Not the best weather in the world this fine day in early May, but people that have lived in Wisconsin for several years learn to make due with what 'mother nature' throws at them. A teenager standing not taller than the average person his age, tosses a cigarette onto the ground as he starts to incline up a flight of outdoor cememnt stairs. The cigarettes hits the ground and rolls a few times before ending its roll in a puddle, causing a slight sizzling sound that can barely be heard over the the background ambience of Menomonee Falls, WI at 7:03 in the morning. Smoke rises from the tossed cigarette and it mists into the air. The smoke is blown into the atmoshere by a lady who walks out of an insurance building, and proceedes to get into her automobile which is somewhat parked far from the building where she was just inside of. If only there were this many parking spots availible twenty minutes ago she may have been able to get into her automobile without dealing with this chance of rain. The teenager cares not about the chance of rain, he strongly marches though the weather through and through. She skurries to the automobile with papers in her one hand and keys in the other. She gets into the car and throws the gear into reverse before the car has even fully started. Lisa was a gem of yesterday. When she crosses peoples paths she makes a majority of them do a 'double-take' as drunk men like to call it. The majority of them know that Lisa was a gem, but an aging one. Mother of one, with another on the way, Lisa has the most wonderful brunette hair, in style, but well past its prime state. Lisa pulls fourth through the parking lot and heads towards its exit. Coast seems clear but just before she's about to leave the parking lot, a car appears out of nowhere, and nearly causes her next insurance claim. Luckily for Lisa she didn't take the slim chance to go and she isn't T-Boned by the oncoming car. The teenager fades into the background of this overcrowded village. "Jesus fucking christ, GO you fucking bitch!" chants a very tall and slim man driving the car who almost ended both the lives of Lisa and her automobile. He throws his finger towards the windshield signaling Lisa to proceed. She scoots off into the landscape and finally the tall, underpatient motorist can get back to his busy schedule of waisting time. Music pounds the speakers of Christopher's automobile. "Da Funk" by Daft Punk is circulating the sound system. A recent preferred album of his, Christopher signals left and shoots his mobile noise pollution machine up Appleton Avenue. "Hey Jason, you got a cigarette?" a short kid with dyed-black hair and a Halloween-style-corny chocker necklace on asks. "I forgot my pack at home under my bed, fucking bullshit." "Sure, Camel Filter alright with you?" Jason says to the kid as he begins to shuffle around in his pocket for his pack of cigarettes. "Here you go, better hurry up though school starts in like ten minutes." "Man I don't give a fuck about being on time for class, thanks for the square, yo! I'll talk to you later, you going to study-hall today?" "The fuck you think, dogg? I'll catch up with you later, I gotta get to first hour on time, otherwise I'm in deep with with the authority, later." Jason says as he crosses the street and heads way to the campus. Jason dresses in only name brand clothing that he just started paying for himself after getting a part time job. He's prefers his Lugz outfits, but he has a problem getting his Mother to drive to the places that sell Lugz. A big fan of the hip-hop scene, or so as much as any white teenager who is growing up in the suburbs can be. His CD collection consists of primarily albums by pop-Rap groups that could be easily identified by anyone who has ever turned on a television. Nothing real deep, but he will insist that he's got more "game" than "any mother fucker" who tries to challenge his motive. He's got a lot of friends, and does horribily in school. His grades started to decline about two years ago, right around the time things got serious with the transition to high school. Soon as things were put into the hands of Jason for decision making, things fell apart. Jason has no real direction in his life, he's guided by the hallow-tipped rap lyrics that stream through his CD player. He is into michevious behviours that almost anyone his age might be. But instead of doing this sporatically and at random, Jason has seemed to create a lifestyle that revolves around going whatever it is he is NOT supposed to be doing. When he is not in school he is at home playing video games, something else that was handed to him by his parents without any real good reasoning behind it. He don't like staying at home all that much he much rather be out kicking it with his homies, keeping it real, spitting mad game and all the good things that come along with that. Entering the school buildling, Jason sees a girl whom he is in Biology II with fourth hour. She smiles at him and does a classic schoolgirl wave to him. "What up Haley, how you doing girl?" Jason asks her with a quirky smile "You gonna be in Bio today?" "Of course, silly! Your the one who skips out not me, hehe" Haley says to him as she shuts her locker. "Are YOU going to be there?" "For sure, granted I make it to fourth hour." he says "I'll talk to you later." Haley walks into her first class which is only a few steps away from her locker. Jason makes way down the hallway, ducking his head down towards to the floor in efforts to trying avoid being seen by his Math teacher who is in converation with some geek in a grade higher than Jason. Thankfully for Jason the conversation is deep and before the math teacher even takes his eyes of the geek, Jason is alreayd halfway through the ground floor of the school. Jason has several people whom he needs to avoid contact with. With somewhat of a violent demeander, Jason is seen walking through the halls of Menomonee Falls High School with a straight face, or one that leaves you with the impression not to get in his way. This works with a majority of people who are merely there for the education, but for the rest of the social combatantas, there is all kinds conflicts that Jason finds himself into. Walking up stairs and through more hallways, Jason finds himself near his locker. Approaching it, he has a slight issue with opening his locker. He's not at school enough to have getting the locker open down to science like nearly every other student in the school. A random older student who also has a locker in the same hallway, adjacent of where Jason's is has a great time enjoying watching him try to open his locker. Jason notices her watching him when his third attempt pops the locker open, when random papers and folders fall out onto the floor. He gives her the dirtiest of looks and she shoots off to her class. Leaving only Jason left in the hallway. Jason posted to his LiveJournal once in regards to the location of his locker. Said that he thought they put people they didn't like, or people who were very smart, because they don't belong to be meshed into the rest of the school. Nobody commented on the post, and that thing and things like that bother Jason. After collecting the fallen stuff from the floor he grabs a single notebook that isn't for any specific class. Mostly second-rate doodles and artistic attempts. Lyrics that are dwelling in his head, are printed out and taped to all parts of the notebooks binding. Lyrics of the music Jason loves are the things he remembers best. Never a historical quote, or lyric from a Shakespeare play. But call him out on the new Ghetto D album by Master P and this guy knows it better than the artist himself. He's even got ideas on where things would sound better if done this way and that. But never a mathematical calculation. Jason can't even find a pen in his distorted excuse of a locker. He shuts slams the metal and you could hear something fall up against the front of the locker once again, ready to fall out onto the floor the next time he opens his locker. Considering Jason's recent school attendance, it will be this time tomorrow. He won't make it through much of the day unless something special happens. He backtracks parts of the hallway he did to get to his locker and heads to his first class. The bell rings a good 30, 40 seconds before he gets to class. Lisa pulls into the driveway of her home. Her husband, Steve, is walking back up the driveway clad in his leather slippers, never meant to be worn outside, and terrycloth and silk-lined robe. Lisa gets out of the car and greets her husband. "I got the insurance papers dropped off. It was too early, so our agent wasn't there yet but I gave it to her assistant who said she would give her the papers immediately." she says to her husband "How are you this morning, honey?" "I'm alright sweetie. I'm so sorry you had to go there so early, its my fault I let this go this close to the deadline." he says to her while he kisses her forehead as they walk back into the house together. "I am going to wake Holly, can you get me some breakfast started sweetie?" "Of course honey. Make sure you pack an extra set of clothes in her bag, she will be staying with your parents overnight remember." she said while shutting the front door of their house. "I got the clothes I want her to have on a pile on the floor in front of her dresser, but be sure to grab some socks." "I got some things to get ready before work in my office. Things I put off last night so we could go to bed together, that's so nice and means so much to me, you know that." Steve says to her while a display of disappointment starts to take over Lisas face. "Could you get her clothes ready for me, but I'm going to wake her now." Steve sprints up the stairs and tippy-toes into their childs room. Lisa just stares at the stairs just walked up, no longer in shock to what she just heard from. Steve was up on things with being a good father, for all of 6 months. Then he started to slowly retreat back into his routine he had before he was one, and leaving more and more respnosibility on Lisa's shoulders, making her leave her job that she had worked hard to earn before she even knew him in the first place. This makes Lisa's blood boil, but its starting to more and more become her new reality. She is starting to come to the realisation that she is going to have to be a housewife for the rest of her life. She thought things would be a whole lot different than they would have otherwise been. She knew that Steve would push off a lot of the parental responsibilities unto her, but there was a point in time where that train of thought attracted Lisa to wanting to be a mother. However things have been a little less sweet when it comes to actually disguesting what you once thought would be a royal feast. She found out quickly that being a Mother was more than she had bet on being. It's not something you just do and add to the things that you were doing before you were a Mother. Maybe that is how it can be, but with a husband like Steve and his recent contunal retreval to being a half of this whole, this sort of thing is impossible. She's getting good at keeping a straight face when she reacts to things, or Steve is getting better and better at ignoring his wife and her feelings. Trying not hang her head, Lisa heads to the kitchen to make make her husband breakfast. Steve doesn't just like breakfast he likes a whole fledged meal. Thankfully to Steven's upper-class mentality and lifestyle, she has the privilage of having a dishwasher, and a rather nice one at that, but she still has a small community of dishes to tackle shortly after Steve scoots off to work. Juggling that and the two year old Holly who controls every element of Lisa's life. Lisa has oftentimes thought of Holly as more a pet than a child. Or so it seems to be that way. When she goes in public with the child, its like being in Village Park with a dog on a chain. Except the chain is replaced with the link of held hands of Mother and child, or the clentching in arms. The complete and final decision of whether or not the visit to the park will be a good visit depends on whether or not the dog will behave. If they start barking, or crying, people will turn and look and she will be forced to do something under the spotlight of everyone else. She will be thinking about everything she is saying before she is to whispher a word, because she's not one to start making wide-open threats that usually make children be quite almost immediately, but make any random spectator cry for social services. As told by Steve, who has never raised a tone with their Holly. He once told Lisa "I will never yell at my child, never, not once. Its how you get kids against you at an early age." Steve and Holly emerge from the upper layer of the house. Steve sets her up on a highchair by the counter where Lisa has prepared both Steve and Holly breakfast. They set themselves up at the counter and began eating their meals. Steve likes to play Daddy at breakfast time, playing with the food more than the child ever has. She walks upstairs to get her clothes ready, such a simple task that her husband considered reasonably unfair to be asked to do. Such a simple, yet meaningful task. In a matter of moments she has the clothes in the bag she asked Steve to put them in. Under her breathe she mutters "Oh no, I have to open the drawer for the socks, what a difficult thing to do!" Zipping up the backpack she shuts the light off in her daughters room on the way out. She can hear laughing and giggling, but she isn't sure which one is doing which. Christopher runs up the stairs of his two-bedroom apartment, on the West side of Menomonee Falls. He rushes through the door due to a very loud noise he was hearing coming from his apartment. He blasts through the door to discover that his alarm clock is going off in his bedroom, which is rather loud for your typical alarm-clock. He rushes to his bedroom and slaps the alarm noises off. Heart beating a little faster, Chris looks around his bedroom to find that its slightly cluttered from too many after-parties hosted at his very residence. "I've got to stop doing this fucking shit" he thought to himself "This is fucking bullshit, nobody comes here and parties with respect anymore, they're all about just getting fucked up and leaving." He picks up a few beer cans and a few more bottles that have been resident on the floor for however long, and puts them in the kitchen. He looks at his kitchen table to find a picture frame on its back, scattered with cocaine and a used straw. For a moment the front of his jaw goes numb from the reminiscent feelings of being under the influence. His mouth now waters, that desire is there and strong. Eying up the amount of left-over cocaine he scrambles his pockets for anything with a straight edge. A drivers license that's heavily worn in will do just fine. A few hard presses, and just the right finger technique and beautifully like magic there are two slim, but not skinny lines measured up and ready for the big show. The used straw is taken to the kitchen sink by Chris, ran under some water and then blown through rather strong, to dry it out. One more quick blow through the straw for good luck and a very deep breathe through the nostrils to make sure there is a clear path to happiness. "Here's to the after-party!" Chris says as he bends down in half towards the picture frame, snorting one whole line up his left nostril with ease. His eye focuses on the picture behind the frame. His Grandparents. "Who the fuck.." He drops the straw next to the picture frame and goes to pick up more random drug parapheniallia and other things that are not subject to the publics display. He hops over to his three-disc CD changer that's on his entertainment centre and pops it open. Nothing but Moby's "I Like to Score" album. A look of approval comes across Chris' face to see this Moby album in the CD player, or maybe the cocaine has started to take its onset. Nevertheless the music fills the room; "Go" becomes the new official "clean the apartment" song of the day. With the shot of enthusiasm from the line of cocaine, Chris hops around with the look of delight on his face, cleaning any and everything in his path. He came across someone's old metal pipe down underneath the loveseat next to the bathroom. Unidentified, but it has to be someone he knows. You just don't find random pipes under your loveseat, that's not normal. Normal is a bag of blow on payday, a good cough with a good bag of marijuana. A lazy next day after a good night on ecstasy. After a little more cleaning was done in the apartment, Christopher thought it was a good time to hop in the shower and figure out what it is he's going to find himself into today. Hit up that second magically-and-free line. Christopher wants to accent his shot of cocaine with a good shot of espresso. He walks into his kitchen and turns on the trailing lights only, walks over to the pantry and gets necessary things needed to make such a wonderful bit of cafeeine. Chris loves to cook and his kitchen proves it. Despite having an apartment, Christopher has quite the space when it comes to the kitchen. He's got all the goodies and gadgets one at-home-chef could ever want, and for his young age, many of these things are rarely used, but it helps him sleep and night knowing that he has these things quickly at hand. Without it his life would imcomplete and have holes spread out over its beautiful horizon. Despite all the parties that Christopher has at his apartment, and despite how messy or out of control the parties get, and unconditionally how much Christohper may or may not get under the influence, he always keeps his kitchen clean, cold and museum-like. He always gets people beer or mixed drinks when they come over, and prefers it when people stay out of the kitchen entirely while over at his place of residence. Unless its a good night of Whisk. Then the real party has started. Since a young boy, Christopher has always played Whisk. He was taught how to play by his German grandfather, who taught him a German modernation on the mildly-ignored game. He and his Grandfather used to play this while placing bets on the games they played. They used traditional red, white and blue coloured poker chips, that were made out of cardboard with something to give it a little bit of a shiny finish. He still has a box of these pokers chips that he and his Grandfather used to use, they were given to him by his Grandmother shortly after his Grandfather passed away last year. Its hard for him to keep it all together when he fingers through the box of old worn, cardboard poker chips. After things at his apartment are set and up to his 'quality' standards, Chis makes way back over to the kitchen tables, bows to the happiness, and inhales what will bring him back to his desired reality for the next 45 minutes. After taking that in, and recollecting himself, Chris sits down at his kitchen table and pulls out his PDA. Looks over his schedule for the next two days. Two consecutive days off in a row. What will one do with himself? This time need not be wasted. A lot of people don't like the kind of work life that Christopher has to lead. He's a department manager in an electronics department at a locale retail store in the Falls. He's been working there on an off for almost six years. He's walked out on the company numerous times after disputes with then management, only to be recalled back to his job after those people have gone their own route in life. It didn't take long for him to rise to levels of managment once he strapped down and got serious about working there in the recent years. He's a drug addict with a problem. The benefit of this is these people tend to be the best employees because more times than not they are working on keeping people from thinking they're on drugs, or that they do drugs or anything to do with drugs. When it comes to work ethics, people with drug problems oftentimes strive to do better than the next random sober person because it will make them feel better about their problems and they feel they will have to work less and less at fixing these problems, because LOOK their work ethics are good. These are all thoughts once justified by people partying at Christophers house. Its justified, every and absolutely all they do. They have reasons for doing what they do, but more times than not they cannot recall, even a short time after, what it is justified what they did. Somtimes, even WHAT they did cannot be recalled. It's all in the drug culture, something Christopher, whom may or may not dealt with this personally, is a definitive member of. Christopher glances over his empty calendar on his PDA. He's got nothing planned, and usually never does. He likes to page through the current day and following few days on his PDA to make sure he's not missing something, but in the back of his head he knows there is nothing there. He likes his routines the way they are, but he needs to know that he's doing something important at all times. Not matter what, or how simple it may be. He gets up and goes over to his loveseat and sits down and picks up his phone. Dials Lin, his person whom he's been with for the better part of a year. While they are officially together, they have not been without their patches of discontentment with each other the last year. When they first started out they were just two people sastifying each others sexual desires with the mutual arregment to not care about anything else about each other but the time spent together in the heat of the moment. In fact there had been times where they had met up and exchanged passionate fiety intimacy without exchanging a word. This was on a wild tangant fantasy that Lin had come up with, but that like almost anything Chris blindly agrees to just to be in his persons presense. She doesn't answer. This may bother the common person, but it doesn't even flag Christopher at all one way or another. Just another missed call. Time to smoke a bowl, give Tony a call and see what has been going on since the last time they have talked. It's been all but thirty-six hours since they have last talked and its been a few good bags of weed and a few good lines that have to be discussed and of course keep up with other human related things. Stuffing a wad of expensive marijuana into his glass pipe, Chris puffs on one or two personally before his dials up Tony. A cloud of smoke covers the room. You do something your not supposed to for long enough and you will start to find yourself with pride in your work. But this pride can lead to unfourtunate events with other peole who pride themselves in doing over with the wrong doers. Jason is slyly slipping his way out of the front entrance of the high school when Mr. Johnson spots him trying to slip away. "Haro, hold it right there! Come here right now! Where do you think your going?" he screams out at Jason who turns around to gaze at him with a slick smirk on his face. "So many questions, I don't know where to start, how you doing Mr. Johnson?" Jason says to him, with an even bigger smirk on his face. "My Mother is dropping off some of my books for class I was just keeping an eye out for her. That Citisenship class is sure going to be tough this year!" "Don't play Kate with me, son! Your attendance is holy like swiss-cheese, its 11:45 what class you supposed to be in, or should I say what class were planning on ditching?" Mr. Johnson, the stocky Gym teacher asks Jason. "Don't give me flack either son, I can run your schedule out in the office if you want to give me a mouse-chase!" "Study hall" says Jason. "STUDY HALL!?" Mr. Johnson says. Jason nods at the teacher. The teacher raises his left arm and points in the direction of Jason's class. Jason slowly walks down the hall. Shaking his head the gym teacher makes his way back to his turf in the school. Jason knows this routine. He makes a quick jolt down a hallway and the gym teacher is long gone. Now all he needs is an additional exit out of the building. Its only 45 minutes early today, he made it through seven complete classes. His parents got on him rough last night about his attendance, but he just couldn't bring himself to do a whole eight hours. Jason makes his way through the back entrance of the school, after doing a near lap around the whole thing looking for a clear exit. Jason hates exiting the school through the back entrance. There are several class rooms on all three floors that have windows peeking out onto this area. He has to walk outside in a confident fashion, as if he has the "reason" to be there, but he can't walk too cocky then someone will definately question what it is he is up to. He manages to get off school property and onto the street without getting caught. He always figures if he ever got this far and someone yelled at him, he'd just blow them off cos he'd already made it off the property and if you do make it that far what's a teacher going to do anyway? Chase you down like a dog? The chances are slim. Walking up the street a bit, a vehicle approaches. Pulls over to the side of the road and the passenger window rolls down. "What up nigga? Fuck you doing out here walking like a prisoner gon' loose?" says the voice of a white guy sitting shotgun. "Wanna ride?" "For sure." Jason says to the passenger, as he hops in the car. This was Jason's friend Houston. Houston was another spoiled white kid just like Jason but with a little more flair to his appearance and attitude. He's also actually spent nights in the county-jail, not the juvenile detention centre that all local bad asses get their respectable degrees of hardened experience from. He also has a few friends whom are African-American, in fact a considerable amount of his friends are African-American and to Houston, this sort of thing makes him "gangster" in the little suburbian dreamhouse of a highschool they attend. He wears his hair very short, a style that looks like it was litterallly ripped off a black guys head. He's a little older than the rest of the crowd, has a little bit of facial hair which also replicates being black. The very elegant looking thin line where an otherwise full beard would be. Very clean. Wearing a pair of glasses that are very flashy and silvery, but obvsiously fake. They are also from the ladies department from the designer he thought he bought them from. Jason gives both the quiet and tucked away driver and Houston a good handshake before leaning back into the seat. They were listening to something that Jason recognised but he wasn't sure what it was so they simply complimented the sound in the car. "Nice bumps, yo." Jason says to the driver. He gets a nod in return. "You've got to pardon me for not talking you lately man, I've been on a straight trip of bull-shit with my parents lately man and having problems with school and shit." Jason says to Houston. Houston leans forwardr ejecting the CD that was in the player. He bends down to the floor and picks up what looks looked like a pizza box. It was a CD holder, holding what looked like hundreds of CD's that Houston owned. He pushed in another CD into the player and new music pounded the classic Buick with a modified sound system. Twista. "Fuck school, and fuck your parents." Houston said with a very serious tone. "I want to get serious about some other shit right now." "What's up?" Jason asked. "We need to let people out here know that were the ones in charge of everything that goes on. We need to people to KNOW who we are." Houston continues "Mother fuckers out here are one some mother fucking bullshit, and I need to let you know that its no longer smile and frown bullshit, its blood or water." The battle of the white teenager rages on. Lisa pulls out of the driveway to her stepparents house, Steve's extremely wealthy parents. She's got a sigh of relief washing over her as she leaves their property. She dropped off Holly because her Grandparents were going to take her overnight and go to the Zoo with her. Lisa was just drilled hard by both of them, namely the Father, for going to the Doctor for another checkup on their oncoming child, that's growing inside of Lisa at this very moment. Its been two weeks since her last visit to the Doctor, and she has felt a little rushed with the whole thing by everyone related to Steve. She feels like she is being treated more like a baby-machine than she is a loving wife who is being respected and loved for who she is, not what she can do, or what she can do that Steve cannot on his own. There is a reason Lisa felt they were united in marriage, but these reasons are now being questioned. For it hadn't been until she met Steve that she believed in true love. She in fact shunned it up until that point. She would never, in her state of mind before Steve, had told anyone to stay with anyone they felt initially attracted to, or felt as if they were under the 'curse' of "love at first site". She just wouldn't have it, it was too improbably, backed by lust, nothing of substance. This was something that Lisa wanted nothing of, she wanted depth and genunity in what she felt was her significant other. These feelings begin to evade her. Lisa feels like the rich school-girl who everyone hated for being spoiled. This makes her feel alienated, because she is indeed spoiled, but her spoiled nature is all in showers of things she does not desire, nor in some instances even need. This drives her to feel even more apart from herself. On the way home, while at an intersection Lisa finds herself in somewhat of a daze of watching two teenager girls walk up the street. They are dressed rather trendy, have multi-coloured hair and look like they are doing something they are not supposed to be doing. Lisa admires the couple as they walk up the street and drifts off into memories of her days of skipping school occasionally with her friends to smoke cigarettes, or drink a beer when they were supposed to be in Science class. As Lisa arrives back home, she comes to the sudden rapid realisation that those wonderful days of great fun and mischief are now over for her, and instead of being the mischievous one, enjoying sporadic and spontaneous adventures for the sake of principal, she is now the anti-micheivious one, enforcing rules down upon her children. The blinking little light on a black plastic box means that there is a new message on the answering machine. Lisa clicks the machine while going to the mirror in the living room to groom her hair a little bit. She's going to let it hang down, she has no children to take care of a few hours, and with no Steve home asking for her to do anything she finds herself with a moment of free time. The message on the answering machine is the voice of Steve, her husband, who is calling to tell Lisa that he wants her to call him at work, because he wants to see how dropping off Holly went, and what day that she had considered going to the doctor for a check-up. Lisa was pacing the living room through is message, and shook her head in disagreeance with Steve's talking about the doctor. There is no problem with going to the Doctor, but what bothers Lisa the deepest is that everyone around her, or the environment Steve has make her life become, a routine of himself, Holly and his parents, and any business associates Steve makes her deal with; seems to be the ones concerned with what is going on with her more than she puts thought into it. Not her well-being, the inside track of Lisa's personal health and mental stability. One can only be asked so many questions until they become socially unstable just from being shoved under the microscope for too frequent check-ups. Lisa checks back with her husband at work shortly after listening to his miniature audiobook of a message of the answering machine. She informs him that Holly was taken over to his parents house safely, that his parents send their warmest regards and will talk that they wanted him to call over there sometime before he left work, and that she just got home. He tells her that he has some business obligations that will run later than usual and that she should contact his parents to tell them that. She obliges and forwards her love to him. His typical at-work response to her closing "I Love you, honey" is, and has always been "Same to you, Good-bye for now" - hang-up. That closing still bothers Lisa still to this day, but when she had cornered her husband at one of his companies work gatherings, while they were slightly intoxicated and dancing, he simply told her that "showing delicacy in a serious toned business atmosphere is like wearing pink leather to a biker rally." She softly laid her head on his chest and continued dancing. He never saw her cry. She has since then given up on any trying to rekindle a sort of traditional relationship orientated closing to a telephone conversation. She figures such tasks are beyond her husband's tunnel-visioned-etopia of a world. Lisa hangs up the phone and for a moment seems to have an upset look to herself, but upon walking through the hall into the bedroom she comes to the slight realisation that has been non existence since Holly has been born. She has a few hours to do absolutely anything she wants. She has to call her steparents to tell them the message from Steve