Fic: Grace - Chapter 1
Title: Grace.
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: P!atd.
I never finished highschool.
This is both one of my biggest regrets and one of my greatest accomplishments. An awesome contradiction, huh?
I should probably put it in context.
*
“Brendon,” Sammy calls, her black hair falling across her face as she pulls off her highlighter-yellow cap. “Brendon, where have you been? School started an hour ago!”
Samantha Dallie was short and mean and a constant clash of colours that she knew didn’t match. She had thick black hair and ever-changing colour contacts, florescent skirts and baggy flannel shirts. She was angry and bitchy and a whole wonderful mess of emotions that always erupted at the worst possible time. For a while there, I thought I might have loved her.
Shrugging, I toss my messenger bag into my beaten-up locker. I’d been at Catherine’s apartment, watching her and her junkie flat mates shoot up. Sammy knew that, and so did everyone else at this godforsaken school.
“Brendon.” She says again, closing my locker door in my face, “Brendon…” Sammy stops there; she knows it’s not her place.
Knows it’s not, because every time she tries to say otherwise, I shut her down with an angry glare and a loud voice. Interfering with my personal life was always a no-go, especially to those I cared about most. Sammy was desperate to reach out to me, to have me unload all my bullshit on her the way she did on me. For me to look her way with the same big, sad doe eyes that she shot me when I yelled. When I screamed, bitched, threw a temper-tantrum. Sammy maybe sorta wanted to help me.
For a while there, she might have loved me too.
Back then however, the councillor said I had commitment issues. A number of years later, Ryan would say the exact same thing.
Sammy’s glaring at her combat boots, ignoring the arm that flings itself around her waist. David’s arm. “Hey Sam, hey, Bren.”
David is polar-opposite to Sammy, tall and selfless and always colour co-ordinated. Blond hair, brown eyes, and ever-steady. Always calm and firm and secure. A rock in a whirlwind of teenage angst and hormones. Christ only knows how he managed.
In four years, I’ll receive a wedding invitation, David Weller and Samantha Dallie (since when was she Samantha?). I won’t go.
David’s arm quickly snakes its way around my waist, as he drags the three of us to one of the few classes we all shared. A class that I’d been failing since my freshman year. A class that David had been offering to help me with since forever.
We staggered off down the hall, some bizarre three-headed-six-legged monster. Three very different people in one totally out of place body…if you could even call it that.
For all of my schooling life, these two people would be what kept me alive. What kept me going and coping and dealing with the horrors of a batshit family and a tedious schooling life. For the 11 years that I was in school, these two people would be my world.
But tonight I’d leave, it’d be the end of all this. I wouldn’t cry or mope at my loss, I wouldn’t say goodbye.
I wouldn’t see these people ever again, well, at least I haven’t…this is my biggest regret.
*
I skipped last period.
Not that that’s that outrageous. Not that it is really a big deal, only that was the last I’d ever see of my highschool…of Sammy and David. But I’ve said that already, huh?
I climbed over the white picket fence outside of our house, up the creeping vines and through my bedroom window. My parents wondered how I managed to break out so much. Catherine always wondered how the fuck they managed to keep me in.
My bag was already packed, one malting suitcase and a backpack that made me look like a turtle. That was it, all of my worldly possessions. Every material item that I didn’t want one of my brothers to highjack.
This was it.
I think I sat in that room for 40 minutes, eyeing the décor, taking in every last fucking thing because hell, this would be the last I saw of it. The last I saw of mormon-urie-lifestyle.
Goodbye, only life I had ever truly known,
Goodbye, life I left too soon.
*
If I could postpone everything I’d accomplished, put it off a few years and do the exact same shit, then I would.
If I could finish highschool, if I could graduate with Sammy and David, could still hang out with them, look after Catherine a bit better, say a real goodbye to everyone, then I would.
If I could put off everything that happened just for a few years.
But I can’t, can I?
Apart from that whole, ‘you-can’t-turn-back-time-bullshit’, there’s also the fact that I wouldn’t be where I am now if I had postponed it.
I wouldn’t be famous, I wouldn’t be writing this.
I wouldn’t have done what I’ve done.
I wouldn’t have met Loretta or Jon or Spencer or Pete or Frank or anyone that would ever teach me anything.
I wouldn’t have met Ryan.
Just for the record, if I say this to him now he’ll do one of two things. A - he’ll laugh it off, laugh and roll his eyes and tell me I’m a corny motherfucker…that I should lay off the chick flicks. Or b - he’ll tell me he loves me…that I wouldn’t have met him, because if I hadn’t had met him when I did, then he would’ve died. Died of a broken heart, of a migraine, of boredom, of crying too hard…of slit wrists.
I think I’m getting ahead of myself again.
*
“I’m leaving.”
There, I’d said it. It was out in the open, sprung from my decisive brain, out of my pressed lips.
I was standing in the kitchen, old backpack slung over my shoulder, suitcase at my feet.
“You might not see me again.” I said, “Not in person anyway…you’ll see me in the tabloids.”
My mother turned to face me, all big, dead eyes and more grey hairs then I’d remembered. She looked tired and worn and ridden with gravity. Pink latex gloves and white cotton apron…sad, dull smile.
