The reattachment process was not difficult at all—the question that it posed rather bluntly, however, was if he would be able to use it ever again. I doubted, she doubted, Roger also doubted, but I still hoped. Doubt does not squander hope, I would like to think, but rather it enhances delusion. It enables a person to be able to think that reality is different than it really is, that it is different than the eyes, ears, nose, and all the other associated senses enables us to understand it as. It enables us to play a false game in the world around us, that which has been thrown into rather prematurely the majority of the time. That is to say, of course, that I hoped it would work.

It worked in the regard that it was attached to his body once again. My mother taught me to sew “just in case there ever came a time that you scrape your knee and bust up your jeans”. She didn’t like holes in clothing, that’s part of the reason she would always, always tell me that I should change my outfit. “Clothing was made by God in Genesis so that we didn’t have to show all of that skin that no one else wants to see, so go put some real pants on”. As if jeans weren’t considered to be real pants. It wasn’t that I was trying to be punk, I just simply liked the way that it looked on me.

The procedure took place within the bathroom, the same bathroom wherein he took his shower the first night; he sat upon a stool that I had acquired from the attic (a stool that I had no idea even existed, and if I had prior it would have made it much easier to reach for things that were kept out of my arm’s length on the top of the fridge), I stood adjacent to him, holding scissors and a spool of twine. Roger was sitting against the toilet, I don’t know why, and Amber was sitting on the side of the tub, the curtains pulled to the side. For a brief moment I looked at myself in the mirror, noticed that my hair was spilling and swooping over my ears, the back of my hair doing practically the same thing. It was getting rather long—that wasn’t the issue at hand, though.

I'd say that, probably like an idiot, I prayed again—to Yahweh, Yashua, Ieadeus Nazernus Rex Itadoreum, whatever he's called. The Christ, that is, who died on calvary; it was an ignorant, I'd say, to pray for his arm to stay attached to his body. I requested that Amber retrieve for me my rosary so that I could write upon my chest with my hand the holy cross and call upon the Lord. I can't remember if I'm supposed to ask Mary first—and did it matter? Who knows. In that way I was crucified just like him, I would say, just like how I asked to be crucified in the kitchen. I didn't ask—I was, I was put to trial by my mother. Traditionally, she was Irish Catholic, and how Irish she really was I had no idea. My father, on the other hand, was a Protestant, yet I had no idea if he truly practiced his faith; even though he attended Mass with I and my mother he never converted, so she failed as a missionary. And my faith wasn't established truly in the first place. So, I wonder if my European ancestors (on her side, specifically) would have been proud to know that I entertained the idea of playing the piano. They would have preferred the harpsichord, of course, but I didn't have a choice, and that was the only way I had gotten classical, cultural influence. There was no way that she was really Irish, as in that she was a descendant of the Celtics. If she thought of it that way I know that she would try and peel off her own skin, screaming that she had pagan flesh—maybe she'd consider me a pagan now, even though sometimes I rarely prayed to Jesus. I wore a pentagram about my neck, and sometimes too I donned my rosary. I know you aren't supposed to do that, but again, did it matter? It's been a year, mother, and in the slightest way I hope that when you see me next my appearance does drive you crazy, drives you mad—drives you daffy. Does anyone say that anymore?

To Roger and Amber, I was putting on a performance as I uttered fragments of some of the rites that I could remember from my childhood. Actually, it might have made more sense for me to learn how to play the organ as opposed to both the piano and the harpsichord.. I'm sure that if she tried, Amber could have joined me. But Lucas was enchanted, if he was even able to express that through his face, through his eyes. He was fixed on me, on what I was saying, even if he couldn't figure out what I was saying. When he felt like it, Roger went to Sunday service with his mom—Baptist, I think. Could have been something else, I struggle to remember all of the denominations. I had asked him once before, maybe twice, maybe even thrice, "Is it really a church?"

"Yes," he'd tell me at the lunch table.