but at this point in time she really isn't concerned too much about wanting to call them. She only a few moments ago was there dealing with them, she doesn't want a refresher just for spite just yet. She plops down on the bed and lays her head upon the down comforter. Her eyes quickly drift shut, and exhaustion overcomes her. But before a moment of true relaxation can set in, the telephone rings again. "Oh for the love of GOD!" Lisa yelps out while marching back to the telephone still warm where she was last touching it. Its Steve again. She is told by him that he's got to now do some business traveling. Stuff with the new office has not gone as the company had planned, so they are sending a few 'vets' to the new office to get things done and have things setup in mirror replication to the way things are ran at the office Steve and most of his branch-colleques work at. She humbly agreed to what he had to say without listening but her attention is once again lifted when he says to her that his Mother has made an appointment for her at the Doctor on Thursday, in three days. "Are you going to ne gone that long, honey?" she asks him "This will be a lot of juggling with Holly, you know how far downtown the Doctor is located, I'm no so familiar with that area." He affirms that he is going to be gone for that long and more. He will be gone for "three business day, sweetie" which in English translation is Steve's wife-friendly and digestable way of saying he will gone for five days, including the upcoming weekend. Another strange translation that she has gotten used to over their short-lived years together. He further tells her that his parents will be taking care of Holly for those days and throughout the next weekend; as they will take her on a special vacation to visit relatives in central Minnesota. They will take her to the Mall of America and they will let her ride the kiddie roller coasters throughout the mall. They are said to have promised Holly to have a wonderful time. "I will have to come home for a little while later on this evening to gather things for my trip. I was not planning such a trip out of the blue like this, I hope you can find it in your heart to excuse such a sharp turn of events." Steve says to here over the phone "Will you be around later around 7 o'clock or do you have something you will be obligated with?" Lisa wasn't sure how to answer the question. She is filled with huge momentum and finds herself wonderfully delighted to have the rest of the day to herself entirely, at her distrection. "Well I'm not sure of anything I'm quite obligated to be doing around then, but if something comes up I'll leave you note or something. It's ok honey don't worry about me, thanks however for allowing me time to myself. Despite you not being here with me it will be a moment to relax." They separate the conversation after they exchange closings and Lisa once again hangs up the phone. "Jerk!" she says out loud to the empty house. A state of which the house is usually never in. With a moment to her self, Lisa runs out the garage and unfolds a folding chair and puts it in front of one of their storage cabinets. Standing on the ladder she reaches around the top of the cabinet, rustling around a few light spiderwebs and some dead leaves. She finds what she is looking for, a very ancient pack of Clove cigarettes. She opens the pack to find six of them left. She bought this pack of cigarettes the day they bought this house. They are quite old. She used to hide them in the freezer when they first moved in but stopped doing that once Steve started getting nosy about her flaws in character. She removes one of the cloves and puts the pack back farther on top of the storage cabinet. You can never be TOO safe. She walks back into the house and out the back entrance; out to where the grill is outside on their patio. The grill that Steve rarely cooks on, moreso his Father on special occasions. She pulls a book of matches out from the drawer on the side of the solid stainless steel grill with a wooden enclosure. She sits down on one of the outdoor chairs they have on their patio and sparks one of the matches. Takes a peek around like she is one of the girls she walking around in town while they were supposed to be in school, and slowly lights the clove. The slow crackle of the leaves burning side the clove made the most harmonic of all noises and despite being 'stale' the smell of the clove is relaxing and soothing to Lisa, who sits back into the chair she sat in. Lisa rolls the clove around in her hand while she smokes it. She hesitated for a moment, almost realising that she had almost forgotten that she were pregnant. She didn't stop smoking the clove, she is sweating for the rebel team. After smoking her clove and tossing the butt-end of it into the neighbours yard, Lisa returns to the house and goes to the living room and turns on the house stereo. "Out of Time" REM's 1991 album. Lisa is a little bit of a bubble-gum girl when it comes to the music that she listens too, she hops all over "Loosing my Religion" and claps along with the music while she goes to lock the front door, and head towards the bedrooom to find a change of funky change of clothes. Now singing along to the music, Lisa undresses and just loosely tosses her clothes on the floor while hopping around the room looking for something else to dress her. A tall standing mirror in the corner of the bedroom catches Lisa's attention as she moved through the front of the closet. She take a long hard look at her naked body as she stand there in front of the mirror. She moves to the side and takes another look at herself. Doesn't look pregnant yet. She really likes how her body looks. She managed to nearly return her body to a like or better state that it was in before she was pregnant with Holly. Got lucky if you could say it that way. She admires the song as it is about to end and returns to the closet and reaches into the closet to pull something out. She holds it up in front of herself in front of the mirror. A quick frown, Lisa doesn't agree with the blouse she has pulled out. She tosses it on the end of the bed. She continues to do this with numerous articles of clothing until she got the perfect outfit she desired. She would clean up the clothes that she just tossed all over the bedroom for the better part of fifteen minutes, but she feels not obligation to do so, so she just walks out the room, leaving the light on. Walking into the living room to where the music now returns to the full volume Lisa remembers putting it to, to the groove of REM. Now the randomly programmed CD changer has now wondered onto Sarah McLachlan. "Witness" on 1997's "Surfacing" drifts soufully throughout the surround speakers. She goes to the phone to make a phone call to her very close friend Stephani. Nobody answers the phone but Lisa leaves a message to her friend and tells her to call her the second she gets the message. Soon as she hangs up the phone, it again rings. It's Stephani. "What are you doing, screening your phone calls now?" Lisa asks Stephani "Look I was wondering what your doing tonight!" Without a pause inbetween her steament Stephani says to her that she will not babysit for Lisa. "No that is not what I want to ask you what your doing for, I have a few free days and I was wondering what you were doing?" Lisa's friend Stephani was almost shocked that Lisa was calling just to talk and was considering taking a few moments out of her busy life of doing Steve's chores that she just wanted to shoot the breeze back and fourth for a bit. Lisa was told that Stephani had no plans later this evenign and if she wanted to get to gether that would be a great idea. "I'd suggest going out drinking, but your brewing up something of your own and probably shouldn't drink!" Late afternoon Wednesday. Christopher has spent the better part of the afternoon sitting at his house watching a documentaries on television about random celebrities he otherwise knows nothing about. Tony has come over and has supplied a substantial amount of marijuana to the afternoons burnt remains. They have watched a fair amount of television and have teased around ideas of doing actual, physical things, that required more movement than the fingers pressing down on the remote control. "We should get some blow, and get together with your woman, get together and play some Whisk!" Tony suggests to Chris. "We could call some more people over if you wanted to and we could get a serious game going with the poker chips and all. I'm only throwing out ideas here, here ya go there might be one left in there." Tony hands Chris the glass pipe that they are smoking out of. Chris takes his pinky and pushed down into the bowl part of the pipe, feels that there is still a tad-bit of a pot left in there to hit. He takes that hit, but does it slowly, as not to such in the hot ash into his mouth. He exhales a weak and nearly transparent cloud. "Weak" he says. Chris taps out the ash in the pipe into the ashtray on the coffee table in front of the loveseat they are both sitting on. "I dunno man, I got off tomorrow night too, I wanna do something fun; something that I wouldn't normally do if I only had one day off." Christopher says to Tony "You know, something other than just fucking around here and playing cards." Tony nods in agreement. Maybe it wasn't the answer that he wanted to hear, but its definitely what he has been told. Chris assumes he just wants to do cocaine, which deep down, Chris is alright with doing, but he wants to justifiy the usage with some sort of ailment. Anything to justify it, just so long as there is justificiation. Chris reaches over to the phone and dials up Lin. This time she answers. "Hey cutie, what's you doing!?" Chris says to his person on the other end of the line. "What you wanna get into tonight? We should do something that isn't typical of us, as I have off tomorrow as well." Tony leans away from Chris who is getting yelled at now from Lin on tthe phone. "Hey come on! Where is this coming from!? All I want to do is hang out with you, but do something out of the ordinary." Rambling between them continues. The smoke that had lingered in the room for the better part of the last 90 minutes now begins to clear up from all the voictrous things that are being thrown from Christophers mouth. He doesn't say anything offensive to Lin, it sounds more like everything is in defence of something that he didn't do right. Suddenly mid-sentence, Chris is talking to nobody but the dial-tone. Soon as he hangs up, a Target commercial stops playing on the television. "Fuck Target, that's the stupidest commercial ever." Chris works at Target, and likes to poke fun at any sort of advertisment that they do. "Don't give me that Target crap," Tony demands to Chris "What the hell just happened on the phone with Lin?" Chris shakes his head 'no' for a second before saying "Nothing, when I told her that I wanted to do something out of the ordinary because I had off the next two days, she went off onto a wild story about how everything that I say is always about me, and that she is never properly considered, or some fucking bullshit, then she started talking about how she doesn't feel that I'm respecting her enough lately and she isn't interested in talking to me right now if that's 'how i'm going to be'" "So, in other words, she's already got plans tonight and the easiest way to get those plans set in stone is to indefinitely clear you off the list of possible agenda weigh-downs?" Tony says to Christopher in an almost fatherly manner. "Or is this for real, your self-centred all the sudden?" "Fuckin-Ai! You really know how to make a mother fucker feel like shit, jesus fucking christ." Chris screams at Tony "If your going to be a little bitch, why dont you just go or something." "Look! I'm not here to make you feel bad, I'm here to keep it real cos I'm your friend, remember? I'm sorry to say it so bluntly, but I'm not like your little woman there who has been distrespecting you for, honestly, the entire time she has known you. You fold to her so easily its almost sick to think about. She couuld tell you that's she's going to have a goup-orgie and that she wants you to have dinner ready for you here in your spiffy little kitchen by the time she gets done getting trained. And you know what the sad part is? You'd have all that shit done for her, candle-light and all." Chris was motionless. He slowly turned his head to Tony. "Your lucky we are not drinking, cos you know I'd slaughter the shit out of you for saying that." "In your dreams, fan-boy!" Tony says to Chris while slugging him in the arm. Chris is quick with a return right hand to the left shoulder of Tony. They both smile and Tony gets off the couch and stretches. Throws his hands high towards the ceiling. "Now lets stop fucking around and go get some blow!" "That's never sounded like a better idea, " Chris says "until now." They both head out the door, destination cocaine. They decided to take Tony's car, as he is a little more experienced to the city they will be going to, Milwaukee. Chris has pretty much been in Menomonee Falls his entire life. He's got a good three or four inches on the height of Tony, so his 1992 Eagle Talon isn't as a comfortable ride for Chris as it is for Tony. Tony fires up the entire and he starts the scenic route to the inner-city. The highway 45 was pretty scarce but the traffic increased towards its end, but the real life of Milwaukee County took place when they arrived down on Appleton Avenue. Tony always drives when they go get cocaine. This is because when Chris gets blow he cannot just wait to get home until he tries it for the first time. He's got a little carrying case for it and everything. Like how pool sharks carry their lucky pool stick with them, Chris has a little to-go bag off random cocaine paraphenillia. Things he seems to use quite frequently. He's got his preferences on what 'works' and what 'doesn't work' when it comes to mobile cocaine use. He's got it all figured out with his strong resume of usage. "Probably end up going down to 43rd if you don't mind," Tony says "Snow is always a little lighter down there." Chris nods as he licks the last side of the blunt, wrapping it up tight, but still breathable. "Whatever works man, you know the whiter the better." Tony and Chris exchange the blunt back and fourth on the way down to 43rd street where Tony will know someone down there who will be able to hook them up with something to keep their minds attended to this evening. "Snap, how much we going for here, brother?" Tony says "I hadn't really thought about it." "Well I do have off tomorrow, and seeing as how it seems that I'm going to be alone again tomorrow, might as well go that good econonimcal route and upgrade right up to the ball right away." Chris says. "Whatever's clever, we'll figure out the financials later. You got front money?" Tony asks "Or should I stop at an ATM?" "No I think I'm good." Chris continues "It won't be more than a buck sixty will it?" "If it is, we'll be leaving 43rd and going somewhere else." Tony says "I'll probably have to run in, I can leave the car running unless I'm told not to." "Yeah I know the drill, no problem there. I'm used to sitting outside in the dark anyway!" Chris laughs. "You want any more of this?" He holds out a small remainder of the blunt they had been passing. "Hell yeah, yo! I'm not bitch, I'll hit that shit till its nothing but paper! Give 'er here!" Tony reaches for the roach. He inhales it hard, trying to make the last few hits a quick and easy process. His second large inhalation of the blunt made Tony quickly throw the roach out the window and wave his finger back and fourth very quickly, blowing on it and all. "Jesus Christ! That was fucking hot!" he said. Before the clock struck 7:30 they were already at the 43rd street destination. Tony pulls up to the house and turns off his headlights. "Alright give me your money, I'll be back in a little bit; I didn't give them a call first so I might be a little longer, you know they don't like unannounced stops all that much." Tony says to Chris as he hands him $160 in twenty-dollar bills. Tony hops out the car and scrams across the street and disappears once he leaves the radius of the street-light shining across the way. Christopher looks around the car, through the windows, taking witness to the life around 43rd street. Not too many people out, but some are. Not everyone is fully adjusted to the idea that summer is coming soon I suppose. There are a few brave souls out there today however. There are a pair of children playing with a beach ball out in front of a house next to the passenger side of Tony's car. Chris sits in the passenger seat and watches them paly with the ball for quite some time. One of the girls turned around and waved at Chris. He quickly looks the other direction as if the children may have been waving at someone else. Somehow when he turned around he was understood that they were indeed looking in his direction. He slowly turns back to their admiring faces and does a weak wave back to them. They continue to play, and they eventually scamper off. Chris lays back into the seat with a little more slouch, and tips his Milwaukee Brewers hat foward over his eyes. He closes his eyes for a moment, and reaches blindly towards the passenger door, and slowly rotates lever on the door to allow a crack in the window and a line of fresh air to seep into the vehicle. The sounds of the outside world get realer, have more depth and have a little more clarity. Suddenly he hears someone yell out from behind the vehicle. "Hey mutha fucka, the fuck you think you doing?" Christopher pops forward so quickly that his hats falls down onto the floor of the front seat of the car after boucing off the broad face of the dashboard. Someone runs at what seemed like light speed past the car and once passing the radius of the street-light nearly right next to the car, the figure disappears. Christopher reaches down and picks up his hat. He stares out towards the diretion where Tony had dissappeared into, but doesn't see any movement, or any sign of getting cocaine, or going home any time soon. Waiting for drugs has become such more of an endurance sport than it used to be. Twenty-five minutes pass before Tony finally emerges back into the light, crosses the street and gets into the car. "Man I'm totally sorry about how long that took, there was a whole lot more fucking around than I had wanted to put up with. I tried to hurry things up as quick as I could." Tony says to Christopher "Now we can get back home and party! Wooo!" "Let me get that, homey. I want to bust one out for the ride home." Christopher says to Tony, who is sniffling every fifteen seconds give or take. "I sure waiting long enough." "Look man I told you I was sorry about how long it took, what do you want from me!? I don't really feel like fucking with that shit right now, let's just wait till we we get back to your place to figure things out." Tony says to him. "Hate to be fucking around and get caught with this much dope on us." "The hell you trying to jinx us or something, stop screwing around and give me my shit, yo!" he says "Let me get my change too." "Dude just sit back, put your seat belt on and just chill the fuck out. We'll be back at your place in no time, I'm just a little paranoid that's all. Better a safe scenario than an locked-up one" Tony says. Chris silences himself. Not another word to be spoken. He knows this scenario, he knows it all too well. There are only a handful of reasons why someone who just got you drugs will not give them to you right away when they first see you after getting them. One of those reasons, and probably the one that Chris is the most concerned with is the one that suggests the reasons they are so unwilling to hand it over right away is because they either have or are still planning to "pinch" from your bag, sort of a "luxury taxes" or sorts drug people do with one another when there is no cash money gratuity suggested or involved. So silently Christopher Goodnough sat in the passenger seat of his lifelong friends automobile. Completely silent and looking a complete 45 degree angle away from the direction of that friend, the entire ride home. Something about that attitude, or the enviornment, or the overall tone in the automobile, made that car ride seem like it was three times the distance. Time dragged on like a tow-truck pulling with flats. Thoughts are traveling two hundred miles an hour through Chris' head on the way back to the apartment. Why would Tony want to take a pinch from the bag if he knew I'd end up doing a bunch of it with him anyways. Why would he assume he would have to keep a little bit on the side in order to be satisfied. Does he think I'm not going to do enough with him? Is he saving planning on saving some so he has a bump to do in the morning. This has the absolute and unparallel possiblity of destroying the entire shift of the coming evening ahead. Whent hey arrive at the house, Chris quickly apologises for what he said earlier even tho deep inside he is still truly torn that his friend is going to do him over like this. To Chris the answer is that nothing, even drugs, should pierce a relationship that has a time-trial-tested positive outcome. Meaning that Tony shouldn't have the assumption that Chris will not "have his back covered", because that "is what people do, who have known and cared for each other this long". Or maybe its just been too long since that numbing benevolence has taken a sweet cruise through his consciousness. The two are quick to unite, as the night is young, 8:17. Houston stands up from the milkcrate he was sitting on in his garage. He's got a Miller Genuine Draft bottle that's nearly three-quarters gone. He stumbles over to a cooler that his friend Lewis was sitting on. He holds his bottle this lip and tilts it back gulping whats left inside. He lets out a large belch and quickly hits the left side of his chest with his fist and says loudly "That's how we do it here in Wisconsin! Get up muthafukaiyneedanotha beer." Lewis slowly gets up, turns around and opens the cooler he was sitting on. Grabs into the cooler and pulls Houston out a beer and takes his empty bottle. Puts it up against the garage wall where they have been collecting Houstons empty beer bottles all evening. "Listen up tho, know what I'm saying." he says while twisting off the top of the beer passed to him by Lewis. "To keep it real, like I was talking about earlier, just wanna keep it real you know between you me here and my folks. We need to keep it real out here you know what I'm saying. Let mother fuckers around here, you know what I'm saying feel the shit we around 'ere be doing. Don't let any nigga around here tell us what to do, but rather have these jealous mutha fuckas follow us you know what I'm saying. Be leaders, not followers." Absolutely flabergasted by what he had just heard, Jason looks towards Houston and shakes his head. "I feel you man, I feel you." Jason tips his Miller Geniuine Draft back, but doesn't take near a swig of his drink like Houston. Not many people his age do. "So what you gonna do about it then mutha fucka!?" Houston says hitting his chest three times and bouncing around a little bit. "What you gonna do!?" "What are you talking about, dude!?" Jason says to Houston, who is still bobbling back in front getting a real grunted look on his face. Jason stands up off the couch that Houston and Lewis had stolen from someones garbage a few weeks ago and carried three street blocks into the place it sits now. "What I'm talking about mother fucker is what do you want to do to represpent what the fuck you stand for?" Houston walks over to Jason and stand toe to toe with him. "What I'm saying is what the fuck do you want yourself to be known as? What is the name of your set, bitch!" "You wanna start a clique or something and have some kind of slogan and trademark, go fuck yourself." Jasons says to Houston who is nearly blue in the face from what he just hear. Without a moments notice, a broken beer bottle is the result of Jasons dropping it after being sucker punched by Houston. Both he and beer bottle took a nose dive to the floor. Houston gets a few abdomin kicks in before Lewis finally hops off the cooler and pulls him back. "Aight, aight, aight, chill mother fucker before your Pops come out here and whoops your ass." Houston turns around and gives Lewis a stare as if he were also what Jason just was. Lewis steps closer to Houston and says "You know you don't want it with me. You better start thinking cleary before I know those spiderwebs out your godamn head. Why don't you sit on that couch and calm the fuck down." Jason, holding his midsection but then giving a little attention to his face that was sucker punched, gets up off the floor and gives a rough look to Houston. He stands, now tall, next to Lewis. Lewis looks over at him. "You aight?" "Don't pretend were friends now. Look I'm outta here, this shit right here is foul, yo, straight up." Jason motions towards the door that leads out the garage on the north side of the house. Just before grabbing for the doorknob Houston says to Jason "Look, don't leave.." but Jason was already at the door, and shutting it behind him. Walking a few feet into the yard, the realisation of how far the walk home from here is to home is quite downing in combination of the few slugs he just toiok from Houston. The garage door he just exits pops open, and Lewis sticks his head out. "You want a ride?" Jason keeps walking like he never heard a thing. He slips through the border of another persons property and is out on to the backroads of Tammarack Trail. Going home. Hoping to make it there too later. Theoretically speaking he should have been there 45 minutes ago. Walking through more yards and more things that are supposed to held by private owners, Jason makes his way back to the central part of Menomonee Falls, to where his house is located. His walking is not done without a few feelings of exhaustion. He would have done almost anything for a ride home, but taking one from Lewis only would make him feel like less of a person. For if it wasn't for the people that Jason knows that Houston is associated with, he would have no other sense in him to keep him from knocking the senses right out of the head of Houston. Jason isn't one for taking that kind of punishment lightly. At the tender age of 16, he's already got two assault and battery charges under his belt. The first happened when he just entered highschool. Jason was on the way to class the first day of his new school and a student, a junior, came up to him and told him in a joking tone: "Give me your milk-money, freshmen!" Jason didn't even look at the guy before slugging him in the side of face with the fiercest right hand anyone in that school has seen with their own two eyes. The assault didn't continue there. The bully tried to shove Jason off of him, but Jason speared him into a glass display case which shattered and cut Jason several times in the arm. Nothing serious but from the falling glass he was obviously cut open. The pain only make his fire rage on further. He punched the bully several times in the face with blood coming out of his own arms, splattering on the bullies face. The feared bully was one that nobody in the school had every stepped up to before. Jason was the first and last person to every try and fight this guy. This is because despite not being the one to start the physical assualt between the two, the school deemed him equally responsible for the milk-money comment. They expelled hiim and suspended Jason for three weeks and gave him a week of in-school detention upon his return. Nobody saw the bully after that day in school, and nobody every talked smart to Jason in school ever again. Despite the harsh things that had happened, both teenagers saw each other in municipal court when they had hearings for their charges places against them by the school for their irritattive public behaviour. With nothing else to loose, the bully approached Jason in the courts waiting area, and asked him how he had been doing and what the status of a few people at school was. What suprised everyone at the school dance, later that year is that people saw Jason leaving the dance with a few of his associates, captained by the bully, Calvin. It was the talk of all high-school gossip during the next full week of school. All the other 'thugs' and 'tough guys' who walked around the school with their shoulders broad, reconsidered their walking stances for a moment when they heard the news of the two rivals teaming up for reasons unknown. A year and a half almost to the day of the assault charage placed against him, Jason was the centre of another topic of discussion amongst the high-school gossip queens. A new student had started at the school and had taken a special interest in Jason, and indefinitely thought he was more powerful and popular than him. One day a few weeks after starting at the school and getting his introductory statements out of his system, the new student Roland was a hispanic kid who didn't like hearing or seeing white guys who thought they were black. He had friended sides with a few people that Jason otherwise didn't care too much for, and one day in class, Math of all classes, Roland makes a humourous comment to Jason. "Whiteboy, I saw you with your hat on crooked earlier, you bump your head or something, or you think you gangsta?" People giggled, a few of the 'wanna be' hard and tough guys turned around in order to anticipate reaction from Jason. Jason simply ignored him, as if the guy had never spoke. That didn't go over well, and never will, espeically with an instigator. "Hey, Vanilla Ice, when's your new album coming out? You told me Ice, Ice, Baby, but you left me wanting more. Come on your bubble gum has me chewing but I'm loosing flava, playa?" Jason turns his head and looks dead in the eyes of Roland. "Pft, you better chill out with what your saying." He says to him in a very serious tone. The teacher stops her lecture and takes notice with what she, and the rest of the class have been trying to ignore for the past few moments. "Mr. Holmes, Mr. Haro, could you two please solve your differences at a later time, this is Math class not social-sciences." The teacher turns around and continues with her writing of arithmetic on the whiteboard. Jason turns his head back to the forward direction as has most of the class resumed doing. Roland shakes his head in disbelief. There was two rows of desks between them, but the way they were just exchanging communication anyone could have swore they were eye to eye. "This ain't over pinky, I'm gonna get all over you after class, finish you like your buddy Calvin should have in the first place." Roland says, unaware of what trigger he just tripped, what wires holding up tension-back fury away from the rest of the world. Without a moments notice, like a horribly realistic scene out of a post-modern Batman movie that people not even born yet would have thought up, Jason springs from his desk and hops on top the desk of the person sitting next to him, jumps off that desk over the aisle next to that and tackles Roland, tumbling both of them out of the desk Roland was in, not without pain to both of them. Roland was seated in the last row next to the side of the classroom, which had a large metal heat register trimming the wall, under two large glass windows which had a line of books in front of it. Roland is pinned up against the register with Jason stradling him. Jason probably hit him fifteen or twenty times before Roland got any sort of comeback to the assault. The teacher was helpless, she stood there in sheer amazment, still in motion, without a slight bit of comprehension that she is the one responsible for doing something to stop this. No student was brave enough to stand up to either one of these too, half of them were afraid and wilting by the things they heard these two saying to each other. "JASON STOP!" a few of the nerdy girls started to chant like cheerleaders alongside their hometown basketball or football team. A majority of the room were hooting and hollering in favour of the assault they were seeing. A good chunk of the male adolesence in the room watched wrestling on television but this beats that any day of the week. Jason gets up after swinging on Roland a few more times, nearly defensless Roland puts up his hands to block from any more hitting, Jason boots and kicks Roland in the midsection so many times that Roland started to spew out blood from his mouth. It wasn't internal bleeding, but possibly he had bitten part of his tongue off or bit his cheek, or his teeth cut them. The noise of the two banging around the room and the class cheering like a crowd of sports spectators, attention from outside the classroom had been drawn in. Jason had stopped his assault on Roland and he lay beaten on the floor bleeding from the mouth and nose. Other teachers had rushed the room to bring the chaos to and end but the chaos had already come to leave its mark on those in the room at that particular moment. Another batch of people got more fuel for the gossip spreading fire