I felt Bill’s elbow force itself through my nose. It left an awful white kind of pain right above my lip. I made the mistake of letting it distract me instead of focusing on the fist that came right after, driving across my chin and crashing me into the cheap floorboards that the old lady had put in eight years ago, when Bill turned ten and moved upstairs.
Before he could jump on top of me, I scrambled to my feet and tackled him right above his knees. Bill threw another fist into the back of my head before he hit the ground. His head banged on the wood as he went down. I clenched my hand into a fist as quick as I could manage and threw it into his teeth. Judging from the way he took it without a grimace it hurt my hand more than it hurt his jaw.
Bill grabbed me by the wrist attached to my aching hand and pulled downward. He’d always been the biggest guy in the home, even back when we were little kids, so when he pulled me there wasn’t a lot I could do to resist. Right as I fell, he pushed himself up with the other hand and wrapped his arm around my neck, grinding his forearm into my throat.
He kept me in the headlock as he stood up, taking me with him. He opened his mouth with a little growl, “You ready to listen? Look where tryin’ to do somethin’ got you.”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” I forced my words through a rapidly tightening airway, “let me go, I get it.”
Bill’s known me for just about my whole life and he knows that I don’t fight when I can’t win so he let me go with a shove, “Now what was that about? Making me beat the shit out of you because you wanted to paint my wall? That ain’t like you Jack.”
“No, see I just knew you wouldn’t get it,” I rubbed my throat first, massaging the red lines his bicep imprinted into the back of my neck, “It matters more to me than to you, alright?”
“That’s not how we did it when we were six, and I ain’t interested in startin’ now,” Bill gritted his teeth and pointed his hand at me with an open palm like how drill instructors do in the movies, “My side is my side. Your side is your side. You do whatever stupid shit you want to do on your side. I didn’t talk when you put up that little poster of that stupid singer, so you don’t get to try to do anything with my side of the room.”
“It’s not a decoration, Bill!” I reached up to my nose, it still hurt like hell, “Fuck, you really got a good one on my nose.”
Bill perked up at that, “Yeah? I saw the elbow thing in the UFC and figured I’d– No wait, we aren’t talkin’ ‘bout that shit, what do you mean it ain’t a decoration? Looks pretty decorative to me!” he gestured with his right hand to the array that I’d started to paint on the nearest wall of the small room.
I understood where he came from, it didn’t look like much and I’d just started to figure out what the lines meant in a way that mattered a few months ago, so I couldn’t say I blamed him, “You don’t get it, it’s like a math equation. It’s in a different language but it needs the space, you can’t write this shit in a notebook.”
“Man, ever since you’ve started on this painting stuff you’ve started sounding more and more schizo. This ain’t no math. These are scrawlings.”
“No, no, no. You just don’t get it. You’ll get it. You’ll see. They aren’t done yet. I’ll show you when they’re done.”
Bill scrunched up the top of his lip and narrowed his eyes in a mad kind of way, before letting a breath out of his nose and regaining a more neutral expression, “Just not on my side, got it? When you went off tagging buildings like you had some kind of gang I didn’t care. Hell, I still don’t care! Just not my side.”
I pitched my head downward and refused to meet his eyes, “I got it.”
“Alright then,” he cut through the tension in the air with a smile, “Fair warning, if I bring a girl in here I’m calling you crazy. Your art obsession can’t be getting in my way when it comes to chicks.”
I picked my head up and smiled back at him, “Come on, we both know you don’t girls. Nobody in this house can get a girl past Ms. Miller.”
His smile grew, “What I think you mean is that you can’t get girls past the old lady. I do just fine.”
“I have slept in the same room as you for ten years, I think I’d know if you got a girl in here,” I said. I still tasted a bit of copper in my mouth, which sucked. Mouth bleeding takes forever to heal properly.
“Whatever man, whatever,” Bill ran his hand over his teeth and looked at it, searching for blood. I guess I clocked him better than I thought, “You going to the movies tonight? The whole crew’s going.”
“I–” I looked at the back wall covered in the symbols I had discovered, “I have to stay and work on this. I can see the movies some other time.”
