Hello there! I am back (sort of)

I don’t know if anybody is still here, and I’m honestly a bit doubtful of it because of the time that’s passed since I updated this blog.

I was a teenager when I began writing this story, and all of the other sims 3 stories that I wrote, and back then it was something I loved so much, in fact, I still think about Dustland Fairytale now even so many years later. The short of it is though, I will never finish this story. It’s been too long, I’m too removed from it and I think that I made too many mistakes to ever fix it. I can’t go back and try to keep on doing something that I did when I was a kid, trying to muster up the same enthusiasm for something that doesn’t give me the same joy that it used to.

Really what killed it for me was life getting in the way. When I finished college and got my first “real” job there just wasn’t the time to write and play sims anymore, nor was there the motivation because my real life was so exciting and different. No longer was I the anxious girl who would sit in her bedroom every night and lose herself in a fictional universe, so I didn’t need my stories anymore. I regret leaving it unfinished, but, alas, it’s how it’s supposed to be, I guess.

In case you were wondering, Jack and Jolene were supposed to end up getting together, and then eventually being forced apart again as her quest to find her son proved to be more important than this relationship with a slightly dysfunctional man. A lot of it is written, there are a lot of blank pages in between, and I considered just publishing what I’d done so many times but eventually just decided against it. I simply can’t justify putting something out there that doesn’t make me proud.

Anyway, what I’m really here to say is that I’m writing again. I found myself telling my friends all about the stories I used to engross myself in when I was growing up, and I remembered how much I loved to do that. I’m in my late twenties now, I hadn’t written a thing for so long – and, honestly, I went to two fortune tellers who told me I should write because it’s good for my soul, so, make of that what you will. I’m back.

I’m keeping it simple this time, no crazy plots or twists and turns, just a story about a girl who grows up not unlike the way that I did, just surviving teen-hood and navigating the challenges of love and friendship in tandem with her own crippling self doubt. Yes, I’m using sim pics to illustrate it, because it would feel weird not to, and yes, I’m now playing the sims 4. If any of my old readers are still here and would like to check it out, I’d love you to. It’s different from DF in a lot of ways, mostly because I’m different now, but if you like it then It’d be great if you could follow along as I publish it. I haven’t been this excited about writing in a very long time, so this feels quite special to me.

Here it is: https://luckygirlstory.wordpress.com/

I hope each one of you is doing well, I miss you all.

Hannah x

Part 3: Chapter Two

The air in Mount Pleasant was thick like molasses. A heavy, dense heat oozed through Charleston and over the Wando River that June that hung around for weeks. Even at night Jolene would lie in bed with the windows thrown open, her skin glazed with sweat and her hair wet from a cold bath, and sleep still didn’t come. She hadn’t slept through the night yet, not since she’d arrived and it was hard to tell whether it was the heatwave or her trauma that was to blame. Even the Valentines seemed to be struggling, although in true South Carolina fashion they hid it a lot better than she did. They’d been bred from old southern blood, adapted to the torrid summers, even managed pleasant conversation on the porch in comfortable linens while Jolene fanned herself furiously with a newspaper and fantasized about the dry summers back home.

She discovered after a few days that it was cooler down by the seaside and most tolerable in the evening, so she eventually took to wandering alone by the shore. She liked to watch the water, the way that it glittered in the sunlight and how the little vacant boats bobbed up and down. It was therapeutic in a way, the gentle repetitive motion of little vessels that had nothing to do and nowhere else to be and it helped to imagine herself as one of them. She’d sit on the end of the long, wooden pier and shut her eyes, allowing the water to skim the soles of her shoes as she listened to the gentle burble of the ocean against the posts of the dock and the squawks of swans and seagulls around her. She was doing exactly that one evening when she was suddenly interrupted.

“Hey, there you are.”

She jumped with surprise.

Jack looking as disinterested as ever, was standing halfway up the dock behind her with one hand in his pocket.

She shifted uncomfortably “Were you looking for me?”

“Actually, I wasn’t. I’m on my way to Sullivan’s Island and I just spotted you out here. This where you’ve been disappearing to, huh?”

“I like it out here.” she said, sounding more defensive than she would have liked.

He looked out over the ocean. “It’s a nice spot here, a good place for swimming. Trev and I used to take our dad’s boat out on the really hot days and jump out of it once it got deep enough. The water is nice.I mean, at least it was the last time we went swimming which was I guess, like, the seventies.”

“Yeah well, I can’t swim, so…”

“Is that right?”

“Trust me, I wish I could. I’d do just about anything to escape from this weather.”

Jack laughed. “Are you telling me little miss Arizona, queen of the Mojave desert, can’t take a little South Carolina sun?”

“I feel like I’m breathing treacle.” She told him, and wiped a hand across her sweaty forehead.

“You’re right. It’s hot. I’d almost forgotten that it can get like this out here, it almost makes you miss Vegas, huh? Not. It might not feel like it, but the only difference between here and there is that their air conditioners are better. ” He extended a hand to her “Come on, No point in sitting alone out here. Come with me.”

“To where?” He hauled her to her feet by her wrist.

“With me. To Sullivan’s Island.”

“What is that?”

“It’s an island. There’s something I can show you when we get there.” He had already let go of her and begun to walk back down the dock before he finished his sentence, and Jolene let out a laboured sigh. She jogged after him. “Is it going to take long?”

“Why? Do you need to get back to loitering on the pier by eight?”

“I’m not loitering.” she bickered, glancing back over her shoulder one last time at the pretty boats before they left. The sun was just beginning to set over them now, and Jack turned to follow her gaze, taking in the beautiful scene behind them, the explosion of bright colour across the sky, and she noticed, just for a second the way it cast a warm glow over his face “Hey.” He grinned “Red sky at night…”

~.~.~.~.~

 

Sullivan’s Island wasn’t an island like the kind Jolene had been picturing in her head, which, for some bizarre reason, was something out of The Blue Lagoon with tropical flowers and palm trees bowing over white sand, no, Sullivan’s Island was just a regular town. A town with gas stations and restaurants and rows of pretty houses with neat manicured gardens. As they walked through it, Jack went on and on about its ins and outs, it’s history, but she had stopped listening to him as soon as she spotted the ocean over the tops of the buildings. She was still getting used to looking at the ocean, something that she hadn’t seen before arriving in South Carolina. To everybody else there it was ordinary, but to her it was still pure magic.

He lead her down a small sandy pathway lined with slatted houses with brightly coloured doors and shells on the porches. Long marram grass jabbed into her bare legs as they navigated through increasingly overgrown terrain, and in the distance she could hear the waves crashing against the shore and seagulls squawking as they swooped up and down above the beach houses. She couldn’t see the beach yet, only sense it, the clear, fresh saltiness in the air, the welcoming breeze in her hair.

Jack seemed to be leading her to nowhere. The path was getting more indistinct with every foot she put forward, and there was sand in her shoes and little red dots on her legs from the grass. The beach houses around them had the eroded appearance of driftwood, smoothed down, slightly crooked, but charming all the same with striped beach towels hanging from the porches, sandals strewn on the front steps next to plastic buckets and spades. Warm, inviting light glowed from within them and she could hear the murmur of voices in harmony with the gentle clinking of the chimes and the shells that hung over the doors and windows.

“And here it is.” Jack was saying to her, and she tore her eyes away from the beach cottages to look.

It was a house. Only not a particularly nice one at all. It sat tall and proud in the sand surrounded by what was possibly a white picket fence, only the plants in the garden had been choked by weeds that had overgrown so completely that it was almost entirely concealed beneath them. Slats hung rotten and sideways on the wall, the glass in the windows smashed, tiles from the roof missing, a three-legged chair weathered and half disintegrated lay sideways at the front gate, and lewd graffiti was scrawled on the door. She screwed her face up in disgust just as Jack extended his arm towards it with pride. “This” he announced “Is where I’m going to live.”

Jolene didn’t know what to say, but he seemed genuinely enthusiastic about it.

“I know it looks like shit right now, but I’m going to spent the summer doing repairs I cleared it with mom, she gave me the keys this morning. He swung open the gate and began climbing over long grass and weeds towards the door. Jolene followed dumbly,  wondering how on earth a building so badly damaged could ever be repaired. “This is the house I told you about before” he said as he jiggled the key around in the keyhole. “My parents lived here when they were married, Trev was born here, I was born here, we lived here…” He shoved the door in with his shoulder and it burst open, sending him stumbling inside. “…Until Dad went to Vietnam.” Jolene couldn’t even make out what room she was standing in until the decades of dust that Jack had sent flying upon his entrance had settled. She coughed violently into the crook of her elbow while Jack flicked the light switch. Twice, three times. Nothing happened.

“Power’s out.” He stated.

“You don’t say.” The room was so dark, but Jolene could make out the shape of it still, entirely empty save for a few stones and bricks on the ground which were surrounded by a battlefield of glass from the smashed windows. “What do you mean you’re going to live here?” she asked incredulously.

“Well, since I’ve decided to live in South Carolina indefinitely.” He took several long-legged strides towards a door at the end of the room, he opened it easily and ducked out into a hallway, still talking. She scurried after him. “I can’t live with my mom. I’ve been living independently for so long now that I just can’t.” He ventured up the very unstable looking staircase towards the second floor. “This place is a lot worse than I thought it would be.”

“It’s completely vandalised.” Jolene agreed, waiting for him to reach the landing before she climbed up. She didn’t trust the stairs to hold both of them at once. “Are you sure you can fix all of this?”

“I’ll try to rope Trev in. He’s not talking to me right now, but he’ll come around. He always comes around.” A door on the landing creaked loudly as he pushed it open into what had most likely been a bedroom at some point “It’s gonna be hard work, I’ll admit, but it will be nice to do something practical after all the time wasting I’ve done for the past few years.”

The bedroom was as dusty and dirty as the rest of the house, Jolene noted as she stepped inside after him, only it was brighter with big glass doors with a balcony facing eastwards and allowing some of that beautiful orange light fill the room. Her eyes widened then as she saw the scene outside. There it was; the Atlantic Ocean in all its vast blue glory, the waves gently crawling towards the shore kindling its own symphony while the sea flowed in smoothly from the horizon, scarred with red, the reflection of the sun rippling in the water as it set. She stood with both hands on the window pane just watching it. She had travelled over two thousand miles, and no here she was at the edge of America and she could go no further, she could only dream about what was on the other side beyond the lightning gold horizon.

“What are you looking at?” Jack asked her with enough incredulity to tear her out of her daydream.

“Just the sea” She self-consciously turned away from the window. “It’s beautiful, that’s all.”

He peered out at the vista and shrugged, then dug around in his pants pocket for his cigarettes. “I need to smoke – you know I told myself I’d quit once I got back home but it just hasn’t really been working out.” He slid open the glass doors and placed one careful foot on the balcony’s wooden boards, checking if they would hold his weight. “My mom would probably kill me if she knew I smoked, she thinks it causes blindness and like… gangrene or something. ‘Don’t ever smoke, boys.’” he said in a high pitched impression of his mother’s voice. “’It’s bad for your teeth, your lungs and your wallet!’ Hey, do you want one?” Jolene grabbed one from the box that he had extended to her. It was still warm outside even though the sun had almost vanished. Little stars were beginning to twinkle, and as she inhaled on her cigarette she tried to remember what someone had told her once about stars and how they formed little pictures in the sky. She squinted at them, trying to pick out shapes, but they still looked like regular stars.

“So what do you make of the beach?”

“It’s pretty neat.”

“This is a good spot for swimming. The beach gets real busy further down but this little patch stays quiet mostly. It was always like our own little slice for ourselves.”

Jolene imagined herself waist deep in the turquoise water, turning her face up towards the sun and letting it kiss her eyelids. She smiled with contentment.

“You should come down here with me some days while i’m working, I think you’d like it, you know? There’s a nice path out that way” he pointed to a piece of land that jutted out further than the rest. “Takes about forty five minutes to walk it, but you get the most amazing view. You could just chill out, I think it’d do you some good.” He hesitated. “That is, you know, if you’ve got the time to do all those things before you go home.”

Panic wriggled around inside her at his last words. Home. For the last few moments she’d managed to put her situation to the back of her mind and just focus on the pretty sea and the sand, but he’d gone and reminded her that the happiness and peace she felt on that balcony was temporary, and now all of a sudden it was gone. Where was her home anyway? How was she going to get there? How long until she’d overstayed her welcome in Mount Pleasant and they’d all expect her to go her own way again? She’d be cast out and alone like she’d always been, penniless and miserable. She’d have to start all over again, this time with no leads on Donny’s whereabouts. She felt sick. She took an agitated drag from her cigarette. “Yeah sure.” she said dryly.

“Where do you think you’ll go next?” He asked. “Like, where do you see yourself in six months?” Was he interviewing her for a job or what? She sighed and folded her arms protectively. “I don’t know. I don’t really want to think about it yet.”

“You’ve gotta have some sort of plan though” he went on, because of course, guys like Jack always knew where they were going in life. The Jacks of the world always had a plan. “Or haven’t you got family or friends somewhere in the country that you can stay with?” Because Jacks always had family and friends to pick them up when they fell down. Sure, he walked the tightrope with a blindfold, but he would always have a safety net. Jolene did not.

“Hmm. I don’t know. Let’s talk about something else for a while.” She felt twitchy, her heart drummed with anxiety.

“Um. Okay, well, how are you doing?” He asked her innocently and she shut her eyes tightly, breathing in slowly through her nose. “I’m miserable” she wanted to say. “I’m sad all of the time and I wake up every morning dreading the next thirty years of my life, because if i feel like this every day then it’s not worth living. Whenever I think about Donny and Arkansas I want to die. I’ve lost my appetite and eating anything makes me want to throw up immediately.” But she didn’t say that. She told him that she was fine.

There was a long pause during which he finished his cigarette and flicked it over the railings. “Jolene, if you ever want to talk about anything…” He was trying to be nice, she knew that, but she also knew that if he said the name “Donny” to her at any stage during the next ten seconds that she would have a breakdown. She squeezed her eyes shut trying to force the sour memories out of her head but it was useless, she was already fighting back tears. “… you can talk to me, I mean, what happened it Ark-”

“It’s getting too dark.” She said thickly. “I need to go.” And with that she whirled around and marched through the balcony doors, through the room and down the stairs. She was already outside before he tried to follow her. “Hey Jolene!” he yelled but she didn’t turn around, and he kept calling her as she wrestled through briars and marram grass, not caring about how it poked and scratched her legs. She just wanted to run away from Jack and all the memories he carried with him and everything he knew about her but shouldn’t.

“Where are you going? Do you know the way back?”

“I’ll find it”

“Oh for Christ sake.”

She managed to finally fight through the overgrowth back onto the pathway with the beach cottages, but her legs, even walking as quickly as they could, were no match for Jack’s six-foot-two long legged stride. He caught up with her and stood in front of her, blocking her path.

“Move.” She demanded, but every time she tried to walk around him he’d block her again. She wanted to scream.

“No. I want you to wait a minute.”

“I want you to move.”