starters, seeing first-hand what rage and pain that Jason Haro is capable of. He had built himself quite the reputation already, this only gold-lined his already luxurious empire. Jason had calmed down, but the other male teachers who had rushed the room felt it was necessary to drag him, literally, to the office like was still wild and out of control. This was witnessed by a whole lot of students who knew that they missed something spectacular. Only those in the room at that time will be able to translate what happened, but forever those translations are never authentic. Jason was also suspended for that little stunt, except this time his parents actually had to put up a fight for his attendance to that school, and that school system. It was surfaced that, through the rigorous testing and analysis by high paid doctors that Jason Haro had some sort of rage disorder that had been the result of years of disagreeable treatment from other, bullies and other such harsh social characters. Roland suddenly disappeared from that school after that day, and nobody every heard from him again, Jason, or anybody else. Jason walks up his street and up the front lawn of his house. He quietly knocks on the front door, nearly an hour past when his Father told him to be home. Anxiety sets in, of all the things in the world that does not fear Jason, nothing scares and frightens him more than his Father. Lisa pulls up to Stephani's apartment, and beeps the horn of her Volkswagon Jetta. Shortly after that Stephani appears from the apartments interior and walks towards the vehicle and gets in. Whenever Lisa and Stephani are together, which isn't so much often anymore before Steven, before children, before Lisa's new life, they are always so giddy with one another as if they're being together isn't supposed to be what they are intended to do. They tend to bring out the best and worse in each other, and for that reason and more they have been friends, solid friends for so long. Stephani has always clued Lisa in, with what is up and coming, and what Lisa should do about her hair. Stephani on the other hand is always on the cutting edge of fashion and all other sorts of things. She is constantly rearranging her apartments interior, one mother she has an Asian setup in her living room and the next time your at her apartment she has a whole new setup that looks like she hops straight out of a tribe from Africa. But that's Stephani and Lisa has always admired her. Lisa and Stephani head to downtown Milwaukee to go to a little bit of an atmosphere that is more something that favours Stephani's personality. She guides Lisa to Moct a nice lounge establishment that Stephani has been known to frequent. She is a rather established and successful interior designer, and of course, her tastes in interior design, reflect her tastes in everything else that she partakes in. For Lisa hanging out with Stephani is like a minuature vacation. They enter Moct, Lisa tagging along behind Stephani as she guides them through the semi busy lounge. They find themselves a table and Lisa sits down but Stephani clamps her hands together and says "I'm going to get some drinks! I know your pregnant again and cannot have alcohal what do you want to have?" Stephani asks "A good latte or something?" "Sure, that sounds wonderful." Lisa says while Stephani walks away to get the drinks for them. Lisa gazes over the crowd. No pregnant women in site. Lisa has been confirmed pregnant, or at least she has known about it for three weeks. She would do anything for a shot of whiskey. She couldn't count the number of times she's literally had to drag Steve to bed, drunk, while she was pregnant with Holly. For a while she had considered that she may not have another drink ever again, that she had seen Steve in states that were so horrible from a sober perspective, that she never would have the desire to drink anymore. However a few short months after Holly was born and her in-laws took Holly off their hands while they celebrated a holiday together, Lisa got very trashed and had one hell of a time doing it. She wanted to do it more, but Steve told her not to "slow down, your a Mother now." Another thing Lisa has learned to do deal with, Steve's simple passing of the torch to her with the justification of "Your the Mother, do it!" Stephani comes back to the table with some drinks in her hand. Steam still airing fresh from the top of the latte. Perfect. Lisa takes her drink from Stephani and takes a sip from her steaming latte. Very hot, but Lisa is a professional coffee lover, nothing is too hot. There isn't anything she cannot sip straight out of the java magicians hands. "So girl tell me, how are you doing today?" Stephani says to Lisa. "How did you manage to get a vacation from yourself?" "Oh you know pulled a few strings, got some people to cover for me" Lisa says jokingly. A short pause ,"Actually, Steve is going out of town on business and Holly is with his parents. They are all somewhere else and I have nothing but myself, and I'm glad I could have a night here with you, its always great going out with you!" Stephani and her fall into conversation about Steve and his overstuffed employment in a Neo-Conservative think tank. Most days out of the week he commutes from their residence in Menomonee Falls to the higher level socially status access points of Chicago. He commutes by transporation other than their own, but nevertheless the hike is taken the better part of the week, in the morning and back again to Menomonee Falls. Steve and his collegues are responsible to a lot if not all of the success the Republican party has had in the midwest of the United States for the past several years. Interestingly enough he didn't really reveal that much about his job, other than "working for the government" before they were married. Lisa isn't exactly what you would call a hereditary Republican, not even the slightest, but Steve is doing his darndest to harness this kind of lifestyle on his wife. His dear and loving wife. Blindsided by love at a tender age. Stephani expresses her feelings to Lisa, telling her that she feels absolutely horrible for her because of what she has gotten herself caught up into. She tells Lisa that despite what is going to happen that she will be there for her and she will never change in that regard. Forever friends through and through, no matter what happens, in the sight of danger know that it there and will help you survive. An hour drifts by and before either one of them even shift the positions they were sitting in. The kind of charisma that only this kind of long termed relationship can copy and coin. "Amnesia" by David Byrne comes over the speakers and there is group of people that seem overly aroused by this "Byrne! Whoever put on Byrne hats off to you and good evening!!" Holding his drink in the air. A few other people on the other side of the room clap. This isn't your typical bar atmosphere that one would imagine, which is why Stephani chooses such areas. A small flock of couples join a small dancing area. Lisa looks over the room and then leans across the table towards Stephani and says, "If you can keep a secret, I would ask you to go buy me a drink." "Lisa! I cannot believe I just heard you say that. I'm not sure whether or not I can be a part of it either. I think if your going to want to do something like that your going to have to get off your pretty little ass and do it yourself." Stephani says, defiant and poised. Lisa hops right off the spot she was sitting and walks straight to the bar and orders a double straight whiskey. Tips the bartender ten dollars and walks back to join Stephani at the table. "I cannot believe your going to drink that," Stephani says "Assuming you can make it a month without telling Steve that you did this, because he WILL find out somehow, who you going to say put you up this? I sincerely hope you do not plan on putting the blame in my court, because listen here, it ain't happening!" Lisa sits down and pulls both of her drink stirrers towards her face and takes a powerful drag off the two of them. Leans back into her seat and closes her eyes. Opens them and says, "You know to be honest, I'd like nothing more than to have an abortion and divorce Steve, but only after I get put in jail for some random crime so when it comes to custody of Holly they're SURE to give them to him, fully, giving me the rest of my life to live on my own." With Stephani's eyes looking likes dinner plates, wider than can be, she manages to push words through the thick shock shes in, "I cannot believe I just heard you say that. What makes you say that, I thought Steve had you all programmed perfectly without a flaw. What you just said right there isn't normal, are you already drunk?" "Stephani, no I'm NOT drunk already. I'm serious. I have never been more unhappy in my entire life. I'm not respected at home, not at all. When I'm at home, I feel like its work. In fact it has become work since Steve made me leave my job. Granted I wasn't turning over new leaves for asshole converstiaves that play golf and fish all fucking day, making laws that effect people they will never meet. But I had a job, I was making it on my own. I had a normal life. I wasn't this expected woman who was beat down by those who came from a wealthier background than I did. Stephani, I have not had an orgasm since before I had Holly. I do apologise for taking it to that level with you, but I couldn't imagine talking about this with anyone else, but that's just to reflect how unrespected I am across ALL boards, not just here and there. Steve wants me up early in the morning to cook everyone breakfast. Which despite all the work was rather nice, all of us together each and every morning, if you excuse all the cooking and dishes you have to do. About three months ago I stopped cooking myself anything for breakfast." Lisa says to Stephani who again has a state of shock cast over her face. Lisa leans forward and takes and other sip off her drink. She leans back but then picks up the drink and holds it in her hand, taking a sip off the cup. "At first it was just a test, you know, to see if he would notice, or maybe ask if I was on some whacky diet. That was three months ago, he has said nothing. It's like I'm invisible. He hasn't even looked up at me while he is eating breakfast. He talks to Holly the entire time, and plays with the godamn food more than she does!" "Wow, Lisa, I had no idea you felt this way. Here this whole time I thought you were just a peach, basking in the sun. Or have you just recently gotten sick of things?" Stephani asks. "Pretty much a few weeks after we were married I got the general idea of where things were going to be going. Sadly enough things have gotten a little worse than I thought they would. So much more responsibility of a suburban housewife than the cover suggests. It's not all peaches and cream on this side of the fence, Stephani, trust me." "I never thought they would be. I was just happy for you because I thought that is what you wanted. If your not happy, I'm not happy, not for you. I could honestly care less about your husband, Steve. When I met him at the wedding, I new for sure he would never be anyone I would be able to get along with which is why there was so much distance between you and I when you were first married. I didn't mean anything directly towards you. But that is the past. What are you going to do about your situation. It's not something you can just walk away from, you are indeed pregnant. I know your flustered right now and you want things to be different but I do not think you have it in you to leave Steve, or even more, have an abortion. I don't see you giving it up for adoption either." "I know, I know. I'm not sure what I can do. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with anything anymore, and I think that is how Steve likes it to be. He likes that when he's not around there are parts of me that cannot function. He provides for me, don't get me wrong, he does everything in his financial power to show that he cares, but to be honest none of that really matters to me. Money, nice things, the finer things in life, while they are luxiourious and all that, I truly am not one to strive for such satisfaction. I am not sure where I am going to go with life, but for right here, and right now, I'm glad that I can be sitting here with you." Lisa takes a gulp of her whiskey, whose ice cubes are starting to dissolve. "I just hope, hope, that one day, one day, I can wake up and be in someone elses life. That, more than I want to live to see the light of day tomorrow, is what I want. I want to wake up as someone else. Stephani if that ever happens to me, pull me aside and be sure to tell me how lucky of a person I am. Even if I do not have a job, or a very crappy one. At least I have me. I will appreciate it." "Your over the top, honey, but for the sake of good times, I hope for you the best of luck in your endeavor. If that does happen to you, you can make sure of it, I will tell you that you are one lucky bitch!" Stephani holds up her glass for a cheers. A slight ping of glasses, and they both take a sip from their drinks. Times slips through the hourglass. People arrive and people leave. Couples hold hands in social harmony, the music drifts alongside everyones mental state. Moct is a great place to be with a friend such as Stephani or Lisa. Both of them are enjoying themelves and continue in their conversations. As much as Lisa tried to talk about other things, Stephani kept bringing her back to her disappointment with Steve and her life with him, because to her its more fascinating than anything she could ever imagine. Soon after Lisa's drink starts to get near the bottom, reality starts to check back in with her. Being pregnant, being the person she was a few hours earlier in the afternoon and who she will be next week start to come collapsing back into her consciousness. Sitting here with Stephani, true, feels like a journey into never-never land for Lisa, but when it comes to be the end of the night Stephani gets to stay in this world and Lisa must go back home and check back in as full-time Lisa; home-maker. "Well what is it that your going to be doing tonight?" Lisa asks Stephani. "Got any feisty men on the agenda?" Stephani giggles for a moment, and holds her hand up to her mouth for a moment, looks innocently over at Lisa and says "Oh come on you know me better than that. I don't have any feisty men on the agenda, but I figure you might seeing as how your husband is out of town, and you seem to be upset with him and everything that has to do with what you do outside of what were doing right now." Lisa looks down at the little over two shots in her glass, alongside a bit of water from the melting icecubes. She tips the glass back and the remaining ice cubs bounce off her front lip as she downs the rest of the whiskey. She taps her glass back down on the table and stares at it. As if its going to spawn legs and walk away. Stephani joins her in staring at the glass, and they both dwell off into a daze for a moment. Stephani looks up and notices that Lisa is crying. A teardrop falls from her face into the glass. "Could you please take me home, I want to go to sleep." Lisa asks. "I'm sorry I just suddenly lost my ambition to be out in public." Stephani sighs and gathers her purse and things and rises up from the table. "I'm sorry girl, look if its any consolation to you, if your not doing anything tomorrow I'd have a bit of shopping to do down here if you'd like to partner up with me and go out to lunch afterwards, I would extremely appreciate your presense. Its awalways good to be in good company, even if they do point out the worst and hope for the best." Lisa looks up at Stephani as she gets up, and leans into her chest. Stephani hugs her friend, and then Lisa puts her arms around Stephani. "Thank you so much for listening to me." Lisa said. "It's all good girl you know that, I love you so much. I'll always be there for you, don't ever question that." Stephani lets go of Lisa but keeps her arm over her and walks with her back to the evening fog of May in Milwaukee. They get outside to a bit of rain, but neighter of them seem to mind too much. They are about a half of a block away from the bar to where they are parked. They are numbed by the alcohal and they are walking in the rain like two people looking for a lost dog. They laugh a little bit about being in the rain in "nice" clothes, while others are scampering quickly through the streets holding anything they can above their heads. They are walkign casually as if its not raining. "I like being free!" Lisa yells out to Stephani who is a few paces ahead. "Me too, girl, me too!" Stephani responds. They get into Lisa's Jetta, after Lisa fumbles with the keys for a few moments. "You ok to drive? Seriously if you want me to drive I can." Lisa tosses her keys to Stephani and says "You can drive to your house, but not because I'm drunk or anything I just don't feel like driving." "Ok, sure, of course!" Stephani says walking around to the other side of the car. "Let me show you how your supposed to drive these things." She laughs. Lisa plops down in the passenger seat and looks around strangly for a moment. "Oh my god!" she says. "This is the first time I've been the passenger of my car." She looks at the dash for a moment while she stares hard. "Yeah I think so, in fact I think this is the first time I've been a passenger in ANYONE'S car for quite some time." She looks over at Stephani and looks out the front of the car, "Huh" "Wow maybe you really didn't want to drive!" Stephani starts the engine of the beautifually engineered German vehicle and puts it in gear and starts to drive off into the night. "We need to get you out more, girl. Got any music in here?" Stephani looks forward at the centre console and sees a CD button and presses it. Garbage comes on. "Garbage, nice! Steve know you listen to this?" she says looking over at Lisa, letting out a little bit of a left. Lisa nearly falls asleep by the time they get to Stephani's house. When Stephani pulls into the driveway of her apartment, all Lisa can think about is being at home in her favourite pair of pajamas curled up in bed under her warm down comforter. Stephani looks over at her, "Lisa, you look beat, why don't you stay here tonight I don't want you to asleep while you are driving home." Lisa is a homely type of person, but that thought of being warm and at home and in bed just seemed like too much of a journey for Lisa to bear, so she happily accepts her wonderful friends offer. Had this been anyone else, she would not have done such a thing. But it only would be within Stephani's company that Lisa would come to such a situation, so its all the same. She knows she'll be treated well here at Stephani's. Stephani pulls the car to aroundside the building and moves the car over to the visitor parking. Lisa turns to Stephani and says: "Thanks for this, you always know how to make our times together wonderful. I really didn't feel like going home to be honest, its such a drive from here despite only being across this small town of ours." Stephani parks the car and kills the motor. She looks over at her friend who is tucked away comfortably in the passenger seat. "Come on girl, its not too far a walk to the back door." She says to Lisa while hoping out of the car and motioning for Lisa to follow her. Lisa gets up out of the car and shuts her door. "Here girl I have no idea how to work these German keys of yours" Stephani says while tossing the keys over the car towards Lisa who doesn't catch them, they buzz right past her and bounce off the visitor car parked off to the side of the Jetta. Lisa bends over to the ground and picks her keys off the ground. Fumbles them in her hand a bit before she gets the door shut and key stuck in its lock. She double-turns the key towards the back end of the car and she hears the doors lock tight. She follows her friend into the interior of the apartment and walks with her up a flight of stairs that twist alongside the back of the apartment complex. "This must have been a bitch to move into she says to her friend on the way." "Oh honey you seem to point that out each time were here, but as I've told you before, as soon as I toured this place I KNEW it was going to be done by movers, there was no way I was going to try and carry stuff up these twisted and hard to manuever flights of stairs. They get paid for it, while I would just have the heartaches of backpain all to myself without any cash compensation." Stephani says will chuckling to herself and then finally sharing a little bit of a laugh with Lisa as she scrolls herself up the three flights of twisted staircase. Lisa follows Stephani through two seperate hallways on the third floor of the apartment complex and eventually they make way to apartment 321. Lisa without any true thought or challenge pops her door open and stucks her hand inside the opening to flick on the lighswitch located inches from the front door. An accent light shines dim light over the entrance of her fine and friendly themed apartment. "What kind of magical kingdom do I get to walk into today?" Lisa says while following Stephani's motion to get inside the apartment. "It's a little bit of a hybrid idea, trying out new things that I could possibly use in furture clients homes." Stephani says while trailing Lisa into the apartment. She flicks on an additional set of lights and points toward the centre of the ceiling in the main hallway of the apartment. What looks like a typical chain-linked fence is literally hanging from the centre of the ceiling and about halfway to the floor. Anyone who isn't over seven feet tall wouldn't be bothered by its presense either. Weaved into the chain-linked fence are typical houseplants, some real appear to be too magical to be actual plants, probably imitations. Lisa stares off to the top of the apartments entering hallway in sheer amazement. "You know I couldn't hang nothing on the wall of my first apartment, and her you are hanging what looks like a chain linked fence with fake plants weaved into it from your ceiling! You must be in good with the landlord." "Ha, well your half-right. I am in good with the landlord. I redid his front entrance way for the ability to do things inside of my apartment. I thought he was really taking advantage of me when it came down to how much work I had to do with that front of the building. It was a project that I had worked on for almost three months, and there were so many hurdles along the way. Your almost spot on the nose with the fence, that is truly a chain-linked fence I got for next to nothing from a construction company that was working on a site over across from the newest Target more towards Appleton." She continues "Those flowers you see that are really weaved good in between the links of the fence are indeed fake, they're replications of some plants you only see in South America in what is left of its rain forests. However the more typical looking fern plants are indeed real and they are grown from the pots that are hung from the wall on the side of the hallway here." She reaches up her hands and points to who typical flower pots sititng on shelves that hanging on the wall right next to the fence. Apparently after they grow for a bit they "reach out" for new places to grown onto. Like those buildings you used to see that would take over the entire side of a building. "Wow that is great stuff Stephani, for god's sake how did you ever come up with an idea like this?" Lisa aks "How on earth would something like this come to your head?" "Well actually Lisa it isn't as hard you might think. Because many of the customers that I deal with work on very limited budgets, which at first seemed like such slander towards being an interior designer living in south eastern Wisconsin. Many of them do not have the incomes of the people you see when your thinking about interior design magazines or something where the customers have a nearly bottomless bank accound and have the kind of money to literally make anything happen. But something like hanging old fences from construction sites and what-not that's something that you learn to do when it comes to dealing with clients who wantt o do an entire room for less than a thousand dollars, and i'm talking about they want to literally take everything out except their electronics and make it back into something completely different." Stephani puts her hands on her hips "Do that for a while and yo'll be hanging fences in no time." They both exchange a little bit of a laugh before progressing to the living room of the apartment. "By the way, speaking of my hybrid idea, this here, my apartments layout, is what I consider a cross between the urban jungle and the actual jungle with a nod towards the rainforests." She points to the corner of her living room which is decorated in such a fashion that it looks like there is a tree growing in the corner and growing up the side of the wall, almost like those real plants are growing into that fence. Lisa's eyes follow Stephani's pointing finger which leads up to the ceiling where the fake tree is met with some wild looking material that looks like its an artificial canopy. It looks so strange because from the floor where your standing you cannot for surely tell whether your looking at something that obviously Stephani conjured up in her wild thoughts, or whether is an actual canopy growing in the living room. "You won't believe in a million years, what this is all made off. Out of all the stuff in the apartment that I've been allocated to modify or decorate since I've moved her, this by far is what look me the longest. I'll let you think about it overnight, and will reveal to you what its made out of in the morning. But know this, there is more construction site materials included in this setup too!" "Wow I cannot believe what I'm seeing. I never would have thought in a million years that someone my friend would make would make the museum take a run for its money. This is amazing Stephani, you definately have made me glad I didn't decide to go to school with you to become an interior designer as well, because for the life of me I never thought I could have ever come up with something as intense and real as this. Wonderful work with this Stephani, definitely, you have by leaps and bounds surpassed yourself once again. I'm still in shock over that teenagers room you did for that family in West Bend, the nerdy son whose room did "from the inside of a computer, looking out." That was amazing too, but this, just look at this!" Lisa takes Stephanis motioning to have a seat anywhere in the room. She takes a seat in a reclinging chair that has been either bought or modified to almost replicate the design of the rest of the room. The colour is hard to define. After sitting down in the chair, Lisa finds herself pulling at the material. So rough looking but so soft to-the-touch. She is bedazzled by its fabric, almost something you'd think you'd see on a Sci-Fi movie. "There is Lycra in that material if that's what your wondering about." Stephani sits down at the couch across the open area from Lisa. "I had the hardest time trying to find someone who could manipulate its colours, not too many people were familiar with it, or wanted to work on it for that matter. That piece actually, that chair and having it all done up the way it is, was the most costly thing in the entire apartment." Stephani gets up and leans down a bit to see into the kitchen. "Holy Moses! It's almost midnight!" Stephani hops up from the couch she was sitting in and puts her hands on her hips. "I'm not much of a night owl, and if you wanted to go with me and have lunch tomorrow we should probably go to sleep so we can have an early crack at the day. I hope its not going to routine your whole routine, but I suppose being a Mother and all your pretty used to getting up pretty early." Stephani turns around and flips the arm of the chair over, relealing a series of buttons at what appears to be a minuature control-panel of some sort. She pushes down one button with a little force and a loud clang happens from underneath the couch. Stephani walks to the other side of the couch and pulls out something from under the couch and pulls it foward. Within a matter of minutes she transofms the luxurious couch into a full sized bed. "I'm going to sleep out here, your going to sleep in my bed! Don't you go denying this either, this is absolute protocol in case someone stays over. I do not have this pull-out couch for visitors, but for myself when I have guests. I had already on planned on asking you if you wanted to stay here if you were tired, so I already went ahead and changed all the sheets and everything on my beds, not so you think your going to get cooties or something." Lisa follows her into the bedroom where is shown where everything is. "You've been here before, so you know where the bathroom and all that good stuff is located. If you feel like taking a shower or whatever between now and when you leave the towels are located in a closet behind the bathroom door." Stephani opens up the bed like a Grandmother putting her Grandchild to sleep. "Do you want me to set an alarm for you? This alarm is kind of goofy so I can set it for you if you want." "Unless the world ends, I'll wake up and be alert and by quarter to six. I've woken up at that time nearly every day since I've known Steve. That's when he likes breakfast." "Awe, girl, come here and give me a hug." Stephani walks over to Lisa and puts her hands around her tightly. She loosens up and first and then Lisa embraces her back. "I hope you sleep well and don't worry, girl, I'M going to cook YOU breakfast in the morning! No kidding." "Thank you so much Stephani, I cannot thank you enough." Lisa says while motioning towards the bed. Stephani walks towards the doorway leading back out to the main part of the apartment and turns around. "The remote by your bed with the single button turns off the lights in here. Don't let the bed-bugs bite girl, I'll see you in the morning." Stephani says with a nice smile on her face. "I plan on waking at six so if you wake before I do, just feel free to do whatever, and don't worry about waking me up or anything. Mi casa su casa." "Will do, thanks. Goodnight Stephani." Lisa says while getting into the bed after taking off her shoes and shirt. She removes her socks and slides into the bed pulling the sheets up close to her head. She turns on her side and for a moment starts to drift into a thought about what Steve might be doing. She sits up and looks over at the night stand with the remote for the lights on it. She was looking for a phone, perhaps she would call Steve and see how he is doing. No phone in sight. She lays back on her other side, staring at out the window. The night looks beautiful outside, the stars bright and the wind, fresh. Despite the rain earlier, its a beautiful night in May, in a little town in Wisconsin. Chris and Tony, both sitting on the couch. Both staring off into space, numb as a concrete slab. "Uh! Oh no wait, yeah dude I cannot feel anywhere between here and here." Tony says pointing to first the middle of his forehead and secondonally pointing at the the cross section of his bottom lip and chin. He stands up, looks at Chris and says. "May I have something to drink good sir?" Chris moves to the other side of coffee table, motioning towards the kitchen, just waiting for the confirmation from Chris. "Yeah of course, can you get me something." Chris says to Tony as he walks to open the fridge. "There is going to be a lot of stuff to drink in there. I would like a Gatorade, can't stand soda or anything with carbonation when I'm ripping. Have yourself whatever you like." "Mind if I have one of these nice looking imported beers?" Tony asks. "I don't want to drink your supreme beer here but something about a nice import sounds good right about." Chris looks at the floor with his hands on his knees and hands held together swaying from left to right in a somewhat overlapping pace. "What a great idea. Scratch the Gatorade, I'm with you on the good import, brother. Nothing like a Becks Dark on a pile of white, my good brother." Chris holds out his very sweety palm out to reach for his beer handed to him from Tony. He gets the beer and cracks the tip of the bottle on the end of his coffee table. The top goes off flying in the backdrop somewhere. "WOW! That was amazing." Tony says while holding up his beer in a similar fashion, as if he is going to do the same thing. "Hold up! You'll break that fucking bottle, have spilled beer and will probably end up cutting yourself. Give it 'ere." Chris snaps the beer out of his hand. Give it a soft loft into the air, but holds up his hand to catch it halfway down, as not to make the beer start to foam, and cracks it on the side of the coffee table and it sends the cap flying off into another direction. "Nice toss there showoff, but lets have a toast!" Chris hands Tony his beer and the unite in holding their beers up against each others. "To friendship, and to this very nice pile of cocaine sitting right next to us. Because Lord knows what we'd be doing right now if it were'nt