Bill blew some air out of his mouth in apparent exasperation before taking on a sly smile, “Sarah’s gonna be there y’know.”
“...Well I guess I can make some time. Socializing’s important and all that. Good for the mind.”
Bill laughed from his chest, “Now that’s the Jack I know,” he grabbed the hole in the only door out of the room (the doorknob had long since fallen out, and I never got around to fixing it), “It starts at eight, but we’re meeting up at the McDonalds around seven. I’ll be back in around ten minutes so don’t let me catch you with your pants down.”
With that, he walked out the room. I checked the door, made sure it shut properly. After finding myself properly alone, I addressed the markings on the wall. I placed my palm on the bottom most mark. The origin, before the line twisted up and around like a weird netting.
I felt a gentle kind of tug on my ring finger, and I submitted. I took something from inside myself and left it with the marking. Nothing permanent, or even costly, but what the lines needed to survive. I watered the painting with my soul, and it became possessed with a piece of my life.
And the paint morphed slightly. At first, the black turned to a sickly brown that could be hardly differentiated. And then it brightened, and brightened again into a shining yellow. And the lines moved as I willed them, a continuation of me. And they surged with vitality and squirmed happily under my care. They intersected and played with eachother as they crept to the door, finding joy in–
“Jack!” Bill. My heart stopped and the lines did too, quickly settling back into their dark, inky stillness, “It’s super late, we have to go now if we want to make it!”
“...I’ll be down!” I lovingly stroked the lines once more before pulling myself away to grab my bag.
I whispered a promise to the lines, a promise that I’d be back, and a promise that they could grow. That I would find a way.
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Sarah grabs my eyes every time I see her. I don’t know what makes her so striking, but that doesn’t make me any less her captive. Even in as unappealing a setting as a McDonalds (and not even a good McDonalds) she seemed like a lifeboat in a hurricane. She felt like that anyway. She didn’t look like that. She looked just okay, long hair, good eyes, but otherwise completely unremarkable. But she felt like a supermodel. Bill always asked what I saw in her. I never could articulate it to him. He’d just say that it’s a good thing I always went for the ones he didn’t want.
She ordered a chicken sandwich with a diet coke (it’s only fifty cents more to get it as a meal with fries, but whenever anybody brought it up she’d just say “I hate fries.”) and went to sit with Mark and the others. I found myself a table over with Bill and his close friends.
I pencilled at the notebook in my lap instead of thinking about how much I’d rather she sat with me. The lines in my notebook had barely a glimmer of the vitality of the lines in my room, but they lived more fully than blank pages so I kept drawing, and they appreciated it.
“...What about you Jack?” asked one of Bill’s friends. Chris? I think he told me his name was Chris.
“What about me?”
Chris(?) scoffed, “Are your ears shut? We wanted to know what you thought about Mrs. Harter’s math test on Thursday.”
“Oh. I don’t know, I probably failed. She’s a bitch anyway.”
“Hey Bill, I thought you said Jack was smart?”
Bill threw him a snarl, “He can do math, he just decides not to give a shit.”
“I don’t know,” Chris exaggerated a shrug, “Sounds like he’s smart in a way that don’t matter,”
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
I didn’t like the sound of that. I’m okay with people implying whatever they want, but not with Bill right there. And definitely not with Sarah sitting a few feet away. Chris was only five eight, or something like that. Definitely too small to be talking shit and feel safe, “Hey kid, how about we take it outside and see how smart I am out there?”
I put the pencil down and moved to step out of the booth like I actually meant to beat the shit out of him. He put his hands up and let out a disgraceful hum.
It doesn’t matter that being able to beat somebody up doesn’t prove how smart you are in a court of law, it proves whatever you want it to prove in a crumby McDonalds. At least that’s the way I see it, “That’s what I thought.”
I fell back into my seat and went back to my lines. Bill transitioned the conversation to something else, keeping Chris’ ego from dwelling on the exchange.
My attention slowly drifted from the lines (so dilapidated and starved of space that they could hardly move, even if I wanted them to) back to Sarah. She started on the second half of her chicken sandwich a few seconds ago.