“Jesus, why are you so upset? I was just trying to say…”

“I don’t want to talk. You don’t even know me that well, it doesn’t matter.” She shoved by him, and this time he let her and she marched on past all of the pretty houses on the sandy path.

“I spent three whole days stuck inside a car with you. I think I know you.” He said incredulously.

She turned on him. “Well I’m sorry that you had to be stuck with me for three days and that every moment with me was absolutely horrible.”

“What are you talking about? I never said it was… like, horrible.” He looked completely taken aback by her outburst, and she would have felt sorry for him if she was the outsider looking in on their conversation but she was already so wrapped up in her own self pity and rage that she didn’t care how crazy she sounded.

“I’m also sorry that you were forced to bring me here and explain to your poor mom, who you haven’t spoken to in years, and your nasty brother why you’re bringing white trash into their home. You won’t have to worry about that anymore because tomorrow I’m going to the airport and I’m going to jump on the first flight out of here!”

“Okay, okay fine, but where are you going to go?”

She almost screamed with frustration. She wasn’t going anywhere, she didn’t have the money or the confidence to do it. “I don’t know.”

“Look.” Jack raked a hand through his hair, black like ink in the dim light now that the sun had truly disappeared. “I’m sorry that things didn’t work out like you wanted them to, and I’m sorry that you’re not in Arkansas right now with your kid and that you have to be here right now in a place you don’t know with people who don’t know you… but Jolene, you’ve gotta learn to accept things as they are right now.”

But how could she accept it? How on earth?

There was a silence between them after that, and for the first time since she’d been in Mount Pleasant, Jolene felt cold. A chilly sea breeze whipped through her hair and across the backs of her legs that still stung from the grass. She took a deep shuddering breath and curled her arms around herself as if to protect herself from the wind and from Jack who was restlessly rocking on his heels waiting for her to start yelling again, but she didn’t have the energy anymore. She wanted to go to bed. “Can we start walking back to your mom’s house?” She asked him quietly, and he nodded and began up the sandy pathway. He didn’t stop to wait for her, just passed her by with slumped shoulders and hands in his pockets, and she was glad. She would have preferred to walk alone thirty feet behind him anyway and avoid the possibility that he might try to talk to her again.

The bridge between the land and island hadn’t seemed quite so long the first time they’d walked it, but now it seemed to stretch on for miles. Everything was dark except for the lights of Mount Pleasant out ahead and the odd car that would drive by with its headlights on. Jack’s lean frame was silhouetted up ahead of her and he was walking so quickly that she worried she might lose him eventually and be left stranded in a strange town with nowhere to go for the night. But she didn’t, she kept him in her sight all the way back, and by the time she reached the driveway he was already closing the front door behind him without even a look back.

She leaned against the front wall and looked up at those pretty stars for a while. They didn’t even look pretty anymore, just like specs of light, about as important or significant as the dead raccoon on the road not ten feet away from her. It was lying on its side and squashed in the middle, flattened by a car while it just tried to go about its innocent business. That’s how she felt, she thought as she stared at it some more; rolled over, flattened, squashed, dried up like roadkill on Route 22.

Part 3: Chapter One

Jolene was hot when she woke up. It was the first thing she became aware of that morning, cocooned beneath heavy feather blankets and sweating in places she hadn’t even known she could even sweat. She struggled out from beneath them before she opened her eyes, still caught in that bleary state between sleep and wakefulness, fully expecting the satisfying wash of cool air over her skin, but it didn’t come. The air was hot too, terrible and warm and humid, so much so that the breath she took in even felt heavy and that’s when she truly woke up, opened her eyes and slowly took in the things around her. There was a lamp on a bedside locker by her face, and beyond that were French doors with white voile curtains on them that did a truly horrible job of blocking out the morning sunlight. Where am I? She thought sleepily as she listened to the birds chirping outside, the sounds of rustling leaves, the low, resonant sounds of a man speaking in the room below her, and then all at once, she remembered.

She remembered this room, this blanket, these silk pillows, and how she’d clung to them sobbing until her throat hurt, she remembered this house in its enormous white colonial glory and how she’d walked up its walnut staircase with a pretty blonde lady who’d rubbed her back and whispered soothing words that Jolene didn’t listen to. She remembered the kitchen where she’d drank cold, sweet tea and the room with the piano and the long glass table that she’d passed. She remembered Jack Valentine helping her out of his car, his face somewhere between concerned and embarrassed, and the blonde man who’d stood behind him frowning at her like she was a piece of bubble-gum stuck to the bottom of his fancy leather shoe. “You fell asleep” Jack had whispered to her “for hours, I didn’t know what to do. I just brought you here.” And when she’d asked him where she was, he told her South Carolina, and for a second or two she’d thought about how pretty it all was with the flowers and green grass. She remembered the car then and how she’d cried in that too, so much so that she threw up outside the window all along the side splashing the jade green paint and how Jack pretended that it was okay.

Then she remembered Arkansas. The sound of the automated voice on the payphone, the gravel in her knees, Graysonia, and all those old wooden buildings that had been vacant for so long that they’d collapsed in on themselves and fallen to pieces. That’s how she felt. Like a shell, empty, broken, about ten seconds away from caving in. She sat upright on the bed in the hot, sweaty, pretty bedroom and let the tears come again, wishing the feeling away. Sometimes she wished that she were dead.

“That’s great!” he was saying to the person on the phone. “Uh huh. Sure sounds like it’s all working out, you know- yeah? …Well you know it’s killing me, right? Man, I wish I could be there, but everything just got in the way… Nash, if there’s anything I can do-“

Jolene’s body was racked with a loud, sudden sob. In the state she was in, she really didn’t need to be reminded that Nash Buckley existed. Only he could make her day even worse from two thousand miles away. She was sobbing so intensely that she hadn’t even realised that Jack had hung up the phone until there was a hesitant knock on her door.

“Jolene?” he said gingerly “Are you okay in there?”

She cried out a syllable that was supposed to be “yes” but instead sounded like a desperate, incoherent wail.

“Can I get you something?”

She sniffled “No.”

“Uh… tissues? A glass of water?”

“No!” She cried with annoyance.

He hovered outside the door for a few more seconds before attempting a feeble “Do you need me to do anything for y-”

“Yes, you can get lost” she didn’t particularly care how crazy she sounded at that moment, because she figured that he didn’t particularly care how she was at all. If he had he would have come in to see her rather that cowering behind the door.

She heard him leave after that, and then more muffled manly voices downstairs before the front door opened and shut.

She got out of bed once the house was silent, using the end of the vest she had slept in to wipe her tearstained face, and then she ventured into her en suite bathroom to unravel some toilet paper to wipe her nose. It was scratchy and harsh against her already sensitive skin, but it was preferable to asking Jack to get a box of tissues for her and seeing the awkward fake-pity expression on his face. She was still hot and sweaty, so she took a cold bath in the beautiful, sparkling clean bath, filling the water up as far as her neck and shutting her eyes as she felt all the uncomfortable hot, stickiness dissolve.

The pretty blonde lady – possibly Jack’s mother, had left a pile of neat, ironed clothes on a chair in the bedroom. When she’d seen Jolene’s clothes, old and stretched out and covered in dust, she’d made a horrified face and whisked them away, along with the rest of Jolene’s dirty clothes inside her bags, and Jolene didn’t know whether they would be put in to be washed or into the trash can, but she didn’t mind, because the new clothes were beautiful. Even from touching them she knew they were expensive, made from the kind of material that Trailer Park girls never got to wear; cashmere, silk, velvet, linen, wool, and although she couldn’t read the labels inside them, they looked real fancy. She cared surprisingly less about the clothes and how expensive they probably were. A few days ago, she would have leapt in joy at the thought of wearing what she knew as Rich Peoples Clothes, but now she felt nothing. She pulled on the plainest linen skirt and t shirt in the pile and left the room.

Jolene couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten, but she was hungry with a capital H. Her stomach was in a state of eating itself from the inside out, apparently, and it rumbled loudly and obnoxiously as she padded over the glossy wooden floor of the brightly lit foyer and into the kitchen, surprisingly small, right at the back of the house.

“What can I do ya for sweetheart?” came a soft, kind voice as soon as she entered the kitchen, and she leapt backwards with surprise. There was another woman there, short and squat with kind, brown eyes in an apron dusted with flour and smears of dough. She was making some kind of berry pie, the pastry tin in the middle of the counter in front of her and a basket of freshly picked raspberries, blackcurrants and strawberries next to it. Jolene realised that she had walked in on the cook. “You hungry?”

Jolene nodded dumbly.

“Well you missed breakfast, but I can whip you up something, what do you feel like?”

“I…”

“Do you feel like pancakes?” the cook asked her, picking up a rolling pin and going over a fat circle of dough. “Or some French toast maybe? Or just a sandwich? You name it you got it.”

“Pancakes is fine” Jolene managed.

“Okay, you can go sit on down in the dining room and I’ll bring them out when they ready.” She smiled warmly as Jolene hesitated “The dining room’s just the next room over Miss Jones, big piano right in the middle, you can’t miss it.”

Jolene had often imagined being filthy rich, she had all of these dreams about owning heart shaped swimming pools and drinking fizzy pink lemonade from a straw while she lounged on a lilo in a diamante bikini. She’d have people to do everything for her, like brush her hair and go shopping for her, make all of her food and clean up her mess, but in her dream, she’d never been quite as dumbstruck as she was when experiencing in the reality. Jack’s house had rooms three times the size of her trailer in Arizona, hell, the bathrooms were probably bigger. Everything was glossy and polished, the beds turned down, pillows fluffed as though it was a show house and nobody was really living there at all. It was so quiet too, not like Vegas where she’d hear dogs barking and cars driving up and down the streets all night, the neighbours on the floor below having an argument, and the neighbours to the left watching the TV at full volume. There were no neighbours here, she thought, as she peered out a foyer window at endless stretches of grass and trees and flowers, and decided there was something distinctly eerie about being ostentatiously wealthy.

In her quest toward the dining room, examined a number of paintings on the wall, none of which looked like anything in particular. They were mostly blobs of colour, shapes here and there, and she wondered why people spent so much money on art that looked like it had been done by someone in kindergarten. She stopped suddenly by the entrance to the dining room as she heard soft voices. She thought that she had been alone in the house.

“I really don’t know what he thinks he’s doing,” said a man, his voice low, with the same southern vowels that Jolene had noticed in Jack, only far more pronounced. “He just shows up out of nowhere and expects everything to be hunky dory, did you see how he looked yesterday? Like complete crap.”

“Trevor” Chided a woman’s voice “Watch your mouth.”

“I’m sorry mom I just… he can’t just disappear for three years and expect everything to be okay, because it’s not. I don’t know what he’s being doing over there in Las Vegas…” Jolene frowned at the way he said Las Vegas; like he was saying Genital Warts. “…but it’s nothing good. I think he’s on drugs.”

“Now I don’t know about th-”

“I swear to God, mom, I just have a feeling. He looks thin, have you ever seen him look so skinny before? That’s heroin, and besides that anyway, all his erratic behaviour, like showing up out of nowhere, saying he lost all his money, and bringing that girl with him.”

Jolene flattened herself against the wall and pricked up her ears.

“Of all the girls… you know Charlotte Rutherford-Wilson? That’s the kind of girl Jack should be spending more time with, not girls like that skinny little thing he dragged in from the desert, you know it and I know it, Jack’s comes from too good a family to be spending too much time with redneck trailer trash like her…”

Jolene couldn’t listen to any more. She turned and hurried away, back up the staircase and into her room where she buried herself in the sweaty bedclothes and began to cry all over again.

Jack: Chapter Fourteen

Jolene slept in her seat for two hours once Jack forced her out of bed and into the car at five AM. She was not a morning person; all messy air and crusty eyes, pouting like a six-year-old as she was bundled into the passenger seat barely aware of what was going on around her. He offered to stop for coffee at the next gas station they passed but she was fast asleep before they even left Tucumcari.

It was nice to drive in silence so early in the morning before the traffic hit the highway. There was a crispness in the air and a hush that only existed when everybody else in the world was asleep. The sky wasn’t red, it was lit up in bright shades of orange and coral with rays of sunlight streaking upwards and illuminating the clouds from beneath. He hit the Texas border at five forty-five and zipped through Amarillo an hour later, counting his lucky stars that Jolene was still asleep. He didn’t want an encore of her Tony Christie impression. He got hungry a little while later and stopped for coffee and a bagel, and just as he climbed back into the car Jolene was beginning to stir.

She stretched her arms and legs and rubbed her eyes. “Where are we?”

“Texas” he responded, restarting the engine. “Just about an hour from the Oklahoma border.”

“Oh, right.” She said with a tired sigh and leaned forward to open the glove compartment. “Bye bye New Mexico” she took a pen and drew a huge X from one corner of the state to the other. “Do I smell coffee?”

“Yeah, it’s in the cup holder.”

She grabbed it and took a sip. “Thanks”

“It wasn’t for you, honey, but alright.”

“Do you want it back now that it’s got all my germs in it and stuff?”

“Nah you can keep it.”

“Sorry.” She cradled the hot coffee in her lap and glanced out the window at the scenery. “When does the landscape stop looking like this?” She asked him. “If I didn’t know any better I’d think we were just driving in circles around Arizona.”

“I reckon by the time you come out the other side of Oklahoma City it gets a little greener, but even then I hope that you like looking at trees and grass and nothing else because that’s all it is for hundreds of miles.”

“I don’t know how you don’t go crazy from all this driving” she commented “Just looking at the same road with the same scenery for hours and hours.”

“It’s not so bad anymore” he shrugged “I used to drive everywhere, New York to Miami, Miami to Milwaukee, wherever. I’ve been driving long distances for years, and you just get used to it; find ways to keep yourself sane, and awake, which is the most important thing.”

“You’ve been lots of places” she said. “Like, you must have seen so many different things and met so many different places. You know before I moved to Las Vegas I’d never been outside of Arizona? Sometimes when you live in a place so small for so long you forget that there’s other stuff out there… not that Arizona is small, but the trailer park where I lived was, and it’s not like I got out of there so much either.”

“At least you got out eventually, that’s a pretty big deal.”

“Yeah, but sometimes I guess I feel like a little part of me never left there, you know? I think it’s hard to forget that you come from a bad place, or that you’re trailer trash. It kind of sticks like…” She squinted in thought as she searched for an analogy. “… like gum on the bottom of your shoe, I guess.” Then she laughed self-consciously. “It doesn’t matter, forget about Arizona. I think I’m going to live somewhere else when I find Donny, like California or New York or somewhere like that, or maybe someplace outside America. Like Europe!”

“Europe huh?”

“Yeah, I bet it’s nice there, like, that everyone is stylish and eats croissants for breakfast.”

“It’s a big continent, I’m pretty sure the whole thing isn’t exclusively France.”

“Have you been there?”

“Nah, never to Europe, I only ever left the US once, and I don’t even like to count it.”

“Oh yeah? Where did you go?”

“Lebanon.”

“Where’s that? Was it nice?”