for this right here." "Probably some bored out shit at the bar or something to that effect, but yes, here's to friendship." They both tip their beers back and take a few good slugs worth writing home about. Good people drinking good beer. At least in their eyes. "But I must say I must apologise for my behaviour earlier, I really didn't want to get caught up like that with you. I just was on some what the fuck shit about why you weren't giving me the white-white right way. I thought you !" "Hey that's no problem at all man, don't you worry about any of that, you know I got your back. I would never do you in like that. We've been friends all of two years of our lives. We have grown up together and I hope I'm still here to see you die." Tony slugs Chris in the arm lightly and leans back into the couch. "I wouldn't put you down like that." The saddest part of all is what happened earlier this evening when they arrived. When they got to the apartment, Chris was in a big rush to get in and use the bathroiom. Soon as they get into the apartment, he jolts to the bathroom. Tony quickly busts out the cocaine out onto the coffee table they're snorting blow on and with a cellophane puts a little bit of the blow in there for himself later. He burned it shut and its in his pocket as he tells his friend of all but two years that he would never, ever do such a thing. The faces that some people put on. If Chris were ever to know about Tony had done to him, this time and many, many other times before this one. Almost every time Tony gets Chris cocaine or almost any other drugs Tony always takes a little bit out of it before he gives it to Chris. That's just how things have been between them. Sometimes, oftentimes with weed, Chris knows about his pinching habits and doesn't even say anything. He figures in that he didn't throw down on the gasoline that it took Tony to get him the weed so why should he put up a fuss about a few bowls here and there, it will end up costing him more if he asked Tony if he wanted gas money. But with cocaine and whatever other drugs that Chris has a long history of use of, but not much overall experience with the drug is where Tony really nails him to the wall. Once Chris forked over the cash to provide himself with three entire 8 balls for one planned night of fun, and Tony being the shark that he is, almost ended up taking half of one of them from Chris before evening giving the bag to him the first time. Now while this sounds irreverent to your average household citizen let it be known that many little things like this is several hours of labour put in at work. This is what Tony represents. The slithering snake that he is. Chris deserves better than this, and mostly does. His relationship however is flawed in the same manner with his person, Lin. She has him so far hung out to dry that that guy wouldn't breathe if she told him not to. However, that is sort of life they both tend to lead. Lin is a control-freak and Chris deep down is a really submissive person, which mirrors his diverse drugs habits. She always has screwed him over, and she gets off on it. She cheats on him on a regular basis which is completely masked by the overly sexual attention that she gives him. He is indeed completely oblivious to the entire thing. He never in a million years would imagine that she is cheating on him, for everything that he does in his life is for her. At least that is the sort of cheerleader chant you get out of him when they are all parading over some cocaine or whatever other drug it is that is on the menu for the evening. They've done all sorts of drugs together. They have gone for scenic walks at noon on mushrooms that they ate on pizza. They have gone on ferris wheels on LSD. They have done all sorts of odd ended things together while under the influence of drugs and or combinations of them. It is because of this that they feel such a bond to one another. The trials and tribulations that sober couples feel for one another, these two feel for each other when they've "survived" another drug together. The simple state of experience declares that they have turned over a new leaf in their relationship. They feel closer and more connected the more they do them, and sometimes they get drugs and do them all alone with just one another, compared to the assorted peoples that regularily attend their lifestyles. Once a few months back, Chris had overdosed on MDMA while over at his girlfriend's best-friend's house. She indeed took him to the hospital, but she didn't speak to the hospital staff at all when they had asked her questions. She went as far as to say that she didn't even know Chris and that she was just at this party and they asked her to take him in because she was the least under the influence. She knew nothing. Chris never did find out about that, he was nearly unconsciouss. Afterwards when it was all said and done, Chris had considered cleaning his life up a bit. For that period of time, Lin declared that they must also take a time away from each other. This was because she simply "could not stand to be around the 'us' thing anymore." Simply stated she could not deal with not deal with not being on drugs with him. When she was faced with the idea of being alone with him and not being able to at least smoke a bowl of weed, was simply too much to tolerate. There was nothing there for her to enjoy, she simply knew not who this person was when she was not on drugs. When they were on drugs she knew him as the Prince. Because she was always the Princess. The absolute divine and loving treatment that anyone of royal status would enjoy. Opening doors, holding hands, that was all second nature. What was special about this Prince was that he took care of all the other little things, and oversaw them like they didn't happen like nobody else was capable of doing. Or things that nobody else would want to put up with. For instance once when they were on LSD, they were sitting at his apartment, just the two of them. They were just sitting on the couch enjoying the floating colours and hallucinations that they saw that were the direct result of them taking the drug. Then Lin leant down and grabbed her purse off the floor. She opened up the purse and took the first then that she grabbed. She took it out, examined it, and then tossed it out into the room. Simply tossed it out onto the room like a cat was in the room and she was throwing it something to play with. Reached into the purse and grabbed out the next closest thing, examines it and tosses that out into the room. She did this until her purse was empty. Several hours later, she would then go into a panic about what happened to the things in her purse, making Chris go out and collect everything for her. Then one night back when Lin still lived with her Aunt in Milwaukee, they were on MDMA and all sitting out in the garage. A random group of people all enjoying one another with the lens of MDMA over their eyes. While sitting the company of fellowship, Lin and Chris were sitting there in teh garage with everyone just having a random conversation about the drugs they were on and how they were effecting on another. Both Lin and Chris were sitting on the ground, when suddenly Lin just leans back and seemigly passed out. She leans back into Chris, pushing him back but she leans off to the side of him, and some of her hair lands in a pan of used oil still sitting in the garage from an earlier oil change. Chris just pushed her back up into position and with everyone staring at her she states "What's everyone looking at?" Lin said "Is there something on my face or something." A random male from the group of teens said "No but there is something in your hair, from here it look like oil. What the hell we thought you passed out or something." "What are you guys talking about?" Lin says while she turns to her person's Chris direction. "What are they talking about?" Chris in situations like this would really play the weak card out in front of people and they would find themsleves looking in sheer amazingment. "Nothing Lin, but lets go in the house for a minute." Chris would further to lead Lin into the house for cleaning of her hair. He would further to make up some story about how that happened to her, because she simply will not hear, or comprehend anything he is saying. It's all nonsense to her, she would never make a mistake, she is the Princess and the Princess, or any form of royalty is not the one who makes the mistakes. If necessary it is the rest of the world who is doing everything wrong, but if it comes down to questioning her authority, one might have to consider their gameplan because that simply is not going to work on her. She will just simply reform any confronntation and rerun it by Chris who will always gift-wrap and candy-coat anything that she can ask of or for him. Their realtionship did however get better after Chris' overdose, once he finally came to terms with the idea that in order for happiness to occur, and to him his happiness lied in the bed that was under Lin's roof, all he had to do is party hard wit her when she requested, and kept on all the things that make him what he is to her, because that is the only way that she will be happy. If he at all times is the moldy piece of clay that she has grown to know and love. If Chris was not catching her up from a pan of oil that her hair all got into when they are just all 'chilling' in the garage, or how when she is too under the control of drugs that she removes items from her purse one at a time, and tosses them out into the room and makes him go and pick everything up for her latere. If he did not do these things for her, these somehwhat mediocre, these somewhat serious things that Chris just overlooks and accepts as part of the 'cover charge' to be with her, then he is better off leaving her, because she indefinitely leave him. So once Chris got serious about his love for her, and started doing drugs again, things were all peaches and cream in the Chris and Lin kingdom. All the pheasants and nobility were all docile in their presense, or so it seemed as they walked around entranced on whatever the guys who drive with drugs stuffed in every nook in thier personal lives sold them. Real or fake. Sometimes they did drugs so often that when they got ripped off they'd be so dilusional when they took the drugs that they would often 'believe' they were under the influence, even talk about it, but had nothing of the sort running through their systems. Things were really good for Chris and Lin, at least the public side of it, for quite some time, and that had ended abruptly within the recent weeks. With Lin meeting up with this guy named Sterling who seemingly has a better paying job and a better trained and experienced drug habit resume seems to be grabbing the attention of Lin moreso than Chris. Chris again is obliviious to this sort of thing because he's so endowed in his cocaine addiction that he is stuck in his own little world that is not worth navigating. Its full of beaches made of cocaine, trees made of marijuana, the sky make of LSD and the oceans are alcohol. A world that Chris has lived in for quite some time. "Fuck this I can't wait anymore, lets do more. I don't want to feel my face until this time tomorrow morning." Chris says when he gets up to get another imported beer for himself. "Drink up pussy, the fuck you waiting for that beer to mold?" Chris points at Tony's beer which is sitting on the coffee table with a very sweating exterior. A large puddle of water is rung around its base on the glass table in front of him. "That import not such a good idiea or what?" "Chill out man, I like to enjoy my beverages, its economically smart." Tony says while looking at Chris who has popped open the fridge and got himself another beer. This time he uses the bottle opener appended to his pantry door to open his beer. "Sounds like some random justification for being a bar fly." Chris says to Tony as he sits back down. "But its ok, I still love you buddy!" Chris says to Tony as he rubs the back of his right shoulder. "What's up doode you don't look so good?" "Not really man, I feel nauseous" Tony says "I'm going to go into the bathroom just to be safe, be right back." Tony gets up slowly and walks towards the bathroom. Chris asks if he wants him to go with him, a good friend will help any of their friends in times like this, especially amongst those of whom do drugs often. "No I'm cool man but I'll moan if I need you for sure." The bathroom door shuts with a quiet click. "Fucking bullshit" Chris mumbles under his breathe. He reaches forward and grabs a remote control for his stereo and turns it on. He skims the radio for only a few moments before switching the source of the audio's input to his CD player. "The fuck's in here I wonder" he mumbles quietly. He hits plays unaware with what he is about to hear. Slowly an old Prodigy albums comes and he turns it down a bit, he just wants back ground music not whole orchestra sitting in the room with him and Tony. He sits back and enjoys the music for a few moments. He figures that Tony will be the bathroom for little while because he always thinks he's going to puke after doing a little bit of that good white. This is routine that is why Chris only minorly suggested to help him in the bathroom because he knew this is not an emergency. Amonst these people when ones eyes are rolling out the back of your head and they start foaming at the mouth then there really have something to worry about. Then the paranoid thoughts start to spark in the back of Chris' mind. About the no passing of the blow when they were on the way hom. He looks over at the glass coffee table and see's Tony's pack of cigarettes are missing a cellophane. He quickly snatches the pack of cigarettes like a child stealing smokes from their parents and opens the pack for a quick examination. There is no cellophane inside of the pack of cigarettes but there isn't that many cigarettes missing either. He shuts the pack without any rush and sets them back down. He puts his hands forward and joins his hands. "Tony wouldn't do me like that, just like he said." Then Chris looks over to the side of the couch that Tony was sitting on. The quickly leans over to Tony's side of the couch and sticks his hand down the back of the cusion and feels around. Nothing, not even lint. Chris kept his apartment clean. He reaches down the side of the cusion and reaches down the side of the couch. Gods could not properly explain the rage and temperment that was flowing like hot lava out of a recently blown off volcano the second he felt that soft plastic stuffed down in the cusion. It must have fallen out of his pocket. Chris is making up excuses already as he pulls up the plastic and resumes his position on the other side of the couch. He holds up the bag in the air. There is only one light in the room that is on and it is in the opposing corner from where they were sitting. He flicks his lighter on to see what is inside the cigarette cellophane he just has found. Sure enough an exact replica of what they were just in Milwaukee purchasing, and an replica of what is scattered out on a glass mirror in front of them. A good amount of it too. He puts the cellophane in his pocket and sits back at in the couch. Unsure what he is going to do. One one hand you got a friend of yours who has been your friend for quite some time, stealing drugs from you. On the other hand you have a friend who stole from you and then looked you dead in the eye, all serious and told you that they would never do such a thing as they were told. He hears fumbling around in the bathroom. Probably the sound of that evil sloth in the bathroom raising up from the floor he was just sitting on. There isn't words to describe what is going through Chris' mind at this moment. Part of him wants to rush Tony as soon as he exits the bathroom, but that will probably result in police from the noise and later a slew of drug charges and eventual eviction, part of him wishes that Chris wasn't even in that bathroom and that he were here alone and none of this ever happened. Part of him also wishes that his friend would not have dogged him like this. Tony talks about how he doesn't like people that would sink to lows like this but here he goes doing whatever he pleases in his own little world. He hears the bathroom flush. He hears Tony cough and then he hears the bathroom door open. "Be honest, tell you what would go down for me really good right now is a blunt, do you got any burn burn, yo?" Tony says while walking back into the living room. Its apparent to Chris that either he hasn't the slightest of clues that he dropped his cocaine, or stolen cocaine for that matter, in the couch or he simply hasn't thought about anything in regards to what he's done since his done it. "Yeah we can rip up a fat one real quick, I just gotta go into my room and shit I got everything in there. Don't you got that church bullshit tomorrow?" Chris asks Tony as he gets up. For a second the thought crossed Chris' mind to just slug Tony as shard as he could in the jaw on the way from getting up from the couch but he thought that may have been a little too dirty, and doesn't want to fight anyone. He's just pissed off that Tony decided to break the rules of a game that has absolutely not rules. Only unwritten ones. There is an unwritten rule in the natural order that users do not pinch or take drugs from one another, and even moreso to someone who you claim to be your friend. It's just something that you do no do. "Son of a bitch your right, I should probably roll out after that B if you don't mind. I'd hate to smoke and run." Tony says. "Don't worry about it there, brother. Its all good I'm going to go roll that up I'll be right back. Remote on the middle cusion is for the CD player if you want to fuck around. I'm not even sure what's in there to be honest, be right back." Tony sits down at the couch and Chris goes into his bed room. Despite the 'elite' groups of people that Chris has over, he doesn't do much partying in his bedroom and rarely does he let any one else into the room. This is mostly because of him not wanting any random person to see anything that he and Lin may have left laying out. Personal stuff, that only those two use while they are alone. Lin is diverse in her taste for satisfaction, and Chris' bedroom is her personal labratory. Chris again, just loves the attention. He plops down on his bed and reaches below it and pulls out a small, wooden suitcase looking container, but inside of it holds all of Chris' random marijuana paraphanallia. This is also where he keeps his "excess" amounts of herb that he buys, if the time and price are right. With a few possession charges under his belt, like people have social merits, Chris has illegal substances. One of the conditions of one his arrests were that he complete a rehab programme and while they did not sample ones urine as a part of membership, instead they had weekly group meetings that were required to attend. There, you were, supposed to, feel comfortable and be able to talk about your drug problems with everyone else openly. Chris felt alienated in this group however, and oftentimes would smoke pot before and after the classes and douce himself in cologne before going in. He felt so alienate, and justified his actions for using before class, by the stories that he heard while in the class. A female who sat two chairs over in the circle of members had once talked about how her and her husband were so heavily into cocaine shortly after they were married, and how she had went over to his bosses house and had oral sex with him numerous times in order to keep him from firing her husband for his poor, over drugged performance at work. He knew about it, but this is just another problem the couple solved, not angered each other about. There is a furry blur over the honest truth on why or why not Chris liked being in this group discussions. He swore up and down that despite the fact that he does cocaine (sometimes he used to swear he would never do or associate with, back in the day of "pot only") he never 'fiends' for it, or does obscure, random, drug-addict type shit for whatever drug. The other part of him inside knows that deep down, when the long run of the road is through and well-traveled that he will be just as bad, if not more, with the situations that he has himself involved with today. And that scares him, because he knows he is strong, or at least years and years and years of drug use has made him dillustional to think he was strong enough to fight off the battle of temptation. Temptations however are usually wars, and strong personal wars usually do not end result very well. Its like civil war, the battle against one self. Chris has a growing personal demon, and the state used this class to point that out to him and he really didn't want to hear about it, but deep down he wanted to know the answer, or at least how bright the other side of the tunnel is. As to debate whether or not the dirt on the windows here is worth the change. Pulling out the basic requirements for rolling up a good blunt, Chris sits back on the headboard of his bed while he works at his craft. He pulls the pillow out from his bed so its not pushing into the small of his back and he starts working on his mastery. Tony is in the other twiddling with his thumbs, bobbing his head to the beat of Prodigy, enjoying the beats of the "Fat of the Land". He takes a few slugs from his sweaty and near warm import. No longer feeling disappointed from the drugs as he was just a short time ago, he's almost bouncing in anticipation to smoke some more of his friends drugs without providing anything back to anyone. A true user. Chris licks the end piece of his blunt that he has just finished rolling. He quickly tosses everything into the box and flaps it shut and pushes it back under the bed. He walks out of the bedroom and throught liviing room and into the kitchen. He pops open the cupboard and pulls out a glass jar of honey. He takes it over the sink and start to run the water. Puts his left pinky finger under the water and rubs it with his other hand to clean it off. He dips the very tip of his pinky into the honey and then rubs the honey dipped finger tip on the blunt. He does this to the entire blunt until there is a little coat of honey around the entire cigar rolled blunt. He holds the blunt lightly with his hands spread wide between his pinky and thumb and uses a lighter to dry it off a bit. Blows on it a few times and goes and sets it on top of a candle sitting on the coffee table. "Pure art" he says to Tony, who goes to grab the blunt in attempts to spark it up. Chris points out to him before he grabs it and shakes his head telling him not to spark the blunt. "Smoke a cigarette first" Chris says "Let that shit dry up a little more, that's going to be some beautiful tasting shit though I'll tell you that much." Chris sits down on the reclining chair which is across the entranceway to the kitchen. "That's a honey-dipped Vanilla flavoured blunt right there boy!" Chris lights up a cigarette. "Gotta stop smoking these fuckers right here man." Chris looks over at Tony "What ever happened with you trying to quit anyway?" "Eh, You know how that shit goes. It made it almost 24 hours so I was proud of myself." Tony lets out a little bit of a giggle. "Truly, truly weak shit, but I dunno I guess I'm weak like that! I'd be able to quit if I didn't drink at all for a while, I think. That is what truly holds me back. Soon as I get to the bar the instant I get a little bit of a buzz going I'm on that 'give me a fucking cigarette' mission. Take no prisioners, hostile type shit you know?" Chris leans forward and holds out his fist, a signal for Tony to do the same, like a handshake. "Actually I know exactly how you feel, brother! Good call." Soon as Chris leans back into his chair after thumping fists with Tony he's reminded of what he now has in his pocket. What Tony took from him. This guy whose exchanging friendship traditions with me in agreerance with random social conversation is more than likely sitting here playing politican with everything that Chris is talking about. At least these are the thoughts that were running through Chris' mind. He could probably go into a rant about how the grass was blue and Tony would probably just go right along with it. Politiican. A social one, and a good one. As much as it bothers Chris he is attracted to it, otherwise he would have picked up on this guys hidden agenda a long time ago. Chris stands up and takes his final drag off his cigarette and puts it out in the ashtray next to the pile of cocaine. "So, " Chris says "Do a line, go on the deck and smoke this Honey Vanilla?" Chris flips his hands at his sides at Tony in question. "Sounds good, go a head first, can I get a glass of water or something straight, gotta prep that good breathe for the drive home." Chris goes to the fridge real quick and grabs out an cold green tea drink with honey. He takes it over to Tony and says "Here you go, it will go well with the 'B', Green Tea with Honey." "Snap! I never had something like this before. Thanks man I really appreciate it." Tony says while popping the top of the drink almost in snych with the song playing. The random has drifted off to "Fuel My Fire" on "Fat of the Land". Tony stealing cocaine from him fuels his fire for anger and hostility, but after smoking this blunt he will return to being his "normal self" and things will be all better again. No worries about any of the hostility coming forth after the good burn. Chris has said to Lin before how he smokes weed to keep himself from 'being himself'. How the little things bother him in life. The smallest and most mediocre of things that people do everything drive him absolutely insane. They drive him so crazy that he says he smokes in order to keep himself from 'going nuts' on everyone around him for their random behaviours that absolutly irrirate him to the boiling of almost no return. While he has told Lin many times that he has been this way his "whole life" and when he started to smoke weed he was finally about to relax more, because before he did smoke he was a "loose cannon" always running his mouth and oftentimes to the wrong people. While that theory may or may not be true, the more than likely case as to why the little things that people do bother him so much is probably his multiple years of working retail chain stores for a vast majority of his lifetime, and more times than not spending the absolute peak of many holiday shopping seasons; being exposed to that often will make ANYONE irritable of people and their miniscule little behaviours. Tony and Chris both huddle close next to each other, while Chris slices and dices them a very nice sized line to inhale. He takes two plastic buisness cards and scoops the rest into the bag they got it in and rolls it up tight and puts it in his pocket. He rolls his finger where the pile of cocaine was and wipes it over getting a bunch of cocaine on his finger. He rubbed his finger on his gums and then hands Tony his cutt off stretchy-straw. "Well here's to you having to get up in, five hours!" Tony sighs and grabs the straw. Like two gold medal synchronised swimmers at the 1996 Olymic Games, the two inshale their swollen lines of cocaine in one swipe, Tony having to go back in a second time to get all of his up. He's been doing cocaine a lot longer than Chris has, so his "ability" to do amazing things are no longer present. Sloppy for a while now. They hop up out their seats and Chris grabs the honey rolled blunt and flicks his lighter just to make sure it still worked. Hate to ruin the moment with a beauty like this. They step outside onto the deck that branches off the spare bedroom from Chris' apartment. The average citizen wouldn't be able to just randomly smoke blunts out on their patio in this suberban landscape, but when your experienced, and in good with most everyone around you you tend to have that tenure to where you can go ahead and do these things from time to time. Otherwise its a subburban mess, and the Menomonee Falls Police department is not slow to get involved. The teenagers who live out here kid about how they theorise that there are morer police in Menomonee Falls than their are people. If that's not the case its sure the hell of a good ratio. But its somewhat demanind, loosing that sense of homely community that the people who made Menomonee Falls what it is. They old timers always saw something else for this area, but Milwaukee had a different one. Or at least that is how the story goes amonst a vast majority of the locales. "Mind if I light that up homey, I'd be honoured!" Tony asks Chris. Chris stared blankly at Tony for a few moments and he viusualised Tony using whatever kind of aparatus that he could find to put some of his cocaine into a cellophane while he was off doing something for a few breif moments, or while he was still in the house getting it from the contact, so without a glimpse of remorse "You've got to be fucking kidding me." Chris says while putting the blunt to his lip and sparking it with his Bic lighter. Chris stands there in complete silence and puffs that blunt like he's a late 50's man who had just enpregnanted his wife unexpectedily and he and his rich associates were all smoking those celebratory cigars in to mark the occassion. Long and proud Chris sucked on that thing before handing it to Tony. "be right back." He says, ducking back into the house real quick. He scurries over to his dresser and pulls out his bad of blow real quick. From his travel cocaine container he pulls out a "smidge" measuring spoon that he had stolen from a restaurant and bakery he used to work for back in the day. He dips it into the bag and cranks it up his nose real quick. He puts the spoon the bag of blow back into the travel case and puts it back on top of the dresser. He scoots back outside and takes the blunt which also looks like its been power drawn on since he went in for a moment back from Tony. "Don't be offended! Your a little too pushy tonight, what's the matter?" Chris asks Tony "Something on your mind?" "Nah doode, I'm just thinking about how early I have to get up. Shits annoying. Don't know when I'm going to give that shit up either. I've been so involved with that since I was young I've seen the ins and outs of it all there, and to be honest its really made me loose the faith. A god-damn shame man, a god damn shame. It's as simple as that last statement. Ten years ago I would never had said 'god-damn' cos it would deeply bother me, because of those things I heard at Church. But then once you get to know those priests, their just like anyone else. I've met a few that were true, and real about what they did, but the other ones I've met, to be honest its more just like a lifestyle to them, their 'acting' in a way. I dunno its weird man, and I'm a little bit too tired to pull apart the mysteries of the cosmos tonight. Anyways yo, I'm straight on that B, I can't even see straight anymore. I gotta drive home and shit, I'm not looking forward to that shit at all." Chris flicks his left index finger and blasts the hot ash off the blunt and sets it on his grill he has outside. He walks back into the apartment with Tony and sees him to the door. "I dunno man give me a call tomorrow or whatever. Not doing shit, got the night off. Maybe we can get into come cards or whatever." "Sounds good man. Have a good night. Thanks for everything. Sorry for irritations and shit, but I've been on on a poor sleeping schedule since I started my new job. So I apologise as I transition myself into a second-shifter." They exchange their fancy unique handshake that they made up back when they used to watch cartoons in their pajamas as children when their parents would get together on the weekends. The've toned it down and taken the childish quirks they had to it back then, but its pretty much the same it was then. Chris shuts the door behind Tony's leaving and he heards him walk down the hallway and to the stairs. Chris walks over to the living room window and watched for the front door to pop open with a leaving Tony. Chris always watches the people who are leaving his house leave the premise. This time however he's watching to see if Chris is going to at least try and pull a cellophane of cocaine out of his pocket once he gets outside. Seems like people have an understand that once they leave someones house they cannot be seen once they are outside or something. Random quirks that Chris has noticed about people and their ways. He sees Tony walk outside. He seems him pull keys out of his pocket and his pack of cigarettes. He stands on the front porch at the entrance of the apartments and lights up a cigarette. He puts his lighter and pack of smokes back into his front pocket and starts to walk with keys in hand towards his vehicle. As he is walking towards his car he starts reaches into his left pocket and stops walking. He opens his bare left hand looks at it confused. He puts his hand back in his pocket again, nothing. Chris is watching this from his window. Sheer fear strikes Chris immediately, as he senses Tony's head turning towards the window Chris is looking