I could tell that Bill saw what I’d been eyeing because he gave me a bump on the shoulder and nodded over to where she sat. “We still got ‘bout thirty minutes, go make conversation,'' he looked over at Chris, “he’s just snippy with you because he shows off for the girls, we all do it.”
I didn’t deny it. It wouldn’t be fair considering he was right. And besides, that’s not the only thing he was right about, I had time to go make conversation and I didn’t want to spend it arguing over nothing.
I shoved my notebook into my bag and walked over to the table with my hands in my pockets (the best place to put your hands when you feel like you might get nervous). Some scrawny looking kid had her locked in a conversation about something or other that she clearly had no interest in. He’d spout off about a hundred words and she’d respond with a curt “I see,” or, “Okay.”
I cut into a natural pause with a fallacious “Oh, I didn’t know you two were here,” and followed it up with a natural, “What’s happening?”
Sarah responded before the kid, “We’re going to see a movie with Bill. It seems pretty good. Are you coming along?”
“Yeah, something like that. I’m not normally into movies, but this one sounded interesting.”
“Oh.”
And that marked the end of that conversation. I didn’t know what to do. With my hands in my pockets, it’d be weird to dismiss myself with a gesture, and a goodbye so shortly after joining the social interaction felt incorrect.
While I puzzled through my next move, the kid hopped back onto his rant about V8 engines or whatever. I used that as an opportunity to escape.
Bill had seen the whole thing, and when I came back to sit with him, he let out a laugh.
Figures.
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The movie sucked. I don’t know who decided that the moral of every story needs to be about family, but whoever did needs to off themselves. I can only stand so many themes of ‘mommy loves you’ before I get sick.
I wasn’t going to say that though, at least until Bill and I had some privacy. Bitching about things as tiny as movie themes in a big group always reads as weak.
Besides, it seems like everybody in the world disagreed with me, considering the quantity of people that packed the theater. When we stood up to leave, we could hardly take more than half a step before bumping into somebody.
I trailed slightly behind the rest of the group, letting them clear a path through the sea of people that happened to decide to see this movie today specifically in a town where no one watches movies.
Someone gave me a shove from behind, and stuck a piece of paper to the back of my neck. I turned around to see who wanted trouble, and my vision immediately grew spotty, like how it does when I stand up too fast, or rub my eyes too much.
I stumbled slightly to the left, and tried to catch myself on something, or someone, but they brushed me off. I overcorrected and fell the other way. I reached out to catch myself on something, but I couldn’t see and slammed hard into the ground.
The floor knocked the wind out of me. I moved to stand back up, but my arms stopped listening to me. I felt my eyes grow heavy and start to close, and the spotty vision turned to black.
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I woke up to a violently bright light burning itself into my eyes. The room I sat in swirled with gray. Gray walls, gray floor, gray staircase in the wall, the only things that weren’t gray were the two men in chairs talking about something and myself, tied to a fancy wooden chair.
I tried to take in the situation. The knots that tied my legs to the chair dug into my thighs, hurting a little and constricting the blood flow. The same rope wrapped around my wrists, binding them both together and to the back of the chair. I could still feel the lines at home, and they hadn’t been disturbed, so Bill hadn’t gotten home yet. So the two men must have dragged me away fast.
When I snapped my head up they stopped talking to each other, instead just staring at me for the audacity of looking confused or something like that. The first one must’ve been in his forties, maybe even his fifties. Fit-ish white guy with no hair. He looked serious, like a drill sergeant. The other one looked more like me. Teenager, white kid, shaggy brown hair, but with a more refined expression. He looked nervous, like I could hurt him with my eyes somehow.
The sergeant took in the silence for a few seconds, swallowing it with an angry frown. Then he began to speak.
“You thought you were clever kid? With the graffiti? Well you got my attention now. What did you want to say?”
I sat there for a moment. My brain caught up so slowly that it took around three seconds to understand what he meant. Graffiti? I really thought that nobody owned those buildings! I guess I didn’t really know. I should’ve known there was a problem when people stopped to touch it. I felt them touch it, I thought maybe they just liked it! I talked faster than I think I’d ever talked before, “I swear, I didn’t know they were your buildings, I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known and I’ll clean them off if you let me go, I’m so sorry!”