“It’s… It’s in the Middle East, and no it wasn’t especially nice.”

“What did you go there for?” She was so hyped up, excited to hear about his adventures, but suddenly he felt sick to his stomach. “We don’t have to talk about it” he said.

“Okay” she shrugged “Well what do you want to talk about?”

“How about nothing for a little while?”

“Nothing sounds good.” She said and glanced at him smiling. He half-smiled back and then she looked back out the window at the dry grass and scrub while he leaned back in the seat and enjoyed the blissful silence once more.

~.~.~.~.~

Around midday when the sun was at its highest over Oklahoma they stopped for something to eat in a roadside café. Jack was anxious to stay on the road so that he could make it as far as Memphis by the evening time, so they just picked up some takeaway food to eat in the car. The tiredness was already beginning to set in; he’d been on the road for seven hours already and the further into the bible-belt they drove the more on edge he began to feel. The little towns they passed, sitting silently and eerily in the middle of nowhere, wooden houses that seemed ever so slightly skewed, pointed church roofs poking out above the buildings towards the sky. American flags were hung from second storey windows and porches and they hung flat and unmoving with no wind to stir them, and signs that said Vote for George H Bush were picketed on front lawns. It was gun loving, republican voting Baptist county, and even though the heavy mid-day heat had settled over their surroundings like a thick blanket, a shiver ran through Jack’s spine.

“This place gives me the creeps” Jolene said as they passed a sign hammered into the dry soil by the road: GO TO CHURCH or the Devil’s gonna get you.

“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.” Jack said and glanced up at a water tower looming ahead of them with unease. The air seemed to be moving in waves like gas and the road ahead look like it was submerged in glittering water; mirage in the middle of Oklahoma.

“Why is it so hot?” she complained, fanning herself with her hand, and then cranked the window open a little, but it didn’t help. The air was so thick and warm that it made it difficult to breathe.

“It’s hot in the south.”

“It’s only 95 degrees” she said accusatorily, jabbing her finger towards the thermometer on the dashboard. “I’m supposed to be used to this!”

“It’s not the heat that gets you, it’s the humidity. It’s so dry in the south west that you can take it, but out here the air is like syrup. It’s a little hard to get used to after Vegas.”

They passed another spooky looking church with a sign outside, the letters askew and crooked in such a way that they reminded Jack of those threatening murderer-notes composed from letters cut out of magazines. “THE MOST POWERFUL POSITION IS ON YOUR KNEES”. He made a face.

“Is it like this in Arkansas?” Jolene asked him in a small voice, and he knew that she wasn’t just talking about the humidity.

“I’ve never gotten out and walked around Arkansas, but from inside the car it looks a lot like the same.” Jolene didn’t say anything, and looked anxiously out the window as they left the weird little town behind them. She was getting quieter and tenser the closer they came to Little Rock. Jack glanced over sympathetically. “Hey” he said “Your brother is okay, you believe that right?”

“Uh huh.”

“They don’t just let KKK crazies from the swamp adopt kids, he’s probably with a nice family.”

“Maybe. I hope so, I couldn’t stand it if things were bad for him. He’s just a little kid.”

“I know that, and I also know that he’s doing fine, and you’re a good person for coming to find him like this.”

“I don’t know if I’m such a good person” she said, almost in a whisper. “I let him go in the first place.” He didn’t ask her what she meant, he just kept his eyes on the road and kept driving. A road sign on the highway told them they were just ninety miles from the Arkansas border, and he glanced at it and then Jolene, whose hands were knotted in her lap, knuckles white, her whole body tense with anxiety.

“Where exactly in Arkansas do you need to go?” he asked he before he could stop himself.

“I have a map and everything like I told you” she said “I can make it from Little Rock.”

“Yeah but… You know I feel bad just throwing you out of the car.”

“Don’t feel bad, you won’t be throwing me out, I’ll get out myself.”

“You know what I mean.” He sighed and raked a hand through his hair. He was so sweaty from the heat; it was never a good idea to drive through the southern states in a car that didn’t have AC. “I don’t mind just bringing you to wherever it is Donny is.”

“Nah, I don’t want to be a burden.”

“You won’t be, how far is the place from Little Rock?”

“Lou Breslin said about an hour and a half, just head down south west towards a down called Arka… something and then go right.”

“How did you plan to get there?”

“I don’t know. A bus maybe if there was one going, or I’d hitch.” The idea of Jolene hitch hiking by the hot roadside on a sweltering day in backwards Arkansas made him cringe. She must have been crazy, that’s one way to make sure you’d mysteriously disappear and never be found again.

“I want to drive you there.” He said frankly “It’s not that far out of my way.”

“If this is about the money I owe you…” she began, but he cut her off. “No, listen, it’s not about-”

“…I promise, cross my heart that I’m going to get it to you…”

“No, listen, I know you will I just-”

“…you can just write your address down and I’ll send it when I have it. I’ll even send you my phone number when I get one…”

“Jolene! It’s not about the money, can you listen to me for a second?”

She turned her face towards him and stared at him expectantly, and he spoke again with a little more composure. “I don’t mind taking you to Donny, I swear, and it’s not about the money, it’s about the thought of you thumbing a lift on an Arkansas highway. What if you get lost? You’ve never been to this place before, what if things don’t go according to plan?” He swallowed hard as the strong possibility of the kid’s new parents turning her away at the door sprung to mind. “You know; God forbid something goes wrong but what if it does? Things don’t always go the way you think they’re gonna go and if something screws up then I don’t want you stranded in a town like that one we just passed through.”

“Well you wouldn’t know if that happened. You could just drive away and never have to worry about me again.”

“Jolene, will you let me come with you or not?”

She pursed her lips and frowned, the cogs in her mind working to weigh out the pros and cons. “Yes.” She said finally. Then she reached into her shorts pocket and pulled put a piece of paper that had been folded up five or six times, and when she unfolded it, it was flimsy and creased, dog eared and thumb-printed to within an inch of its life, but Jack could see that it was a list of directions with a small hand-drawn map in the bottom corner. On the top were the words “Graysonia Arkansas.”

“Clark county” he said “I’ve heard of Clark county, just not Graysonia.”

“Lou says it’s a small town and it’s got train tracks right the way through it, lots of trees and forests and stuff.”

He took the sheet of directions from her and took a closer look. “It looks like we don’t have to go to Little Rock at all” he said. “I can turn onto route 59 and cross the border a whole lot further south. Looks like it’s not too far out of my way anyway.”

“How long until we’re there?”

“Maybe four hours or so” he handed the paper back to her. “Just try to relax until then.”

“I’ll try.” She sat back in the passenger seat and the car tore off along the highway; long and straight, disappearing into the horizon, gravel hot from the sun, lined with dry trees and pale grass; the road to the terrifying unknown.

~.~.~.~.~

It was pushing five PM by the time they reached Clark County Arkansas, the tension and anxiety inside the car was so thick that you could have sliced it like butter. Jolene’s body was so curled in on itself, her hands like claws on her knees, one leg jerking incessantly, had had been doing so since they crossed over the border. Jack placed an intentionally comforting yet somewhat awkward hand on her shoulder. “Are you afraid?”

“Yes.” She said sheepishly and took a deep, stuttering breath “I want to go back to Nevada.” Outside the car were trees that arched over the road, lush and green, and yet amongst them were the needled twigs of dry, dead branches reaching out to the car like gnarled fingers. There was that eerie airless silence once again, the only sound was the wheels of the Cadillac as it ground over pieces of loose gravel and the steady hum of the engine. They hadn’t passed another car in almost forty minutes. Occasionally they drove by the long dusty entrance to a farmyard, the roofs of the barn visible above the hedgerows, but apart from that there was no sign of human life. It was the kind of place you’d hear about on crime documentaries; strange cult activity, man found mutilated in a creek. Although he’d never admit it, Jack was afraid too.

“Maybe we’re lost.” he said, and took another look at Lou Breslin’s directions.

“No” said Jolene “There’s a sign for Gray Lake. We’re going the right way.”

Jack spotted an old man pottering down the side of the road beneath the shade of the trees. “Hang on.” He said, and rolled down the window. “Excuse me?” he called to the man, slowing the car to a stop. “Can you tell us how to get to Graysonia?”

The old man scratched his head “Where?”

“Graysonia. Apparently it’s close to Gray lake.”

The man looked briefly confused, but then nodded. “Oh yeah, Graysonia, you’re not far from there now, are you sure that’s where you want to go?”

“Yes.”

“Alright. You just keep driving up the way you’ve been driving, you’ll see an old barn there about two miles up and after that you take the road immediately to your left. It’s a small road, ‘bout enough room for one car, but keep driving up that little road and you’ll see it eventually. You can’t miss it.”

“Thank you, sir”

“Can I just ask you for the sake of my own curiosity, what business have you got in Graysonia?”

“Personal business.” Jack said, and then rolled up the window. He gave the old man a quick wave before he pulled away, and he waved back slowly with a perplexed expression, then he stood there on the road and watched them, and Jolene turned in her seat and watched him right back until they turned a corner and lost him.

“People out here are strange.” She commented.

“You can say that again.”

It wasn’t long before they reached the barn, it just stood there looming by the road, ivy snaking its way up the sides, its corrugated roof rusted and filled with holes and a sign nailed to the boarded up door that warned against falling debris and unstable flooring. It had probably been abandoned for a decade or more. They took the small road to the left just as the old man has instructed them, and he was right. It was a tight squeeze, barely enough for one car and as they crawled through it they were accosted by a barrage of branches and briars, scraping and smacking against the sides of the car, leaves and twigs snapping on the windscreen, and the wheels jerked and bounced over pot holes and rocks giving Jack traumatic flashbacks to that awful rollercoaster ride during the Spring Fling.

“I want to go back to Vegas” Jolene said again with a tremor of panic in her voice. “I hate this place; I want to go home.”

“Jolene” he said soothingly “Just think about the kid, okay? Think about why you’ve come all this way. We’ll be fine.”

“You were right Jack, what if they don’t let me in? What if I can’t see him or I can’t take him with me? What am I doing here?”

“Calm down, okay, take a few deep breaths.” Jack opened his mouth to say something else, but then he spotted something on the roadside shaded beneath a tall pine tree. It was a wooden signpost, crooked and split, but on it were the words GRAYSONIA. He slowed the car to look more closely. “It’s right up ahead” he said. The road slowly widened and the foliage began to thin out, becoming sparser as the car rolled in towards the town. Jack felt another chill up his spine. It didn’t take a genius to know that something was wrong with this place.

Not far from the road there were a few building scattered here and there, the spire of a church overlooking them from a hill above the dirt path, but it was caught in a tangle of trees. They could see the train tracks Lou had spoken about, right up ahead crossing over a river, only it was clear no trains had crossed that river in a very long time. Jack parked the car on the side of the road and climbed out, looking all around him in astonishment, and Jolene followed suit. The sound of the passenger door slamming shut seemed to echo for miles. “Is this it?” she murmured, and Jack took another glance around. He didn’t know.

They walked together for a little while side by side in the middle of the dirt road in search for something, anything that would indicate movement, activity, life, but there was nothing. The carriage of a train sat by a grassy knoll, its windows covered with moss, trees beginning to grow around it and through its gaps. It was a relic from another century sitting silently in the grass, rusty and broken, slowly being swallowed by nature. As they walked further exchanging no words they came to what was once a stone building, towering high above them, the front part of it fallen away as was its roof and its windows, leaving just a shell, once again being consumed by the trees and moss, and Jack began to feel an awful sense of dread, a heavy, sick feeling like a weight in the pit of his stomach, but he said nothing, they just kept walking.

Finally, they reached a long street and along it were five or six houses, dirty, wooden things with porches that hung sideways, windows that were clouded with dirt, shutters swinging open with some hanging on doggedly by the one rusty hinge that was left. Again the trees had taken over, their long sinewy, leafless branches poking through the sliding, bending over the houses like terrible creature preparing to consume them. Another small wooden sign stood to Jack’s left, the words GRAYSONIA ROAD leaving a lump in his throat, the knowledge that they weren’t in the wrong place was the worst feeling of all. He turned to Jolene, who stood perfectly still beside him, looking at the houses with an expression that revealed nothing, completely deadpan, just looking at each house in turn, slowly, methodically, almost serenely, but the moment he touched her shoulder and said her name she turned into something else.

“He has to be here” she said, a forced, choked voice that didn’t sound like her own. “Lou Breslin said he was here, so he’s got to be.”

“Jolene…” Jack said again.

“No, no… shh, he has to be here somewhere.” She shrugged him off her and ran ahead towards the houses. He called after her as she climbed onto the first rickety porch but she didn’t listen. She curled her hand into a fist and hammered on the door. “Hello?” she called “Is anyone home? Hello?” She moved to a window and peeped inside. “Anyone there?” Jack watched her as she ran to the next house and did the same, and then the next, growing more agitated each time.

She pounded on the third door. “Hello?” She screamed “Donny? Does Donny Jones live here?” It was a pathetic, heart breaking sight. She knew as well as he did that Donny was not there, and yet she was hanging on to every last hope that she’d find him. How could she not? After seven years of searching it couldn’t end like this, it just couldn’t.

“Jolene” Jack said soothingly “Shh, try to relax…” but she fought harder, trying to push him off her so she could claw at the door again. He wrapped his arms tightly around her and dragged her down the porch steps, and then slowly she began to give up. Her body became limp, her breathing slowed, and he let go of her, allowing her feet to touch the ground again. “Jack” she said helplessly as she turned to face him “He has to be here. Lou said he’s here.”

“Maybe Lou got it wrong.”

“How could he get it wrong? It’s his job to find people.” She covered her face with her hands. “Where’s Donny?”

“I don’t know, I’m sorry, I wish that I did.”

She took another frantic glance down the street. “There’s one house I haven’t tried.”

“Jolene, no” Jack grabbed her wrist as she tried to move towards it. “He isn’t here, there’s nobody here and there hasn’t been for decades. I don’t know where he is but it isn’t Graysonia.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?”

“Okay, just think for a second. Do you have Lou Breslin’s phone number?”

“Yes” she said, tears of defeat welling in her eyes. “I know it by heart.”

“Okay, then call him. I’ll drive you to the next town and we’ll find a payphone. He must have just made a mistake, I bet the town Donny’s in is close by.”

She nodded and wiped the tears from her face with the collar of her t-shirt. “Okay let’s go.”

~.~.~.~.~

It was a twenty-minute drive to Amity which was the nearest town with a payphone and for the whole trip Jolene sniffed and wiped tears from her face, determined to stay strong and not to crumble. She knew that there was still a chance to find Donny, all she had to do was phone Lou Breslin and iron out the confusion, but Jack didn’t have the same positive attitude as she did. The whole thing sounded fishy from the start.

There was one phone booth in the whole town, on a street corner, and he parked right up beside it and had barely ground the car to a halt before Jolene was out counting change in the palm of her hand and holding the receiver to her ear. Jack got out of the car as she was punching in the numbers, and he dug his hands into his pockets and hummed tunelessly trying to feign nonchalance when really he felt incredible and overwhelming stress. This phone call could make or break everything for Jolene, and they both knew it.

