The Goth Club

The Goth Club: Jaces' Past and a Newfound Purpose

            After sitting on the floor of the abandoned classroom for ten minutes, Lyra grabbed her stuff and headed to Jaces’ Home. Yes, Home with a capital H.

            Jace lived in the town orphanage.

            Lyra found Jace in the same spot he always went to retreat from the world. They were really getting too big to crawl around in the little black tunnel in the Homes’ playground. Lyra could just make out the lanky figure huddled in the center of the small tube, his head nearly touching his drawn up knees in the narrow space.

            “I hate her.” Jace said without any other indications that he knew Lyra was now crouched beside him. The ghosts of memory showed themselves in the despairing anger that Lyra could see leaking out of Jaces’ eyes even in the nearly non-existent light.

            Lyra knew exactly who he was talking about. She also knew there was nothing she could say to make Jace feel better. So she just leaned her head on Jaces’ shoulder and lay quietly with him until the sun went down.

            Jaces’ POV

            Jace watched Lyra set off back home with a sigh that died on his lips. She knew. She knew everything. Other than Katie, the woman in charge of the Home, she was the only one.

            Jace wasn’t an orphan. He was abandoned.

            It had happened when he was five, just after the first week of Kindergarten.

Jace had never known his dad. As far as he could gather, his father had died from being in a coma for too long. What he was in a coma from, Jace had never been able to find out.

            His mom, on the other hand—she was out there somewhere. A soft oval shaped face and dark blond hair firmly defined her as ‘pretty’. Jace had studied the only picture he had of the two of them together—taken for some church event when he was two—until he had memorized how she looked, at which point he viciously ripped the picture to shreds.

            One day, Jaces’ mom had taken him to time square in New York City. It wasn’t a long trip, since they lived in Northern New Jersey. He trusted her when she urged him to push ahead in the crowds to see a person in a funny costume. He looked for her when he turned back around and didn’t see her standing there. He screamed for her when he got pushed through the huge, suffocating crowds, nearly being trampled several times. He worried about her when the police took him back to his house and swept the city for a sign of her. And finally, he was crushed by her when the police found a note in her room that said how much she hated being a mother and how she decided to run away and start a new life where no one would know her, and nobody could ever find her.

            Of course, there had been intensive searches. But it seemed that Jaces’ mother had simply disappeared into thin air.

            While arrangements were being made for Jace to live at the Home, he stayed with the only friend he’d made in kindergarten—Lyra. She knew the whole story.

            She knew that the picture was the reason Jace didn’t go to church anymore.

            She knew that the reason he got to every class late in school was so that he didn’t have to feel the lingering fear he got from being stuck in the crowd between classes.

            And she was the one who came up with his new name when he had refused to remain Thomas Greenbaum, son of the angry mother.

            She made him Jace Arcanum, son of no one and an angrier person than the devil himself.