough, hands retreating to the pockets of his jacket as he walked alongside Sebastian. That was a strength of his, he liked to think. The less others thought about him, the less he had to think about others thinking about him. This was the basis for over sixty percent of his anxieties. Life was hard.

“A gag? What, like he thought I was your sister or something?” Micah appraised Sebastian with a look. He didn’t think they looked all that much alike, except for the fact that they were both white guys, which did kind of make them look similar by default, he guessed. Anyway. Not the point. “I mean, it’s whatever. The last thing I wanna do is start beef with a guy who smokes. He might, like...cough on me and cause me to go into epileptic shock. Or run me over with his car.”

Sebastian wasn’t quite sure what the fuck it was about him extended the lost inhaler to Micah that made him think that now was a good time to unload whatever it was that was plaguing his mind on his roommate but whatever. “No,” he said confidently, not hesitating for even a moment as the word was ejected from his lips. “Bitchy but not in a girly way, just in a like- a wimpy guy way,” he looked Micah up and down, to say that he was wimpy wasn’t to say that he was effeminate, Drea was a girl, so was Gwen and Maria and there was nothing wimpy about any of them if you asked Sebastian. 

“If you want to look like a girl, start with a skirt and shave your legs,” he offered, folding his arms across his chest, “Pretty sure it’s not against the rules,” he wasn’t sure at all but he also didn’t give a shit if Micah got into trouble for it, “-and that’s like a pretty big, yo, I’m feminine play,”  

Bitchy? Micah stared at the palm of his hand like it’d provide him answers, but all it left him with was more confusion and more self-doubt. He supposed he could be okay with wimpy...it wasn’t exactly an ego-boost, but it didn’t have him doubting his outward expression of gender.

“I’m not trying to be feminine, Sebastian,” he said, exhausted. Wearing a skirt to classes was a bona fide way to scare every nun in sight and get called up to Father Doheny’s office for some “lecturing,” probably. Micah would sooner book a one-way ticket to hell than go around cross-dressing at a school like Broadripple. “It’s just that, I’m eighty percent sure someone mistook me for a chick, and I don’t know shit about what led them to that conclusion. Like what, do people think I’m androgynous? Do I look like Ellen?” 

Though Sebastian tried to stay out of trouble as often as he could, supervising staff hadn’t found it nearly as funny as he did when he’d shaved a ‘culturally offensive and unsavory’ mustache onto his face, at least that’s what it had said on the official detention form. In retrospect, he should have learned more about Charlie Chaplin before using him as an excuse because when Sister Michael asked Sebastian to describe his favorite Charlie Chaplin performance, he’d said ‘the Communist Manifesto’, thinking of Groucho Marx instead of Charlie Chaplin and referring to Karl Marx instead of Groucho Marx in what could only be described as one idiotic flailing after the next.

Still, it had been worth it for a few comedic Snapchat stories, he decided as he strolled out of detention with his backpack over his shoulder, having almost fallen asleep at least six times in the past hour.

It was just as cold that afternoon as it had been that morning and he popped the collar of his blazer to shield his neck on his way back to the dormitory building, only to be distracted by the presence of a classmate not too far off in the distance, “Yo,” he called out to the student a few yards ahead of him in the school quadrangle, “You dropped your shit,” he expressed, bending over to pick up the item he’d watched fall out of their backpack.

Micah didn’t consider himself to be someone self-conscious about his looks. In fact, if he had to consider it, he would say that he wasn’t very conscious of them at all. Or -- okay, sometimes he saw his ribs in the mirror when he was changing and was like, should a guy be that skinny, but he didn’t contemplate it for long. He had all twenty-eight of his teeth and his eyes worked pretty well. That, to Micah, was enough.

...At least, it had been up until last Saturday. Micah didn’t know what to make of it when Johnnie told him Sebastian had to tell him that Micah wasn’t a chick. He wanted to believe that Johnnie had never seen him before and just assumed, for some odd reason, that Sebastian was rooming with a girl, even though that never happened at Broadripple. Because he made it pretty clear that he was, in fact, a guy.

Didn’t he?

Micah had time after his French exam to agonize over it, almost missing when Sebastian called out to him. He turned around at the last second and almost blanched when he saw him carrying his sticker-covered inhaler. “Oh. Shit.” Micah quickly swiped it back and shoved it into his pocket. “Thanks.”

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?”

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.”

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?”

“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?”

