An Evil Mind

“I t-tried,” I whisper. “I tried to protect her, and you, and everyone. But all I did was kill her. I failed. I failed and I killed her, and hurt you.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, hot moisture collecting in them.

“I don’t deserve to live -”

Her arms tighten, squeezing the air from me.

“Stop,” Isis says.

“It’s the truth –”

“Newsflash; not everything that drops from your gorgeous dumb mouth is the truth.” There’s a pause. “Ah, shit. I just called you gorgeous. Now I have to commit seppuku.”

“Don’t you dare,” I mumble into her neck.

“See? That’s how it feels. That’s how it feels when you say you don’t deserve to live. New rule: Nobody gets to talk suicide ever.”

A tear escapes, and I bury it in her shirt collar. She puts a hand on my head, petting it.

“If you really think you’re so bad,” she says. “Then live. Live, and suffer. Live with the memories of all the bad things you’ve done. Don’t take the easy way out.”

There’s a poignant pause. Then she adds;

“- numbnuts.”

The name is a tiny injection of reality, of light. The cracks in me relieve the pressure of the last year, of the year before the last, the water flowing through them slowly as my breath deflates in my lungs. I look up, and cup either side of her face.

“I’ll only say this one time, so listen carefully.”

Her eyes are wide, her lips parted and her cheeks are flushed. Her eyes too, I notice, are more than a little tear-stained.

“You’re right,” I finish. “You’re right for once, Isis Blake.”

And then she smiles, and for the briefest half-second before her friends come barreling out of the hall and shout for her, everything in the world is right, and bright, and better. We part, my arms already missing her warmth, and she looks back at them.

“One sec!” She whips her head around to me. “So you’re here now? You’re living on campus like the rest of us peons?”

I nod. “The Jefferson dorm. 314. For a while.”

Her stare is flinty. “You have a lot of explaining to do. Due. A lot of explaining is extremely overdue. And you should call your mom. She’s been really worried about you.”

“Agreed.”

“You still have my number, right? You didn’t chuck your phone in a lake when you went to join the Empire or the seven samurai or the monastery of lame grossness or whatever?”

“I have it.”

She chews her lip. “I still haven’t forgiven you. But I’ve found, through eighteen years of vigorous experimentation, that I’m much more willing to forgive people if they interact with me on this physical plane. Talk to me. Text me. With cute cat pictures or winky faces –”

“I don’t do winky faces.”

“Aha, but you do cat pictures!”

“No.”

“Yes,” She argues.

“No.”

“Ugh, look at us. Why can’t we just talk like normal people? About, like, concerts and cake and our deep personal beliefs and the color orange and stuff?”

I stare at her blankly. She nudges me.

“Orange. C’mon, try it. A conversation about orange.”

“It’s….orange.”

“Ding ding ding. Give the man a cigar. Orange is orange. Wow. This has been an excellent conversation. Your powers of observation are downright fearsome. Maybe we could work our way up, you know, to purple next time. Except then you might disappear for years again –”

“It wasn’t years.”

“ – and I would be lost and heartbroken, and then you would come back having spent fifty years thinking about purple, thinking; ‘oh yes, now is my chance to impress Isis with my deep and thorough knowledge of the color purple’, and you’d find me in a nursing home in a coma dreaming about Johnny Depp all vegetable-like, and you’d have to hurry to tell me about purple because one of my potential spawn might pull the plug on me. Maybe you’ll pull the plug on me. Note to self: ugh, don’t get old.”

“Too late,” I smirk. She puffs out her cheeks and stands.

“Anyway, I like you but you’re ruining my life. Bye.”





-7-

3 Years

47 Weeks

2 Days

Everything happens all the time forever, and this would be a terrifying concept if I wasn’t so enlightened and in-tune with the natural forces of the universe, which include but aren’t limited to; A. taco salad, B. taco salad, and C. my own glorious ass (glorioass). Which increases in size directly proportionately to how much taco salad is in the area. Science has come so far.

Regardless of how big my ass is, it won’t be big enough to crush Nameless’ huge fat head. Also, I would not touch him with any body part that is not spiked and or doused in black mamba venom. Now that he’s going to my school, I have to devise ways in which to rid myself of him sans homicide. Maybe, like, a fortuitous black hole.

But first, I have to throw a tantrum. It’s an area in which I have great experience.

“Do I even wanna know what you’re doing?” Yvette looks down as I attach myself to her leg the second she walks in the room. I whimper attractively.

“I’m taking the time to revisit your ‘drop out of college in the first year’ plan.”

“Oh, stop,” Yvette throws her laptop bag on her bed. She drags her feet to her desk. “While you’re down there, untie my shoes for me.”

“Like I was saying,” I untie with gusto. “I recently discovered someone I really don’t like goes here.”

“That dude you were talking with the other night? Model McFartington?”

“Have I called him that? That sounds like something I would say.”

“You say it a lot. In your sleep.”

“Yvette!” I wail. “It’s not Model McFartington. There is another person on my shitlist. Model McFartington is on the shitlist, also, but he is not number one, and also he’s got a bunch of red squiggly lines through his name, because sometimes I take him off the list and sometimes I add him back on.”

Yvette raises one studded eyebrow.

“It’s complicated,” I summarize. “Let’s drop out.”

“No,” she says simply.

“WhhHHHYY?” I inquire delicately.

“We gotta experience the whole nine yards of college agony before we drop out. We have to black out drink a bunch and swear off men forever and fail a bunch of classes and try cocaine. That’s at least seven months worth of work right there.”

“Says who.”

“Says every poignant coming of age movie ever.”

“Ugh!” I let go of her foot and roll under my bed. I see a moldy dick carved into the wood mattress slats and immediately roll back out. “Ugh.”

“Look, I’m sorry about this dude, okay? Or…two dudes, or whatever you have going on. Point them out to me and I’ll sock them so hard they’ll vomit up what’s left of their souls. But right now, I gotta finish this Chem essay or I’m screwed. Metaphorically. I haven’t actually gotten screwed in a while.”

These are her famous last words, because when I go to get dinner and come back full of burrito and knock for her to let me in there is groaning emanating from the door and I hear Yvette demand for something ‘harder’. I trip over a dust particle with alarming grace as I make my way to calmer waters. Jack opens his door with sleep-mussed hair and no shirt and it’s then I realize these waters are about as calm as people who win free cars on Oprah.