"Is it though?" I tried to challenge his thinking—to me, it isn't a church. It's not. And I acted as though it was of my concern, like I would walk through its doors to worship. "No Eucharist." I knew more than I wished to admit. To them, I was a saint simply because of the amount of knowledge I held about Catholicism and similar practices.

"What's that?"

"Exactly."

To hell with the second Vatican, I want my Latin.

Amber brought something up to me when I was halfway through my sanctification. "You could have been an altar boy."

I could have been an altar boy, she was right—I was going to be, actually. "I was going to be, but it got too complicated. Would duct tape be a good choice?"

"It'd make him look like he's patchwork," she said.

"Raggedy Anne doll." That was Roger.

"I'd argue the stitching would do that job." I had used thread that was once my mother's. I could have used twine from the garage, that would have been much sturdier.

"What's your confirmation name again?" Why was she asking me that?

I hesitated to respond, lightly fingering the stitching that I had sewn. "Bartholomew."

"Agatha."

"I knew that." I didn't, I just wanted to say that I did; but I did know who that was, St. Agatha, of Sicily, the fifth of February. And I’m fairly certain that she is mentioned in the Canon of the Mass.

☠ ☠ ☠

“You’d tell me that, right?”

“I’d tell you what?”

She didn’t make any sense. She was standing over me, me sitting on a bench in the boys locker room, her looking down at me.

“You’d tell me if you were uncomfortable.”

I didn’t want to give her a straight answer—I would have said that it wasn’t her place to know that, but considering she was my girlfriend it technically was, as much as I didn’t want it to be. Lucy was wearing a long red dress, something that I didn’t think I would ever see her wear; it sparkled when the kaleidoscopic lights hit it in the gymnasium, but here, in the dead and dull locker room with the buzzing iridescent lights installed in either the early 60’s or 70’s, they were like pale, miniature rhinestones. Still nothing to lose myself over. And I was in contrast: a black suit, a tie that I can’t remember the color of, my hair in the style that I wanted it to be even with the constant protest of my mother. I had to learn how to tie a tie that night—it was my first homecoming, Junior Year, I skipped the other ones.

“Are you out of your element?”

I still stayed quiet.

“Give me something, Mark!”

I wasn’t even looking at her at that point, I was looking at the floor, asbestos tile. My hands were on my knees, pawing lightly and awkwardly at the cloth of my black pants. This was the boy’s locker room, she wasn’t supposed to be in there—she had followed me in.

“I can’t just stand here and wait for you to come out, Mark.”

That ate me up inside. She meant to come out of the locker room, that’s what she meant—I swear, that’s what she meant.

“You’re an asshole,” she sounded like Amber, “y’know that? You’ve always been like that. You don’t tell me things, you just act like I’m supposed to know them. Well, I’m done guessing, okay? I’m done.” She slumped down onto the bench, sitting next to me, trying to lean her head on my shoulder. I flinched, I would have thought that she would have started to yell at me again—but she didn’t. Instead, I felt her bounce lightly a few times. She was crying.

“You’re going to ruin your mascara.”

After wiping her eyes she looked at me. “I can’t go out there like this.” At that point, she’d been crying for four four minutes.

“No, you can’t.” That wasn’t the response that she was looking for, but I didn’t care. That didn’t matter to me, all that mattered was getting back outside.

What happened was she tried to dance with me—a song came on, one that I didn’t know. We were standing practically in the center of the gymnasium, the lights were still flashing various colors but it was rather dark, and there were so many people around us that I had trouble figuring out which way I was looking. That doesn’t make sense—it makes sense to me, though. And she put her hands on my shoulders, she was trying to bring me a little closer to her. I wanted to cry, I wanted so badly to cry, I wanted to run into the locker room so that I had a moment to myself where I could try my best to recollect myself. So then, like I said, she followed after me.

“You should try fixing yourself up.” The way I said it—it didn’t come out right, it sounded like I was being rude to her.

