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.
"What the hell happened to you?" I asked. The other few nights I saw him, he had a couple of bruises. Being a cop wasn't like picking cherries in the forest. It aligned more with fighting a bear over the cherries you wanted. So I figured, why ask? Now... I kind of got worried.
"Don't worry about it." His nonchalant actions weren't enough for me. He sat himself on the edge of his bed and brushed tensed fingers through his hair. His groans, his sighs... don't worry about it, yeah, right.
I sat myself upright. "Don't do this. You're the one who-"
"Kingston doesn't play around, alright? He takes a good beating and gives it back." He hunched over and rested his arms on his legs, letting out a quiet breath. True that Officer Kingston looked intimidating, I doubted things were easy and I knew Leone better than that.
Other than the fact he had the gift to change a girl's monthly subscription with Mother Nature into weekly check-ups with a doctor instead in his outfit, why was there a reason to lie? Out of instinct, out of... a desire, to say the least, I got up and went inside the bathroom, grabbing myself the tissue box and wet one. I came back and took a chair from the kitchen placing it in front of him and took a seat. When I laid the box beside him, he brought his head up, curious.
I cupped his chin and dabbed a few swipes under his nostrils and asked, "What really happened?" since my eyes studied him more and found a tear in his shirt on his left shoulder. The faint sight of a bandage asked too many questions.
Another breath left his lips, the warm breeze bristling across my finger and I shivered a bit. Been a while since that happened. "I fucking hate cops."
"But you are on." I threw the damp, blood stained tissue out and drew a dry one, removing the rest of the residue. "Did Kingston-"
"No. I actually like him. He trains me hard but he's a really good guy. It's just the other fucking pigs that don't know how to do their fucking job." He made that face again and this time... I liked it. "They shot an unarmed man five. Fucking. Times. He didn't even fucking do anything! I couldn't jack shit about it." Tori swore up a storm, but he right now swore up a rainforest. His face reddened as much as it could and fumes left a curse under his breath. Multiples actually. "I couldn't do nothing about it, Thomas..."
I lowered my arm as his eyes gazed in mine, his full of a lot of regret and guilt and a sense of helplessness I knew all too well. I threw the dry tissue out and averted my gaze for a while because those eyes... they were the first thing I ever noticed about him back in the day.
"Look where that got me... you can't do jack shit to help your own people without getting beat up. That's fucked up, right?" he asked.
"Was this after Kingston knocked you out?" I stared for an answer, one I knew. So when he looked away quick, licked his lips a certain way, I knew I was right.
"I just wanna do good, Thomas... I want to be better than I used to be. I don't understand why all those pigs think we're to be privileged like that. We go around protecting and serving our people, not picking them off one by one for population control or some shit. Everyone's gonna paint us a bad way and I... don't want to be looked at like I done something bad again..." I knew what he meant, I figured out the double meaning and he was right.
The community would look at him like he did something bad, like he was going to screw up their life and I looked at him like that. Guilt kicked my heart and beat it against my chest when my eyes caught his.
"You are not a bad person... and thinking they have all the power is ridiculous." Ms. Argent said something last week about Power and I paraphrased it for him. "Power is worthless on its own, and it only becomes a force you can't reckon with when it's attached to a certain object or law. And with that object or law instilling fear, a sense of authority, people think they can cast judgement when it best benefits them or even their race, religion or whatever the hell they believe will make the world a better place."
Ms. Argent had a point when it came to that, when it too came to how worthless a word was that influenced human behaviour anyway. We all feared something and cops used their guns as the very source of their power because deep down they'd be nothing – not for those polluted officers.
I continued, watching his eyes change in mine, slowly but reassuringly. "Cops, the government, believe their way of thinking, and their judgement is what will better the people of society when in reality it's only about to implode. They make us believe we have power when they've already burned a few holes in our mind." Wicked, wicked people we trusted. People we were supposed to trust ourselves with and it seemed like Clarence had its own set kinks. But in my eyes, it wasn't as severe and this cop thing wasn't a state thing at all, but a whole country problem.