She finished punching in the numbers, and they both waited for the ring. The pause seemed to stretch on for minutes, and Jolene’s face was screwed up with worry, both hands curled around the receiver so tightly that she could have crushed it. Next thing there was a long beep, and then came a mocking, automated voice.

“We’re sorry; you have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error, please check the number and try your call again. We’re sorry; you have reached a numb-”

She hung up the receiver. Jack stared at her open mouthed, and she just stared at the phone for the longest moment. She finally looked at him as a tear rolled down her cheek. “I…” she said helplessly.

“Did you dial the right number?” Jack said, panic creeping into his tone. “It must have been wrong”

“It was right” she said. “He’s disconnected his line.” Then the floodgates came. She whole body shook from the sobs that escaped her then, floods of tears, the helpless harrowing cries of someone how has lost everything. Her legs collapsed from underneath her and she fell onto the hard pavement, jagged pieces of gravel sticking to her knees. Jack got to his knees too and wrapped his arms around her, and she gripped the front of his shirt and cried into his chest and he stroked her hair, whispering comforting words that she couldn’t even listen to. He felt tears brimming in his own eyes too as she sobbed, realization slowly beginning to set in. He got it.

“The kid… Donny.” He said softly. “He’s not your brother, is he?”

“No” she wailed “He’s my son.”

END OF PART TWO

Well, there you have it. We know what Jolene’s deal is now – stay tuned for part 3 when you’ll find out a whole lot more about that sticky situation, as well as what was going on in the prologue – coming soon!

As I did with part 1, I’ve made a quiz for part 2 so you can refresh your memory before the next part! HERE

Again, a huge thank you to all of you who have stuck by me over all this time and been so patient with my erratic schedule, you’re the only reason i’m still writing this

x Hannah

Jack: Chapter Thirteen

Jack’s Cadillac coasted into the parking lot of a small motel in Tucumcari New Mexico before sundown, the sky streaked with pinks and oranges, the sun bright gold beneath the clouds as it slowly sunk behind the blue San Juan mountains.

“Red sky at night…” Jolene said as she climbed out of the passenger seat and stretched her arms and legs.

“Huh?” Jack grunted as he slammed the car door and opened up the trunk.

“Red sky at night, shepherds delight” she clarified. “It’s a saying.”

“Never heard it before” He dragged her tiny bag out from underneath his mountain of cases and tossed it to her.

“You know, ‘Red sky at night, shepherds delight, red sky in the morning, shepherds warning. It means when the sunset is red it’s going to be a sunny day tomorrow, and when the sunrise is red it means it’s going to rain.”

“There’s a one hundred percent chance it’s going to be sunny tomorrow” He grabbed one of his bags and closed the trunk. “I don’t need the sky-at-night to tell me that. Do you even remember the last time it rained?”

“November” she chirped.

“Well uh… yeah whatever.” He turned and walked towards the motel reception office.

“Why are you so grumpy?” she called after him as he pushed open the swinging door.

“I’m tired” he yelled back, disappearing inside, then after a short moment poked his head out of the door sheepishly. “You uh… you got the money to pay for these rooms?”

She laughed. “Yes. Hold on it’s in my bag.”

Tucumcari was a town lit up in neon, like a miniature Las Vegas for truckers, and the motel signs were just beginning to glow as the sun finally dipped beneath the horizon. The place was painted pink, small and quaint with the old Route 66 signs still hanging on the walls, awnings over the doors and windows, there was even a small oval pool out the back surrounded by lounge chairs and potted palms. Jack’s room was seven doors down from Jolene’s and almost all the others were occupied. All along the front of the rooms were old men and women sitting out on deck chairs drinking beers and wine, wearing shorts and sandals and shades, and a group of old ladies cat called him as he passed.

His room was big and comfortable and cool, a sign on the window even boasting about refrigerated air. It had a bathroom, a television and even a small kitchenette off the bedroom with little pink appliances that he wouldn’t be using, but it was cute all the same. He dropped his bag onto a chair and climbed up onto the springy double bed, allowing himself to sink into the mattress. He’d driven for so long that day that when he shut his eyes he still saw the endless highway and still felt the pedals under his feet and the way that the engine hummed beneath him.

He cracked open his eyes and looked at the clock by the bed. It was only seven PM. He sighed and rolled over. He couldn’t go to sleep yet, he’d wake up again at three AM and then be exhausted by midday, so he struggled off the bed and left the room in search of something that would keep him awake.

There was a leisure room next to the office. It had a pool table and a couple of arcade machines and even a small bar at the back where more old folks were drinking as they watched a football game on a television overhead. He ambled up to the bar and ordered a beer, not that he could really afford it. He’d emptied his bank account that morning, all fifty-two dollars and seventeen cents of it, and that was supposed to buy his food during the journey, not beer, but he wasn’t really the kind of person to think too hard about the things he did, especially when he was tired.

He took the beer out to the little oval pool out back, a couple of other people lay there on lounge chairs and Adirondacks enjoying the cool after a long hot day, and he kicked off his shoes and rolled up the ends of his jeans to sit on the edge of the pool and dip his feet in. The water was cool and refreshing and so was the beer and for a few blissful moments he could drift into a world of his own, watching the ripples in the clear blue pool and listening to it lap gently against the sides. Thoughts began to flood his mind, memories of South Carolina, his parents, his brother, all the people that he’d known once upon a time. He wondered how they’d feel when he came home, would they even be happy to see him? The son who went for a drive one day and never came home eight years earlier. He’d been so young and angry and stupid back then, never giving a thought to anybody else or how they felt or how the things he did could hurt them. He wasn’t prepared for what he would do if he had a door slammed right in his face.

“Fancy meeting you here.” It was Jolene at his shoulder, grinning at him and crouching down to join him by the pool. He felt a pang of annoyance. “Hi Jolene.”

“You still tired?”

“Yeah I’m exhausted.”

She pulled off her boots and dipped her feet into the water. She had skinny white ankles and feet and a bronze tan that stopped halfway down her shins; tan lines from cowboy boots, and he smirked to himself while thinking that he’d never seen something so country in his life. She shut her eyes and took a deep, slow breath. “I’m tired too. This is a nice place though; my room has a little kitchen inside it where I could cook or something if I wanted to, and the bed is so big and comfortable.”

“Same as my room, I just can’t wait until I can sleep tonight.” He dragged his hand down his face and rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand. “It’s been a long day.”

“Where are we going tomorrow?”

“I want to get to Arkansas if I can. It’s about a twelve-hour drive, and that’s without stopping, but if we get up early enough then we can be there by this time tomorrow. I was thinking we could leave by five.”

“five AM?”

“Yeah”

She laughed “Okay, whatever you say. You’re going to have to come and wake me up for sure.”

“Alright, I will.” He took a mouthful of his drink and gazed off towards the mountains in the distance, and Jolene said nothing else. She just swished her feet in the pool and hummed gently to herself.

“Jolene?”

“Mmhmm?”

“What do you think your brother is doing in Arkansas?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, why would anyone go there, there’s nothing in Arkansas. It’s the deadest state in the country.”

She laughed “It’s not like he chose to go there. That’s just where he ended up when he was adopted.”

Jack looked at her in surprise. “You never said he was adopted. I got the impression that he ran away or something.”

“Why would he run away when he was just a baby?” She giggled “You think he just climbed out of the crib and crawled to Arkansas?”

“What? You didn’t say he was a baby. I thought he was like… sixteen or something. You never cleared that part up in the car.”

“Sorry. He was just born when he got adopted and I’ve been looking for him since.”

“I didn’t know it was legal to look for adopted kids before they turn eighteen.”

Jolene shrugged. “I don’t know either. Maybe it’s not, I don’t care. All I want to do is go and get him.”

“What are you going to say to his new parents?” Jack was suddenly incredulous; the whole situation was a thousand more complicated than he’d thought. “Are you just gonna show up with your arms outstretched and ask for the kid?”

Jolene’s face dropped and she suddenly looked confused and upset. “I… I don’t know. I’ll figure it out when I get there. It’s all going to work out fine.”

“Jolene, you-”

“It’s going to be fine. I don’t know. I…”

“Maybe you should think about how you’re going to approach this-”

“I don’t want to talk about it right now if that’s okay.”

He paused and stared at her, then down at the rippling water the pool with a perplexed expression. “Alright, that’s fine.”

Behind them two people moved from their Adirondack chairs and made their way back into the motel. Jack and Jolene saw the opportunity and swung their legs out of the water, carrying their shoes over to the seats and taking up residence on them. Jack leaned back and rested his head against the back of his chair. The place was getting pretty dark, all the neon from the town glowing in the distance, the reflection of the lights around the pool glittering in the water. “So your brother” he said carefully “He’s a lot younger than you are.”

“Yeah, sixteen years. He’s seven now.” She looked so sleepy, curled into a ball on the chair, arms hugging her knees staring off into the sky with huge, sad, doe like eyes. “How many years between you and Trev?”

“Four and a half. It was his birthday a couple of months ago so he’s thirty-one now.”

“Shame you couldn’t call him to say happy birthday.”

“Yeah.”

A few more of the guests started to move inside as a chill began to creep into the air and the sky began a deep inky blue, a couple of stars speckled sporadically across it, the sliver of the waning moon shining bone white over the desert.

“Hey Jack?”

He glanced at her. “Yeah?”

“Can you tell me about your family?”

He frowned “Why?”

“I don’t know. Just that photo in your car, you all looks so happy. I just think I’d like to hear about what it’s like to have a happy family.”

“We weren’t that happy. My parents separated a couple of months after that photo was taken. I don’t think any family is especially happy, you know? Everybody is dysfunctional, so don’t worry about it.”

“Well your Mom and Dad, maybe they were happy when they were young, they must have loved each other once upon a time.”

Jack paused thoughtfully. “I guess they did, maybe. Their life together was always up and down, right from the start, but yeah. Mom always said that there were a lot of good years too, all mixed in there with the bad ones, I guess that’s life. Bad stuff happens, people aren’t right for each other, things happen that you can’t control. That’s just how it’s got to be. Permanent happiness can’t exist; that just goes against the laws universe.”

“They must have thought they were right for each other at some point. It’s weird how you can really love someone for a little while and then all those feelings just fade away.”

“It is. I’m not sure my parents ever loved each other in the first place though, not really. Not in the way that you’re supposed to love the person you marry, it was never selfless or unconditional, it was like they were always just trying to make the best of their situation. They felt like they were stuck with each other for eighteen years.”

“Tell me about them.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I don’t know. Where they met each other, why they got married. I like love stories.”

“It’s not really a love story.”

“I don’t mind” she smiled “Go.”

Jack sighed and took another sip from his beer bottle. “Uh… okay well they met in the late fifties when they were nineteen or so. Cece, that’s my mom, was going to be a nurse and was halfway through her training program in her hometown of Mount Pleasant South Carolina, that’s a suburban town kind of sandwiched between North and South Charleston and bordered by the Atlantic. She was so smart, people who knew her back then always talked about how clever she was and how no matter what she did she was always good at it, and she was really beautiful too; guys used to show up at the nursing residence where she was staying all the time and ask her on dates but she didn’t go on too many of them. She preferred to stay in and read or study, and at the weekends she’d go back to her parents’ big country house and go horse riding through the woods. She was such a goody two shoes, all clean cut and perfect, but then she met Jesse Valentine and it all changed.

“He’d just quit his job in Boston Massachusetts that year, and had subsequently landed in South Carolina doing work for his uncle on a construction site in Mount Pleasant, and that’s where he first laid eyes on Cece. He was a real tough city boy, rough around the edges who swore a lot and smoked a lot and had a gun in the glove compartment of his car, but he was tall and strong and she was bowled over by his pretty boy looks, even if his accent was so thick she couldn’t catch half of the words he said. He was a guy with no prospects. He’d barely scraped by in school, never applied to any colleges and he already had a criminal record for driving while stoned.

“For some reason Cece just liked him a lot, and they started to spend a lot of time together even against the advice of her friends and parents. I think she knew he was bad news, even back then, but she’d never been so enthralled with someone, or felt such excitement as she did when he was with her. Eventually she stopped studying hard at nursing school and she was late to shifts, and then she stopped showing up at all. She spent a summer with Jesse in Boston, and when she came back she was so different, she’s started drinking and smoking and was always talking about going to parties late at night, which she’d never done in South Carolina.

“They got married after about a year of knowing each other, which was pretty sudden, but not in their minds, I guess, because they really thought they loved each other. They moved into a small house by the beach on Sullivan’s island after their honeymoon and as was expected of her, Cece left the nursing school and became a full time housewife. She was a little sad about it, I think, she knew that she could have been a good nurse because she was so good with people, so caring and sweet, but someone had to clean and cook dinner for Jesse when he got home from work in the evenings.

“Trev was born in the summer of 1960, and after that things started to get difficult. Cece found it hard to take care of the baby all alone, he cried all the time and woke her up at odd hours of the night, and Jesse would never help. He was always too tired from working hard at the construction site. It turns out he wasn’t suited to married life; he was too wild at heart, he had that unbridled independent streak of a boy who was never going to be tied down, and the confinement of the situation awakened a lot of anger in him. He and Cece would fight all the time, he stressed her out, she felt like he wasn’t trying to be a good husband or father, but as Trev started to get older, things started to get easier.

“There were a few years that everything was good, they began to get used to parenthood and married life. Jesse was still restless and angry sometimes, but it was becoming less, he began to settle and it was as though just for a few years the two of them created their own little bubble. Everything seemed okay, Trevor was doing just fine, and Cece even found out that she was pregnant with her second child. She was so excited about it, she had all these idyllic dreams about a perfect all-American family of four living in their sweet little house just like the families on TV, but her idyllic little bubble was burst when the whole world began to change around them.

“All around there was talk of a nuclear war. The Cuban’s had missiles, communism was expanding, the US was under threat. An enormous wall sprung up in Berlin dividing the city into East and West and President Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas. People marched on the streets of New York protesting against wars, protesting against apartheid while the police beat the protesters down. Bob Dylan emerged, singing songs about changing times, while four floppy haired boys from Liverpool landed on American shores singing about a revolution. All over the television were hippies with megaphones, discourse about communists, bombs and guns and hand grenades.

“Their second baby boy was born right in the middle of it all, and this one was Jesse all over, from his eyes to his mouth to his thick black hair. They named him after his father: James, later shortened to Jack and well… that’s where I come into the story. That’s me, baby Jack Valentine, born October 19^th 1964.

“One day a letter came in the mail addressed to Jesse, and as soon as Cece took it from the mailbox she began to cry, she knew exactly what it was. He had exactly one week to attend a physical examination in Columbia. He was being drafted to fight for the United States in South Vietnam.”

Jack broke off when he glanced over at Jolene to see her eyes heavy and sleepy, beginning to flutter shut. “You’re tired” he observed “You should go to bed.”

“No, no I’m fine!” she protested “Tell me what happened, did Jesse go to Vietnam?”

