Stranger

Freak freak freak    The walls mockingly echo his thoughts. They bounce off them with a ping-pong ball, ripple across the cranium.    Freak freak freak   Voices echo, concreted, formalized in his head, and Jake believes every word, agrees with everything, swallowing a prickly lump in his throat.    Freak freak freak   Yes, he's a fucking freak, and there's little to convince him otherwise. No such proof exists. This is an axiom, this is a hot brand burned into his subcortex. There is no such reality in which Jake Sterling would not be a freak. Because this word...   Oh, that's fucking word.    It had taken root too deeply in him. It has grown, spread by airborne droplets, and his whole brain is infected, all his thoughts are poisoned, all his lungs are deprived of oxygen.    Freak freak freak   It drives into him with aspen stakes, collapses with the doors of a steel maiden, crushes bones ruthlessly and disinterestedly. “You don’t need those ribs anymore, can we take them away?”    “Why do you need ribs if there is nothing to protect under them?”    Jake bites his lip and slides down the wall to the floor. In this back room he is already like your own. Almost no one goes here, few people even know about its existence. Inside is full of unnecessary junk, which everyone promised to throw out, and so they left it here.    This is where he belongs.    Thick darkness envelops him gently, predatory, in his own way. Lets in like an old friend, but not close enough to stand on ceremony. "Come in, don't feel at home." "I'll put up with you out of courtesy."    Jake closes his eyes, squints hard, rubs them.    No. Just not now.    Please.   But life is as favorable to him as those whom she sent him.    Tears burn cheeks, leave baking, red-hot paths. Two tears deliberately slowly trickle down his cheeks, converging nastily on his chin and dripping onto his knees drawn up to him. Jake snorts evilly, desperately, hysterically, hopelessly. He wipes the salty and wet with his wrist, but it doesn't get any better.    He rarely gets better. He's either fine or worse. Either mediocrity or death throes.    Therefore, Jake is not even surprised when a tantrum swells in his chest, swells with an abscess. A lump rolls up to the throat, draws oxygen from the lungs demandingly and rudely, like a defiant high school student.    He convulsively covers his mouth with his hand. No, not for anyone to hear.    To not hear himself.    Because he doesn't want to, he's tired. He tired of drowning, choking on the sounds of his own helplessness, his worthlessness, his woundedness. Tired of looking in the mirror and seeing a monster there — no longer a person. To see something there that so brazenly, so unceremoniously wears the name of Jake Sterling.    He wraps himself in his nondescript, uncomfortable gray sweatshirt, pulls his head into his shoulders, runs trembling hands through his hair, pulls with frenzied force. Maybe at least this way he will have enough strength to abstract, to calm down.    But it never works.    Therefore, behind his smoldering bitterness, he does not immediately notice how the door opens. How a thin streak of light cuts through his forearm and it bleeds open with a deep stab wound, fatal and lethal. As the light grows bolder, inadvertently touching his hair, and then his face. And Jake is all a bleeding wound that will remain in the memory of time as a terrible, unhealed scar.   But he doesn't notice.    Until he hears a voice.    “I knew it”, he says casually, with careless, boundless laziness, as if it was by accident.    Just like Drew accidentally looked into this back room.    Like he wasn't looking for him.    But Drew can't by chance, can't spontaneously.    But wherever Jake goes, Drew finds him. Always finds.   He approaches cautiously but confidently. Each step is verified, calculated, read out of the corner of the eye, swollen with a muddy film of tears.   When his brown eyes dig into his cheeks like third-degree burns, Jake looks up blankly.    “Drew?”, he says dumbfounded, but with some kind of delay, slowing down, one continuous delay. Paths blurred with tears freeze on the cheeks, tightened with scars too obvious to ignore.   “Those jerks again?”, no extra words, no extra context. They do not need it, he is superfluous, he is cut up, tormented by their heavy silence for two, too loud and eloquent for a simple conversation.    “I’m fine”.    “Jake”.   “Nothing happened”, he says looking away, taking his thoughts away from him, away from him, away from him, looking too intently, too expectantly for an ordinary person. From him, pursing his lips in immured, mimic-patched uncertainty. From him, placing a scorchingly warm hand on his bent knee. “Really, Drew”.    “Jake”.    “I'm just a little tired. Today was a hard day. In general, nothing serious-“   “Sterling”, roaring through the dark corners of the back room.    And Jake swallows all the words, all the excuses. Swallows like bitter cough syrup.    Because when Drew calls him like that, it means something bigger than nuclear winter. Something more chthonic than a Kraken in the depths of the ocean. Something more destructive than normal conversation.    Jake cringes all over, constricts. The gaze wanders across the floor mindlessly and soullessly. Wouldn't he notice?    But Drew notices. He notices him everywhere Jake goes. Always finds.    “Don't lie”, he says insinuatingly, thoughtfully, straight into the eyes. And Jake is afraid, very afraid to look, because he knows he won't get out again. He won’t to look away anymore. “Jakey, answer”.   And the answer finds itself.   It rolls up to the throat with nausea, twists the intestines into a tight knot, pinches in the nose with bubbles of gas.   And he throws himself into Drew’s hands too trustingly, too recklessly, jumping off the bat like a lemming seeking rest. Falls into his arms with a bag of bones, a human shell, his likeness, a fake.    Freak freak freak   And Drew catches him, clasps his fingers on his back, giving a saving static, flowing sobriety of reason.   Jake nuzzles his shoulder almost bashfully, almost desperately. Compresses his lips, hides their break in the folds of Drew’s shirt, digs into this with pale fingers. He cuddles hysterically, convulsively, as if you let go, and the mirage will melt, crumble into a sand dune, and Jake will certainly be pulled in, flooded, strangled ...    “I'm here”, he speaks directly into his ear. A dry fact that always sounds like salvation. A beacon that stoically holds back the inky dark storm that unfolds in the chaos of Jake’s emotions. “Jake, I'm here”, and he puts his hand on his head, and tartly burrows into his hair, presses him tightly, as if he himself seems to be a mirage.    Jake sobs loud and shrill, sucking in his breath hoarsely and hoarsely like a broken radio. Drew is silent in understanding, silent with the sterility of the hospital, the psychiatric ward. Softly, like white walls.    Hungry darkness floods their images in the walls of the back room, imprisons them there forever.    And Jake thinks being a freak isn't so scary.