Chapter 6.

The meeting was torture as I started to sober up. My head got dizzy and I felt sick to my stomach. I needed some drugs. I needed some anything. I needed to feel amazing again. I needed anything to make me happy about being practically a teenager, cuddling with a stranger who is almost forty, trying to make sense of post traumatic stress disorder without admitting it’s all just post traumatic stress disorder.

“I need to go to the washroom. Be back in a min.” I rush up the stairs and open every door, searching for the washroom. I finally find it. It’s an unsettling room and it makes me feel uncomfortable.The wallpaper has flowers on it but it is peeling and the flowers look morbid and awful.

I leaned over the off-white toilet and spewed out most of the Japanese food from last night. My stomach is in pain, and my throat feels quite dry. I went to the off-white sink, with the gold (plastic) taps, and rinsed my mouth out at least ten times with warm water. There’s a cabinet under the sink, and I searched for some mouthwash, knowing Gerard was going to kiss me at some point and I didn’t want anyone to taste my vomit.

I did not find mouthwash, but I found a bottle of prescribed Valium. Not to Helene but to her husband, Jonathan Morris. He’d probably left it here, Helene probably didn’t even know about it.

I could totally steal this bottle of Valium.

I pocketed the small bottle, used some more tap water to wash down a pill, and then left Helene’s place quickly. Between the puke and the cocktail of drugs I’ve taken this fine afternoon, I really did not want to go back. Gerard would just have to forgive me for leaving, cause I had this awful stomach pain (the story I’d manufactured on the spot, and planned to tell him if it’s ever needed).

I found some coins and got on the bus and decided to go see what I’d been avoiding. I travelled for forty minutes, before getting off at the other side of town and taking a walk through a few side streets, my shoes still a bit wet and cold, before I found the sign I’d been looking for.

Hudson Cemetery.

There was a nice stone path, that twisted and curled, gravestones in neat little lines on both sides of the path. It would have looked pretty from above. I knew the path, even though I’d only been here once, quite a while ago.

The gravestone was a reddish brown colour, and there was a white engraving.

REST IN PEACE JAMIE WILLIAM FINN, SON, BROTHER, AND FRIEND. 2009-2014.

I sat down, and pulled a packet of cigarettes out of the lumpy pocket in my sweater.

“Do you need a light?” A man’s voice asked me. I turn, and take a better look. He’s tall and very thin, with over gelled brown hair and small lips. His mouth looks like Gerard’s, very small.

“Yeah.” I said, and he threw me a pack of matches.

“All I’ve got, sorry.” He looked genuinely apologetic. Sweet guy. I guess it would be socially acceptable to be polite to someone sitting in front of someone’s gravestone. “I’m Mikey.”

I made the internal connection between Gerard and this Mikey guy. “Gerard’s little brother, the one who played bass and wanted to be best friends with Morrissey.”

Mikey chuckled, and looked shocked. “Gerard doesn’t usually have friends, especially one’s I didn’t force him to make.”

“We met yesterday. I’m Juliet.” Mikey sat down beside me.

“How was he? It’s been a while…” My eyes widened. How the hell could he know? I wasn’t an expressive person. Or did he just mean how was he doing. “I can just tell, I mean, I just can if it’s about Gerard. We were really close. You don’t have to answer, about the sex. It was a weird question. You probably don’t want to talk about it.”

“He was good.” I said, half wanting to gossip with Mikey because I had no girl friends to fulfill my gossiping urges and half wanting him to shut the fuck up.

“Brother?” Mikey said, nudging his head towards the grave. I nodded. “If you want to talk to him or something, I’ll leave…”

“What’s the point, he’s dead.” I muttered.

“Sometimes it helps, I talk to my niece. She was amazing. The daughter I never had.”

Of course Bandit was buried here. Unless Gerard had another dead child, which I sincerely doubted.

“I’m sorry for your loss.” I say to him, as genuinely as I can. He seems truly sad. I wonder if Gerard would be as sad, or more sad, if he remembered what had truly happened. Probably. Which is why it had to stay kept a secret.