The old guy gave the young guy a weird half-smirk, “Not our buildings, kid. We got the message you put on them nonetheless, and that is why we are here,” he shrugged, “Or to be more accurate, why you are here. Now talk. Which Franklin pissed you off enough to want to meet with us? And to do something as idiotic as throwing glyphs up on alley walls?”
“I swear to god I have no idea what you are talking about,” I said, the words bolting out of me before I knew their shape, “I just paint the lines because I like them, I swear.”
Old guy kept a solid poker face, but the young guy's expression betrayed him. Confused, more than a little. He looked at the old guy and opened his mouth like he had something to say, but the old guy shut his mouth with a glance.
“Kid, you aren’t in trouble yet. But if that was a joke, or a lie to try to get out of here, you best tell me now.”
“I promise, I’m just weird! Everyone says I’m weird!”
The old guy looked at me, then at the younger guy, and then back at me. He covered his mouth with his hand, but I could still hear him let out a muffled swear under his breath, “Alright kid, this isn’t how I would’ve wanted to be introduced, but you can call me Mr. Mallory. I’m not exactly sure what to do with you right now,” he thought for a second or two before continuing, “I belong to a family that specializes in those little paintings you make. Yes they move. You aren’t crazy. Here’s what I’m going to do: You are going to go unconscious again, you will wake up in that restaurant you and your friends were at earlier this afternoon. You will attend school tomorrow. I know you like to skip, you will not be skipping tomorrow. My friend Thomas here will approach you after school, and he’ll get you sorted. Are we understood?”
A “Yes sir” ripped itself out of my throat.
The younger one got up out of his chair and walked behind me. The older one spoke up again, “And kid, just for future reference, keep all your paintings inside for now. Don’t put them out in public.”
I felt something prod the back of my neck and I blacked out for the second time that day.
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The old guy didn’t lie. I woke up sitting at the same table I ate at a few hours earlier, complete with my bag, my phone and my wallet. I don’t think they took anything off me at all. I looked around the empty restaurant. It was late. Really late. Past closing. The lines in my room verified the time. Bill had opened the door almost an hour ago so it must have been ages since the end of the movie.
The only employee in the McDonalds lied passed out on the floor. Presumably my kidnappers had done something to him, but regardless of my innocence I didn’t want to be around when he woke up.
I grabbed my stuff and headed to the door. I considered briefly calling the cops, but thought better of it. These people knew everything about me. If I called anybody, they’d know, and for all the gentleness they’d handled me with so far, I suspect they’d take off the kid gloves if I tried to get them arrested.
On the walk I could only think about meeting Thomas tomorrow. If I got the chance, I’d beat the shit out of that kid. He thinks he and his dad are so much bigger than me that they can just knock me out and tie me to a chair in their basement like some weird serial killer true-crime podcast bullshit? What a joke.
When I got to the old house with the chipping blue paint that I called home, I opened the door as quietly as I could.
Didn’t matter. A short, old woman whose skin sagged off her body loosely grabbed me by the shirt the moment I stepped inside.
“What hour do you call this?” demanded Ms. Miller in a quiet rage, “You have school tomorrow!”
“I just got sidetracked, can I go to bed?”
Ms. Miller tried to stay quiet, and keep from waking the other kids. It ended up making her words come out like snake hisses, “Were you vandalizing again? I swear if I find another can of paint in your room tomorrow, then when you come home you’re going to wish that the police caught you instead!”
“I’m sorry about coming home late, it won’t happen again.”
“You best believe it won’t happen again! You will not be going out past eight o’clock for the next three– no, six weeks! And right now you will go straight to bed, and we will discuss this at length tomorrow!”
“Yes ma’am,” I started to silently march off to bed as she ranted by herself about my delinquency.
As I reached my hand through the door hole of my room, I heard Bill from the far mattress.
“Where did you and Sarah run off to, big guy?”
Sarah? She disappeared too? “Look man, I’ve had a long day. And it’s late. And it’s a school night. Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”
“Oh what, you’re actually gonna be on time for once? Color me shocked.”
“Whatever. Fuck you, I’m tired.”