out of. He hits the floor. Heart racing at 200 miles an hour. Panic, fatigue, sweaty palms. Cocaine and paranoia, hand in hand. Will he come back to the apartment and try to make some excuse to sit back down on the couch and see if it fell out in there, or look in the bathroom or something from earlier when he was laying down and vomiting up imported beer? Questions unanswered while Chris lays there on the floor and panics. He doesn't hear anyone coming back up the hallways but he panic rushing through his system makes him feel like there are twenty-thousand pairs of eyes staring at him at this very moment and if his moves even in the slightest degree they will all start staring at him harder and putting him under the spotlight Chris hears what sounds like a car leaving the parking lot. In a cheesy, theif-in-the-night sytle, Chris rolls around behind his couch and crawls on the floor to the spare bedroom where the light is off and where there is a window that has a direct view of the parking lot. Once he gets to the room he hops up to a couching position and runs to the window where he peeks out the very side of the window ever so slightly. Tony's car is gone. Relief washes over him like a jump in a cold pool. Chris walks into the living room and cleans up the little things that were distrupted during the visit. He grabs cleaning stuff out of the bottom cabinet beneath the sink and cleans off the coffee table and dumps the ashtray and sets its on top of the refrigerator in a box where he has other random ashtrays, lights and matches. One fire hazard in a to-go box. He even dampens a paper towel and sprays it with a alcohoal/water mixture that he has a in spraybottle under the sink as well and he wipes down the leather couch where Tony was sitting and where he was sitting as well. Chris was very weird about how things where cleaned and how germs were spread around. Something he got from his clean-freak family. Something that only intensified when he got on his own and had a big drug problem to juggle around with too. Gives him something to do while he on drugs, and is another one of his 'justifications' of doing them. Oftentimes heard quoted as saying "I love getting stoned and cleaning my apartment." Hardcore user stuff. He goes into his bedroom and pulls the to-go container of his cocaine necessities and open it up while sitting on the bed. He takes out his bag of cocaine which has unknotted a little bit from being just tossed in their earlier. Chris takes the cocaine bag out of the container and walks back to his dresser. On his dresser he has a small glass sugar bowl that looks like a squatting duck, but its painted black and has little orange horns like its a 'rebel duck' or something. One of his ex girlfriends got him a set of them for his birthday a few years back, it was in a set of a salt and pepper shaker, but the white duck with horns broke so he got a new set of shakers and just used this for decoration. Then when he started doing cocaine a lot, and had some on him in larger amounts he would start to use the old shaker for a blow holder. It works out quite well for him actually, as its not too deep and doesn't have little overhangs over the edges, where otherwise hard to reach cocaine would be hard to get at if you tipped the thing over on its top to clear it out. The shaker was near full when he got all the cocaine inside. This cracked a little of a smile on his face, like the gleaming happiness of a child on a spoiled Christmas morning. He tops the black duckling and slides it back into the corner where it had originally been sitting in the first place. He walks back to the bed and covers his paraphernalia where his cocaine was, and takes it over to the dresser as well. Chris sits back on the bed and puts his elbows on his knees and leans into himself. He is absolutely confused as to what to do about Tony's situation. Time has brought Chris to a point where he feels like he must stand up and let Tony know that this type of shit cannot continue. How can he trust someone random when he cannot even trust his one friend that he has known for so long. What has Chris done to Tony that is so horrible that makes him feel like he can do this type of thing and have it be ok, and how he could lie to his face like that. Like it was nothing, like it was a simple question, like Chris asked him if he needed a coat outside or not. Nothing like this. Chris always figures everything in cost by how many hours it would take him at work for him to pay for something. He figures that he worked nearly six hours for the amount of white that Tony took from him. That's six hours that Tony spent sitting at someone's house, taking some more shit for free from them. Tony never really ever held down a job for too long, and he always has leeched off other people. These sorts of things were excused, because up until now he was a very reputable person. Sure, Chris has caught him in hundreds upon hundreds of little white lies over the years, but they were somewhat excused due to the fact that there was so much substance to their relationship. Sure he may have fibbed a little bit about this or that, but nobody Chris has ever known has been through the things that they have been through together. That, almost always trumped anything anyone could lay down on the table. He's even played Tony over Lin before, which really back-fired, but that's how Chris' mind has been programmed over the years. Chris gets up off the bed and walks out the bedroom and back into the living room, shutting the lights off behind him. A sigh is heard over the ambience of the sole resident. "No more back talk about it, Jason! Your father and I have decided to not give you any more slack in regards to your consequences. Time and time again you have proved that you have no benefited from getting the benefit of the doubt." Jasons mother says standing in his doorway with her night gown on and hair still wet from the shower. Jason's last appearance has disrupted the family at home. Jason's father got a call at work from the teacher's office at school telling him about the gym teacher catching him trying to skip out. Jason is a on a manditory school attendance policy with his most recent truancy conviction from the muniopical court, pressed into place by the administration at his school. Jason already had a reputation in the district as being as the one to 'keep an eye on', so when he made the transition from the 8-9 grade campus over to the actual high school the adminstration there already had a fierce plan of attack to slap Jason back into shape in regards to attendance. His freshmen year of highschool he only had attended school for three days the entire school year. While most of this was beyond his control, as he was locked up for convictions of a criminal nature from two years ago, which had finally concluded in court at the beginning of his high school career. He is required to attend 85% of his classes with no school related troubles otherwise. Jason hasn't handed in a math assignment once this year in school, but he had a pretty sophisticated layout planned after court when he figured out exactly what 85% of school he would attend, and what 15% he was going to miss. Percentages in math were always a problem, but they were simplistic and quick for him when it came to figuring out something that he actually cared about. "What do you have to say for yourself?" she asks of her son "What reason do you have for skipping class today? What is your excuse this time? Sick? Had a doctors appointment? Had a funeral? Or no wait those are legit reasons to be misisng class, you were just randomly leaving for the principal of leaving and your Father and I are sick and tired of it. You are to come home right after school and your not to leave your room at all. I've called your Guidance Counselor and she has agreed to get me a list of all your past due assignment and assignments as they are assigned in your classes and she is going to fax them to me at work. Your not getting away with all this bullshit anymore. I'm serious Jason Gregory Haro. You've pushed it too far this time!" Jason's Mother says before slamming his bedroom door shut. Jason just stares at his closed bedroom door, then motions a middle finger at it. Wishes his Mother could see the disrespect that he is illustrating for her. For his Father too. Jason turns to his computer desk and heads on over to it and has a seat in his worn in, padded, yet torn, folding chair and rattles his mouse and actives his computers desktop. He opens a blank text file and types the time and date. He starts typing at two hundred miles an hour. Spilling his guts in all and any direction. Types about why he skipped class today, about why he hates his Mother and Father and why he wants to beat the shit out of Houston more after hearing all that flack from his parents. When he is done typing out his feeling, relief washes over him in a cool and refreshing wave. His closing line to his typing was "They didn't even smell the liquor on my breathe, which is good cos my drunk fist is stronger than my sober one." He posts his feelings on LiveJournal, oftentimes several thousand word posts without even a single comment on even the longest ones. He's got private entries on this digital community that suggest that the reason nobody comments on his posts is because he posts too long and he forsees the word motioning towards a 'high-speed' and 'short-and-sweet' sample of data. Meaning that nobody has a growing care for long and intricite thoughts and ideas. They all (the vast majority of people online at least) like slogans and quick things that they can quickly remember, or copy and paste and have fun with elsewhere. Lots of time is spent in front of computer for Jason. He writes a lot of stuff, mostly just personal thoughts and whatnot, but a lot of is actually very intellictual stuff, many subjects or which people twice his age don't even think about, but they are the things that make Jason think the most. He posts about how doesn't feel 'right' as the person he is, and he even is open with himself and recognises his extremities and leans to deal with them as they change. Right now he thinks he is some kind of white Tupac Shakur or something, and all his friends seem to think so as well. Three years ago, Jason was on a skateboard for a majority of his day. One night when he snuck out the house he was skateboarding through the park and a passing patrolling police officer saw him and tryed to give him chase. You can only go so far off the road with a skateboard, but twice as far as a police officer in an automobile can go. He ended up deep in the woods of the park where the cop kept a long patrol for hours. Jason ended up falling asleep on the ground, using the skateboard as a pillow. Neck pain, but freedom was there waiting for him in the morning. Luckily for him as well his parents didn't notice his disapperance, and went to work thinking that he perhaps left for school early or was running late and still sleeping. A few of the rich kids noticed that he was wearing the same clothes as he was yesterday, but he didn't seem to mind much, and only lasted in school until a little before lunch anyways before surfing the school on his trucks and wheels for numerous hours again. When he was of the skateboarding subculture of teens in the Falls three years ago, he was extreme then. He wore the biggest and baddest pair of Jnco pants that you could find, he wore reputable DC or Airwalk shoes. He would do all sorts of things that amazed the groups of wanna-be skaters and girls that associated themselves with the clique as well. Once he started smoking cigarettes however, skateboarding wasn't hard, but it definitely was more difficult than it was before he started to smoke. Cos he inhaled, not just draw on cigarettes in front of others to make them 'think' they smoke, when they're really just stinking up their fingers and lips, mouth and staining their teeth. So he moved to a non-athletic lifestyle of Goth-rock. Marilyn Manson Goth as many called it. Died his hair black, painted his nails black, and even would occasionally put a thick black 'X' on his forehead with a Sharpie. While it drew in the highest amount of criticisms, he always dispositions himself in such a fashion where one would walk always thinking that he didn't care, or even notice you were staring at him. He noticed, and he tallied it, he lived for it. He lost his ability to shock and amaze people doing things on his skateboard, so when he lost that he still needed the attention because he resided in the shine of the light, so he had to get it any way he could. Nobody was reallly into the depth of this 'shocking' appearance as he was. He wrote stuff on his computer, but back then it was his actual paper and pen journal, about how he 'put this Goth shit on the map in the Falls'. He was determined to get respect if he could, but most of the people laughed at him. Some of the grades above him gave him the call name "Slash" because they used to clown about he was a 'Skater Slash Goth Slash Dirt'. The dirt was in reference to his status of being a smoker. No matter what social clique Jason was associated during his years in school, he always was the one to take the name or 'sub-culture' and take its colours and run with them to the extreme corner, making anyone of that same social status that much more noticeable. Many liked it, many did not. He always was an 'influence' to kids who strive to fit in, but never by the younger 'in' kids who were watching him. Jason's extremities over the years never really made anyone who was 'real' respect or appreciate him, but Jason will swear up and down that they all think he just a wonderful person. Deep down however, Jason knew what time it was, and he knew who he could and could not boast to do. Who he could do and couldn't do things with with, or to. So the "Slash" nickname was somewhat self-inflicted, but little does Jason know its suburbia and cable television and pop culture that makes Jason who he is, not his unique and independent thinking. Jason walks over to his closet and slides it open. He pulls out his walkman and scans his pile of CD's stacked in his closet and looks for something to listen to. He pulls out "Ghetto D" by Master P. In many regards Master P is pretty much the sole incarnation of what Jason has become. Or many it was being locked up. Past convictions got Jason put in a juvenile detention centre when he was a young teenager. For a term of six months. His parents felt a feeling of greatness when they assigned him to this facility. They felt as if they had lost their son. He had long black hair and was all painted up, although he was smart enough to not wear that to court. However his nails were still painted and they were convinced that the Judge had even that in consideration when he sent Jason to that place for a half of a year. When walked in he looked like a half dead zombie and when he came out he was bald headed, and talking with an ebonic twist to his otherwise very white sounding suberbian version of English. His parents were not much happy with the new version of their son that they got back from the state ran faciility, but they sure liked it more than the vampire they sent in. When he got it out things were actually looking up. Jason had friended an African-American male in their who gave Jason an almost religious preaching about how he was lucky to have the kind of family that he did and that he was the luckiest person to have the satisfaction of knowing that there will be someone waiting for him on the other side of those walls when he got out. The luxury of knowing that there are people who have not given up on him on the outs. He told him about how he should turn his life around when he got out and things will look up from this day forward and if he kept his 'game' tight enough he would be able to get through the rest of his life without any bumps in the road and one day he might be able to put the day he got out and beforehand behind him forever. But that's only if Jason kept on his game tight. That was quite a long time ago already, and he has long forgotten those lessons that he was taught. It's such a good idea to change your life around when your in the worse of times, but after being back in your natural enviornments when the trouble has passed over, your quick to fall back into your ways. Old habits die hard. No doubt about that. Soon after being released, Jasons sophmore years in high school had ended. He took up work with his Father part time in the summer, doing carpentry. He was getting quite good at it and his Father considered putting him on full time, but this is when the things really took a turn for the worse. This was the time in Jason life when he met up with Houston for the first time. He met Houston at a party that he was in attendance with both of his partents. They were at a work party for his Mother who was a retail sales associate for a large chain store. Houston was in the same boat, a child of someone who was forced in coming for social points for their respectable parents. Neighter of them were having too much fun. Houston was the one who initially approached Jason, asking him what he was at the party for. They mingled and exchanged contact information before they left the party and the trouble started from there. They began just randomly hanging out, playing basketball, talking about bubble-gum rap music, or walking through the detailed aspects of the Menomonee Falls area, either on foot on their tricked-out BMX bikes. Then Jason and him really started hanging out a lot. They started getting real serious about how they were influencing the people around them. They'd often fantasise about being in the "mafia" or being involved in some "mobster shit". While Houston had a very watered down relationship with faint gang members who lingered on the outskirts of Milwaukee County, and thought they were straight up-gangsters, for Jason all the stuff was pretty much a dreamt up Hollywood fantasy. He had never really been involved with anything too serious. Most the issues he's been involved with that have had any sort of 'official' response was because the situation required some sort of official authority to respond to it. Whether it be the police or the school, the officials who had gotten Jason in trouble, have always been for something 'non-violent' and never had any victims. Houston didn't really much either, but he didn't have a problem experimenting in Menomonee Falls with victim related illegal manderains. Started out simple and mediocre. They spraypainted stuff. Tagged walls with markers in public, defaced all sorts of random things. They each came up with a symbol to represent they're presense and they would spread it like wildfire. They felt famous and really rode the wave, personally, when they're unviersal defacing of stuff around the Menomonee Falls, and tracing the borders of Germantown, Milwaukee, and Brookfield, made the public papers of Menomoee Falls and Germantown. Houston had the article cut out of the paper and hung it in his bedroom. Then when 'tagging' got boring for them, they moved on to straight vandalism. This almost got both of them arrested numerous times when they first started to dwell in this area of crime. This is because, literally, Jason would laugh so loud and so much while they were doing the vandalism that people would notice his noise making before they had any idea of what they were doing. This also was around the time of his first violent encounter with another person. After getting chased down by the cops, in and out of peoples yards, in, around and under cars, through woods, through creeks and over rocks, through talls weeds for almost an hour through nearly half of the diameter of Menomoee Falls; Jason and Houston bareley escaped arrest one night after they broke into a church and stole their fire extinguishers and threw them through the windows of houses around the church. They did it in their 'professional mobster' style, wearing gloves and all that. Some kind of suberban, twisted, strategic plot againt their own. It was strange, but it sure greased their wheels. Once their escape had been confirmed between the two of them, Houston slugged Jason very hard in the face. The left side of his face swole up almost instantly. Without a moment of hesitation, Jason swung a heavy jab at Houston and hit him in the bridge of his nose, what felt like almost a shattered bone; it sent Houston right to the ground. They've respected each other very much ever since that day. They swore at each other a little bit and Jason posed question as to why he did such a thing, and he was told off that he was a 'squeely little bitch' when he's going someting illegal. "You laugh like a girl at a circus when your getting into some shit." Vandalism ended for them (for the most part) when they were both arrested with another pair of deliquents for breaking into the local bus company and slashing up a majority of the buses seats, breaking mirros, windows and igniting the fire extinugishers. They forever rethrought everything they would ever do. They quickly learned that when you blow off a fire extinuisher you are leaving a trail that can be followed by the police. They just follow the yellow brick road. When they were arrested for this crime, this was the first time that Jason's Father struck him. Jason had come home one night, told his parents that he was at the library, 'doing research for a report for Science'. They believed him because since he had been out of juvenile detention he has not been doing ANYTHING wrong. Twenty-five minutes later, Jason is in the shower ,and the police come to the house with questions for Jason to answer about the vandalism. After the questions from the police to Jason once he had gotten out the shower to find his Father standing there IN the bathroom to tell him what is waiting for him downstairs in the kitchen. Naked and all, but the severity of the situation and the tone in his Fathers voice when he said "You have absolutely no fucking idea what is in store for you when the Police leave this fucking house." before telling him to "cover that thing up and get your ass donwstairs, SON." The first time his Father had ever called him that. His Father only hit him once in the face after the police. He was lucky that they didn't arrest him and put him back in lock-up for the night, but his Mother assured the police that he wouldn't be leaving the house AT ALL for the next several weeks. "Skipping school, you know, I kinda understood that." His father said to him. "Sue, seeing as how our son here thinks he is an adult, we might as well put all our cards out on the table. Jason we've skipped out of school before too, we were not angels in school and in fact, Sue, you skipped out QUITE A BIT your senior year." he says to her, she nods in agreement. "Skipping out of school is understandable, school is not fun when your growing up, Jason, I understand that. What I do not understand however is how you could do something like this. What is the justification in this?" Jason said "I don't know." and like a rookie boxing match, the veteran hit first and hit hard and the competition fell to the floor. They didn't talk for a while after that moment, but they both deserved the time apart. They leared about each other and of themselves during that time. If this wasn't enough, Jason puts his parents through the treaterous of all trials and triubulations a teenager his age is capable of getting into. Houston and Jason headed some sort of twisted, suberban group of deliquents that pretty much followed, and attributed the thoughts and ideas of them. They got the ingenious to go on a huge crime spree. They broke into the local churches of the Menomonee Falls area and stole everything you could think of. For the random purpose. For prinicipal. For the trill of the run. How much can you do without getting caught. How far can they be pushed? One night they stole a quanitiful amount of things from the churches, including checking account information that was direclty tied into the funds that ran the church. Rnadom computer equipment, stuff, anything. One of them stole a folding chair. That's how trivial it was. There was no purpose. It was just something to do, a game. They brought back all the stolen stuff over to Houston's house. His parents were gone for the weekend so it was the perfect location, not to far from the church and it had a few good tossing locations for things if they police ran in on them suddenly. They get all the stuff they had taken into hte Houston's house. Down in the basement they take everything, where they all six assemble. They're still all quiet like they were inside the places they just robbed, but they were getitng gradually louder and they started to laugh about how each other were all behaving inside, immitating each other, poking fun. Out of the blue, like a storm with no warming sign; sudden wraps at the door. Loud ones. "Nicholas, Nicholas?" Houston gets whiter than a ghost and slowly counts the people in the room. "What the fuck is someone upstairs saying your name for?" Houston whispers to Nicholas, a kid who is with them. "My Mother probably called the cops on me again." He said with a long face. "She probably told them where you live man I don't know!" he said back quietly. Houston holds his finger over his lip, signaling everyont to be quiet. He walks towards the other end of the basement and peeps out the window that just peaks to the corner of the front porch. Sure enough, there was a police officer standing at the window, yelling Nicholas' name though it. He scurries back to the huddle of teenagers all quicking having their lives flash before them. Holds his finger out straight at Nicholas and says; "You take your mother fucking ass up there RIGHT NOW!" "Fuck no man, you go up there." Nicholas says. "Oh my god your fucking dead, the cops might as well stay here, cos I'm going to fucking kill you." Houston says to him. Jason stands up and walks over to Nicholas with his finger over his lips. Nicholas looks at him for a second. Jason cocks back and jabs him right in the side of the head. Holds finger over his lip again, and says "Shut the fuck up, don't you make a noise." "Dude its on, fuck both of you guys." Nicholas says. Houston walks to the front of the basement again and looks for the police whom he cannot see. He slips up the stairs and the group can hear him tip toeing in the rooms above. "I dont' give a fuck about what you have to say you little fucking bitch. Your in the wrong for having the cops here looking for you. You don't even have to worry about me, you fucking poser, you need to worry about Houston, he's gonna fuck your shit up good dont you worry about that." Jason says holding onto Nicholas' TShirt. Nicholas gets a look of concern over his face, he's anxious and does not want to deal with the oncoming confrontation. He starts to shake. Houston comes charging down the the stairs and runs straight at Nicholas' and hits him in the face a trio of times. "Fuck you doing giving your Mother my address for you ignorant mother fucker. You have any idea what could have just gone down? You need to learn when to and when not to run your fucking mouth because to be honest you really are a loose cannon. Your a fucking poser, you wouldn't even be allowed to hang around with us mother fuckers unless you were so tied in close with others. You need to check yourself, yo, before one of us do it for you." Houston straightens out Nicholas' shirt after talking to him like a mentor. "Now from now on you ain't telling nobody about where I live, I don't even want you thinking about where I live, and you don't go around for any reason talking about the things that we do here. There are quite a few of us in this room, and the more that there are the more possiblity there is that one of you guys are going to run your fucking mouth to the wrong person," he says pointing to everyone in the room "So be smart about your shit, yo, or your going to be asked to leave, but its not going to be with words." He says while shaking his fist. "So right now, Nicholas, your suspect. Something goes fishy with this shit right here we just got done doing, all eyes are on you kid." Nicholas stands up and says "Well I'm out of here then, I don't need all this fucking stress. I'm not going tell anyone about the shit that happened, in fact, I'd wished I didn't know anything anyways, because all of this stuff is fucking stupid. I'm leaving, excuse me." Nicholas holds out his hand in front of a standing tall Houston do doesn't look like he's going to budge for anyone or anything. "You are not going anywhere. The police are out looking for you, your better off calling the police from the payphone at the gas station as asking them to come pick you up. Your already a witness and an accompliace with the crime, so you can sit your pretty ass right back down in that seat. Can't take back the past, fuck you think this is a magic show. Sit your fucking ass back down." Houston points the place where Nicholas' was sitting. He slowly sits back down. "Now we gotta figure out what we can do with this stuff, cos to us its just evidence sitting in my basement. We could organise the shit and figure out what if any value we have here and try to sell some shit off, but not out here. We'll have to see if anyone I know in Mil-Town can help us off this shit. Can't exactly have a rummage sale with this stuff, know what I mean?" Houston has a seat on his bed across from the couch where the rest of the people, minus Jason who was sitting on an full box of old vinyls that were Houston's Father's passion. He was sitting there somewhat quite despite all the disruption in the room. He's got feelings of remorse that he's being involved with stuff that he does not want to, he's going into deep analytical thoughts about the ramifications of what he has done wrong. What could become of all this, but those feelings are quickly washed away with the next barked out command from Houston. Must prove to him and all others that nothing truly bothers him whatsoever. No matter what the legal, social, or personal cost. A doormat. Within a few days those boys had used the stole Checking Account information that they had stolen, and with the computers and computer hardware they also lifted, they setup falsified accounts with the major ISP networks and used the information further to purchase stuff on the web, when security was a mere illusion, and they would resell them for little or no profit to the local kids in the neighborhood. Sometimes they would turn a profit, but it was indeed rare in the beginning. Within a few weeks of the robberies, and absolutely no flack from the Menomonee Falls police department to any one of those six guys who were involved, Nicholas is approached by a police car while walking up Menomonee Avenue towards Village Park. The officer asked him what he was doing and when Nicholas simply responded 'Walking, why?' the officer got a little more fierce with his questioning. This was a common practice within the Menomonee Falls police department. The higher-end quotaed officers were oftentimes more like social rebel warriors than they were police officers. They were more in tune with the 'bad kids', and who they were at the local schools moreso than they were with actual crime that had been happening around the city. Nicholas had eventually hauled down the Police Department upon discovery of cigarettes on his person. Always a sure-fire way to get an underage teenager in trouble. On the way to the police department the arresting officer actually takes one of the cigarettes out of Nicholas' pack and smokes on on the way to the department. When they got there, the officer put harsh psychological warfare into play with Nicholas' who had otherwise had no other police interaction except when he was the rear passenger of his older buddy in high-school. He was in a minor car accident and made a breif statement. "We can forget the cigarette thing ever happened if you want to start talking to me about what happened at the churches." Within 45 minutes, Nicholas had pretty much broken down the entire operation and its progress since then. Went into ellaborate detail with what was going on with the checking accounts and what was going to be going on had none of this questioning happened. He went into detail about Houston's friends in Milwaukee, giving them the white-version of the nicknames Houston calls them by. Always looks so funny on paper. The officer has a few officers run the names, get the addresses and dispatch more officers out the addresses listed and to bring the boys all in for intense questioning in their own regards to what had happened. Nicholas didn't know this was happening. He was in the questioning room handcuffed to a table when the officer went into the hallway to give another officer instructions on what to do. Nicholas was in the police department, getting questioned furather, getting fingerprinted, getting photographed, getting documented for about three hours before the first of the other six had returned with officers accompanying them. Out from the small window, Nicholas can see Jason getting lead past the window by an