“I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow, but you can barely keep your eyes open.” He stood up from his chair and held out his hand for her. “Come on, up.” She groaned and grabbed his hand to pull herself from the chair. She was so tired her whole body seemed unstable, like a puppet on strings or a foal trying to walk for the first time. They walked back towards their bedrooms in silence, a few of the old folks still sitting outside chatting quietly. It seemed so much later than it really was.

Jolene reached her door first, and as she twisted the key in the lock she turned to Jack and smiled sleepily. “Wake me up at five AM, there’s no way I’ll be able to do it myself.”

He nodded and headed off towards his own room. “Goodnight Jolene.”

“Goodnight Jack, Sleep tight.”

 

Jack: Chapter Twelve

The great thing about an American road trip is that you can sing your way all the way across the country, from Albuquerque New Mexico to Atlanta Georgia, there’s a song out there for just about every city along the way. Jolene sang every one of them loudly and tunelessly on the first morning with the passenger seat window rolled down as far as it would go, one arm out stretched as though she was trying to capture some of the hot desert air in her palm. The highway out of Vegas was empty, a long road that would never end stretching out in front of them, a road to possibilities, the road to freedom lined with cacti and whiskers of straw scorched by the sun, and the sky was blue and cloudless and endless and Jack felt lighter than he had in years.

Cities and towns came and went, and buildings turned from high rises to sprawling suburban dwellings to flat roofed shacks until they passed through Boulder City and all their surroundings slowly turned into dust land. The road out in the middle of the Mojave was cracked and eroded from the heat and the wind and Jack’s jade green Cadillac threw up clouds of dust behind its tyres as it zoomed along the highway, hopping over loose rocks and potholes, their luggage rattling around in the trunk. Jolene only had one small bag when he picked her up at the Steakhouse, she said she didn’t own anything else, and her small tattered bag looked so insignificant when thrown in amongst his masses of bags, boxes, guitar cases all shoved in whichever way they fitted. They were things that he’d accumulated little by little from all the places he’d stayed and lived, but the day that he left home in October 1983 his backpack wasn’t a whole lot bigger than Jolene’s. For a short moment he felt an unexpected sense of kinship with her, an acknowledgement that at different points in their life they had shared a common experience.

Jolene opened the glove compartment and took out the road map that he had prepared with a red marker line following the route along every highway and through every town and city, through deserts, between mountains, over lakes and rivers. Thousands of miles spread across her lap. “Where are we now?”

“Just about to cross over the Colorado River. Hey, if you look down here to your left you can see the Hoover Dam.”

She almost leaned right over him to look out the driver’s side window and down into the water below them, the dam white and gleaming wetly under the sun.

“And now” he said as they crossed the bridge and landed back onto the highway once again surrounded by desert. “We’re in Arizona.” Jolene looked back to the map and placed her finger right in the centre of Arizona state. “I come from Arizona” she said conversationally.

“Oh yeah? What place?”

“It’s a couple hours from here.”

“Is it on our route?”

“I hope not.” She dipped her head and looked intently at the road map. “How long is this trip going to take you?”

“Something like thirty-five hours. I want to stop off twice, tonight somewhere close to Albuquerque and tomorrow night maybe Memphis or something.”

“So I’ll get to Arkansas tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow night if we don’t break down somewhere or run out of gas.” He forced what he hoped was a breezy laugh as though to cover up the fact that either of those outcomes was a legitimate possibility. “Where exactly in Arkansas are you going?”

“I have my own map with directions and stuff, you don’t have to worry about me. You can just drop me off in Little Rock and I’ll get there myself.”

“Just chuck you out on the side of the Freeway?”

“Yeah, I’ll make it where I need to go.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Hey! I see we’re going to be passing through Amarillo!”

“Uh huh, probably tomorrow morning.”

She grinned devilishly, “So would you say this is the way to Amarillo?”

“Huh? OH…”

She threw back her head and started to belt out the awful seventies ballad “Sha la la la la la la la! When the day is dawning…”

“No, no come on, not Tony Christie.”

 “…on a Texas Sunday morning, how I long to be there, with Marie who’s waiting for me there…”

“Please, not in this car.”

“Every lonely city, la la la la la, where I hang my hat, aint as half as pretty as where my baby’s at!”

A pickup truck overtook them on the highway, its driver staring right into Jack’s car with incredulity as Jolene screamed out the lyrics, her arm flailing out the open window. “IS THIS THE WAY TO AMARILLO? EVERY NIGHT I’VE BEEN HUGGING MY PILLOW!”

Jack rolled down his own window and stuck his head out, taking in a lungful of hot Arizona air. Only twenty-one hours to Little Rock. He concentrated hard on a mental image of two thousand seven hundred dollars in his hands. It would all be worth it in the end, even if Tony Christie was involved.

“DREAMING DREAMS OF AMARILLO, AND SWEET MARIE WHO WAITS FOR ME.”

They stopped to pick up some coffee and fries in a truck-stop in Winslow Arizona after four hours of driving, and of course Jolene had a song for Winslow too. Jack got out of the car to stretch his legs while she went inside to pick up his double espresso, and looked around at the scenery, all too familiar, desert and scrub, scrub and desert, and wondered how many more hours it would be before they reached a place that looked like something else. He yearned for green grass and hedgerows and woodlands with animals that weren’t trying to poison you all the time.

Jolene came out of the station carrying two coffees and two bags of fries, bopping her head to the song she was singing to herself. She handed his share to him and leaned against the wall where it was shaded and slightly cooler. She began to munch on her food in a world of her own, half humming half-singing another tune. “Well, I’m a standing on a corner in Winslow Arizona and such a fine sight to see, it’s a girl, my lord, in a flatbed Ford slowin’ down to take a look at me”

Jack took his coffee and fries from her. “Is that The Eagles? I love The Eagles”

“Mmhmm. Me too.”

He took a sip of his coffee and sang the next line of the song to himself “Come on baby, don’t say maybe…”

Jolene smiled to herself “I wanna know if your sweet love is gonna save me.”

“We may lose and we may win though we will never be here again, so open up, I’m climbin’ in.”

They awkwardly avoided eye contact, feigning nonchalance as they sang the chorus line in tandem. “So take it easy!”

~.~.~.~.~

Jolene was still singing by the time they zipped over the Arizona New Mexico border in the early evening, The Eagles greatest hits tape on its third repeat. She whooped as they passed the ‘Welcome to New Mexico’ sign on the side of the highway and reached for Jack’s road map again so she could draw an ‘X’ through the state of Arizona. “So long to the Grand Canyon State!” she cried. She opened the glove compartment to place the map back in, but something inside it caught her eye. “You’ve got a novel in here” she commented, and pulled out a dog eared copy of George Orwell’s 1984.

“Oh yeah.” Jack said, glancing at it. “I forgot that was in there.”

“Do you like to read?”

“I uh…” he broke off with a small laugh “I try to read sometimes but I get bored of it pretty quick. I think I’d like to be the book reading sort but that’s not me.”

“I don’t blame you, this book looks especially boring.”

“Haven’t you heard of 1984?”

“No, never.”

“Are you serious? It’s one of the most famous books there is!”

“Well what’s the story about?”

“The dude… Orwell, he wrote it in 1948 and it’s kinda how he imagines the world is gonna be in 1984, and it’s this whole dystopian thing where everyone is being watched all the time, you know? People aren’t allowed to do anything that sets them apart or have any independent thought or anything or they’re made to disappear, I guess it’s a comment on where he felt the world was heading, too much surveillance and censorship is kind of damaging, I guess.”

“Uh huh. Did you like it?”

Jack chuckled. “No, I hated it. I never finished it, I didn’t like the characters because they were so dull and didn’t have any personality. Whatever about it being a great idea and an interesting view on the future, but the whole thing was a massive chore to read.” He broke off self-consciously “I’ve never admitted that before. It’s one of those books that everyone is supposed to like.”

“So you like to feel things about characters?”

“Yeah, I guess I do.” He shrugged “What do you like to read?”

“I can’t read so good.” She said unselfconsciously. “I can read a lot of words but not all of them… not the real long ones, you know? I never even finished middle school, and I was never good at all that stuff anyway.” She opened a random page of the book and tried to read it, as though to prove to him that she was telling the truth. “Corners, the gangs of y- you… youths in shirts all the same colour, the en- enom-”

“That word is ‘enormous’”

“Enormous kwa-” She broke off with frustration. “I’m not the reading sort either.”

“That’s alright, everyone is good at different things.” Jolene flicked through the book, the pages yellowed at the sides, some of them coming loose at the spine, and then something fell out of it onto her lap. Jack took his eyes off the road for a moment to look at it, and recognised it immediately. It was an old photograph he’d been using to keep his place in the novel, taken down by the sea in North Charleston. Jolene picked it up and examined it. “Is this your family?”

“Yeah” he said. “That’s my mom and dad and my brother Trev. That’s a really old photo, I reckon I was thirteen or so there.”

“You look like your dad”

“I know.”

“Your brother” she said, pointing to the tall fair haired boy. “He’s handsome.”

Jack laughed out loud. “Trev is the biggest dork you’d ever meet. He was in the chess club when he was in high school, he even won a prize for it, then he went to Cornell and majored in Math.”

“He sounds like a smart guy”

“Yeah, Trevor’s a real smart dude. He’s one of those guys that’s good at everything, he was on the baseball team too and he did things like volunteering at old people’s homes at the weekend. Everyone frickin loved him.”

She looked more closely at the photo. “Does he live in South Carolina?”

“I don’t know, he might. I haven’t spoken to him in almost three years.”

“How come?”

Jack shrugged “Uh… it’s hard to keep in contact with people when you don’t see them a lot, and I lost all my phone numbers and addresses around the time I moved into my apartment in Vegas.”

“I get that, and Vegas is so far from South Carolina. When’s the last time you saw him?”

“It must have been around my nineteenth birthday I guess, I don’t really remember anymore, just that it was a long time ago.” He shrugged “We lived in New York at the time, and I got out of there in 1983 so that’s what? Almost eight years. Huh.”

“Why did you leave New York?”

“You sure ask a lot of questions.” He said with discomfort. “I don’t want to talk about what happened in the eighties. It was a weird decade.” He let out a short sharp laugh and shook his head. “What about your family? Where are they?”

“I don’t have any photographs like this one” She said sadly, and carefully placed it back inside the book. “My family weren’t all that great, they didn’t do much only sit around all day. I come from a trailer park in the middle of nowhere where it never rains and everyone just sits out on their front lawns drinking beers and doing nothing.”

“Huh. That sounds like a real treat. How big is your family?”

“Well, there’s my mom, she probably takes up enough space for like three people, and there’s my dad who doesn’t count because I don’t even remember him. He was one of those hippies who just wanted to smoke some grass and drive his Scooby-doo van around the place picking flowers.”

Jack wanted to laugh at her commentary, but her delivery was so solemn that he stifled it.

“Then there’s Donny…” she broke off. “We don’t have to talk about my family if you don’t wanna.”

“That’s okay, I don’t mind.”

She tucked her hair behind her ear and slowly and methodically placed the book and the map back into the glove compartment. “He’s the whole reason I’m going to Arkansas. He’s my brother, see and he went missing about seven years ago or so. I spent the first couple of years looking for him myself, you know? I walked around my hometown a lot, and then I walked further and further and I knocked on doors but nobody even knew who Donny was. But then one day I was walking some more and I started to see these signs tacked up all over the place. They were on poles and walls and park benches, just this guy’s face, and he was smiling a lot in the photograph and giving two thumbs up like he was really happy about something and underneath his face was “Lou Breslin your friendly neighbourhood PI” with a phone number. Then I learned that a PI was a private Investigator, and that meant that he was real good at finding people who had gone missing. I thought that he could find Donny for me, so I called him up.

“He had this weird dingy little office in Phoenix, and I had to get there on a bus, and it was a hot day and I got there real sweaty and I was mad when I met Lou Breslin, but everything kind of looked up when he told me that he was the right guy to call, and that he was going to find Donny as soon as I gave him two thousand dollars.”

Jack frowned. “And did you give it to him?”

“Not right away, I didn’t have that kind of money lying around, so I kept his phone number under my bed and I hoped that one day I’d save enough to pay him, but the number was lying there for nearly two years before I realised I couldn’t just loll around with my momma hoping that thousands of dollars were going to fall onto my lap while I was watching an episode of Magnum PI. On the day I turned twenty-one I packed up all my things and I went to Las Vegas to try and get a job that paid a lot.”

“And did you?”

“I found a lot of…” She broke off with a small laugh “…different ways of making that money, but I managed to gather it and I sent it all to Phoenix, but then I heard back that the money wasn’t enough, and that I needed to send more if I wanted to see Donny again. So I worked harder and I sent more, but the same thing kept happening, see, I’d work and earn and send the money, but the money I sent was never enough.”

Jack made a face. The whole thing sounded fishy as hell, but he didn’t say that to her. Instead he said: “And how does Arkansas come into this?”

Jolene smiled brightly “Well, last month I got a letter in the mail from Lou Breslin’s office in Phoenix, he said that all my money had finally paid off, that he’d found Donny in Arkansas. He sent a map along and everything an address and directions to the exact house he’s living in.” She sounded so excited, practically bouncing up and down on the passenger seat. “I can’t wait until I get there, I swear, I know that I’ve spent a lot of money on this whole thing but it’s finally paying off.”

“That’s great” said Jack “I hope it all works out.”  She didn’t respond, and when he glanced at her she was staring dreamily out the window with a wide smile on her face, as though thinking about this bright future she’d imagined for herself and her brother, and as much Jack tried not to care about her or her story, he kind of did. He accidentally gave a crap, and the less cynical side of him hoped that things would work out in the end, even though he wouldn’t be there to see it.

Jack: Chapter Eleven

“Say Cheese!”

Jack awkwardly crouched down to Nash’s height and flashed a pearly white smile towards the lens of Nadine’s camera.  It clicked and flashed brightly, blinding him momentarily and he blinked frantically in an attempt to regain his sight.

“Another” cried Nash, slinging his arm around Jack’s shoulder and gesturing towards Nadine who was looking down at the camera in her hands in confusion. “One more babe, Jack, this time make a funny face, alright?” Jack obliged and crossed his eyes, and Nadine snapped another shot of he and Nash. Suspended in time; the two best friends that ever were, together for the last time.

It was early summer and everything was finally ready to go. Jack’s apartment had been sold that afternoon. The new guy was moving in the following week, and Jack had his keys ready to hand over once he left it for good. All of his clothes and valuables were stuffed into the trunk of his Cadillac ready for a cross country adventure. He was to leave for South Carolina early the following morning, and he had everything mapped out. It was a thirty four hour journey, crossing through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and finally South Carolina, which perhaps wasn’t the most scenic route in the world, but after becoming so accustomed to desert and scrub over the last couple of years, he figured corn and farmland might be a refreshing change.