I also told him, "Mae sense of that any way you like; agree to disagree but I think it makes sense. I agree with my professor." Silence stood for a moment until he lowered his head and the edge of his lips dipped to an angle. Then it slowly grew up to his eyes. A light, soft chuckle also left them. "What?"
"Nothing," he said. "Nothing." He pulled himself up from his bed and walked over to the bathroom, closing the door behind him. I heard the sounds of the shower and realized he was taking a bath most likely. A nice, long needed bath for the scars he got being a decent, human being, and like the ones he took when I couldn't explain to him simple Math. Not 2x2 or anything like that. More like the nonsense of 2a take away 6b to find xyzk. Like, really? But I smiled at the fact he did keep in mind what I said, judging by how he looked at rest than before.
Even right now... I knew I didn't love him like I used to, and I couldn't deny that a part of me worried.
The science of how we thought... how we remembered... the science of how our minds just knew. The simple cognition of our mentality, of our world and our identity, together, became the foundation of society itself. Ms. Argent talked about how we formed society, how we killed it, how we remembered the bad and forgotten the good, or at least tried to. She said that the cognition process, which was so beautifully studied and welcomed with open arms took a bomb to the best the minute it stepped in the hands of religion.
No doubt Ms. Argent believed in nothing but science as her God. It said religion wasn't really all that bad, it was the people behind it who thought what they were doing with their world was right, like the ones today. Yeah, like criminalizing people who liked the same-sex, giving death sentences to those who were coloured, or shot without any warning, or even those who went bankrupt because money robbed the hearts of the poor and rich. Clearly not every single religious person associated with any of the acts I mentioned, like my dad's parents, and neither would I call Jared a horrible person because he believed in a God.
But I believed the world wasn't like how it used to be as kids. How we imagined it, how we thought about it, how we remembered it. It clearly wasn't a puzzle we solved so quickly, because it took and still takes days to solve the world.
"Cognitive Psychology is the study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem-solving, creativity and thinking. As each generation is birthed by a new set of rules, we pay attention less and less, and why?" Ms. Argent asked.
Nothing. Just a few taps of pens and pencils and scrunch of paper. Then Mikayla hesitantly raised her hand. "Because... the media. They show a few celebrities, print a couple of articles on body image and bam, we're wrapped around their finger."
"And with our language, we talk the way we do because?"
"Because we were nurtured liked that. From wherever we grow up, from the glades, to middle class to being rich. We're exposed to how everyone around us talked and thought," Jade answered.
"And all the state's history is simplified for the simple fact we won't have the memory to hold it all. We won't have the memory to be unbiased in a situation because we're all taught to take a side, be cautious and solve other people's problems before our own. We skew our own memory because of that, losing sight of how we perceived ourselves." I raised a hand and once she caught it, she pointed a finger and said, "Yes, Thomas?"
"What about creativity and thinking? I mean, we all think different now but in high school or even middle school we'd all be pressured to think alike and lose our creative differences between each other. We're told a lot of what to think instead of how to think, what we wanted to see instead of how we should see, and what we should bring to society because it benefited them instead of us, you know?"
"Exactly. It's lucky we have a form of freedom today, where you're learning how to cope with this knowledge, understanding all the different coils in our brains. Our mentality is the strongest point out of all of us and damaging it is harmful. It skews everything we ever believed and thought and remembered, like I've said a million times," she explained. "You've all hit the nail right, but just one thing... don't miss it next time."
If anyone tried making sense and understanding my mind, we'd be here till my grave. I'd be here till my grave as I didn't understand it quite well. I mean, I was still growing, just an innocent twenty-one year old – as innocent as I die heartedly believed. Tori tried convincing me otherwise with her provocative moves, sexualized thoughts and ridiculous jokes that stitched my stomach.
Honestly... how'd I survive with that woman? How'd I even survive with myself with the kind of mind I had? Damn, I'm a survivor.