She punched my shoulder, and I don’t know if she was trying to do it in a playful way or if she was genuinely upset with me. I would bet that she was genuinely upset with me.

“Hey—!”

“We should go out.”

“You’re not even supposed to be here in the first place.”

“They said that the locker rooms are off limits in general.”

I brought her up. I didn’t want to take her hand, but I did it anyway—there was something that she wanted to tell me, I could tell just by the expression on her face. We couldn’t get to that at the time though, she became too occupied with making sure that she could fix her smeared, watery makeup.

“My purse, can you get me my purse?”

I handed it to her, off of the bench. “I’m going to leave now.”

“You won’t even wait for me?” She scoffed at me, I guess I deserved it.

“Yeah.” So I left.

It looked like how it did before, when I ran off. Because I was alone I stood at the sidelines, watching everyone slow dance. That wasn’t for me; actually, any sort of dancing wasn’t for me, I don’t think I’ve ever thought that dancing was an action that I enjoyed. Instead, I waited for her—and as I stood there I observed everyone. The majority of the boys looked the same, they all had their suits on, they were moving in the same melancholy motion, and the girls were similar in their own right too. Lucy thought that by wearing that dress she would stand out amongst the crowd—and she was wrong, there were two other girls with that dress.

But I saw Lucas. I had yet to meet him, I had yet to get to know him, but I had seen him already multiple times through the hallways, in passing. And there he stood, off to the side; one would have thought that he would be in there, amongst the rest of them, slow dancing with some girl that meant the world to him (or, rather, a girl that he wouldn’t care about in the morning). I made my move, going over to him, standing next to the punch bowl, holding a plastic cup and watching everybody.

“You wouldn’t happen to know if this is spiked, would you?”

I looked over at the scalloped bowl, the liquid inside of it looking like blood. I took the ladle, filled a cup for myself—it definitely was not spiked. For some reason, though, I had a muffled cough the moment it hit the back of my throat. “No—no alcohol.”

“Oh, so you’re good at telling that sort of thing?”

Yeah, I guess I was wrong, as now that I’m recounting this story I think I had talked to him before. I never got his name, of course, but I had talked to him before. I guess, then, I had known him before Amber did. “Yeah, I am.”

“Do you drink?”

The way that he looked at me, his eyes, they both made it impossible for me to lie to him. There was a sort of thing that had entrapped me, that I couldn’t truly realize in that moment, yet it was still there and it was, without a doubt, there. So instead of lying to him I didn’t answer his question. “Kool-Aid or Hawaiian Punch?”

My question made him think for a second, his eyes leaving me and going back to the slow, lulling and dancing crowd. “I’d say,” taking a short sip, “Hawaiian Punch.”

“And I’d say the opposite.”

“It’s Hawaiian Punch, though.”

“Kool-Aid.”

It seemed easier to jokingly (or maybe not so jokingly) argue with him then confront whatever it was that I was feeling in that micro-instance. Only for Lucy to return, coming to my side.

“Mark.”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Lucy.” And I didn’t even turn to her. She tried to take my arm. I refused, putting my hand in my left pocket—she had tried to grab my right arm.

“Punch?” he asked her.

“My boyfriend? I’d love to.”

That response didn’t put a frown on his face, but it did turn his mood to be somewhat sour. “Oh, alright. I’ll have to find someone else then.” He wasn’t the one that was dishing out the punch, I don’t know why he was acting like he was.

“Yeah, you will.” Quite the comeback. And they were butting heads, an unstoppable force (Lucy) met an immovable object (Lucas). They strictly contrasted—never did they compare to share a likeness, no similarity. Not even the hair color.

He didn’t come with a date.

“Let’s go, Mark.”

I still refused to look at her. Maybe I liked standing at the punch table, maybe I did want to try some more of the punch even if it made me cough the first time I tried it, nearly made me throw up in my mouth.