“What- no,” she expressed emphatically in her defense. “I’m afraid of drugs for a start and I’m not even cool enough to know where to get them even if I wanted to be on drugs,” it was a sad truth but it was the truth no less, “I understand that this is an extremely invasive question but have you ever had your head forced into a toilet bowl? I have. It changes a person. I’m not paranoid, I’m extensively aware of the capacity of teenagers- especially teenage boys- especially, especially teenage boys without their parents around. It’s a hot bed for miscreant behavior, it’s Catholic school Abu Graib,”

Speaking of toilet bowls -- Micah felt like an asshole, now. He drew his bottom lip through his teeth, reminiscing on the various ways in which he’d faced the wrath of his peers firsthand. It just didn’t make sense to him that the guys here would target Casey, of all people. Like, yeah, maybe she was a little weird, but so were most people here. You had to be a special kind of fucked up, after all, to be sent off to a Catholic boarding school. But she wasn’t ugly and had a nice body, and to Micah’s knowledge, that was enough to warrant a lifetime’s worth of chasing and ogling.

“So, then...do you have an idea of who it could’ve been?” he asked, resigned to his role in this very strange Lifetime anti-bullying PSA. “Anyone you’ve talked to lately that could be a potential shit terrorist? Shit...orrist?” 

“But people do!”,she insisted.Her lack of an indoor voice caused a few nearby people to turn their heads.“You’d think I’d lie about weird shit I found out from a buzzfeed video?"Weird shit she found out from late night YouTube binges was too sacred and questionable to lie about.

"SWOT already takes us bowling all the time.”,she pointed out.The large amount of videos of her doing a piroutte before throwing the ball into the gutter proved her point.She smiled at the suggestion of going to the zoo though.The only barrier to that idea was travel.Fuck boarding schools in the middle of nowhere.She liked her classmates but Broadripple being located in a remote area had its downsides.“My plan to get Damian to relax is for the greater good.It would improve all our lives."It would especially improve her life because maybe that would get Kat to stop talking about how weird Damian was about sex.Isobel didn’t want to know about the face Damian made when he was scandalised by his own horniness."Can we please stop talking about Johnnie trying to get off with every woman he meets?He gives me the creeps."As fun as the idea of seducing an Amish woman sounded she wanted to be the one doing that and preferably a million miles away from Johnnie.”He triggers the sixth sense I have for sleazy straight guys.”

As far as most of the student body was concerned, Micah didn’t exist, and he quite liked keeping it that way. When people started turning heads in his direction because everyone and their mother could hear Isobel talk about furry Buzzfeed videos, he sank down low in his seat, using his hoodie as a blinder to further shield his face from lingering glances.

“It’s not like I wanted to talk about it,” he mumbled beneath his breath. Micah had never felt so sexually violated by another dude before that SWAT experience -- he didn’t want to imagine what it was like for the girls at this school. “I don’t even know what his deal is, it’s like...okay, this is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, right?” He abandoned his pen to form a triangle with his hands. “Down at the bottom is sex, and then the tier above that is also sex, and so is this one -- and then at the very tip, you have food, shelter, all that stuff. He’s a fucking...praying mantis of a human.”

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?” 

“--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.” 

A laugh sputtered out of Johnnie when Micah fell, more amused than mocking but Johnnie had an air about him that made him look like a school bully and it didn’t help that he was standing over him while he was flattened on the floor. He quieted when Micah glared at him, moved to offer a hand only to be brushed past. 

“Hey, come on. You gotta admit, that was pretty fuckin’ funny,” Johnnie called after him. He followed, of course. He wasn’t going to be left behind to make a pie when there were other, more satisfying pies to be had. “Where you are goin’? Come on, Mika. We’re all pals here, aren’t we?”

He followed Micah for a few paces around the village until he rounded a corner that left them just out of eyesight. Johnnie took the opportunity to stretch his long, long legs and get into Micah’s way, stopping him with a palm planted against the building. 

Without the judgment of spying eyes, Johnnie was more brazen with his approach, using less discretion in the gaps between them. When he said that the pond was dry, he’d really meant it.

“Why are you mad, huh? I didn’t do nothin’ yet.”

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?!” 

“That’s what I’m tryin’ to do,” Johnnie answered casually. He grinned when Micah escaped him and left him with the bowl.

Grabbing a spoon, Johnnie started mixing the dough for the pie crust. The card said that the butter needed to stay cold in order to make it flaky but Johnnie wasn’t great at following instructions. He looked more invested in pumping the shaft of the spoon, stabbing at the soft butter and smearing it around the inside like he was doing something completely different.

“Sex is life, dude. We wouldn’t be here without it. There’d be no songs or paintins or fuckin’ books. People wouldn’t have goals or love without sex. I dare you to name me a greater reward in the world.”

Johnnie left the bowl once he got his point across and Micah was dodging his eyes again. He circled around the island, palm dragging on the counter top as he sauntered up to the guy until he was too close again. It was risky how close he was but Johnnie liked playing games too much to care if someone saw it. There was no question of who was in charge there.