Nash had insisted on holding a going-away-party for him on the eve of his departure, and thus the reason he found himself posing for his fortieth photograph in Nash’s kitchen, surrounded by friends and sort-of-friends and a load of chips and guacamole. Nash had even bought a “Bon Voyage!” Banner and hung it awkwardly above the patio doors which was a nice, albeit slightly embarrassing gesture. Jack had honestly hoped to slip out of Nevada under the cover of night unnoticed, failing that perhaps a small gathering of close friends, but whenever Nash was involved in something it had to be big, it had to be loud, and if it wasn’t tacky, well, it wasn’t a Nash event.

“Ayyy! More wine!” hollered Santorini, who had approached him from behind wielding a bottle of Australian shiraz. He tipsily topped up his already half full wine glass, and accidentally sloshed some of it onto the floorboards in the process. Nadine stared at the puddle of red wine at their feet with a pained expression that reminded him of how Steph’s face used to screw up when he wore navy shirts with black jeans. He wondered if Nadine ever looked back at her careless party girl days with longing, back when she was the one spilling shiraz on the floorboards, busting stereo speakers from blasting Don’t You Want Me too loudly and leaving marks on the countertops from dancing on them in heels, but if she was unhappy with her choices he didn’t feel sorry for her anymore.

The place was dotted with groups of friends and acquaintances, mainly people that Jack had sort-of-known during his time in Las Vegas. Toni Taurus and the Elevators were there, keeping to themselves in the corner of the kitchen, sipping morosely from their glasses of shiraz. Antoinio Rivera was there too with his big broken nose, clinging to Santorini all night and constantly looking around him in disbelief at Nash’s new house and life, confused and frightened by the lack of tequila and cocaine. Jack was almost tempted, in the spirit of his last night in Vegas to apologise for all the fights they’d had, but then again, it wasn’t like he was really all that sorry. Rivera’s face was one that was crying out to be punched, and it was one that he’d be happy to never see again.

Nash took a knife from the counter and tapped it against the side of his wine glass “Hey! Everyone!” he yelled “Pipe down; I’ve got something to say!” the buzz and chatter in the room died own quickly and he glanced confidently at all the faces in his kitchen. “Welcome, guys and gals, well, this is a bit of an emotional night for us all, I think. It was only a couple of weeks ago that our good pal here, Jack Valentine told me that he was leaving Vegas. He told me halfway through a rollercoaster ride, because, you know; I guess he likes a dramatic delivery.” A titter passed around the room, and Jack cringed, feeling like there was a bright white spotlight focused right on him. “I remember thinking that goodbye was going to be hard” Nash went on. “Jack? Not in Vegas anymore? I can’t even imagine that, I thought. And I was right, because standing here today I can’t believe that our time’s run out already, and even if you know that a farewell like this is coming, you’re never prepared for how it really feels.

“I met Jack almost three years ago in the Flamin’ Flamingo, which many of you know it’s the grimiest venue in the whole of Nevada, he was a weedy little dude back then with a sort of half mullet, wearing a faded out Duran Duran T-shirt and a beat up leather jacket, but boy, let me tell you, this weedy little dude could sing. Yaknow, since then he and I have been through a lot, he’s been there through the best and worst moments of my life and I’m honest when I say that to me, Jack Valentine is Vegas. He is the epitome of Sin City, and nothing’s going to be the same without him. Poker nights will never be the same, the Superbowl will never be the same, I’ll never do body shots of tequila off strippers in the Shark Club again without thinking about Jack…” He glanced over his shoulder at Nadine whose eyebrow had almost disappeared into her hairline. “…Not that I was gonna do that stuff anyway babe.

“ Nah, seriously, when he’s in South Carolina we’re going to be separated by over two thousand miles, but I hope that’s he’s going to take a little bit of Vegas with him and that he won’t forget all of us here who came out tonight to say goodbye. Besides, we’ve got your address now, and goddamn it we won’t let you forget us!” He raised his glass in the air. “So this is it, a toast to Jack Valentine on his last night is Las Vegas, I think I speak for every person in this room when I say we’re going to miss you like crazy, but I just want to say how thankful I am to have known someone that makes saying goodbye so hard. To Jack!” everyone in the room followed suit and raised their wine glasses. “To Jack!” and Jack bowed his head in gratitude. He felt suddenly emotional about leaving, a feeling that hadn’t really struck him before, but endings were always hard, weren’t they? He knew that Carolina would bring so much more happiness to his life once he reached it.

He looked up from his feet and saw Nash and Nadine together by the counters speaking softly and seriously and if Jack hadn’t known any better he would have sworn he saw tears in his friend’s eyes. But that was impossible, Nash Buckley didn’t cry; he probably just had allergies. Nadine caught his eye from across the room and smiled slightly, her gaze lingering on his as though she was trying to communicate something to him, and he got it. They were both glad that he was leaving, because they knew in the long run it would be better for Nash; fewer complications, less bad feelings and guilt. It was finally going to be okay.

Jack walked home at one AM, passing through Las Vegas Boulevard which was in full swing with buzzers and bells and lights and flashing neon everywhere the eye could see. He dodged crowds on the sidewalks, his shoes crunching on shards of broken glass and was hollered at by a trio of drag queens smoking outside a nightclub. The nights were still cool in May, cool enough that he shivered and crossed his arms over his chest, wishing that he’d anticipated the cold, but when he’d walked to Nash’s earlier it had been far too hot to bring a sweater. The streets smelled like dry ice and fast food laced with cigarette smoke that invaded his senses and reminded him that he was desperate for a nicotine fix. He drew his Marlboro reds from his back pocket hastily and his lighter came tumbling out with them, falling onto the pavement behind him and smashing to smithereens with a miniature explosion. He swore under his breath but kept walking.

He turned onto East Flamingo Avenue and zipped up an elevator above the street that brought him to the entrance of a beach club that he’d never been allowed to enter. Every time he’d reached the top of the line the bouncers had always helpfully informed him that unless he was “A hot girl or River Fucking Phoenix” then he wasn’t getting near the place, which was like, totally fine, it was probably a lame club anyway… He could hear the booming metallic music from the street, but there wasn’t much activity going on outside, apart from two bouncers standing gruffly by the entrance, but just as he walked by them, a girl tottered out of the club in heels that were too high for her to balance in. She stumbled out onto the sidewalk, knees knocking together like a fawn trying to walk for the first time while trying to place a cigarette between her lips. One of the bouncers brought his huge meaty hand down on her shoulder. “If you leave the club you can’t get back in” he barked.

“Can’t I have a stamp?” The girl whimpered, her cigarette bobbing up and down in her mouth as she held out the back of her hand for him.

“No stamps. Either get back inside or forget about it”

“I just need some air, it’s hot in there!” her shoe wobbled beneath her and she lurched to one side. Jack had the instinctive urge to try and help her to stand up properly. She made another slightly pathetic drunken sound and held up five fingers to the bouncer “Five minutes”

“No”

“Pal… listen… buddy five-”

“No”

“Five minutes, I just want to smoke this cigarette. Five minutes”

“Forget it toots.”

“Ugh. Screw you” The girl said and she stumbled awkwardly towards the railings that overlooked the busy street below. She produced a lighter and lit up her cigarette, leaning over the side above the traffic, her long, glossy blonde hair hanging like a sheet while the bouncers muttered to each other behind her. Jack approached her gingerly.

“Hey, excuse me” he said in the most non-threatening way he could. “I really don’t mean to be an asshole here, but to you think I could borrow your lighter for a second? I smashed mine on South Boulevard and I need a smoke.”

“Huh? Oh, yeah sure.” She tucked her hair behind her ear and handed it to him, allowing him to see her face for the first time and as he saw her he had a sudden jolt of recognition. He knew this girl.

“Violet?”

 

Her face suddenly dropped. “Uh… um… yes.” She turned her face away from him and stared back down at the cars below.

“I’m Jack, remember?” he prompted “From the casino? On your birthday?”

“Uh… Yes.” She was either extremely drunk or extremely tired, but he guessed that it was probably a combination of both, but she was still wobbling on her feet, even as she held onto the railings.

“Are you okay? You just got kicked out of that club.” he finally brought a cigarette to his lips and inhaled it along with the cold night air and shuddered.

“I’m okay” she sighed. “I’ll walk home. I can walk.” She hauled herself off the railings and began to totter across the pavement, but only made a couple of steps before one of her ankles took a turn. Jack dashed to help her before she fell. “You’re not okay” he informed her.

“I’m not that drunk” she slurred “These shoes… they’re not mine, they’re Caroline’s and her feet are bigger…”

“Yeah, alright but either way you can’t walk home in them. It’s one AM anyway, it’s dangerous to walk at night.”

“I’ll take off the shoes” she kicked them off and gave them to Jack, who stared down at the seven inch platforms with heels like a weapon in his hands. “These things could do some damage” he commented.

“Yeah, to my goddamned feet” She began to walk barefoot towards the stairs.

“Violet. Stop, I don’t know where you live, but you can’t walk all the way there like this.”

She made an incredulous sound. “Can’t walk in the shoes, can’t walk without ‘em!”

“Let me hail you a taxi”

“I can’t pay for a taxi”

Jack balked. Neither could he. “Okay, okay wait.” He chased her. “You can walk home, alright? You can walk home, but you’ve got to try to sober up first.”

I can’t walk home with you”

“Who said anything about walking home with me? I just want to get you some food or coffee or something, alright? Then I’ll leave you alone.”

“And I’ll never see you again”

Jack smiled “Right. You’ll never have to see me again. Pinky swear.” She stared at him suspiciously for a long moment, making him wonder what exactly he’d done to make this girl so wary of him, but then nodded once. “Okay we can go get some food. If you can find somewhere that’s still open.”

“No sweat” said Jack “I know a place that’s open all night.”

~.~.~.~.~

The 909 Steakhouse was a little bit out of the city. It was a small diner-style place with a flat roof that was probably a gas station once upon a time, sitting on the roadside against a backdrop of cacti and scrub, it’s tarmacadam parking lot cracked from the sun with weeds forcing their way through the gaps. The moon was big and full in the inky sky above Jack and Violet’s heads as they moved towards the diner door. The red neon burger sign fixed to the wall shone brightly on Violet’s face and hair, lighting her up like pop-art, while the orange street lights drained all other colour from the scene around them as though they’d stepped through Jack’s television set into a black and white film.

Jack had never been inside the Steakhouse; the greasy breakfast food thing wasn’t really his style, but he knew that Nash had haunted the joint a lot a couple of years earlier while he’d been seeing two or three of the waitresses, so he knew it stayed open until at least two AM on Friday nights. A tin bell above the door jangled as he pushed it open and stepped inside. There was just one wiped-out looking woman behind the counter who was forlornly drawing shapes in a pile of spilled salt with her finger. The clock behind her tall blonde hairdo read 1:15 AM, and it ticked loudly against the rhythm of an old Johnny Cash song playing from a radio in the corner, and one other guest sat in a far booth slowly sipping on a cup of coffee.

Violet came wobbling over the threshold behind him but immediately recoiled when her eyes adjusted to the lights and she realised where she was. “No” She hissed, turning back towards the door to leave “No, no, nope.” Jack gently placed a hand on her shoulder “You okay?”

“No, I don’t want to stay here.”

Jack looked back around at the practically empty steakhouse with confusion. “Why not?”

“I don’t like this place.”

“Violet… come on. Just get something to eat real quick and you’ll be sober enough to go home.” He was beginning to become convinced that she was a little unhinged.

Her face was tense and anxious, and as always she was going out of her way to avoid making eye contact with him. Her breath smelled so strongly of alcohol that he had to lean away from her a little as he spoke to her. He held up both hands to her “Ten minutes. We’ll just stay for ten minutes and then you can leave, okay?”

“Okay” she said hurriedly and then dipped her head, letting her long blonde hair fall over her face and she scuttled to a booth in the far corner. Jack strode after her and slid into the seat opposite her. She kept her face turned towards the window, staring out at the parked trucks and gas pumps as though she was watching primetime television. Jack shrugged to himself and nonchalantly took one of the menus from the table. He skimmed down the long list of greasy diner foods, trying to find the item with the highest carb content to take the away the edge of the liqueur Violet had consumed. He began to realise how hungry he was himself, it had been almost twelve hours since he’d eaten.

The waitress from behind the counter shimmied over to their table with a notepad. “Good evenin’ angel what can I get ya?” She had a strong southern twang.

“I’ll get the greasiest thing you’ve got” he said and glanced into his wallet “and the cheapest”

“That’ll be the bacon.”

“Can I get that with something carb-y? You know like-”

“Bacon with a side of hash browns.”

“Right.”

“And for your girl?”

“That’s for her, I’m good.”

“You sure sweetheart? Coffee or somethin’? We do sweet tea.”

“No coffee thanks, bacon and hash browns is just fine.”

“Okay” She smiled and tucked her pencil behind her ear, and Jack noticed her glancing quizzically at Violet, still staring out the window, before she turned away from their table. His stomach rumbled angrily into the silence after the waitress had gone, causing Violet to look over at him blearily. “You hungry?” she asked him and he shook his head “No, I’m good”

“Your stomach was growling just now”

“I know, but I’ll be fine, I just want you to eat something first. I’ll get something later”

“Why don’t you get something when we’re here?”

“I… well, I’ve only got five dollars.”

She looked at him, big brown eyes wide and watery with realisation. “And you’re using it to buy food for me?”

He shrugged, trying to play his embarrassment off as indifference.

“You don’t even know me”

“I don’t want you to get into some kind of trouble if you walk home drunk late at night, that’s all.”

There was a lengthy pause in which neither of them said a thing, and then she quietly thanked him and stared back out the window. Jack looked at her with a slight frown between his brows. Her huge brown eyes, her long spiky lashes, her upturned nose that slanted like a ski slope, she reminded him of someone he’d met somewhere, and he was irritated by the fact that he couldn’t quite place her.

“Here we go, bacon and hash browns!” The waitress had returned wielding a steaming hot plate of slightly wilted food in which she placed down on the table in front of Violet.

“Thank you ma’am” Jack said “That was fast.”

“Yeah well, we just have that stuff waitin’ out the back, just got to heat it up!” She placed a well-manicured hand on the table in front of him. “Say, you mind if I ask you somethin’?”

“Go ahead.”

“Any chance you come from the south?”

“Yeah I come from South Carolina.”

“Ah, see I thought that when I was talkin’ to you, thought I recognised that accent. My family come from Georgia I just thought you sounded a little like you were from Georgia too.”

“Yeah, well close enough” he grinned politely. Meanwhile Violet picked up a piece of hard sizzled bacon and took a noisy bite from it.

“It was a little hard to figure out you know? Because you ain’t got the real accent, the way you say ‘coffee’ is like you’re from New York, sort of.”

“My dad comes from Boston; I guess maybe I talk like he does sometimes.”

“I think I’ve got a cousin or two in South Carolina” She barrelled on “Maybe you’ve heard of them? Tripp and Buddy Tucker.”

“Carolina’s a pretty big place, there’s a lot of Tuckers.”

“Everyone knows Tripp and Buddy! Hey, if you ever see them tell them that you know Candy! That’s my name by the way, Candy Tucker.”