officer. Jason's hairdo always stands out in a crowd, but Nicholas is extra conscious about what is going on right now, being in a police department for this long. Jason doesn't notice that Nicholas is in the room he just passed, as he's loaded into the next questioning room with a single handcuff welded to the all-metal table. Houston however notices his right away. He's been at this police department more than he has been at his own grandparents house. Soon as he gets there he peeks into the first questioning room to see who is in there, and when he makes eye contact with Nicholas' his eyes turn burning red. The blood in his veins nearly evaporated when he saw him sitting in that chair. Hes quickly pulled back to next to the garage door they pulled into. The rest of the guys were all hauled in too. Houston nearly refused to speak about anything, which got him all kinds of hard-pressing from the police but that was pretty much the route he has always taken when he is questioned by police about anything. From remote things about vandalism to intense felonly-charges of theft by fraud. Jason's got a little more of a different policy when it comes to to dealing with police questioning. A police officers dream to arrest someone like Jason. While they don't get much out of him in regards to what Houston's involvement was, what the others may have did. But Jason took the rap for a lot of what had been committed to by him and the others. He admitted to stealing from the church, taking what he did. He even admitted to taking things that he knew the other people have taken, but he had a thought that they would not fess up to what they had did and they would blame it on either Houston or himself anyway. So he just took it, took the fall for others mistakes for the sake of prinicipal. The police officers were happy with what they got from Jason, and figured that after this simple statement there is enough evidence for a 'solid case' against him from the beautiful state of Wisconsin. It was nearly eleven o'clock at night before the officers were done with the intense questioning. They were all over the place scrambling to get them out of there before the third shifters had arrived to work. That night when Jason had gotten home from the police department he wasn't as fearful as to how his parents were going to react. He figured they had been told by the police what had been going on already, so the big shock value over his Father has probably come and passed already. He wasn't concerned about what his Mother was going to say because she will never hit him, only beat him down with empty threats and words. When he arrives in the patrol car with the officer he notices that the vehicles are not in their usual spot, his Mother's car is always parked on the right hand side outside the garage, while his Father's vehicle always sits in the one and only available spot in the garage. His Father's vehicle was missing his Mother was in the spot behind the available spot in the garage. This drew questions to Jason's mind. Where would his Father be? His Father is never gone at this hour, and what is his Mother doing, is she leaving too? The police officer doesn't just take him out of the patrol car and drive off, he escorts Jason the door. He pounds on the front door like its noon. Before the third knock the door is open and a wide-eyed Mother answers. She pulls Jason into the house and thanks the officer without much conversation. They must have talked on the phone. The doors slams and for a minute Jason had hoped the officer might have stayed for a little while, because when its all said and done the punishment from the police, unless its directly jail, do not have the same kind of psycological overpowering of you like yoru parents do. "Your Father is at the bar drinking, and I absolutely demanded that he stay in a hotel, because Jason to be honest if he saw you tonight he'd probably put you in the hospital. What in GOD'S name are you thinking? Stealing from churches? Fucking around on the internet with other peoples financial information? Do you have any idea what kind of trouble we are going to be facing with this Jason? Do you realise that we may not be able to keep living in this house with the given cost everything is going to do to us? Do you have any idea what this has done to our family? Get to your fucking goddamn room right now." She said in a tone that was up until now unheard of. She never spoke to him like this. She was always run to run the guilt gauntlet on her son but she was never one to sit there and make posed questions about the future. She never tried to put it into perspective like that about his future and never really tried to scare him about the financial situation of her and her husband to him. Jason walks into his bedroom and sits at his desk. He looks up at his computer to make the discovery that his keyboard is gone. So is the mouse. Monitor and enclosure is still sitting there but without a keyboard and mouse you can't really use the computer all that much. Jason has a spare mouse in his closet atop a bunch of other ignored stuff, but not another keyboard. They probably figured that he was doing some of the illegal things in the house here, but in fact, he never partook in any illegal activity on his computer at his house. 11:27. Never been up this late with his Mother up and raging through the living room in her own little world and with his Father gone, at a beer, not coming home. It was a disgraceful time in their lives. They unded up getting him a lawyer through someone that his Father had known through someone at work and they got by on the absolute bare minimums for quite some time before they were able to once again stand on their own two feet, with somewhat of a marching fashion as they were before Jason, their one and only son, threw them into the gutter and dragged them through the mud. Jason is not even halfway through the sixtenth-year of his life and he has already ruined himself into the late twenties with the things he was doing then. Things that went unconsidered. Jason takes off his shirt and throws it on the floor. Kicks it to the wall and plops down on his bed. Staring off to the side of his bedroom, he peers staright into his closet. Thinks about the events that happened today. Thinks about the look on the face of that gym teacher who probably would have paid anything to just swing on Jason once. Thought about the car ride from Houston and his friend, and the confrontation they had in his garage later that evening. Thought about all the things that he did wrong today and things that he should have done. He recalls his teacher telling him something about some report being due in Social Science, and how he hadn't even considered working on it, or even picking an area of research. He's been on the vurge of flunking out of every class that he is in currently. He looks down on his life, but maintains the outlook as positive to the rest of the world. Fake. Jason gets off the bed and walks over to his PC and sits down. Shakes the mouse and opens up a text document. Starts typing for a few moments, stops. Copies the text he's typing and closes the document. Opens up a web browser and opens a new post to his LiveJournal. Pastes the text and continues writing. Subject being "My One and Only Wish", in it describing in detail that if there were such things like a fairy coming down from the skies and granting him three wishes that he would only wish for one wish. His one and only wish would be to be someone without the school record and legal crime record that hinders him from ever truly becoming anything too successful in life. Any rare changes and 'exceptions' to the rule were afforded to people who had higher and more materiialsed lifestyles. No fairy would have the time of day for some kids in Menomonee Falls he figures. DIrectly from his post… "Had this fine entitity granted me the gracious granting of a wish I would ask to become the person I always had the potential to be. The person who would not have done all the illegal things I've done in my life. The person who would have been attentive in school, the person who would have been taking notes, the person who would have been staying up until midnight to studay for a test not the person out stealing peoples shit. I would do ANYTHING for this wish to be granted. Sacrifice anything I have today for this wish to come true. But this is reality, what the fuck am I talking about, right? I still go to bed hoping that miracles do come true. Life changing, amplified truths, unanswered questions. I hope that life isn't as boring as this little life I have tunnenled down into seems." He posts this thoughts and closes windows. Goes back to the bed and plops down. A quarter hour falls off the clock. Jason is hazy on the bed now, completely number to the moving around, conscious world around him. In a trance. Just the moment before falling asleep. Right before falling into a peaceful sleep, Jason is quickly woken, something is ticking at his window. He sits up on the bed, and looks over at the window. He sees nothing, but a few moments later more ticking. Like someone is tossing small pebbles at it or something. Its quite possible someone is out there and they are trying to get his attention, or they want him to sneak out. "Not tonight boys." he says. He lays back on his bed, now a little cold, uncomfortable. He gets into bed, under the covers. Burrows in for a moment and the rush of chilly air slowly fades away. Warmth sets in. A few more ticks, but now its more a peaceful way for Jason to concentrate on going to sleep. Before he gets too close to sleep once again the tapping stops, after getting longer spaced out and short in repritition. Maybe it was Houston, maybe it was his friend, maybe it is someone with a million dollars that Jason could have if he just opened his window. Jason didn't care, or acknowledge it. He's going to bed early tonight, he wants nothing to do with the rest of the world right now. He lay in bed thinking about being in the same room when it was painted like the solar system, when he was a grade-schooler. Thought about how him and his Father made planets made out of styrofoam circle they bought at a craft store. How when they were painting them, they had gotten some paint on the carpet. His mother had yelled at both of them. When she left the room, Jason's Father leaned towards him and whispered in his ear: "Someone's its better to just say your sorry and smile to the girls when they're mad at you." Jason thought about how those times haven't happened in years, if not that moment. How his family used to be so close together, and how they used to play games together. They used to laugh, he used to look forward to dinner in the evening. How he loved watching his Mother do things, and how he used to like helping out. This wannabe hard ass teenager lets a few tears drip down the side of his face and absorb into the pillow and sheets beneath him. He thinks about how he used to look forward to being at the store Grocery Shopping with his Mother, because that was their alone time together. She would send him on "missions" to get certain foods from aisles. He would go with her up until he started becoming a teenager and hanging with his friends more than he hung out at home. Hanging free, having nothing else to do. It crushed his Mother how almost overnight it was all about him and and how it was about his parents and instantly that changed into hanging out with friends and disrespecting them. His Mother spent almost two hours crying into her husbands shoulder the night he had called her a bitch for the first time. It was deeply personal for her. When they were a new family together, before Jason even knew what vulgarities truly meant in the terms of adults, something that he still does not truly understand, his Mother and Father were in a fight one evening and they were going back and fourth pretty heavily with negatives about each other and anything that related to either of them. The things they were saying to each other were unjust and said without reason. Only for reasons of hurt. Jason's Father started to get loud with his Mother and he declared that he was going to leave. Walking towards the front door of the house, Jason goes to his Father and begs him to stay. He swats the child away and bends down towards him and says, "You can stay here with that bitch there!" pointing at his Mother. He stormed out of the house and didn't come back for three days. Right after he left Jason's Mother was sitting on the stairs of the front porch crying. "I will never call you that, Mom. I will protect you from him." He said to her while hugging her tightly. She held on to him so tight it was almost like she would hold her husband when she was sad and needed someone. That's how she held her husband that night Jason called her a bitch. Jason is crying fairly well at this point, thinking about all his has done wrong. He wants nothing to do with anything or anyone. Getting up tomorrow is the last thing that he wants to do. Hazy in thought, Jason slowly drifts off to sleep. Tapping on the window begins once again, but he's into sleep now, not teetering on the brink of it as he was. The evening fades into a very early morning, the mist of the night sets in. Menomonee Falls is a beautiful place in the middle of the night. The quiet streets. The random front room light that's on in someone's house provides a homely effect to any block within the village. Street lights shine brightly and trees drift and sway from late night shifts in the wind. You hear owls hooing and you hear little to cars. The town is literally asleep when its dark out. Business signs provide colour to the avenues that decorate its commercial areas. A few places are open all night. The people working in these rare establishments, are all nice and friendly people. All is quiet. A few automobiles traces the main streets of the village, all going at the near crawling speeds the road signs call for. Runners and random walkers start to bring a pulse to the sidwalks of the village starting in the middle of the morning. Starting at about 4:30 you can hear a random bark of a dog. Fresh to the outdoors who will go for an early morning stroll with their owners, while they get their exercise. The parks start to breathe with people at about five in the morning. The gazebo glows bright in the middle of Village Park up until 6:00, depending on whether or not the area is observing daylight savings, at which point its only on until five. By this time, regardless of the daylight savings, several dozen people have passed it on the paved trail that runs through the heart of this hilly park. Jason's house is fixed not to far from the Village Park area. In fact he was only two streets away from it. When he used to attend school at North Junior High Campus he would be able to leave his house at quarter after seven and get there to class on time with a few breathes to spare by 7:20. Nowadays he has to take the bus in order to get to school. Being a teenager and being good at being late, being lazy, and being overall a sloth in regards to any sort of efforts to anything, Jason would oftentimes miss the bus and would have to either get a ride from his Mother, or hitch a ride from one of his friends. Whether or not they actually made it to school was another thing. All things Jason has wished had never became. Jason is wrapped in the bedsheets like a fishermans knot when the loud beeping of an alarm clock starts going off at 6:15. Jason manages to reach the alarm clock and turn it off without opening his eyes, or moving much from his sleeping position. He pulls his arm back into the bed and scratches his head. His hair feels different, he feels his head and opens his eyes. His hair is a little longer in some areas but other areas seem shorter. Confused, he sits up in bed and immedately looks down at his underwear, which are breifs. He hadn't worn briefs since he was a boy, he wore boxers from 12 years old on. He stands up and turns to his mirror. He is almost floored when he see a modern version of the simulated solar system that he and his Father had made many years ago. Flush white, Jason goes to the mirro and looks at himself. He is shocked to find himself a much different person than he was when he went to bed. His hair cut like a standard John Doe who is straight off the suberbian outlet mall train. Looking like someone who he would be making fun of when he was in school yesterday. Jason spends nearly ten minutes looking around the room. Looking through things, looking through is closet. Nothing, not a single things in in this entire room that he has in these spaces that are unfamiliar to him, are his. He is confused. Sits on his bed, head hung low. What in world has happend. What has gone wrong? Jason went to sleep one person, and woke up another. Someone who is a straight up nerd. A nerd. Someone who is good in school. Jason looks up and over across the room and looks at the desk where the computer is. He walks over to it to be disappointed that its not the computer he had went to sleep with on his desk. This is a different computer, maybe even better in performance but that is not what Jason cares about. He wants to look at his journal entries. The thought dawns on him to check his LiveJournal account on the internet. She logs on to the website and looks at his entries. There is only one post on the website, one from a few months ago which was a basic hi and hello post to the rest of the world who may or may not have been looking. For anyone to read. A much different atmosphere than he was used to. He pokes around at other parts of the computer. Files on the desktop, shortcuts within the menus. All the stuff on the computer was school related information. He opened it, and looked a few things here and there, didn't seem to spend too much time looking into it, but all of it seemed strangely familiar. As if he new this information already. Ask him anything he was looking at yesterday and he possibly would have told you to fuck off. Not because he didn't know the answer, because he didn't want you to know he didn't know the answer. There is a knock at his bedroom door and before he can get up to let the person in, his Father comes into the room. "Morning buddy!" His Father says while pointing to the computer "Getting some last minute studying in before your Advanced Geology test today?" "You know it!" Jason is almost in a state of literally shaking from his nervous system supercharging. "Dad, I have to ask you a question." He says to Father. "Do you like this haircut of mine?" "Of course son, what is wrong with your haircut?" His Father asks, running his hands through is sons hair. This throws Jason off, his Father had never in his entire life been touchy feely with him, and at first he flinched. His Father reacted to it but did not say anything. "Looks just fine if you ask me." His Father puts his hand on his sons shoulder. "Your going to do just wonderful on your test today son, I just know you will. I'd give you some pointers for the test, but to be honest I don't think I took that class when I was in highschool. Can't remember a single part of what I was helping you study yesterday. I got breakfast almost ready, so come down whenever your ready, but don't run too late!" His Father smiles at him and walks out the room leaving the door open. Jason goes to the door and shuts its halfway. He walks over to his closet and finds some clothes to wear. Looking through is closet, he is extremely disappointed at what he sees for a selection of clothing that he can wear. He picks out the most formidable thing he can scour out of the closet. Dressier khaki coloured pants, with a somewhat decent button up shirt to go alone with them. Not big enough to let it hang out, he quite possibly will have to tuck the shirt in. Something that he hasn't done in nearly 5 years to what he can recall. Tucking in your shirts was something that dorks did, not Jason Haro. This is a Jason Haro that isn't someone he ready to be. He fears seeing people in school. He fears seeing Nicholas', possibly Houston. What will they say to him when they see him? What will they do to when they see him dressed like some dork out of their wildest fantasies of people to pick on? What will happen in less than an hour? He dresses in his clothes that he does not exactly prefer for, and walks downstairs. He gets halfway through the hallways leading downstairs when he realises that he would need a belt to keep these pants up and his shirt tucked in. He walks back into his bedroom and looks around his room for a belt. He doesn't find one in his closet, he doens't find one on his dresser. After navigating through his drawers he finds not only a belt to wear, but a little envelope. One about the size that would have a nice greeting card, or thank you card inside of it. On the outside of the envelope was marked the words "gift money". Inside the evelope, Jason counts over four hundred dollars. To his suprise, he found that much money, or any money for that reason. The person who Jason woke up as, is astronomically different than the person he was used to when he went to sleep. There are numerous elements of the setup of his room, the setup of his computer, and the way his Father was acting towards him earlier that makes him feel that something has done incredibly wrong. While affixing the belt to his pants, missing a loop from lack of being completely awake, he finally gets everything into position and fastens the front of the belt. He crouches down to see how far his pants went up on his socks. The old Jason that would dress a little more 'hip' would only buy pants, or instruct his Mother that he would not wear any pants that would show his socks at all. If he put on a pair of jeans or khaki pants and when he crouched down if his socks showed just a ilttle he would refuse to wear them. Even if his Mother got them from a place such as Goodwill that did not accpet returns, he would still deny her the gracious gift. She would end up having to give up the clothing to a donations service before anyone would make use of them. Jason was that picky about what he was wearing, how he was looking, and how people thought about him. Jason puts the money back into the envelope the opposite way it was in there before he counted it. The larger bills were in back of the stack of money inside the envelope but when he put the money back in he put the money in reverse chronological order. The largest bills were in front and the smallest in back. The old Jason way. He shuts the drawer and walks back to the mirror on his closet door. He takes a long hard look at himself and wonders what will become of the coming few days. He wonders to himself how he will handle staying in school for an entire day. He is surprised that he does not have a craving for a cigarette. If he hadn't had been up this long without smoking yesterday he would literally have started to shake and tremble. Anything to get that good nicotine craving tossed off to the side. The easiest method to get rid of a cigarette craving is to indulge into the temptation and have a cigarette. It was not too hard for him to get away with smoking almost right after waking up. He would slip out his bedroom door and sit on the roof of his house and smoke a cigarette before 6:45 in the morning the time his Mother would come to his room to make sure he is up for school. Both of his parents smoke cigarettes themselves, so them simply smelling it on his person was resident in a neighborhood located next to impossible. He wasn't to concerned about it then anyways, but something tells him that they would be quite disspointed in this outward looking dork who dresses like he's going to a private academy, not a public school. He walks down stairs and finds his father finishing up breakfast. In all his days, he has never recalled his Father making breakfast. His family didn't really sit down for breakfast in the morning before they all parted their ways. They would maybe nibble on a little something, but it looks like his Father was cooking an all out breakfast for the family. When he appraoches the main area of the ktichen he looks over at the kitchen table to notice that is a little smaller than normal. One of its leaves were missing. Something else that he never recalls seeing. His kitchen table was always with one leaf in it, because three people at the table during a meal with other random pots and pans on the table all required lots of space. However there are only two spaces setup at the table this morning. Jason is curious why. He hasn't seen his Mother yet this morning, and he is a little confused as to where she might be. She is the earliest bird in the bunch of this house, so without her trampling around the main level of the house making sure everyone including herself was on the ball seems to have left a little gapping hole in Jason's morning routine. Not to say seeing his Father cooking breakfast didn't. "Why didn't you set up a spot for Mom, Dad?" he asks his Father who almost dropps the frying pan with bacon on it on the floor when he hears the question from Jason. "Excuse me?" he said in an offensive tone. He obviously did not like that question and he would keep staring at Jason until he responded with an answer. "Why isn't there a spot setup for Mom at the table, is she not here?" Jason said to his Father, posing a question that was not easy for his Father to respond to. His Father comes around the island in the kitchen. "Do you have any idea how hard it is for me to deal with enough already? Do you have any clue how hard it is to wash your hands and look down see no wedding band? Do you?" His Father continued before his son had a chance to answer him. "No! I don't think you do! You couldn't have any idea, your just a kid! You got all the book smarts a kid your age could ask for, but for this area of the game, the area where your heart and your mind are the only vulnerable targets, that is where I have you beat, Jason. You have no idea how much I loved your Mother and still do. There isn't a day that goes by where I rethink anything and everything I could have done differnt for an outcome that would have a more positive impact than what we have here today." His Father looked at him very dirty and walked out of the kitche after telling Jason that he should eat breakfast before it gets cold. French toast and bacon, one of Jason's favourite things to eat for breakfast was still steaming off the pan on the kitchen table. He has a seat and for a moment sits there and ponders what his Father had just told him. He was shocked hear that his Mother and Father are no longer together. What could have been the reason behind that. He hopes that it was not him, but thinking back of the reflection of himself in the mirror, he seriously doubts that he was a part to do with anyhting that wasn't favourable by the mass majority. Looking at his clothes, the average student would think that he wouldn't hurt a fly. Sadness seems to set in a little bit before he starts to eat his breakfast. He seems to be dwelling on the idea of not living under the same roof as his Mother. This is something that he has absolutely had no experience in for his entire life. Something he has never thought about, things that he were only in his wildest dreams. He thinks back about how he used to think about how life would better without his Mother or his Father in his life. He no longer feels that way, not even in the slightest. He wants nothing more than one of those dreaded family nights where his Mother would suggest that everyone dress in their pyjamas and watch movies. Jason used to partake in this activity with his family right up until the time that Houston seemed to be more important than anything to do with his family. He looked over at the spot his Mother would have sat in in this was a normal family meal together. The spot never looked so dull, so empty, so incomplete. Jason's Father doesn't come downstairs until Jason has finished eating, loaded his dishes into the dishwasher, and assembled his backpack which was conveniently located, already stuffed with large books and notebooks by the door of his bedroom. When his Father finally did emerge from the upper level of the house, he immediately approached Jason and put his hand on his shoulder. Looked him straight into the eyes and said that he was sorry for yelling at him and being so short with him earlier. He apologised numerous times before revealing more information that would help Jason piece together what has actually occurred between them. "I had never intended on making your Mother feel like she was less important than anything else in my life. Before I could prove to her that she was my everything she was already filed for divorce and was already in the mix with her new boyfriend. I still to this day think that she was convinced by this satanic perosn to ruin both your life and mine and live happily ever after with him. I am sorry I ruined our family, Jason, can you find it in your heart to forgive me?" His Father starts to cry a little bit, and Jason gives into the person that he has spent years creating, the angle of himself that was unaffected by his actions, unaffected by what other people said, unaffected by his delibrate methods of making people think that he could care less about anything else in his life. He hugs his Father tighter than he's grabbed onto anything in his entire life. He grips his Father with such a strong force that he could feel his Father react to it a little bit. Angred with himself at how he treated his son just a little bit ago, he hugged back with great force and the two embraced in an exchange that neighter of them were ever involved with. With one another. At least from what Jason can remember, for he is not sure who he may have been yesterday. "Well before your off to become the school rebel we better get going so you can get to class early to pitch the idea of your report to your teacher before classes start." His Father said to him. His Father is alot more in tune with his school work and school related issues than what Jason also recalls. His Father was always concerned about his school progress and would often talk to Jason about it, but when Jason started to skip out of school and display his general discontent with things, his Father retreated farther and farther away from his school related happeneings. After a point it wans't even worht asking Jason how he was doing in school. This is because Jason wouldn't be able to answer him correctly, for you have to first attend school to have a formidable opinion on how things are going there. With no attendance you cannot provide the people who provide for you such an answer. Jason grabs his backpack off the island in the kitchen and tosses it over his shoulder. He gives his Father a nod to let him know that he is ready to get off to school even though he is anything but ready to go to school. Seeing the people that he is used to seeing in kindship. He is not ready to see the people who wanted to beat him up yesterday, not looking forward to see the people who expect him to be a rebel, not looking foward to seeing the people who think that him being there will result in someone getting talked to dirty, or getting picked on. What will the world say when they see him at school? Quite possibly things could be normal. They could go over swell and nothing would be different. Maybe those people will just walk right past him without looking twice. Maybe they will not think he is any different than any of the other nerdy students. Maybe they will just ignore him. He is hoping that hey just ignore him, because that is what he wants to do with the rest of the world. Before leaving the house, Jason had a sudden urge to go back on the computer upstairs in his bedroom and search for more information about what has happened to him. What would cause him to go to sleep as one person and to wake up as another. He's trying to play it off as cool, like he knows what is going on. How strange would it sound to ask his Father why his hair is cut, why he wears breifs, why the solar system is up in his room, what and when did he and his Mother broke up. These are questions that cannot be asked, so he rather just time let sort the details out, and he will figure out the rest as he goes. He hopes that after school, granted that he can make it through the entire day, that his computer will have some information leading to the reasons behind any of the questions at hand. If any part of him is still like the person he remembers he will have at least symbolic textual information typed up on his computer somewhere. The old him wouldn't have let this all go on without documenting some of it on somewhat of a personal level. Without some sort of leads, Jason feels troubled that he will be unconclusive on major parts of his life. Will he get to see his Mother again? Will he have to deal with this new person of hers, or will she shelter Jason from such realities because Jason is now not the person he once used to be. Possibly his parents will be completely differnet acting towads him, like his Father has been to him this morning. Jason gets into his Father's car and his Father starts up the car