“Did he die in the shooting?” Mikey asked me. I nodded.

The shooting was one of the worst things to happen to New Jersey in a while. Three people walked into an elementary school, and shot many people, mostly children, and once they heard police sirens, they put bullets in their own brains.

Those cunts killed my brother, and Gerard’s daughter. And they were so high on Ketamine that they couldn’t tell the difference between an elementary school and a drug den.

And I was the one who sold them the K, or at least some other K, a week prior to the event. But based on the odds, the drugs I sold them lead them to hallucinate, and shoot my baby brother to death, along with many other kids and teachers.

Oh my god.

I killed Jamie. I killed Bandit. This was all on me. I wasn’t really the murder type, I just needed some money.

I was probably the reason Gerard was crazy, and the reason Helene is eccentric, and Victor is lonely, and me and Mikey are just plain old sad.

I’d only sold drugs twice, once in grade nine, I sold some ecstasy for a little bit of cash, and a few months ago, when I was broke as shit and I didn’t really take Ketamine but I had some in my kit, so I thought, let’s sell it, now and for a lot.

And those, those fucking crazy people, I knew one of the guys names was Jonathan but the names were irrelevant to me, those crazy people seemed harmless. Jonathan flirted a little with me, and the other guy and girl were borderline fucking in public while buying the shit. We parted ways, I remember thinking that they seemed nice, and than I was gone.

“It’s not your fault.”

Of course, that freaking mind-reading Mikey.

“How do you know?” I said, looking so apologetic, I wanted to punch myself in the face.

“Because I thought the same thing for a while. Bandit was really sick, had some sort of flu thing. Gerard was going to work, and didn’t want her going to school, so I was taking care of her. She was screaming, saying how much she wanted to go to school, and driving me bat-shit crazy. So I drove her to school, she was like forty minutes late, but she was happy. I think she just didn’t want to sit around all day, she’d get bored. So she walks into class, I walk away, I call Gerard and tell him I took her to school. He’s a little mad at me, but he knows Bandit and her manipulative ways so he let it go. She probably learned the manipulating from Gerard being the biggest pushover in humanity. I go home, have a strong drink, watch some reality TV, pass out. I wake up to Gerard breaking through my door and turning on the news.” Mikey’s eyes watered. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t kiss him, he was Gerard’s brother and even though I had low standards, I couldn’t do that to Gerard for some reason.

Maybe a hug. A hug could work. Those aren’t really that sexual. More comfort. Pure comfort.

My arms were wrapped around Mikey, his head pressed into my shoulder.

“It’s not our fault. It’s not our fault.” Mikey muttered as if he was some machine on repeat.

We both calmed down, Mikey stopped crying, I stopped panicking. I decided I was going to spend a lot of time with Mikey. He got me, probably because of his mind-reading skill, but he just sort of, understood things well. I didn’t have to hide anything from him. He knew what happened. He knew Bandit and Jamie were dead, and he knew it wasn’t my fault or his fault or anyone’s fault.

“NO!” A loud scream from a familiar voice shocked us out of our comfort. “Wake up! This is a bad dream! Fucking wake up!”

Gerard was on his knees, in front of Bandit’s grave, screaming like a mad man.

I guess it was time to put my own suffering behind me. Me and Mikey had a lot of explaining to do.

Notes

It took me a week to write this, between plotting it out, organizing Mikey's character (he's going to be here a lot), and trying to see how Gerard reacts.

Contemplated making it an Inception-like thing where Gerard actually knows the witch thing is fake and is pretending cause he doesn't know that Juliet doesn't know.

Contemplated making Mikey kind of a dick, to the point where Juliet only befriends him cause he's not Gerard.

But I settled with Gerard having an appropriate response and making Mikey a nice guy cause I felt bad making Mikey mean, cause he's such a sweetheart in real life.


If you read that, that was my thought process. XD