“You know, I’m going there tomorrow, so if I see them I’ll definitely tell them I met Candy Tucker.”

She smiled brightly, oblivious to his slight sarcasm and started to turn away but something about Violet caught her attention and she stopped, cocking her head to one side. “Hey, I know you!” she said, startling Violet so much that the rubbery bacon slipped from her fingers. “You used to work here, right?”

Violet was shaking her head anxiously.

Yeah! Weren’t you my replacement when I was on maternity leave? I remember because Mary-Sue told me all about you afterwards. Summer of eighty-nine!” Jack stared at Violet questioningly, cogs in his head beginning to turn, pieces starting to fit together.

“You know Caroline has this photo of you guys in her staffroom locker? It’s so cute, I don’t know when it is but you guys are all curled up on this sofa with cocktails in your hands, you know you look so different when your hair is brown, but it’s real nice blonde too!”

Violet looked as though she was about to cry when she caught Jack’s eye across the table. He didn’t know what he was feeling, but it was like all the fizz in a soda can bubbling its way from his feet all the way up to his head as he began to connect up names and faces and events and places, and he wondered how he’d missed it before. He could see Violet looking desperately towards the exit but Candy had unintentionally blocked the end of the booth with her body, and she went on obliviously with her speech. “You know, I’ve heard your name a hundred times, doll, but I just can’t call it to my mind… Oh, what is it, I’m so sorry! I want to say Julia… is it Julia? Julie?”

“Nope,” Said Jack “It’s Jolene.”

~.~.~.~.~

The only sounds were the clock and the radio in the moments after Candy left their table, and Jack stared across at Jolene Jones and she stared back, suddenly seeming sober with big fat tears gathering slowly in her eyes threatening to spill down her cheeks. She reached up and wiped them away with the back of her hand and sniffed loudly. “This is why I didn’t want to come here.” She said thickly. Jack snatched a napkin from one of the holders and offered it to her sharply. She looked at it as though she distrusted it, but then gingerly plucked it from his hand and wiped her nose. Jack felt so stupid; how had he not known? How could he forget the girl who had stolen two thousand dollars from him in the Flamin Flamingo dressing room?

“I don’t even know what I’m supposed to say to you.” He admitted, and from the moment he spoke to her she burst into a fit of full on tears, her body wracked with sobs, wailing into the two-ply napkin he’d given her while he sat upright and uncomfortable on the other side of the table.

“I’m sorry I told a lie.” She coughed “I hate that I’ve turned into such a damn liar.” Jack pulled more napkins from the holder and awkwardly placed them next to her plate. “It’s okay, no need to cry about it.”

“Just one lie turned into another and then I couldn’t stop… Oh God! I’m sorry for everything!” She grabbed a handful of napkins and loudly blew her nose. Jack glanced around the diner self-consciously, wondering if anyone else was catching this over-the-top emotional outburst and was willing to save him from it.

“Everything’s been so hard since I got here…”

“Listen, honey, it’s alright it was a long time ago.”

“oh GOD.” She broke down into a fresh fit of tears “You want that money back don’t you?”

He hesitated. “Well, yeah. You took a lot of goddamned money from me.” He suddenly moved past his discomfort and began to feel annoyed, who did this girl think she was anyway? “You know that money was all I had that month, I took it out of the bank to pay my rent and the next thing it was gone. I barely ate for a whole month trying to scrape that money together again, just so I wouldn’t lose my apartment, I had to take on an extra shift in a factory working nights to earn extra cash, all because you saw some damn money and had to take it.”

“I needed it” She sniffed “You don’t understand how badly I needed it too.”

“Maybe you could have done some work and earned it like every other functioning member of society, huh? Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to steal?”

“You don’t know nothing about my momma.”

“Alright, alright I’m sorry, I don’t know your momma.”

“I’ll give the money back” she said to his utter amazement, and he narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “What do you mean? How? You couldn’t pay for a taxi ride home! I just spend my last five dollars on some food for you, food that you didn’t even eat.”

“I’m sorry, you can have it” she said, and slid the plate towards him. He pushed it away with annoyance. “Forget it, I don’t want it.”

Jolene sighed and wiped her hands over her damp cheeks “I’ll give the money back, I promise. It’s just gonna take a little while because I haven’t got a whole lot at this moment.”

“I could just bring you with me to the police station right now.” He threatened, but instantly regretted it when her face screwed up again and fresh tears began to pour down her face.

“Jeez, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that…”

“I can get it to you, I promise, I just need some time. Have you got time?”

He sighed reluctantly “Yeah I got time.”

She nodded and continued to brush away her tears, slowly beginning to calm. She took another bite from her half eaten piece of bacon which was likely cold. “I heard you say you’re going to South Carolina tomorrow.” She said while giving her nose one last wipe with the heel of her hand.

“Today technically.” He replied. “In about eight hours-time.”

“Are you driving there?”

“Yes I am.”

“Huh.” She picked up a hash brown, bit off two thirds of it in one go and continued to speak with a full mouth. “Do you think I could ask you to do something crazy?”

“I’m not really in the mood to do any favours for you right now.”

“Just hear me out.”

“Alright.”

“I’ve been trying to get to Arkansas for a little while now, but I haven’t got enough money to get there.”

“Uh huh…?”

“And I was wondering, you know, since you’re going that way maybe you would drop me somewhere in Arkansas.”

“What the hell is in Arkansas?”

“Nothing that’s any of your business.”

“Hmm. Well, no. I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Are you kidding me right now?”

“Listen!” she said desperately, her eyes wild. “It would mean so much, you’d be doing me the biggest favour anyone’s ever done for me.”

“Okay” he said sarcastically “So I’ll drive you, someone I don’t know and who owes me two thousand dollars, all the way to Arkansas just for a favour.”

“I’ll pay you back for all the gas” she said to his amazement. “When I give you back your money I’ll include gas money.”

“Are you seriou-”

“And an extra five hundred. I swear. An extra five hundred dollars. I’m not playing around.”

He stared at her incredulously for a moment or two, but her face was open, genuine, desperate. For some reason she was really itching to get to Arkansas, and for a second he almost felt like giving in.

“Okay, seven hundred.” She barrelled on. “Two thousand plus gas plus seven hundred, that’s what It’ll pay you to drive me to Arkansas.”

“I…”

“You were going that way anyway!”

“Two thousand seven hundred dollars plus gas and the motel rooms for when we need to stop off.”

“Deal.”

How do I know I can trust you.”

“I’ll tell you where I am in Arkansas, I swear. I’ll give you a phone number and you just tell me where to send the cash.”

“Okay” he said with a shrug, hardly able to believe what he was agreeing to. “Then I’ll meet you back here at nine thirty.”

Jack: Chapter Ten

Jack still dreamt of South Carolina even twelve years later, but his memories were disjointed. They were the plantation home in the countryside, the trickle of a stream, the leaves of an oak tree, the keys of a grand piano. He could still feel the grass under his feet or hear the birds singing in the trees and the distant whinny of the horses in the stables, sometimes he’d still awaken in the night and taste his mother’s homemade lemonade on his tongue, always a little sour, ice cubes bobbing in the glass and he found it funny how such a tiny thing could epitomise his entire childhood, but it did, and when he had these vivid dreams of the east coast he’d feel the kind of happiness that could only exist in a child. But the peaceful South Carolina dreams always turned to something else and soon he’d see the snow in New York instead; walls of ice and frost, blizzards and snow storms and then as always his dreams would be invaded by grenades and explosions and the whistling sounds of the New England storms would transform into the roaring sounds of conflict, to shouts and cries for help, a pale faced young man in uniform, gasping for air, filthy hands clamped together over his chest with blood running between his fingers and mixing with the dirt beneath him, and then Jack would wake up with gunshots still ringing in his ears.

Sitting bolt upright in bed, Jack was suddenly aware of the telephone ringing in the kitchen. He glanced at the clock. It was eleven AM. He kicked the blankets away from himself, feeling the cool air lick his skin. As he struggled out of bed, he realised that it was the first morning in almost two months that he’d woken up without feeling as though he was trudging through a pit of despair, and made a mental note to open some windows and take out the trash later. He shuffled through to the kitchen and picked up the phone.

“Christ Jack, finally.” Came a loud, animated voice. It was Nashville Buckley himself.

“Hey” Jack greeted, stretching his arms and legs. “How’s it going?”

“How’s it going?” Nash repeated incredulously. “This is the first time you’ve answered my calls since like… since February.” Nash was chewing something over the line, Jack guessed it was probably his breakfast cereal. “Jack, man, look at the fucking calendar, what’s the date?”

“Uh huh see I don’t have a cale-”

“It’s April thirteenth, Jack. April. I would have thought you were dead only Santorini said he saw you outside some casino on Saturday.”

“You still hang around with Santorini?”

“I had to.” He cried. “You wouldn’t return my calls. What was I supposed to do? Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

Jack laughed. He kind of missed Nash. “So what’s up? What’s going on?”

“I’ll tell you what’s going on. Nadine is dragging me to some kind of Spring Fling fun fair today, and I swear to God… if you don’t come with us and keep me away from the flower stand, dude, we’ve been planning the wedding nonstop, I can’t… I can’t look at any more fucking roses.”

Jack’s good mood faded as soon as he heard the word Nadine. He curled his fist around the hair at the crown of his head and pursed his lips as he tried to tactlessly backtrack. “Jeez, Nash I dunno, I’m pretty busy today.”

“Nuh uh.” Nash said. There were more sounds of him chewing over the line, and Jack had an image of him sitting by the breakfast bar tossing Cheerio’s into his wide open mouth.

“Uh huh. Busy, sorry. Can’t go.”

“Dude.” he cried “You have to come; it will be something fun we can do. Bet my bottom dollar you’ve been holed up in that apartment for weeks with the blinds shut, and I bet it smells like the cigarettes you shouldn’t be smoking and your goddamned socks. I know you.”

“Nah, it’s too hot out today.” He said, although Nash had been right: He hadn’t even opened the blinds yet.

“Too hot” Nash scoffed “Says the guy from South Carolina where the air is made from hot soup. You need to get out of that house, get some fresh air and get over Stephanie already.”

Jack was startled that Nash thought he was living in his cocoon of despair because of Stephanie, the girl who hadn’t even crossed his mind in what seemed like weeks. It was kind of strange to even hear her name.

“There’ll be like… fun stuff at the festival” Nash went on. “Stalls and tents and rollercoasters and all, come on. I know it’s not your style but you’ve got to get out and breathe some fresh air into those tarred old smokers lungs.”

“Yeah but…”

“Yeah but I’ll see you at the fair in in forty five minutes, but do yourself a favour and take a shower first you dirty hippie.”

Jack groaned as slammed down the receiver and then he began to wade through ankle deep debris towards the bathroom. Nash was right, he needed a shower, he needed to open the blinds, he needed to go out and get some fresh air, and whether he liked it or not, he needed to stop hiding in the darkness and finally see Nadine.

~.~.~.~.~

The minute he stepped through the ballooned archway and into the fun fair, Jack regretted going. The place was thronged with people all packed in together like sardines in a crushed tin box, everyone colliding with one another while holding giant cones of pink candyfloss and enormous ice creams that were melting quickly in the sun. Ferris wheels and roller coasters soared above the crowds and stretched up towards the clear, deep blue sky, arms and legs flailing everywhere and shouts and screams of glee ringing through the entire venue. Jack, for one, was not in the mood for gleeful screaming. Instead he adopted his surliest expression and fought through the masses wishing for a quick death. He also wished that he hadn’t chosen to dress entirely in black – a heat magnet. A giant thermometer above his head informed him that it was 87 degrees, but when in the centre of a swarm of sweaty festival goers while dressed like a mortician it felt a hell of a lot closer to 120.

He didn’t know where to look. It was as though he was caught in a kaleidoscope of colour and shape and noise. A young girl who was pushing her way through the crowd accidentally deposited a lump of candyfloss onto his trouser leg as she passed that melted and stuck to his fingers when he tried to wipe it off. A huge wasp circled his arm in pursuit of the sugar and he swiped out again, only to awaken some kind of vengeful rage inside it as it began a furious spiral around him, angrily buzzing closely to his ears while he waved his arms around his head and turned in circles on the spot before diving into the safety of a nearby candy-striped marquee. He stumbled forward awkwardly, knocking his shades down the bridge of his nose and falling into an innocent member of the public who had been idly admiring a flower stand inside the entrance of the tent, and just as he spluttered out a disoriented apology he heard the sound of his own name carry through the buzz and chatter of the marquee crowd: “Jack!”

He craned his neck and glanced over the heads in the crowd and saw Nash manoeuvring towards him using his sharp bony elbows as weapons against everyone who blocked his path. He grinned when he reached him and patted him comradely on the shoulder. “Well, my buddy, my pal” he began joyously “Ya look like shit.” Jack opened his mouth to retort, but Nash was already bringing him back through the masses and closer to the back of the tent, nattering incessantly as they went. “It’s been too long! Why has it been so long? Why haven’t you been showing up to poker nights in Rivera’s basement anymore? Huh?”

“Because I hate that g-”

“Not that we’re complaining, man, I mean, it’s nice to have a chance to win for once. You know the whole time you played with us Santorini never won once?” He steered Jack around a stall selling hemp-themed paraphernalia. “Nothing, nada, no wonder the guy was always bumming for cigarettes… and got evicted last November. I guess you could say you’re partially responsible for it, right?”

“No. I think Santorini probably has a gambling probl-”

“Oh!” he motored on without a breath “and guess who I saw last weekend. Guess.”

“Stephanie.”

Nash looked disappointed “Yeah. How did you know? I passed her on Bellagio. She looks good; wearing one of those sun hats, all loved up with this dude… he looked kinda like Jerry Seinfeld.  Nadine and I went to say hey to her but she blanked us.” He made an indignant noise “Rude.”

Before he knew it, Jack had been guided towards a jewellery stand dripping with shiny bracelets and necklaces. A selection of glittery rings was laid out beneath a large mirror in the centre of the stall, and gazing into it holding a huge, tacky necklace to her neck was Nadine. Jack’s body went into fight-or-flight mode the moment he saw her, with waves of discomfort coursing through his entire body and a sick, tight feeling took over in his stomach. Seeing her again was a sudden uncomfortable reminder of how he’d made an ass of himself the last time he’d seen her, and why he was the World’s Worst Friend (trademarked), and yet she was still the same Nadine he’d been infatuated with, with the same long blonde hair and slanted green eyes and smooth tan skin, only she was different now because she represented something entirely different than before. He didn’t feel the same lust anymore, just guilt.

“Hey babe!” Nash said to her, oblivious to the atmosphere around him. “Look who I found.”

She turned away from her reflection, and for a spilt second as she saw Jack she looked pleasantly surprised until her face shut down and all expression vanished; eyes like cold jade stones, lips forming a hard line. “Hello” she said frigidly. “Long time no see. How are you?”

“Good” he replied.