“If you’re going to be a bitch about it, I’ll go and wait in the car.”

He interjected: “The night ends at 10:00.”

I had forgotten that I was the one that drove us.

“Did I ask you?” Why was she getting snappy with him? I didn’t like that, I especially didn’t like it when she did it with me though, of course.

“If you want to wait an hour and a half, you can wait an hour and a half.” Told her straight. I did this time, that is, not Lucas.

They didn’t even share the same eye color, I forgot to mention that. “Then that’s what I’ll do,” she told me.

I should have thrown my hands up with excitement, maybe congratulated her and asked her if she wanted a medal or a chest to pin it on. “Good.”

She hadn’t left yet. “It is good.”

“Go do it then.” He was butting in again.

Lucy turned on her right heel to look up at Lucas now. “Excuse me, but who the fuck are you?”

I didn’t flinch at her verbiage.

“Excuse me? Excuse you, I think. I’m the one who’s making sure this kid doesn’t get pushed around.” I wasn’t a kid. “Missy.” He added that in a little too late, it didn’t fit in too well, but he had already said it.

“Seriously, who do you think you’re talking to?”

Maybe there was something in that punch that Lucas had been drinking, as if it was spurring on this sort of side of him that I hadn’t even seen when we eventually became friends. “I just told you who I am, did you not have your Goddamn listening ears on? Maybe next time, tune to the right signal.” He didn’t understand the situation, it was foreign to him, yet he had stepped up to bat for me and I appreciated that a thousand more times than he would have ever been able to understand—especially at that moment.

Finally, she had had enough of our freshly formed duo. She left us standing with each other, there at the punch table, and we watched her storm off in her carmine torrent.

“What was her problem?” That was right, he didn’t understand at all.

“A lot.”

“I’ll say.”

“Thanks for that. Lucas, right?” I already knew, of course I knew, I almost couldn’t not know with the kind of status that he had.

“Yeah, it’s Lucas.”

But I didn’t realize that I could have continued the conversation by formally introducing myself, and maybe that was for the better because our friendship might have been formed prematurely when it was in reality. I wanted to say, “My name’s Mark, you might have seen me pass you a few times in the hallway. I think we had gym class together for a semester, was that sophomore year or freshman year? First or second semester? Or was that someone else? Yeah, that was probably someone else.”

And, unsurprisingly, instead, I poured for myself in silence a second full cup of punch, took a drink, almost threw up on tue white party-table-cloth, held it back with a hand and sheer mental fortitude, then departed from Lucas without even a hand-muffled word and went to look for Lucy. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, yet a voice that I didn’t like the sound of told me that it was what was needed of me.

I took my time to get outside and to my truck. It wasn't incredibly urgent, still I knew I had to get it done. It had to be over, I had to put an end to it. For my sake.

"I think our relationship is where it shouldn't be."

She was sitting on the hood. "You can sure as hell say that again."

"I think our relationship is where it shouldn't be." I was met with the glare of a thousand knives, of a thousand deaths, rather.

I learned then that Lucy smoked. I already knew that she smoked, what I mean is that she smoked marijuana—she pulled it out of thin air, almost, I had no idea where she kept it. Was it in the hood of my truck, maybe in the gas cap; had she hid it there and I didn’t even realize? The lighter, too, where did she keep that? There were no pockets in her dress.

“That stinks.”

Lucy seemed to lack the ability to look me in the eyes, like how I did when we were at the punch table, as instead she looked at the highschool, across the parking lot, shrouded in the night. “Mark.”

“Lucy.” I was formally addressing her, and her to me.

“I can’t do this.”

“What is it that you’re trying to do?”

“You. Not in that way—I mean I’m trying to be with you, but you’re making no effort.”

Both my hands were in my dress pants pockets now.

“You’re a mess and you don’t even realize it.” She was trying to burn through her blunt as fast as she could. It still stunk. “Maybe I’m the mess,” she said, fixing her dress.