“So, what you’re tellin’ me is that you don’t think about it? There ain’t a moment in art class where you’re lookin’ at pictures of the Sistine Chapel and wondering how fuckin’ horny this dude must’ve been to paint an orgy in a church?” he said, cocking his head. “Deprivation makes people fuckin’ crazy, you know. Makes people paint orgies in the pope’s house. You don’t wanna go crazy, do you?”

I dare you? I dare you?! Micah could easily conjure up a list of better rewards than that: money. Sanity. An all-expenses paid trip to the Bahamas. Don’t tell him that a half hour of awkward fumbling and chafing was the greatest gift to mankind, because Micah knew it was complete and utter bullshit. And he didn’t have to be a greasy freaking manwhore to see it.

Johnnie advanced on him and Micah stumbled back, tangled up in a waltz he didn’t know the steps to. His stomach twisted and turned, and when he swallowed, he thought he could taste bile rising in the back of his throat. What even was Johnnie’s motive, here? Did he get that much of a kick out of creeping him the fuck out? Was this some sort of test? If Micah indulged him in his goading, was he going to pull the curtain back like the Wizard of Oz, haha, I got you, you fucking homo? What had Micah done to him to merit that?

He was already crazy, Johnnie. Sex or not, he was already fucking insane. 

Micah’s heel caught on a raised tile as he backed away, and he fell flat on his ass. The commotion was enough to send a wave of silence over the room, everyone’s gaze flitting toward him and Johnnie. Watching. Waiting. Micah looked up at the senior, worked his jaw, and pushed himself up from the ground to shoulder past him. “Fuck you,” he muttered, charging for the exit.

Screw the stupid pie. He needed some air.

Johnnie’s ego grew three sizes every time someone looked particularly disappointed in him and at the time, he really needed a boost. With everything coming to light at once, the last thing Johnnie wanted to dwell in was reality. He wanted sex and high speeds and loud music. He wanted someone else’s exasperation to outweigh his, someone’s breath louder than this own, someone to remind him that he wasn’t the only person in the universe because lately, he’d been feeling just that.

“Nobody important,” he told him with an impish smile.

Johnnie stood upright for what seemed to be the first time since he arrived at the station. He took the egg from under Micah’s grasp, juggling it in one hand before cracking it onto the edge of the bowl. The shell split evenly down the center, his long, nimble fingers pulling the egg apart like he’d been doing it for years.

There was a tactic to his show, now that his arms weren’t in the way, he could crowd Micah all he wanted. He could smell the shampoo he used. 

“What can I say? I’m really invested in sex. Why aren’t you?”

Micah exhaled sharply through his nose like he had two straws stuck up his nostrils. His patience, on most days, was a thin wire subject to snap at the slightest applied force. Johnnie took that wire and he flossed his fucking teeth with it. It wore on Micah like a strip of sandpaper. 

He wormed his way out of Johnnie’s bubble, ending up on the opposite side of the island. The lingering scent of tobacco crowded his senses and made his lungs feel as though someone was squeezing them in a tight fist. “Because I have a life, Johnnie.” He didn’t. “I have other shit to worry about.” He did. “Why aren’t you invested in your education? Are you trying to be homeless?”

Griffin rolled his eyes affectionately, settling back into the comfort of easy, uncomplicated conversation. Micah had hardly fixed all of his problems, but he’d done enough to draw Griffin from his temporary spiral of misery and trauma.

“I’d never dunk my head in a toilet,” he assured the other boy. He shook his head like a wet shaggy dog, loosing his curls from where they’d stuck to his forehead. “This chaos is carefully maintained.” 

An obvious joke. Anyone that had ever seen Griffin could tell he woke up each morning with bed head and thought, ‘that’ll do’. He did run a hand through it, conscious of what he must look like in the moment. 

“But yeah, I’m… I’m good,” he said, standing up from the floor as if to prove this point. His clothes were soaked, clinging to him. He pinched and pulled at them a bit, adjusting. “This was actually all performance art so the joke’s really on you,” he said, smiling wryly as he offered Micah a hand to help him up.

Micah managed a smile -- this time, it reached all the way toward the corners of his eyes, wrinkling them with mirth. Griffin looked ridiculous. So did he, most likely. His shirt was damp and his ass was soaking wet with shower water, and yet, he didn’t mind it half as much as he minded the stiff blazer and tie that constituted his school uniform. Maybe that made him a little crazy, too.

“Good,” he said. 

He met Griffin’s hand with a tight grip, slipping only slightly as he hoisted himself up from the floor. Griffin had warm hands; Micah noticed right away, because his were usually quite cold, and so the warmth spread from his fingertips up the length of his arm. He felt it even after his hand fell back to his side.