Broken, Flawed & Living (Discontinued)

Chapter Eight

All I ever thought about on my day off was the fact how messy my mind clustered together the other day. Second round tryouts were today and all three of the boys killed it and a few more took their rejections a little bit to the heart. Sucked for them, yeah, but I was glad Chanced look like he had a blast with his close buds. Leone used to be on the team once back in high school with them, so I guessed it sucked for him.

But honestly... Monday was a whole lot of something and articulating how I felt about it felt difficult – a lot of times I tried. Take risk, he's not into men... Leone still tries... When Wednesday rolled around, I didn't get out of bed until the afternoon hit. Tori slept like a baby and all my calls went right through. While Levy had a class, Chance and Chris went out for a run and used up some free time for the gym. And I just slept, eat, and rested. This day couldn't had come any slower.

Felt like I'd stress myself to the point where I'd do Math. I won't ever stop referencing that. But trying to figure why I felt the way I did Monday, or why Leone and Tori heated themselves over the fact I liked Chance more than they realized or why Chris acted different. Different in a sense he hinted towards things I never picked up right. Proved how long the road I was away from being a psychologist.

But right now... I cared less. Because all I knew, all I was ever going to know was that Tori and Leone were right, my feelings were messy and convoluted to the point where I could be an undetected Math genius – my lame jokes probably died a long time ago. All I knew was that Chris' words were something I should've applied to anything really; take a risk with a new job offer, or a risk with new friends, or a risk with yourself. Did I really need to overthink so much?

Clear answer... no.

Take a deep breath, refresh your mind with a book, tea, coffee, and just relax. Be simple for one day and I lived by those words today. I went in my bag, grabbed the journal-like novel I should've opened and flipped through the first couple of pages. Let me tell you... it was something.

It talked about a set of supernatural and inhuman beings or just simply mutants. They were of this world, of a world where everyone believed they were fictional characters in the mind of their author. But no, they were real. They were breathing. They were living. Beings with different kind of abilities, like a bender of Earth's elements; a dimensional traveler; Six Paths of Hell, whatever that was and Grim Reaper's partner.

It had it all.

It read like a true journal, each page a diary entry, each section and arc. It brought up a lot questions, like if these people were honestly real, where would they be? I remembered as a kid I read this comic about a bunch of mutants and watched a few media adaptions about them. In all those adaption they were never considered human enough, they weren't considered equal to society and shunned, criminalized like they took a life of an innocent when in fact they never harmed another soul. And when they did, it was purely unintentional because no one dared talked and educated them about a condition society shunned.

Could you imagine society being like that to you? Telling you, you weren't real? You weren't enough? That you weren't even considered human enough to understand love, life, friends and family? Society had a lot of influences and I'd never let them get to me again, not like how they almost killed my mom before. But could you really imagine being criminalized for your own innocence because you were different?

This book even said it was absurd and ridiculous, how such a convoluted society turned its head on itself and burned a few bullets in the world and everything in it. A real pager turner and I loved it. I questioned why I didn't pick it up the first day I bought it. Like, really, Thomas?

This is what I needed. A book full of life itself, full of something more than just its words, but a meaning in only a few. You know? Pretty cool, if you asked me. But a lot more along its pages revealed the truth and I still didn't believe it at the time. So as I kept reading, finishing off the first Arc about these supernatural beings, the door unlocked and opened. Leone came in, suited in his gear and I took a double shot when I noted a few blood stains on his nose.