and lets it idle for just a few breif moments before starting off to school. Jason is very close to school, but apparently taking him to school in the car is the route that his Father seemingly wanted to take, so to avoid any sort of displaced questioning, Jason just took the ride without thinking of starting the short walk to school. His Father despite who said he wasn't angry with Jason for what he had said, is not the social Father who was up close and personal he was this morning. He looked over at his Father while he was driving, and he has a look of blankness on his face. The kind of looks someone gets after they are told or asked something they do not know how to respond to. Something difficult to deal with, something hard to conceptualise. "Dad I'm sorry about what I said earlier. I'm a little off-the-ball this morning and I didn't mean to upset you." Jason is almost taken back from what he said. Where did that come from? He didn't use such proper english before in his life. His Father didn't seem to think it was too off-the-wall as he didn't seem to be set back from the statement his son just made. Maybe this is the kind of language that his Father is used to hearing him speak. His Father looks over at him for a moment before looking back at the road. "Jason I would never get mad at you for no good reason and I wasn't mad at you before. My only problem is that I'm still very soft in the areas when it comes to talking about your Mother. You and I have been making on our own for nearly six months now. For that I'm proud, because your Mother told me during our divorce that she never thought I would be able to keep you at the high levels of academic achievement that you had while we were still a family. Your grades have actually continued to improve. You know as well as I do that were barely able to keep that house on our own. I would never ask you to help out with the financial situations at the house, because I do not want you to focus more on work than school. Most definintely your school is far more important than some stupid little bookstore ever will be." His Father continued to speak but Jason's mind wandered off as soon as his Father said the word bookstore. that must be where he works. He wonders which one, he cannot think of one in an immediate area, unless its a place that requires him to get a ride from his Father to get there. The job at a fast-food restaurant which he recalled was literally down the road from where he was living, and that is where he figured that he worked still, even as a tucked-in geek. His Father doesn't finish his thought before they are in front of the campus North Junior High campus. At this point, Jason knows the interior of that school better than he knows anything else in his life. He is confused a little bit because his Father stops at the intesection in front of the school. "Do you want me to get out here?" he asks his Father who gives him one hell of a blank look in return instead of a response. "I'm sure you'd really like to attend a public school Jason, but don't worry your almost done with highschool. Only the rest of this year and one more and your done. Don't get the senioritis too early. I went to public school and look at me, I never changed the world." his Father continues while travelinging through the intersection. Public school is poison for your mind. Everyone who goes to public school, when they are in their thirties all talk about how they only thing they learned in school is how to 'put up with b/s' from others, how its nothing more than a containment facility for people too young to declare they wish otherwise." "I know I thought I'd give you a loopy response to this outlandish school full of degrenerate children and troubled minds." Jason almost bites down on his tongue when he said that to his Father. The things that he is saying to his Father, he is very conscious of what he is saying, but the roots of where the words and statements come from are unheard of, unseen, unplanned. Its like the things he is saying are triggered from some part of his body that perhaps is under the control of someone else. Is Jason still dreaming from last night? Of course not, that would be about as far fetched as the situation that he is having right now, adjusting to his new reality. His Father makes a turn at the next intersection. "What time does classes start exactly?" Jason asked his Father "I forget to be honest." When in fact he just simply didn't know. He didn't know what school he went to even. His Father turns to him and says "I'm not quite sure either, I know its a considerable amount later than the school you just tried to hop out and go into! I want to say 8, 8:15." His Father says with a smirk on his face. "What are you afraid we are going to be late or something?" "No, I was just thinking about it, and I realised I do not have an idea off the top of my head of when it opens. I guess I'm there early enough each day where it has never been an issue, no idea why it dawned on me. Pardon my slowness this morning." Jason is starting to get a little self conscious about what he is saying to his Father. He fears that his Father will be a little too clever to realise that something is wrong with his son. He is a little anxious to get to school, despite it being a new area that he is not used to he will have the luxury of being alone and that will afford him time to clear his head, collect this thoughts, and to figure out who he is. He would do almost anything to have those answers right now. He feels lost in his own person, and this is a problem for someone who has the social status of a headliner student. His Father takes a left hand turn and approaches a very large brick building. He pulls over to the side of the road and wishes his son good luck with his oncoming test. Jason looks at him with a little hesitation, because he does not feel as confident as his Father does in how he will do on the test, but he wishes his Father the warmest regards, something that feels a little odd to him, never being close to his Father. But this is a clean slate, at least it feels that way, so Jason starts from places he couldn't even get to, on this fine day. Lisa wakes with a bladder that seemed like a large blowfish. Ready to explode. For a moment she had that feeling of uncertainty of where she was. She's unfamiliar to this room. She has the strong need to go to the bath room. She hops up and starts walking towards the bathroom. She's stopped in her tracks, stubbing her toe on what felt like ton of bricks. The lights are off so she extends her hand and feels around for the bathroom door. She finds it and she feels around for the lightswtich. She finds it and turns on the lights. To Lisa's suprise the bathroom is near empty. She quickly goes to the bathroom and looks around teh bathroom. Not a single thing on the wall, not a single thing in the stand up shower, not a bottle of shampoo, or conditioner. She opens the closet behind the door where Stephani told her there were towels. Opens the closet door, empty. The medicine cabinet on the wall that doubles as a mirror. Open that and there is nothing even inside that. Lisa would start to panic like she had been abducted by aliens, and they put her in an hallow version of her friends house, but she knows better than that. Stephani is probably in transition of some quirky bathroom design and let the alcohol she was drinking earlier tell her to go ahead and use the shower when indeed that would not be possible. She lowers the lid on the toilet and washes her hands. She wipes her hands on her clothes, what else could she do. She walks back out the bathroom but she leaves the light on. She peeks to the floor to see what on earth she stubbed her toe on, which is now throbbing and feels likes it ten times bigger than it actually is. She looks down to find a box. It looks like a typical cardboard box but it sure was heavy feeling when she slugged it going the other direction. She walks slowly back to where the remote for the rooms lights were located. To her amazement there is no remote for the lights, or nightstand for the remote to be placed on. Now panic is starting to set in. Stephani could very well be redecorating her bathroom and had forgotten to tell her about it before she went to go to sleep but for no reason would there be a nightstand next to her bed when she had gone to sleep and mysteriously it had disappeared since then. She looks over at the doorway. Thankfull she is still in the same room she went to sleep in. She walks over to the door way a little slower because the bathroom lights do not shine that far into the bedroom. She gets to the lightswitch and flicks it on. She immediately squints and a shock wave of horror flushes her. She sees cardboard boxes spread out all over the floor, and a single lamp is lighting the entire room. It does not have a lampshade and its just sitting on the floor. Its not even a frosted bulb, its almost blinding to look at. Lisa has a yellow and white design burned into her line of vision for a few minutes after looking at it after she first turned the lights on. What on earth has happened here? The bed she was sleeping on also is just a mattress, no sheets, just a comforter and pilows tossed on top of the mattress. Her shoes and shirt are still on the floor where she put them when she when to sleep after getting here with Stephani earlier, but none of this stuff was here. There were lights that had a remote, the room was decorated, This was Stephani's room. Now Lisa looks like she is someone who lives in someeones abandonned storage unit. She was froze at the doorway and still holding the lightswitch, looking around for a few minutes before she got the courage to move. She couldn't resist but to open one of the boxes and look inside of them. She goes over to to the box next to the heavy one she stubbed her toe on. She noticed "Clothes" written on the side of the box. "Clothes?" she thought "Stephani has lived her forever, kind of an odd time for her to have random boxes of clothes sitting around." She looks around the one more time, anticipating that possibly Stephanie will bust in the door suddendly and get on her for looking in her boxes. She opens the top of the box. The flaps poof out in front of her and her to her amazement she finds HER clothes. "What the fuck?" she says outloud, almost too loud for what time it was. She looks into the box further. Her favourite sweater, slacks, braziers, panties, socks, belts and other personal effects of hers were all inside of this box. Confused, she rushes through the rest of the box in no hesitation to discover what else she may be finiding of hers inside. She looks at the other boxes. She wonders if they are all stuff insdie of hers, but more importantly why are things of hers boxed and in Stephani's baedroom. She opens a second box and confusion really sets in hard. Atop the second box there are a pair of shoes that look familiar, worn, but she doesn't recall owning them. The stares at the shoe for a few seconds, then pulls the pair out of the box and sets them on the floor. Then it comes to mind. This pair of shoes she recalls seeing when she was at the mall getting Steve's tailored pinstripe suit from a tailor located in the mall. She was with Holly when she saw the shoes. The shoes, when she saw them did not fit her. Her feet were swollen up a little bit from what they otherwise normally were. This is because the pregnancy with Holly, had changed her body a little bit. Making random parts of her body unable to fit into things they once could. The shoes were so highly desirable, that she had even asked the sales associates working if they had any bigger sizes, or a like size but with a wider width. To her unfourtunate suprise she was unable to get a pair of the shoes. Being designer they don't really come in larger and wider sizes unless they are speacially ordered or even more, tailored to fit her feet. Money that she doesn't see worth spending on a simple pair of shoes. She has this thought when she is at the mall to pick up her husbands custom tailored suit for over two-thousand dollars. He and everyone else who worked for the conservative think tank in Wisconsin all had multiple thousand dollar suits. Some with closets full of them. Some that don't fit, some they decided that they didn't like, some bought and never worn. That's just how these people held themselves up, it was their norm. But for whatever reason, the shoes that Lisa had always wanted since laying eyes on them the first time, were now apparently hers, they are in a box with her clothes, so she assumes that they are for her. Maybe Stephani bought them for her, but if that was the case, they would not look worn. They are too big for Stephani's petite feet. The entire second and third boxes were all full of clothes that were owned by Lisa. She looked down at the the rest of the boxes. Sliding them around, looking for labels on the sides. One labelled "stuff" Lisa tears open. She recognises the top item in the box. Its a photo album. The one she had all her pictures up until she married Steve. She hadn't seen this album since she and Steve were making their first photo album together, when she hand picked her favourites out of the album and added it to their new photo album. She takes out the felt covered photo album with the glittery word "Photographs" on the front cover and binding. She opens the book and takes a navigating trail down memory lane. Pictures of her in middle school, pictures of her as a young child, pictures of her in high school. She presses her fingers on one image of her and her old friend in high school. "Look at that hair" she thinks to herself while she is embarrassed to be remembered as someone who used to wear such a hairdo. "When people think of my name, I wonder if this hair is what people remember me with, or if this just sticks out personally to her because it is a photograph of herself." She places her finger on the side of the page to mark where she had gotten up to, and flips the remainder of the pages to the back of the book. To her immediate suprise she finds no images. No images of Steve in the back, the ones from the ladder part of their relationship shortly before getting married. She looks through the second half of pages of the book to find most of the pages blank. About three quarters into the pages, she finds a folded up piece of paper, folded all weird and very small. She takes out the paper and unfolds it. It is a letter addressed to her and it is from Stephani. Your classic traditional high school letter that students would pass to each other. The letter is something that her nearly absent long term memory of high school faintly recalls. A letter from late senior year, talking about random high school meanderings. About how after high school everything will be so much better. How they should one day live together, and get old together. It detailed how men were the root of all evil and all they want from us is babies and dinner. She recalled this letter much clearer now. She remembered distancing herself from Stephani after this letter because she had thought that she may had been hinting towards lesbianism. That always had scared Lisa about Stephani. Lisa wasn't too much a fan of Lesbianism. When she was in highschool she was a prototype hereditary Republican. That's eventually how her and Steve crossed path. All her political viewpoints changed moments after getting serious with Steve about things, and in her mind, maturing. But at this point in high school all she wanted to be was married and with children. Additionally in her mind all Stephani talked about was how men were evil, but yet she never saw her with any boyfriends in all the years she's known her. She supposedly dated an older man once when they were in high school, but Lisa only heard about the stories, never seen or heard the guy in her life. All the signs pointed to Stephani more than likely being a lesbian, but once day Lisa just came right out and asked her. Stephani almost shrugged the idea off of Lisa's lips when she asked. "Absolutely not, why you in love with me?" was her response. Lisa folds the letter in half twice. Doesn't even attempt at trying to get the folding back to how it was. She has long forgotten how to do that. She puts it back into the photo album and closes it. She looks into the box again. She has random books, trinkets and other things that were all hers, but they were things that she seemed to have had a long time ago. Stuff that was packed away in her house. In the basement behind all that gym equipment that Steve bought and never used. It was not stuff that she was activly used in her everyday life. She stood up and stretched. She had no idea what time it was. She peaks down into the box in hopes to find a clock of some sort, but she does not seem to find one. She stands back up and heads towards the doorway. She opens the bedroom door and walks quietly into the living room. There is no light whatsoever in the living room at all. Trying to remember the precise layout of her friends apartment, Lisa holds out her hands and tries to sense her way to the kitchen. She finally finds the kitchen and green LCD lights display 4:48. She feels around the walls and eventually finds a light switch. She flicks it on. To her absolute amazement, like Stephani's bedroom, Stephani's kitchen is full of cardboard boxes. No labels on the side of these boxes like there were with the boxes in the bedroom. Lisa doesn't even try to look through these boxes, she goes back into the living room to wake up Stephani. She goes into the living room, finds the lighswtich in there and nothing happens. She goes towards the front door, but she could feel that there was stuff randomly laid out on the floor in places where other things were earlier. She makes it to the front door of the apartment and turns those lights on. Bare. Nothing like what she had come home to with Stephani earlier. No chain linked fence with a fake plant going through it. No plants hanging on the wall growing onto the fence. Nothing but boxes. Random shoes and stuff tossed about throughout the apartment. Like Stephani had just moved in. But her stuff is in boxes as well. She walks back into the living room and looks around with the light provided from the front hall light. She looks around and sees there is a lamp sitting on the floor but is is not plugged in. She goes over to it and takes over to the side wall and plugs it in. This lamp has the luxury of a lampshade on it, it is not a blinding light like the one in the bedroom. She looks over to the area where there used to the be the pull-out couch. She almost is not suprised to not see her friend Stephanie sleeping on a nice pull out couch that she saw her go to sleep on last night. This is the strangest day of her entire life. There is no doubt about that. She sits down on the floor and leans her head against the wall. She feels faint, almost like she is going to pass out. She recollects herself for a few moments before getting back up and walking back towards the bedroom she had just emerged from. Halfway down the hallway she notices another door. A nice place like this, this has to be a spare bedroom. This has to be a two bedroom place. The door is shut tight. She is tempted to open it to see if Stephani is sleeping inside, but she figured knocking lightly on the door would be the most polite thing to do in a crisis sitatuion like this. She taps three times on the door. Twice lightly and the last being a little rough. She hears a little rustling in the room behind the door. The rustling stops and Lisa considers knocking again. Just as she is about to tap on the door once again, the door swings open. An extremlely rough looking Stephani, with her hear all thrown off to one side ,and her makeup that she forgot to take off smeared peers out the door at Lisa. "What!?" "What!? Pardon my language but what the hell is going on?" she asks Stephani "I got to sleep last night in your bedroom and I wake up to a room full of boxes with my stuff inside of them. What the hell this is freaking me out!" "Are you high?" Stephani asks her. "Not to be rude or anything girl but its not even 5 o'clock and your waking me up on the first night of our new place together on some wild story telling nonsense. I need to sleep Lisa, go to bed, clear you head. Do something, but don't wake me up every again before 8 am." Stephani slams the door. With her mouth standing wide open, Lisa stands there with a look of shock on her face. What did Stephani just say to her. It did not make any sense. She walks back into the living room. Stands in the middle of the floor, in a room with no furniture, only boxes and rolled up rugs, and other random decorative things. She looks into the kitchen, and notices a stack of papers sitting on the end of the counter. She walks over to it and picks it up. She looks it over, and it is a lease. She starts to read it over, page through it, and when she gets to the end she sees that both Stephani and her names are on it, and her signature with yesterdays date is on the bottom of the last page. Lisa almost fell over, unconscious. What has happened? She plops the lease back onto the counter and goes back into the bedroom. Now she is on a mission. If this is where she resides, shes going to get the bottom of this. She goes into the room where she had put her stuff before going to sleep. Sees her shoes and her purse. She goes through her purse and grabs her car keys. She looks at the set of keys. She recognises all but one key, but she has a hunch she know where that key is for. Also her house keys for her house that she owns with Steve are missing. There is no key to her In Laws house either. She looks up and out the window. A smirk comes over her face for a moment. As crazy as this all seems to her, she has a moment of calming tranquility when she has the thought of the possilbity that she may never have to speak to her in laws again. That makes her happy more than anything. But then suddenly it hits her. She goes into the bathroom and pulls off her shirt and her brazier. She looks in the mirror at her chest. Her areolas are almost the same tone of her skin, her breasts visually larger than they were yesterday. She picks up her brazier and looks at the size. Its not even the size she recalls buying. Interesting. She puts it back on and puts her shirt back on as well. Then she undoes the button on the front of her pants, and unzips them. She pulls off her pants and looks at the back of her legs. No varicose veins. Her legs are smooth as can be. The hair isn't even long enough to shave, but she had a sudden urge to do it anyway. She resisted, put her pants back on and grabbed her keys and headed towards the front door. She looks out the living room window to see what it looks like out side. She doesn't seem any obvious signs of it being too cold, so what she is wearing now, along with some shoes will do just fine for going out in. She tries the orphan key on the ring and sure enough it unlocks the front door to the apartment. She still has her Volkswagon keys, so she isn't expecting any suprises. She walks outside and into the parking lot. Shes standing on the second to last star of the staircase that lowers from the porch area to the parking lot. She is overlooking the cars in the parking lot. She looks down at her keys again. That is a Volkswagon key on her keyring, those stick out like yellow cars on the highway. She scans the parking lot looking for ANY jetta, even older. Having a group of dancing midgets wouldn't suprise Lisa at this given time. She went to sleep last night and woke up in a different world. She wonders if she didn't have to go to the bathroom so bad in the middle of the night if she would have woken up to the life she thought she knew. She does not see a black Jetta. Just before she turns around to go back in the house out of the corner of her eye, she sees a Navy Blue Jetta sitting out on the road in front of the complex next to 'her' building. She walks slowly down the length of the parking lot. She looks around her as she walks, anyone who may see her would think she's a drunk, or someone strung out on drugs who cannot remember where they parked the night before. She gets to the side of the Jetta parked on the road. Taking another look around the car and the area around her, she pokes the keys into the lock and twists. The doors pop unlocked. "Blue?" she says outloud. Why blue? She sits in the passenger seat. She opens the glove compartment. Nothing inside other than the manual for the car, some spare napkins, a few pieces of loose paper with nothing important written on them. A few receipts. One for clothes, one from the department store for what looked like houseware items, but its too hard to tell with all the abbreviations. She looks in the console of the care in between the two front seats. A few random CD's are inside. She picks them up and thought about taking them inside the house, but she realised that she does not have a CD player setup in the room where she has all her boxes. Today must be moving day, Lisa thinks to herself. A day of a new beginning. She puts her head back on the headrest and breathes in a breath of fresh air. She brushes her hands over her face, rubs her eyes a bit, but she quickly opens her eyes and looks at her left hand. There is no wedding ring. In amazment, she blurts out "Oh my god!". For she hadn't noticed until now that she was without a wedding ring. She drops the CDs and they scatter amongt the drivers seat and rear floor of the car and she hops out of the car and goes back into the apartment. She has nearly started running by the time she gets up the apartment door. For a moment she thought, maybe when she goes back in everything will be the way it was last night. But when she gets in its still to the old boxes and the moving in. She goes into 'her' bedroom and rips into her purse. She gets out a smaller purse, a female wallet of sorts and pops it open to get her drivers license out. Her picture, her maiden name. Lisa Douglas. For the first time in her entire life, Lisa Douglas is truly happy. She is happy that she does not have a wedding ring on her finger. She is happy that she does not have Holly. She is happy that she does not feel bad for not feeling bad for not wanting either Steve or Holly in her life right now. For the first time since she has married her authoritative, and overly materialistic husband, Steve, she is happy and the moment and spotlight are on her. The name Douglas has never looked more pristine and ever so benevolent ever in her entire life. She felt like getting the name tattooed across her forehead. She wants to call her parents and tell them that she loves them, but its nearly quarter to six, a little bit too early to be calling her parents. Lisa looks up for a moment, she stills knows their number by heart. She puts both her wallet and her keys back into her purse and stands up and puts her hands on her hips, like Stephani would. She looks around the room. Shakes her head in approval, not a bad room for such a beautiful and independent woman like this. She feels like she is having a creative overflow. She had all these wild and crazy ideas of things that she could do to the room. She never could place things together like that in head, but right now at this moment she is having white heat in a creative mind. She envisioned wild drapery, a canopy over her bed, and lights in her walk-in closet, bordering the door. She turns to the bed and pushes off her comforter on to the other side of the floor. She picks up the boxes that she had opened and she put each of them on the bed. She took out her clothes and started organising them into piles. She then moved the things into the closet one pile at a time. She tied her hair up and broke a sweat moving stuff around and reorganising things. Moving things to another spot, switching it around. She had a great time doing it. No constantly checking on anyone, not cooking anyone breakfast, not getting ready for a day of chores for Steve; nothing. She has a great surge of energy running through, because in the world she is used to she is used to be flying around the kitchen at two hundred miles an hour at this time. Today she is organising her clothes before six o'clock in the morning and to her there is no place else she wants to be. She is a little surprised that all those clothes she unpacked only filled up a small fraction of the spacious walk in closet. For a moment she considered redoing the way she has things in place, with all this extra space. She could put all kinds of other things in the closet aside from clothes. She however decides not to, because she figures she has the rest of her life to do it. Another wave of happiness washes over her. The grabs a few mores boxes of stuff and sorts them out as well. She put a few things on the floor, that she either wanted to hang or put somewhere else. With a few boxes left to go through she walks back into the living room to take a look around at what all is actually all out there. She shes a few things that she think may belong to her. There is a nightstand that is a very light coloured wood that has blue handles on each of the two drawers. She would assume that if she once owned a silver Volkswagon Jetta, that was black and now she has a blue one, this nightstand is more than likely hers. She walks over to it and opens the top drawer. Underwear, braziers, a few sports bras. The match the size of the one she has on now. She sizes up the nighstand, takes a step back. Bends down low to the floor and touches her touches, crouches down and pops back up. Approaches the nighstand and on her mark she hiked it up and carried it into her bedroom. When she got into the bedroom, she took the contents of the drawers and just loosely tossed them onto one of many open shelves in the walk in closet. She then took her purse from up off the floor and dumped its entire contents into the now empty top drawer of her nighstand. All kinds of random stuff fell out of her purse. All sorts of very important things fell out as well. Again her wallet, keys, checkbook, random paper and coin money, gum, breathe mints, cigarettes, a lighter, lip gloss, tampons. She looked at the few $20's and $5's and singles that had fallen into the drawer. She picked it up and arranged it all the same way and in reverse order of denomination. She's confused on a majoir element of her life. How does she pay rent, how does she get money. How did she get this money that she just arranged? She looks to her checkbook to possibly get an idea of where here money is coming from, and more importantly what she does to get money. Where does she work. Her checking accounts transactions are pretty slim at best. Hardly any withdrawls, many deposits. All her major deposits seem to be deposited twice a month. Respectable amounts, but they are from Stephani. She will have to find out what is going on about this without downright coming out and asking Stephani why she is giving her several thousand dollars a month. Is Stephani her empoloyer? She doubted it, but without hesititation she is ready for anything to be her new reality. Her biggest concern is that she is getting paid, or has been up until now with possible experience in things that she may have no idea how to do. This poses great worry. Hopping around the room unpacking didn't seem like the greatest thing in the world to do anymore. Lisa sits down on the floor and sits in a couched position, with her head resting on her knees. She wonders what will become of her. SItting here in the room, she has absolutely no idea, none whatsoever about what work might be like, and if she is responsible for a great amount of things taht would cost Stephani money, or people, customers. What if she is a janitor? A veternarian? A clown in a nation-wide circus parade? She hears rustling in the other room and she looks at the wall separating her from the noise. She is anxious, hoping that Stephani will come into the room and start a random conversation with her that will answer all the questions she is in need of knowing. The noises get more frequent and less spaced apart. Lisa gets up from the floor and stands up, waiting for Stephani to come through the door to talk to her. She waits for a little while, nobody comes. She hears rustling around in the bathroom, across the hallway from her room. The sound of the shower starts up, leaving Lisa to deal with several minutes of uncertainty. She spends those minutes rearranging things that she had scattered about in the room. Stephani is in the shower for the better part of a half hour. Lisa finds places to put things in her closet, finds homes for her perosnal items that were resident to a cardboard box up until this moment. The sounds from the bathroom retire and she hears the rustling resume in the room next to hers. In the bedroom of her friend who was quite upset with her earlier for waking her up. Something that Lisa doesn't really feel any regret for doing. When she woke up, she was experiencing feelings that she had never felt before. There are not words to explain how she felt when she woke up. Its hard to conceptualise, waking up with all the knowledge and information that you had the