Lacked a response for her. I gave her a look, for her to break her vow of no eye contact with me for a brief moment.

A whisper from her: “I know.” I thought she would have coughed. “I’ll be damned.”

“You’ll be damned.” Finally, I entertained her once again.

“How long did we last?”

“11 months.”

“You’ve been counting.”

I looked down at a watch that I didn’t carry; I left it on my bedside table. “Of course.”

“Of course you have been. Why did I even ask?” Her legs were now crossed.

I peeled my eyes away from her, looked around at the encroaching treeline, the hanging stars, the highschool that looked behind me like a fortress of hell. That’s what it was to me. “It’s like hell’s capital.”

“What is?”

“The highschool.”

“You would say that.” She was tired of me, and she could have told me so, that would’ve made me wander back into the same place I was actively condemning.

“Pandæmonium.”

“Crazy?”

“No, capital of hell. Paradise Lost.”

“No idea.”

Made sense. “You forced this on me, Lucile.”

“Fuck off.”

“I didn’t want this.”

“I know that you didn’t want to come to homecoming, but that’s what you do when you’re dating someone. You have to make sacrifices.”

But there wasn’t an altar for me to do that on. “I don’t understand what I’m supposed to sacrifice.

And that’s not what I meant, I know that you forced me to come to homecoming, but you forced this whole thing.”

“Us dating?”

Hesitation for a second. “Us dating.”

She continued to smoke her blunt. “You can’t say it’s my fault though. You could have said no, you could have refused.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why?”

Now she was pulling that thing out of me, the thing I didn’t want to say. It was the thing that I couldn’t even put a title to in my mind, I couldn’t give it a proper name because then that would be giving it a semblance of legitimacy. “I can’t say.”

“But you can. You can say.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You need to.”

It was that thing that kept me up at night, turning back and forth in my sheets, that thing that made me almost blue in the face when I thought about it, the thing that forced me to throw up in the toilet when I thought about it too much. Everytime that I thought about it I was knocking on the door of a truth that I didn’t want to be opened.

“I don’t think I like you.” That wasn’t the whole part of it, that wasn’t all that I wanted to say—it was the only thing that I could let slip out at that moment.

“That’s clear.”

“I don’t think I like anyone like you.” That’s not how I wanted to put it. It’s never how I want to put it, when I talk, when I have a conversation with someone; I can never string those words together, I can never tell someone exactly what I mean when I say the most obscure things.

It got cold; maybe it was already that cold.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Me saying that had brought her to look me in the eyes again. I peered into her green eyes. There was a moment in time where she only had contemplation—then, she found what she didn’t even realize she was seeking. “Oh, shit.”

I didn’t want to say it. I couldn’t say it—again, it made me want to throw up.

“Shit. You’re joking?”

I guess it wasn’t as bitter as I thought it was, it was just all the things that led up to it. The interaction itself wasn’t as terrible as I make it out to be; though the stain that it leaves on me is far worse than I could ever imagine.

“No.”

She got down from the hood of the truck, her dress following suite in a flowing manner. Another breadth out of the blunt. “Well.”

“Well.”

“That’s definitely something.”

I nodded. I couldn’t acknowledge it again.

“Just say it.”

“What?”

“Just say it.”

“I can’t.”

“Just,” she paused, “say it.”

Our eyes were still connected.

“You’re a queer, Mark.”

“That’s not it—.”

“Then what the hell is it? I thought that’s what you meant.” Yes, of course, she did get bitter. That was short lived though, I remember.

“That is it.”

“It is.” And she laughed to herself, she found it funny. Maybe in a sort of twisted, ironic way. “I couldn’t figure that out on my own—that’s fucking embarrassing. That’s why you didn’t like when I touched you.”