Even now, years later, I still don’t know what I was expecting. I was leaving home with some sort of reckless abandon, to seek out a world of fame and fortune and people who would actually give a shit about what happened to me, at least for five minutes. I was leaving, and maybe a part of me was hoping that my mother, this frail, tired woman would say something that would make me want to stay.
Of course, as always, this was expecting too much.
Her eyebrows twitched a little, her smile faltered, and she turned back to her station at the sink. “Goodbye then, Brendon.” She muttered, picking up a dirty bowl from breakfast that morning.
I watched her for a few moments, rooted to the spot maybe wondering if I was really about to do this. If I was really about to abandon the only life I’d ever known. Wondered if this woman even gave a shit.
“Fuck you.” I said, before I picked up my bag, my suitcase and headed to Catherine’s apartment where she would give me that goddamn book.
In a split second, I had made the biggest decision of my life. I had left home (family, friends, Las Vegas), I had left everything on this stupid whim that maybe, someday, somewhere, I could be famous.
This, I think, is my biggest accomplishment.
I was 16.
*
This probably calls for a new beginning. A new fragment for a new stage of my new life.
So I guess this starts with Ryan.
*
There aren’t that many miles between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, so I’m not on the road for too long. Four hours or so.
All the same, I pull over for lunch. Pull over at this ugly, crappy little diner with peeling walls and faded yellow curtains. The neon sign on the door flashes ‘-p-n’, and the Wilson’s Diner logo is painted clumsily on the glass panelling of the door.
It’s the aftermath of a trainwreck, a hurricane, a nuclear bomb. Tables and chairs strewn aimlessly, floor tiles broken and cracked, plates and dishes stacked on tables and trays. The counter is impossibly clean.
Even now, years later, I have no idea why I went inside.
I sort of fell into one of the booths, ignoring the stares I got from the other customers - the truckies and bikies and 12-year-old single mothers - and picked up the sweaty menu.
It was 20 minutes before I was served, despite the severe lack of paying customers. The waiter approached cautiously, a long and lanky boy with a face hidden behind bad hair. His nametag said ‘George’.
“Order.” Came a mutter, somewhere from the darkest depths of this boy’s throat. “Order.” He repeated.
“I dunno,” I said, cocky and arrogant and rude. “Anything on here that hasn’t been soaked in cheap grease?”
“Depends,” George muttered, “You got the cash to pay the difference?”
I smirked, watching as he tucked one long bang behind his ear, my first glimpse at a cherubic face. “Got me there, George.”
“I’m not George.”
My brow furrowed and I gazed pointedly at his nametag.
“Well, my name is George, but I’m Ryan.”
There’s a whole back story to this, to the name thing I mean, but that comes a lot later, so with this I just nod, and whenever I say his name now it’s deliberate and slightly condescending.
“Yes, and my name is Brendon, but I’m actually God.”
George/Ryan doesn’t laugh so much as snort, and lets loose a drawn out eye roll…Well, at least, I think he did. The hair made non-verbal communication difficult.
He runs a bony hand through his hair, before tying up the shoulder-length locks with a black band.
My first thought was that he didn’t fit here. He was this long, frail, impossibly pretty thing that must’ve been routinely raped by…everyone, the truckies, the other waiters, the bikies…the 12-year-old girls. He had a face that set something off inside me, a mini eruption in my stomach and…and I wasn’t gay.
“Order.” He says again, raising his eyebrows to an impossible level as he swayed a little on his feet.
“What can you recommend to a rising star, Ryan?”
George/Ryan shot me a sceptical glance, “Rising stars aren’t frequent customers, but if you want I can tell our chef not to spit in your food.”
I grimaced slightly, before sliding over in the booth. “Wanna sit down?”
I wasn’t hitting on him or anything.
I wasn’t.
He shot me another sceptical look, before nodding back to a sign on the wall. Do not touch the waiters, you will be persecuted.
“What is this, the playboy mansion?”
George/Ryan snorts, scratching his head. “Only after 9.”
Opening my mouth to speak again, the waiter leaps to the gun. “Order.” He repeats, “You may be a rising star out there, but in here you’re just another customer. So please place your order with me, or maybe you’d rather I get Jules.” He points towards an enormous, brutish fellow flirting with one of the 12-year-old single mothers.
He looks like a serial killer.
“And here I thought we were connecting.” I state, fluttering my lashes at him in a move Catherine always did when she was trying to get a guy into bed…not that I was trying to get him into bed …it’s not like I was attracted to him or anything.
Not then at least.
“Salad.” I say, “no dressing. And a water.”
George/Ryan nods, writes the order down quickly on his pad, and heads back to the counter.
George/Ryan doesn’t bring me my meal, a taller, broader guy does instead, one with the name Brent scrawled across his tag.
In fact, I don’t see George/Ryan again that day, and when I ask the grouchy kid behind the counter, he’ll tell me that his shift is over.
So I do the only thing I can do, I shrug my shoulders, pay, and move on to LA. George/Ryan was just a pretty face, I told myself, not that I cared or anything, and if I’m honest, I forget about him in a matter of days.
Forget that lanky body, and that scruffy hair.
Forget the George nametag on the boy called Ryan.
Forget him entirely, at least for a few years.
Just for the record, Ryan never finished highschool either.
*
TBC.