day before, but when you wake, you wake to a completely different person. One can find themselves in a quite difficult situation in any given day of their lives but when it comes to the situation of being another person, but still the person you remember, one finds that to be quite difficult to deal with. Its hard to figure out where to act and were to observe. The changes of anyone understanding Lisa's story about what "really happened" is far-fetched at best. Nothing can prepare Lisa for the conversation she thinks she will have with Stephani. She feels that she will sense something is up right away and that Lisa will not be able to beat-around-the-bush with creative conversation to slip out of this. Stephani opens the door with a towel wrapped around her and her hair and body still dripping wet from the shower. Chris is sitting in his living room, alone, without a clue as to what to do with his situation about Tony. With is apartment already cleaned up from the visitor, Tony, Chris goes to his desk that is rather messy despite his very clean apartment. His 'organizational' skills are very loose, even in their finest hour. He sits down at his desk and looks at the stacks of unpaid bills, unopened letters, unopened greeting cards. Overwhelming thoughts of disorganisation set in and for a moment he considered just pulling his large garbage can from the kitchen and dumping everything into it. The pens, pencils, notebooks, mail and other stuff that has taken a large amount of his desks space and turned into their personal lounge. The desk was an equivalent to the kind of lifestyle that Chris represented. Disorganised, ungraced, unplanned, sporatoric, and chatoic. So many times has Chris sat down and "wiped his slate clean" and tried to start over with his organisational properties that run deep in his mind, but shallow in the wading pool in working function. The back of his desk, the side facing the wall, the drawers are all half-incarnated ideas of ways of new organisational methods that were used for the remainder of the day the system was implemented and died out slowly afterwards. Like many of the other things in his life, nothing sticks in place. Nothing stays the way that Chris would like them to have gone. He sets something up to do be done a certain way, but the moment that something in regards to drugs or alcohal is brought up, it always seems to take precedence. Take succession, take the place of whatever new and intricate system that he has put in place. Fed up with the multiple failures of his life, Chris finds its in himself to do it one more time. He pounds his left fist on his desk and says "Fuck it" rather loud. He stands up quickly and goes to the kitchen and opens his pantry door and drags the foot pedal metallic garbage can and drags it to the front of the desk. He sits back down and takes all the large papers and mail that has accumulated on the 'writing area' of his desk and stacks it all on somewhat of a piled manner. He then takes the half organised piles of old paid bills, old letters, old cards and puts those in the pile of unorganised things. He takes the bottom drawer out of his desk, pulling up on an angle when he gets pulled out all the way, so he can actually remove the desk drawer from the desk itself. He sets the deep drawer on the floor. This drawer has large stacks of unused paper, notebooks and other stuff that has been tossed on top of the organised piles in an unorthodox fashion. He works the stuff to the side of the drawer, affording a little more space inside and then he removes the rest of the drawers in the desk and dumps their contents into the drawer removed on the floor. Putting the drawers back into the desk after dumping them, he thought would go through all his stuff, and for the 'last time' he will organise his life and he will maintain it, keeping his life in order. Little does it occur to him that the desk is not the reason he is out of order, but rather his lifestyle of constant and perpetual drug use has dethroned any sort of motivation he may have had and replaced it with motivation to do drugs, find more drugs, and to untangle the mysteries of who to do drugs with. This consumed most of his days, and when he had off, he almost planned on trying to find drugs and people compatiable with them. When Chris started doing drugs, they gave him a rush that was worth writing home about. He recalls being a young teenager, in his early stages of hardcore marijuana abuse. Back in the day when he would get a full body buzz, would laugh uncontrollablly, and when he would have conversations with his associates and friends about the proper ways to, and improper ways not to smoke. Discussings matters that were concering their everyday lives. Like who was responsible for providing the circle of smoke with stuff to drink, stuff to eat, stuff to laugh at. If someone was providing a smoking circle at their own residence, were they also obligated to provide other bare essentials, or was this something that one would require others to provide, seeing as how they were already providng the circle of friends with the illegal drugs? These were all issues that concerned them deeply. Concerned them like abortion concerned Republicans, the way affirmative action concerned Democrats. The way having a clean atmosphere concerned the Green party, and the way that 'natural order' concerned the habits of purists. Time passed however, and Chris and his associates have matured in their concerns. Now instead of being concerned about having something to drink or eat while they were using marijuana, they motioned to more important elements of happy drug use. Like who was all brining pot, and how much they would be able to stockpile up for one evenings consumption. Smoke blunts, smoke out hand made bongs that someone created and thought up while under the influence. Bongs made out of 2 litter empty bottles of soda pop. Sealed with wall putty, made with old imcomplete ratchet sets and screens that were in the sinks in public bathrooms. In fact before Chris and his associates were able to steal all the screens from the petrol station down the road from his apartment, the management of the building locked up the bathrooms and demanded that patrons ask for a key in order to use the bathroom. They never got in trouble for taking them, but the owner had a pretty good that he and his associates were the ones taking all of them but was never able to prove it. Again they're ways improved, matured. At least in their eyes. They got a point where smoking out of a handmade bong was 'silly' and 'for kids' who had nothing better to do. Then the ways of their world went along the lines of seeing who would purchase the biggest baddes water pipe from any of the handfuls of head shops that lingered the South Eastern Wisconsin area. Then they all got their own personal glass pieces that they would carry around like a student carries around lunch money. In fact a few of the younger teens who where not yet 18, would carry their glass pieces in their pockets while they were in school. They would oftentimes go to Chris' house right after school and they would smoke until they had to be home for the evening. They didn't eat, they didn't drink, they didn't even talk sometimes. They would just smoke, smoke more, smoke untill you couldn't see across the room. Conversations that they had while doing this would have included, but was not limited to, talking about smoking alone was for 'hardcore drug addicts' and smoking in a group is the only way to enjoy the burn. Within two months of this conversation, as there were many like this with varying combinations of people in a rotationing evolution of seating patterns, they were almost all smoking alone in some matter or degree. Their smoking circle was like watching a group of kindergardners playing musical chairs. Chris had so much enjoyment out of smoking. It became almost what he was known for, and people started hanging out at his house without really knowing much about his or anyone else there, but they knew there was a very good chance they would be able to catch a buzz, just so long as they were in the building. To the younger batch of teens, the 'slow' days at Chris' apartment, meaning there was not a 'dedicated' smoking sessions going on in the apartment, whether there was more coming in soon or if they were preoccupied after a serious burn over a video game of some sort, or playing a game of cards, where more than the teenager could fantasise about smoking during the course of a single day. Most of the 'regulars' wouldn't even know the peple who were all in attendance, but their tenure over any of them kept them at peace with the surroundings, and in combination with the heavy thick cloud of smoke hazed over the room, none of it mattered anyway. Who any one was, who they happened to be fucking, or who they may or may not be friends with, just so long as they had the fire and they brought it with them to the apartment, you usually got in without too much of a hassle. This came to a head when one night some younger kids where over at the apartment and they were somewhat of an inexperienced group of smokers who didn't know much about the culture that existed within these four walls and four rooms, and sure the hell didn't know much about smoking a massive amount of marijuana in the middle of the night on the weekend when everyone else has off an is at home, or parying themselves. One of Chris' neighbors had called the police for a noise complaint and when they came to the apartment to see what the fuss was all about they clearly saw more than just noise. They smelt and felt and could visually see the smoke that lingered in the apartment when Chris answered the door, not that they couldn't see the smoke had had lingered out into the hallway from people coming and going from the apartment. Had Chris not been in so good with is landlord, who would purchase weed from Chris himself, he would have been evicted. Drug people always see eye to eye when it came to situations like this. At least the ones tied to each other like they were. Not even the responsibly of being a business manager would take precedence over the use of drugs. Chris however did have an issue with the state after this little ordeal. Two of the teens in the apartment who had pipes on them, and a little bit of marijuana on them fell into the responsibility court that existed on Chris' turf. Plus with the visual conception of their activities, the police were able to enter the house without a warrant, as they saw illegal activity from where they were standing in the 'public domain'. Chris earned himself 4 parapheniallia tickets that night for two bongs that nobody had accounted for, and two glass pipes which were of his possession. After that had went down, Chris got a little more conscious about what went down in his apartment, and moreso who was all going to be in attendance. At first he had enforced a rule to not have anyone over who was younger than legal adult age, but that ended shortly after that, because one of the teens who started to frequent the apartment had a respectable connection for good priced smoke and that always took control of the situation. This is right about the time Tony introduced Chris to cocaine. It was somewhat of an interesting scenarion on how this came to be. Tony had gone to the city to get some weed for Chris' and he came back with some snow in a bag, but he didn't tell Chris about it at first. Instead while he was on the packing duty of the pipe, he put a small amount of the cocaine on top of the bowl, discusing it with a little bit of weed. Chris reacted to the taste, but Tony said "Not the best tasting burn in the world, but it was cheap!" Chris just agreed and continued to burn with him. When Chris metnioned that he felt extremely higher than he had been on burn for quite some time, that is when Tony told him that they just smoked a bowl that had been snowed. Chris was very upset at first because he had always been on an 'organic' drug habit. He would always smoke weed, he would want to be buried with a blunt in his suits breast pocket, and he had occasionally done mushrooms. He was at that time not a fan of 'chemical' drugs, and he shunned them pubically, privately and swore an abstience towards them. Twenty minutes after they had smoked that snow capped bowl Chris posed a question about how much cocaine had costed, and how many times Tony has done it. When Tony told him that he had been doing it for a few weeks, and that he did it via inhalation through the nasal cavity and rarely smoked it on bowls unless he was letting someone else try it who hadn't done it before, interest started to create itself. As if there were not enough horrible thoughts that raced through Chris' mind throughout the day he would further to motion towards first a social, then a recreational, then a addict level of cocaine usage. There was a even a point when the 'guy who would never any chemical drugs, not even for money', and the one who 'wanted to buried with a blunt' didn't smoke weed for a few weeks because there wasn't a 'good reason' to get burn. You didn't get the high you wanted when you were on blow, and without buying it you could get that much more cocaine if you used the money towards the white powder instead. This injected a rancid amount of character twists to Chris' personality. Many started to take notice of such things. His work had suspended him because he was worthless at work for the onset of his cocaine habits. It was much like his onset stages of smoking weed except with marijuana you had a great deal of control of who you were while you were on it, even tho at first it was a little chatoc. Even when he first started to smoke and he would giggle like a school girl over the stupidest of things, and would have a full body buzz, he still had a good grasp on what was going on and despite appearing to be pretty dense, he had it on lock down compared to how he was when he started to do blow. He would go to work, strung out from the night before, oftentimes with little to no sleep prior to the shift. Sleep is near impossible after a long night of slicing and dicing powerdry balls of white into dust and inhaling them through his nose. Tony had never gotten into cocaine too much, has he never would hold a job long enough to buy a socially respectable amount of it, but he did do it and when he would find the opportunity to get his hands on a deal, or a chance to fuck someone over on a purchase of it, he would jump all over the opportunity and without the slightest bit of hesitation he would take advantage of anyone who would happen to have money in their hand. One night Tony had a done a bunch of cocaine, all free, from a bag he had pinched, or better called scooped out of someones purchased bag. He hung out with the victims for a while, did a portion of their blow with them in a socially discusted manner and then made up some excuse about why he had to leave. In reality he just wanted to leave to go do the stolen blow he got from them because they were not doing it quick enough for him. No matter what anyone would try to debate and pass off as truth, people got a tolerance for any drug they did as much as Tony or Chris would. He rolled on the people and got into his automobile and ventured off into the night. He didn't even make it halfway up the road, just into the trim of the petrol station where they used to steal screens from, where he pulled over and wrestled around in the backseat looking for a CD cover to cut up on some blow. He didn't have a razor blad or anything that close to sharp on his person so whe used his drivers license to bash the power down into an inhalable line. He did one, he did two, and then he thought driving a little more would be he best thing for him to do. He didn't put the removed coaine back into the bag he had the stash in, rather he just set the powered CD case on the passenger seat of his car and drove off. He got a little down the road and realised that the blow started to drift, and was getting near the edge of the case. He pulled over again and decided that it would be easier to just do the rest of the cocaine instead of trying to channel it back into the bag. He ripped the remaining four lines, a little more than he had anticipated, and not too much it was cut up any good so he had a thick and damp wads of cocaine strung into the hair in his nose. Bit by bit, each time he would sniff while driving a little more would break off and either straight fall out of his nose, or back into his nasal cavity. Driving became near impossible, and before anyone would see Tony again, he would be admitted to the hospital, go to rehab, and be put in jail. Chris never found out that night what truly happened. Tony insisted that he simply swurved lanes and hit the oncoming car in the oppsite lane. However Chris never got the real reason why Tony ended up the hospital, because Tony walked away from the accident nearly unharmed, he was treated for his overdose on cocaine. He didn't want this to get back to Chris however, because just became he didn't have a car for a while, had a hell of a legal issue with the state and lost his licence for a year and half, Tony still wanted to have the luxury of knowing that the next night he would be able to do any and everything he wanted would be on the train of doing cocaine, and not alone. With the one person who he knew he would be able to run the gauntlet on when it came to the next purchase. Chris and Tony contined their cocaine habits nearly where they had left them the night before Tony's accident. Had he not been on a 15 mile per hour road, his life could possibly have ended. Chris and Tony wanted to bury the demons from the past and move on to be bigger and better. Tony and Chris started hanging out a lot more than they did, and alone. They figured the less amount of people they did cocaine with would be the best thing for them, socailly and financailly. They started to do a bunch of blow and go to the bars when they turned legal drinking age. This is when Chris met Lin. The night that Chris had met her, he was under the influence so much from the cocaine and overserving of alcohal that he couldn't even remember what they had all talked about initally, but it was all magic words to the extremly drunk woman named Lin, who was an illegal perosn in the bar, but only by six months. They had eventually got her to come back to Chris' car to do a bunch of cocaine with them before heading on over to the next bar. The trio had walked into the bar and only Tony would make it to the actual bar and order a drink. Chris and Lin had gone back to the car to do more cocaine and to fondle each other in the back seat. It was the first night that Lin did cocaine, so she wasn't too thrown off when she sexually seduced Chris, who was unable to perform, due to his inability to achieve an erection, a direct side effect of his continual and overdoseable levels of cocaine consumption. Life pretty much went on like this in a traditional fashion up until the present day. Tony was able to keep his driving down to a bare illegal minimum while Chris and Lin's relationship blossomed, wilted, blossomed again, and wilted and died off. Chris and Lin were indeed still together and Chris' introduction to cocaine and heavy marijuana use brought her to the state that she is in, this present time. She's a super smoker and has not been without pot for almost an entire year. She went with Chris and Tony down to the city and gotten in good with the person they get their smoke from, and she got in real good with the person when Chris and her were one one of their many 'breaks'. So close, that she wasn't even paying for weed for a while there, all she had to do was show much she appreciated the notion. Usually inolving sexual related matters, with oftentimes more than those two. Chris, nor Tony had ever really found out about what really went on between the two. Tony had often joked about it, but Lin had no idea that the origin of these claims were merely thoughts in the back of Tony's cloudy head. Before long however, Lin was almost fully moved into Chris' apartment. Bouncing back and fourth between his place, her parents house, and the drug dealers house in the city. She never kept things of hers at his house, as there was never a chance that the same things or anything for that matter would be in tact when she came back. When and if Chris did something that she did not approve of, meaning he asked her to do something on a night she already had plans on fucking the drug dealer, or someone else random from the random bar she may have been at, she would simplly declare a little 'break' for her and Chris. Meaning she would 'break up' with him for whatever amount of time she needed until she was 'free' again from the grasp of whomever might have captivated her attention for the time. All these thoughts and more came to a head when Chris was cleaning off his desk. There were random pieces of paper scattered around the desk. Some had quotes that he had thought he heard right from other people. He used to like to inspire himself from the words of others. He used to be all about lyrics of music, but his tastes in music had motioned towards a more electronical force, where the lyrics were not the focal point of the music, rather the sound of it was. This mirrored his lack of attention to detail, and how his depth had really shallowed over the years. He used to have notebooks, and even found it while clearing out the desk, that had lyrics of the music he had liked since he was a young teenager. A simple three subject notebook, the cover had been taped numerous times to keep from falling out. He even had duct tape on the binding of the clean notebook in order to keep it together as it has been moved quite a few times in the years he has had it. Dumping the last things into the drawers, which had long overfilled and spilt out onto the floor, Chris finds an unopened letter from his Grandmother. He opens up it up and reads it. The date is from nearly six months ago. He recalls taking this letter out of his mailbox and how he had intended on reading it, but never did. Overwhelming waves of remorse flush him, as he reads the letter. The letter had asked him to come to her house, which was only weeks after his Grandfather had died, asking him to come help clean out the basement of his Grandfather's stuff. She had told him that she would pay him to help her because he is the closest relative. He looks up at the clock, to check the time, as if he would have the nerve to call her now and tell her that he would help her. He couldn't even recall the last time he had contact with his Grandmother. She has been on her own, ever since her husband died. She had expressed love to him and told him that he was a spitting image of her loving, caring and caring husband. How he would grow to be twice as strong and twice as sincere as he was because now he has the spirit of his person in combination with his spirit, and how two heads are better than one. Chris quickly had a thought about how Tony had once said "two 8 balls are better than one." Chris slams down the letter to the desk and screams out "that's it, I'm fucking done." He pulls a memo pad off the pile of stuff compiled on the floor and writes, I WISH I NEVER DID DRUGS, AND YOU WILL NEVER DO THEM AGAIN on it three times, undelrining the bottom line and he tapes it to the wall in the middle of the desk. Where a computer monitor would be at a computer desk. He stood up and eyed up his pile of stuff on the floor. He wanted nothing more than to redo his entire life, and he thought starting with this pile of crap he assumed on the floor would be a great start. He grabs his keys and light spring jacket and heads out the door. Its only a few miles down Brown Deer to the next twenty four hour Walgreens where he can aquire things to organise his desk with, put his life back together, and this is when he can start focusing on not doing drugs anymore. He has a hard feeling in his head. The doubts and reasons not do to this start to come tackling in on him. Quitting drugs was too much of a obsticale for him to tackle. It would mean a complete reroute of everything he has done up until this point from over a decade of heavy usage and disregard to any other form of life, and during certain times. It would require trying to convert his current roster of loser friends into someone who he doesn't even know. He's played the German version of Whisk so much while either drunk or on drugs that if he did it any other time, especially sober, that it would immediately rekindle any thoughts of the old him, the him he would do anything to leave behind. Getting in his car, Chris looks in his ashtray to find a blunt that he must of sparked and never finished. He pulls the blunt from his ashtry and the smell of burnt blunt papers and ashed weed fill the his nasal cavity. He thought about maybe tossing the blunt out the window and never smoking again, starting absolutely right now. But in his mind that would be the equivalent of throwing out money out the window. So he put the blunt to his lip, still a little cold from sitting out in the metal slot in the ashtray. Smoke shoots out the end of the blunt after he sparks it, and a puff of smoke emerges in front of Chris' face when he takes the first, but he sucks the cloud back into his lungs, inhales deep and holds in for minute. He quickly starts the car and travels out the of the parking lot of his apartment, headed eastbound on Brown Deer Road. Soon as his front tires hit the road, he exhales his held hit of the blunt and starts coughing like something horrible out of a Canadian health commercial against lung cancer. The coughing does not sidetrack his concentration on taking the rest of this blunt to the dome and drinking to this destination. Braked at a stop light, Chris is a suddenly hit with an extreme shot of paranoia, as a Menomonee Falls cops pulls up next to his car at the intersection. The cop looks over and sees the car filled with all the smoke from the blunt. The light turns green and for a moment both vehicles hesitate off the line. Chris figured that if he didn't go before the cop he would get pulled over for sure, so he starts to creep through the intersection headed towards Milwaukee. The cop soon follows. They are the only two on the main drag of Menomonee Falls, and when they get through the intersection, the officer without using his signal turns into the lane that Chris is driving in and starts to ride his ass a little bit. These were tactics used quite frequently by the Menomonee Falls police department. If they couldn't get you for drunk driving, couldn't pin something on you with the naked eye, cos the smoke could very have well been cigar or cigarette smoke, they would often follow a car to the point of illegal distance. They would often get so close to the person in front of them that they could not see their headlights in their rear view mirror. This would almost always cause the driver in front of them to swurve even a little bit, but as long as the tires slipped even closely to either line of the side of the road, the police would then have a reasonable cause to search the vehicle of the person who is at the polices mercy. If the police would perhaps find that the driver was a middle aged woman, or a person with a child, or an eldery citizen, then the police would simply let them go. But in the off chance, that the police run your license and you have anything other than a slight traffic offense, your easy prety for these amatuer cops to earn their rank, earn the respect within the force, and to spread fear of them on the street. The police has been so institutionalised that the police chief would try almost not let them leave his or her district because it would spread a wildfire of misjudgment, misconduct and misbehaviour throughout the rest of the state, and that was something that the Village did not need. Eventually the cop shook off Chris' tail. These were the golden years for people who broke the law. Menomonee Falls bordered Milwaukee and Washington Counties. Meaning that as long as you got out of the county, you were safe. If you were unlucky enough to get to the other side of the fence, then you were fair game for getting trampled on, and trampled on is exactly what you would get done to you had you not been in accordance to the laws that the police officer looking in your direction believed in. Soon as Chris' got past the on ramp for interstate 45 the cop hit his blinker, he's at the end of his jurisdiction. Better to just shoo off onto the highway and pretend that it was the their intention in the first place. Chris' testicles felt like they were starting to come up through his throat, so a few deep breathes of fresh air with the window open, Chris is almost shaken of the fear that just controlled his life for the last two minues that seemed like two hours, weeks or months depending on what angle you were looking at the situation from. Chris scrambles around on the floor for the blunt he partially put out and shoved under his driver seat in order to keep a little bit of his pride in the event he was pulled over and harrassed by the police. He finally finds the blunt which had burned unevenly causing a big chunk of it to become unsmokable. This wasn't the biggest concern to Chris however, as he has promised himself he was going to make a change. When Chris arrives at Walgreens its not to his suprise to see that the ambience of the neighborhood has changed. In Menomonee Falls just a few moments ago there were only two cars on the road, nearly nobody walking on the streets and you could almost hear the hum of the neon lights that hung for the local business. Once you pass 124th street, once you enter Milwaukee County, the world comes back to life. There are more people walking on the streets than there are driving in Menomonee Falls on Appleton Avenue the day of the Independance Day parade. More traffic on the roads than a distant suburb of Chicago, and more people out selling crack than any other city in the state. He enters the building. Store security is apprehending someone who looks like they store something, as the security people were removing things from his pockets and setting them on the counter where there were also cigarettes a pager and other random perosnal effects. Chris went to the stationary aisle and started to look things over. A desk organiser, a letter opener, a letter tray, paper trays, all other sorts of random things for the desk were all accumulated on top of each other in the aisle while Chris was still looking for more things that he could use. He got rubberbands, binder clips, and memo pads with a sticky adhesive strip. It takes him two trips the check out. Chris sticks out like a store like a pair of inverted dice. In a store with patrons buying soda, a bag of chips, candy, condoms or cigarettes, Chris purchases over 60 dollars in random office supplies. He finds himself carrying four bags, two extremly heavy to his car. He pops his trunk, loads his stuff into it and heads back to his apartment where he can sort out his life. Upon arrival at his apartment, things immediately start to seem off. Halfway up the stairs the intense smell of mulberry invading the hallway leading up to his door. Maybe Lin was in attendance, she must have a spare key that Chris doens't know about. He opens the door to find something that nearly shocked him. He looks over at his desk, his living room, his kitchen. All jet black. Jet black furniture, jet black desk, jet black appliances in his apartment. His entertainment center is a painted black wood with a shiney finish, with glass doors. He drops the stuff he bought from Walgreens at the opening of the door and walks in, the door slamming up against the bags of purchased things. Something definitely broke inside one or more of the bags, but Chris does not seem to care. His desk, once a piled mess of papers and drawers that were pulled out and dumped out on to the floor are all now completely organised. The things in the bags from the Walgreens were aleady on his desk, higher quality, better organised than anything he can dream up. He runs to his bedroom. All black. Black bed, black comforter, black covers on down pillows. No sign this is his stuff, no sign of.. Where are the drugs? He scurries to the bottom of his bed and pulls out, pornography magazines. Nothing horrible, Playboy, but nonetheless its not the one hundred plus dollars in cocaine in a bag, or his glass pipes, or any of his marijuana. In complete and udder shock, Chris was back to the black furnished living room that his key somehow seemed to unlock. He was almost waiting for someone else to come into the aparmtent and ask him what he was doing in their place. He checked the bathroom and spare bedroom but saw nobody or a sign of anything. He walks back to the desk which is heavily organised, looks at the spot on the wall where he put the memo pad with his pledge to stop doing drugs. Instead of finding his paper taped to the wall, he found a small wood plauge with a silver plate, on it which read in signature-esque typeface. "The only sacred thign on earth is the intergrity of your own mind" by Ralph Emmerson.