When I looked up from my notes, Ms. Argent went from her computer to the center of the room. One glance at the clock she let out a breath. "Before you leave, take the picture I've given you. You all have the same. Look it at. Study it. Write what comes to mind. Then write a story for that picture. It's all I want you do to," she said. "And read your chapters for once. You're all better than this, come on." She smiled as she picked up on our groans and sighs and soon we filed out of class.
"Hello, Mr. Thomas!"
"Holy Mary!" I jumped, my screams reaching the far ends of the hall, garnering a few stares. I clutched my shirt, swallowed hard breaths and finally took in my jumpscare.
God damn, Chris!
He laughed. "Holy Mary? What?"
"You should explain yourself first!"
He grinned wide, like watching my pain was funny to him. How dare him... "You're easily scared. That's what Tori says."
My face straightened. This girl... just did not. "She's going to die. She is going to die a slow, painful death very soon." I took my leave with Chris, following him down to the Cafeteria we'd meet up at, and my pain still made his day. "She will rue the day and you might die first."
"Oh, come on. That's not fair, Mr. Thomas. You can try killing me, but don't kill her. I need her."
"Hm, we all know. But she's a dead woman – spilling my secrets like she has no damn mind. And don't think I can't kill you. Watch yourself, Christian."
I'd smack the grin of his face sooner or later. "I don't see why you're so mad about this."
"Because now I know what I'm expecting and I won't expect it. You guys are dicks." Man... "A big ol bag of dicks."
"She also told me how much you do love your dicks."
Oh. My. God. Before I'd strangled his neck so he'd never laugh, I'd strangle that psychotic woman first. Now you understand why I tried staying innocent in group of sex-crazed delinquents. Then again, it applied to only Chris and Tori for that matter. Levy had his moments, funny, and Chance had his rare times, but those two... a match made in heaven, I tell you!
She still gon die, though.
We reached the cafeteria and when we neared the tables where everyone sat, at the far back, Chris spoke up. "So I think we should ditch the therapy thing. I was thinking other day-"
"Nice way to change the subject. Hm. And oh my, never thought the day would come to know you think."
"Look who's the dick now." And now I annoyed his ears with my laugh, sending him a sly, toothed smile. "So anyways, Mr. Dick, I was thinking we'd be a couple of amateurs pitching ideas to head officer managers – they'd be our audience."
In all seriousness, I found his idea better than the one we had before. "Okay, cool. Thinking of going for comedy instead?"
"No, no. You're still the serious one."
"Okay, interesting."
"Think we should improvise it or write an actual script?"
"I'll write like a draft version and we'll see where it goes from there. I think writing a script would be better since we'd play off each other better – we could improvise on the spot."
We reached the guys and took our seats, me, of course, being cuddled up next to Tori. Everyone but the devil child herself had food in front of them and it looked like Levy, Chance and Chris cooked up something for themselves. They were gym buddies so it made sense. I didn't even know we had a gym in the place until Tori tried pressuring me to go. She wanted to be ogled and ogled herself at other men, sweating, exhausted, in need of hydration – in ways I didn't want to know.
Once Chris took out his own packed lunch, Tori and I got up and got ourselves slices of Pizza. The guys gawked and marvelled at our choice of food but they never knew life like we did, as hard as it was to admit Tori knew about life. I kept taking jabs at her like no tomorrow, but with how many she did with me? I think we were close to even. Just a few more and I was done.
"Sucks that Leo isn't here with us... everyone please hold hands and pray," Tori said, locking her fingers with mine. She tried reaching for Chance's but he never linked up. "Chance, hello. Come on, brother, don't leave me hanging. We must pray for Leo's poor soul right now. He must be lonely."
"He'll be fine, woman. Relax," I said. "He doesn't revolve around us or you for that matter."
Her eyes bulged out of their sockets. "Everything revolves around me. You do."
"Excuse you. My life revolves around my life," I said and from the looks of it, Tori died a little inside because the guys laughed.
As she eyed me down, like she planned my death I doubt, she spoke up. "I am your God." Everyone's face lit up again and delight and I choked on my slice of Pizza.
It soon died down and a small moment of silence whisked by until Chris cleared his throat. "So I'm hosting a Halloween Bash."