“That’s not—.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Yeah, it is.” I thought there would have been a weight that would have come off of my shoulders; maybe it would have felt as though I had walked a hundred miles in armor that was way too heavy for me, to then take it off when I finally reached my destination. Yet the only thing that it really did was manifest tears. “It is.”

She was similar to Amber in a lot of ways, actually. She didn’t know how to console me when I cried. “Mark—no, you—don’t cry buddy.”

I couldn’t help it, so she came over to me. She remembered, again, that I didn’t like when she touched me, but that didn’t matter—I didn’t care who I stained with my tears.

“It’s not your fault.”

“Yes, it is.” I sniffled.

It was.

“What I mean is, it’s not your fault that you’re like this.”

No, she was wrong.

So we broke up the next morning; that was it, the end of an era in my life that I was forced into. We called a few times after that, we talked in the hallway a few times too, but in the end we just grew distant. I guess that’s how those things go.

Of course, that’s what I would say if Amber hadn’t become great friends with her without my knowledge.

☠ ☠ ☠

We skipped school that Monday, unsurprisingly. It was a normal thing for Roger to do.

I learned the night of the reattachment that I was haunted by a rather peculiar specter. That is, he was peculiar in the sense that I don't think I quite understand why I saw him—he wasn't, in any regard, alien to me. I'd taken to sleeping, once again, with Lucas at my side; still, I could only hope that he too slept. But I was met with a nightmare, near the witching hour about, wherein I was placed within my dad's seat, on the couch, facing the television. It was night, I think—either that or the curtains blocked out sunlight in totality. There was a knock at the door; within my mind I knew that it was someone that I had been anticipating, they had told me that they were going to be arriving prior to then, at some point that I couldn't associate a time with. And when I opened the door I was greeted by the sickly face of the adulterer, the man who I had smashed my bottle over his head with. I crawled out of his grave. The silhouettes of the trees that I could barely make out swayed, leaves spurred past him, and I heard in the far off distance the toll of the First West Salem Baptist Church bell.

Jodorowsky’s Dune should have come out, because I know that I would have watched it. If there were a thousand people that would have watched it, I would be one of them; if there were a hundred people, I would be one of them; and if there were none, I would be dead. I finished reading Dune that year, actually—I had tried to start it the year that Lucy and I had our falling out, however I never did complete it. Truly, God bless Frank Patrick Herbert Junior. Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy the Dune movie from ‘84, it didn’t feel right. I don’t think that it was what Herbert would have wanted. So I was haunted like Paul.

And he, the adulterer, called out to me, like he was whispering an elegy of something that I didn’t know about. His words escaped me—maybe, in that moment, I was the subject for a work of Lovecraft’s.

Probably, originally, I would have thought that it was amazing that I was haunted by a ghost, some sort of phantasm. I also would have thought it to be that of my late grandfather, mother's side. To think that there was someone who wished to reach out to me from beyond the grave, that was great, truly. There's a distinction between the supernatural and the fantastical--the things that Amber concerned herself with are the latter, all completely ridiculous. But never before then did I ever have a sort of actual interaction with the otherside—I wouldn’t say that what had been done with Lucas was of the same nature. That was, and still is, a biological miracle, brought to reality with my hands. Out of the graveyard, to stand in the center of my bedroom, to lay with me in my bed.

I woke Lucas at my side, again. I gripped at him, and I felt the stitchings that were fresh once again. He was sleeping—finally, he was sleeping.

Roger was sleeping in the living room, just as Amber. He laid sprawled out, comfortable yet uncomfortable in appearance, on the floor and on the back; the marijuana had put him to sleep. I learned that he had continued to smoke throughout the entire day. And I don’t remember much of what happened that day in totality. The first of the next day (Tuesday) that I experienced was the cold clutch of Lucas, his presence an anchor to my reality.

“To bed,” he muttered to me.

I could have sworn there was the howl of a wolf out my window, perhaps a fox. Did foxes howl? Did wolves even howl to the moon, or was that solely a product of folklore? Was that werewolves?