"Your parents trust you again?" Levy asked. "We kind of destroyed your house last time." And Chris chuckled.
"And that's why I've been so lonely for the past three years. This is the last time they'll ever trust me with the house. Alone."
"It's probably gonna be lame like all the others," Tori said, flicking her wrist, whipping her hair and of course changed her voice.
"You're just hating because you can't have cool parties like mine. It's okay, baby doll, we all can't be sexy and wild."
"I pull of both with ease, thank you very much. Thomas can definitely back me up on that."
Ugh, "I spent too much time forgetting... everything and you just had to bring it up again? It's worse than that 1 boy and 2 cups things. Oh the shivers... Don't bother asking."
"And you're all rude." Like I said. Delusional. "Bitches," she whispered.
Then another set of banters occurred between the two blinded lovers. I hoped she kept what I said to her in mind and talking to Chris again, he'd just dodge around it like last time. I saw them together, I saw a future where I'd be free from her clutches and yet I understood their fears. But come on, they should've gave it a try, at least a real date. If it felt too awkward, they could always go back to how they were. I'm sure Chance and Levy and even Leone saw it miles before I did and waited for the eventful and no doubt dramatic day.
The way those two smiled, how Chance and Levy reacted with the emotions that controlled the muscles in their faces, it became so clear. And as Chris went on with his Halloween Bash excitement, his enthusiasm grew more and more. When he first mentioned it I was kind of like, oh, wow, a Halloween bash. I compared it to the ones any normal¸ twenty-something my age had and realized I've never been to one. I've said I made my own homemade ones, which were off the chain, holla, but in actuality, I kind of feared the ones Tori went to.
It's why I never went to the last one Chris hosted. Sex, drugs, hangovers before being wasted which made no sense, I got scared about that. Just gotten out of a relationship and being pressured by a couple of boys into a sex-driven one? Pressured to drink and do any kind of drugs? Not even a chance. My parents would kill me and I'd kill myself before that happened. But Tori always reminded me not all parties were the same, not all were nasty or disgusting or voided of any respect in the house.
Ha, how dare she say his parties were lame and she went to them anyways?
I believed her. But still... I wouldn't fit in one bit.
"It'll be Chance's favourite night of the year," Chris said. He nudged, winked and smiled at said man. Then he turned to me, grew a sly grin and looked away quick. There he goes again... what? Chance shook his head smirking and stayed quiet. "And you should probably take a chance that night, Mr. Thomas." Again... what?
"And who says he's going?" Tori asked.
"I... did," I said.
"And who says you were going?"
"I... did. Again. I'm sorry, what?"
"He's going to have a good time, Tori. You should come, too," Chris said.
"Nah, b. We're going to have our own party with fruit punch and apple juice like old times. Ain't that right, Tom Diggle?"
"No..." I actually wanted to go for once despite my fear. Chris hosted it and I trusted and respected him. Even knowing what Levy said about last time, I still wanted to go.
Tori sighed. "Okay, fine. I'll go, too, just because Tom Diggle is going." That was a damn lie. "And maybe I should help you plan the bash – make it cooler."
Chance chuckled, for someone who stayed quiet in the matter. "Like you helped him with Jamal?"
"You told him that?! I was helping!"
"HA, no! Who knows what you're going to do with Chris' party."
"Exactly," Chris said. "She might renovate my kitchen instead." We all finished our lunch and I don't know how or why or what, but choked on something other than air. For the longest time, too.
"We might as well switch up the roles. Screw gender roles! Yeah!" For as I long as I knew this woman... no one else would understand her better than I did.
"I wouldn't mind being on the bottom for you." And since I met Chris, I was glad someone understood him.
Why didn't they get together?
"Okay, come on. Let's do something. We have a little over half an hour," Levy said, getting up from his seat. We followed suit and as we walked out together as a group, Tori clung to Chris spitting him her ideas while he rejected each and every one of them. The look on her face mirrored the way Arthur looked when she rejected the deal to own his old car – which broke down.
I stood behind in the group, just smiling at the group of friends I got. Nothing seemed more refreshing and confusing as family did.