She cast a disparaging eye over him and raised one neatly plucked brow before she turned away to place the tacky necklace back onto the stand “That’s good.” Then he caught sight of himself in the mirror and began to wish that a gaping hole would open in the ground beneath his feet and swallow him up. His hair was tousled, sticking up on one side and altogether too long; in dire need of a haircut. He was red and sweaty from the heat and the crowds, and only when he looked down at himself did he realise how glaringly obvious the pink candyfloss stain was against his black denim jeans. Nash was right, he looked like shit, and had definitely never looked as shit. Nadine on the other hand, in her un-creased sun dress and gently curled hair looked like a trillion bucks. It was like she was a Ferrari and he was a used Honda Civic. She was The Godfather and he was Troll 2. She was Bloomingdales and he was Walmart.

“Nadine and I have been here all afternoon.” Nash said cheerfully “Looking at like… different kinds of flowers mostly. All of the ones we like are white. They all look totally different.” His smile kind of reminded Jack of a ventriloquist’s dummy; wide and unnerving.  At one point could have sworn he saw his eye twitch. “It’s been three hours without a break, but it definitely doesn’t feel like it. It’s been so much fun. It’s great spending this time together.”

“Our wedding’s going to be white” Nadine said in the same frosty tone as before. “Everything white, white flowers, white cake, white balloons and ribbons. Except the guests can’t wear white, only I can, obviously!” She smiled thinly.

“Yep yep yep. It’s gonna be… hella white.” Nash shifted restlessly from foot to foot. “Hey babe, how about Jack and I go and see some of the rides? Do you need any more help with flowers?”

“Nope, you guys can go do whatever. I’ll just meet you back at the car”

“Okay see you later babe!” Nash hadn’t even finished his sentence before he was off like a shot towards the exit of the marquee. Jack jogged behind him. “You okay?” He asked as they dashed out into the fairground.

“Yep yep yep. It’s just the flowers” He stopped at the end of a queue to one of the rollercoasters and spun towards Jack disparagingly “They’re all the same flowers. I needed to get out, I was waiting for you man!” He semi-playfully punched Jack in the arm “What took you so long?” Jack tried to explain the concept of time, and how humans cannot teleport from one location to another in a split second, but before he could finish his sentence Nash had already moved on to another topic. Jack sometimes wondered how someone like him, the laziest man on earth, who fantasized about going back to bed ten minutes after getting out of it could have been friends with someone who always behaved like he’d had five shots of espresso in his morning coffee. Yet somehow there he was, standing at the end of a very long queue, and he didn’t even like rollercoasters.

~.~.~.~.~

By the time they reached the top of the line, Nash’s zippy mood had turned into agitation, he was getting snappier and angrier like a child who needed naptime, only instead of naps he needed nicotine. “Where are my cigarettes?” he snapped, patting the front and back pockets of his jeans. “I swear they were here!” He was still searching as they were ushered through onto the platform to board the rollercoaster.

“This one sirs” one of the staff said, pointing them towards one of the carriages, and Jack climbed in first, followed by Nash who was now checking the pockets of his shirt. “Aha!” he proclaimed, and between a finger and a thumb he held a single cigarette in the air. He placed it between his lips and held it up to his lighter just moments before one of the staff approached them again. “Excuse me sirs” he said “No smoking inside the rollercoaster please” Nash screwed up his face in disgust. “Excuse me sir” he retorted “I’m going to go ahead and smoke my cigarette”

“I’m sorry but I can’t let you do that”

“Hey! I don’t see this rollercoaster going anywhere yet, do you?”

“Sir! If you can’t extinguish your cigarette I’m going to have to ask you to step out of the carriage.” Nash stared him down for a couple of seconds before surrendering and stubbing it out on the side of the car. The man walked away satisfied, and within moments the bar was lowered over their laps.

“I wanted to talk to you about something” Nash said sullenly as he curled his hands around the bar, and Jack glanced at him in surprise. “Yeah, what?” Another wasp began to buzz near him, trying to get close to the candyfloss stain on his jeans, and he swatted it away.

“It’s about the wedding”

“Uh huh?” the wasp was back again, hovering over his leg as he jerked it away as best as he could while restricted by the bar.

“There’s a lot of shit to arrange, you know? Who’s invited, the food the band and all, and like, Nadine’s got this wedding planner in which is good, but there’s still stuff I have to do… and I’ve been thinking a lot about like, all my friends and all…” the back of Jack’s hand made contact with the wasp and it reeled backwards.

“…and I was just wondering, you know, since we’re good pals or whatever…”  Jack suddenly felt the tiny legs of the wasp crawling on his upper arm. He gasped and jerked his hand up, ready to swipe it off.

“…If you’d be my best man.” But it stung him. The pain was sudden and sharp, and the wasp was gone before he could revenge-squish it. He yelped. “FUCK. Ouch!”

“What?” The rollercoaster suddenly jerked forward and began to trundle along the tracks.

“Sorry! Ow!” Jack said, hissing through his teeth as he pressed his hand to the sting.

“…Jack what the hell. Are you going to answer me?” Nicotine-deprived Nash was getting more irritated by the second. The rollercoaster began a slow and steady incline towards a high point on the tracks. “Do you want to be my best man? For my wedding? Yes or no?”

“Awh Jeez…”

“You need to give me an answer here…” The car rolled to a stop at the top of the coaster.

“No” Jack said without thinking, and then the rollercoaster plummeted suddenly downwards at a ninety degree angle. The wind was roaring past his ears, but he could still hear Nash’s incredulous “What?” loudly and clearly. “What do you mean no?” the carriages snaked over bumpy tracks, flipping over, jerking from side to side, and Jack was suddenly overcome with nausea as he held on to the bar, knuckles white. “Can’t” he managed.

“Hold on, what do you mean you can’t?” Nash was somehow completely un-phased by the movement of the ride. “We’ve been friends for years! This is the ultimate friend… thing to do for me, are you kidding me right now?” Rational thought slowly began to return as the ride slowed in anticipation of another right-angle drop. “I’m sorry man…” I can’t be the best man because I was in love with your fiancé for over a year and almost slept with her at your engagement party, and I honestly can’t participate in your wedding day because the guilt is too much and all I’ll be able to think about is how I’m the worst more unworthy best friend and best man on the planet. Also I don’t think I’m going to go to the wedding at all because I feel sick thinking about it. Sorry bud. “…I’ll be away. I can’t go.”

“Are you serious? Where are you going? Can’t you just rearrange your trip?” The rollercoaster lunged downwards again, and Jack groaned queasily. “I can’t rearrange it.”

“Why not?”

“Nash I’m sorry. It’s not a trip. I’m… I’ve gotta leave Vegas.” It wasn’t until he said it that he realised it was true, and suddenly, even though he was feeling sick to his stomach and slightly faint it was as though a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. It was the solution to everything; no longer would he be stuck in a rut, low on money, lonely, surrounded by people who left a bad taste in his mouth. He’d taken the plunge before and left the life he had behind him, and he could do it again.

“But why?” His friend spluttered as the rollercoaster began a slightly less terrifying route over a flatter portion of the tracks.

“I’m broke. I can’t get any good work, I’m getting hooked on a lot of shit I shouldn’t be hooked on, I’m stuck in a rut. I really just can’t stay here any longer. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you… I just, I guess I just decided recently”

“When?”

“Soon. As soon as I can get a little money for a plane ticket. Or gas. Haven’t decided if I’m flying or driving… or where I’m going. Carolina, maybe.  Home.” He placed his head onto the bar, willing his motion sickness and dizziness to go away.

“Home is fine” Nash said, right before the car completed a sudden three-sixty loop and zoomed around a sharp bend that tossed them both violently to the right. “But this is Vegas this is where dreams are made!”

“This is where twenty dollar hookers and Elvis impersonators are made”

“Casinos, man, the Bellagio fountains! Gold plated hotels! You know they’re talking about building a mini Paris? Right in the middle? Paris France. Well, I guess Paris Vegas.”

“I can’t do it” Jack said wearily as the ride finally squeaked to a halt “This place is gonna break me” The bars lifted and they spilled out of the car, and Jack dizzily stumbled off the platform and landed safely feet-first on solid ground. Nash strolled along nonchalantly behind him and ignited his cigarette. He took a long, satisfied drag from it. “You know, when you leave it isn’t going to be the same” He said after a few moments. There was solemnness and thoughtfulness behind his breezy tone. “I don’t know, man…” he hesitated. “…I’m going to miss having you around.”

“Yeah?” Jack said, frowning. “I guess I’ll probably miss you too. Huh.” And for a second or two they said nothing, as though they were silently acknowledging the fact that they had just shared the strangest and most genuine moment they’d shared for their entire friendship. And then Jack keeled over and yacked right into a trashcan.

Site News 24/04/16

Hello!

This post is LONG overdue. I did post a notice on my Simblr a couple of months back but I know that many of my readers don’t go there, and either way it’s time for an update. I’m not entirely sure of how many people are still checking up on my story but I expect that by now a lot of people have probably given up on me which is totally understandable. I’ve been mute for about six months.

My excuse for my absence initially was that I had just started a new year at college and was getting settled in. I’m studying for a different certificate this time, which means the structure of the course is different as well as the people I’m working with so it’s kind of been an exciting year filled with doing things that I wanted to do and making things I wanted to make and meeting a bunch of awesome new people to do those things with. I’ve been entering into the “professional world” a little, which has been slightly overwhelming at times what with networking and LinkedIn and business cards and conferences, award ceremonies and festivals. It’s been a lot of fun but it’s entirely new to me, and although there were (admittedly few) times that I considered working on this story again, when it came down to it, it just always seemed like I could be doing something else with my spare hours.

Where I left off in the story I’d kind of run into a creative block anyway. I had been questioning exactly where I was going with it and even considered scrapping the whole thing and starting again. I won’t. That’s a job for another time, and before I do that I want to finish what I’ve started even if it’s a bit crap and has weird plot holes (The prologue sequence has kind of screwed me over big time). A lot of the ideas I had for Jack’s story seem really far-fetched and stupid now that I read them again with fresh eyes for the first time in months so i’m going to have to strip a lot of it down and write it again, but after a long break from the story I kind of feel ready to do that. The story is not going to be Pulitzer prize winning material but I guess it doesn’t have to be. It’s just a creative outlet for me and I’ve come to like the characters in it. I’d be unsatisfied if I left it unfinished.

Now that the college term is coming to a close I’m suddenly going to have spare time that I didn’t have before, and I’m not going to be feeling guilty about not doing important work or furthering my professional career during it, so you guessed it: I’m going to be publishing again. I can’t say when exactly, because that all depends how bad the damage is when I go trawling through the fragments of Jack’s story, but I swear, one of these days i’m going to open my game for the first time since September (hoping that it still works) and i’m going to screenshot and edit until my fingers are sore and I’m going to get back on track. Roll on summer!

Thanks so much to everyone who’s sent kind messages to my Tumblr inbox & continued to comment on my blog while I was MIA. You’re all STARS. x

 

Jack: Chapter Nine

*please pretend there is an actual human croupier behind the blackjack table instead of a robot!

There were four players at the blackjack table, all of them older men, gruffly perched on the stools, leaning on the table with concentrated expressions on their faces while the croupier shuffled several decks together. They rattled like automatic gunfire. Jack stood to the side and watched for a while with Violet next to him while she shifted her weight from foot to foot nervously. He wanted to tell her to take a deep breath and calm the hell down but decided against it, as every time he spoke to her she made a face like she thought he was about to jump her with a knife.

“When can we play?” She asked him after the first half hour, and he told her that he didn’t know. He’d played Blackjack at the Emerald Queen casino enough times to know a thing or two about how things worked there. He’d figured out that the bank usually won about three or four percent more than the punters, so he needed to wait until the bank was due for a bad run before jumping in and playing. That’s why he liked Blackjack. It took thought and calculation and was the only game in the casino that you could win every time, but only as long as you knew statistics.

“I’m waiting for the odds to be on our side” he murmured to Violet when she made an impatient noise. “The bank is on a good run right now, just wait.”

“Doesn’t this count as cheating?”

“What? No, I-”

She gasped “You’re a Card-shark.”

“Shh! I’m not…” he lowered his voice “…I’m not a Card-shark. I’m just good at Blackjack.”

“How good?”

“You’ll see.” He saw his opportunity, and then as though climbing into a cold pool, he slowly eased his way into the game.

“Can I trust you with these?” Violet said as she pressed some tokens into his palm. He nodded.

The other players turned to look at his as he sat among them at the table, and the croupier regarded him with lazy interest while Violet hovered anxiously behind him. He tossed a couple of his own tokens onto the table first to test the waters, keeping Violet’s safe in his pockets. “Draw” he said, and two cards were swiftly dealt from the metal, self-sealing shoe. The croupier dealt himself two cards and then flipped them over.

Jack flipped his own, an ace and a king. Blackjack, and he raked in his winnings promptly and expressionlessly, immediately calling for another round. He began cautiously with small bets, playing it safe while he tested his calculations, and Violet’s eyes were wide with fascination as she peered over his shoulder, her breath steady on the back of his neck. Her breath hitched when he withdrew her tokens and tossed them onto the felt, calling for another draw.

“Split” he ordered as he turned over double eights. The croupier fired out another card; a seven. “Split” he said again, now playing three hands against the bank, and a frown of concentration formed between the brows of the croupier. Jack drew aces, he croupier got stuck on sixteen. “Bank busts” he said gruffly and paid them out.

“Holy crap” Violet whispered as Jack gathered the tokens into a small pile. “You’re a total Card-shark”

“I’m just good.” He said with a smirk. Then a drink appeared at his side.

“Compliments of the casino” the waiter said before moving off.

“I guess you’re good enough to get free drinks.” She commented.

“I’m not the only one getting free cocktails” Jack said as shoved a substantial bet across the table. “but I’m not drinking it. Draw.”

“What? Why not? It’s free.”

“Because all casinos in Nevada pull the same bullshit stunt: Right now this place is being pumped full of pure oxygen.” He flipped over a ten and a seven. “They’re piping it into the place through the vents, I swear to God. The drinks keep coming, they’re free, you keep drinking and you don’t feel drunk. What gives? Right?” He drew a four, and the croupier paid out again. “It’s the oxygen; it keeps you wide awake so that you keep playing while in reality you’re so drunk that all rational thought is gone. It’s a downward spiral from there, just bad decision after bad decision until you’re flat out broke and it’s all because of the damn free drinks.”

Violet paused. “And you know this from experience?”

Jack smiled. “You can have the drink if you want it.” But she stared at it and shook her head “Nuh uh. No thank you, I don’t drink Margaritas.”

~.~.~.~.~

The margarita was still untouched after an hour passed by, and Jack’s winning streak continued. He was winning by about six percent and the tokens were starting to pile up, little by little. Violet was practically climbing over his right shoulder to look at what was going on, watching in fascination as the few measly dollars she’d given him began to multiply and turn into tens and hundreds. The croupier was leaning forward too, his face scrunched up in concentration, his movements quick and agitated as he dealt another duo of cards to Jack, and then another, and then another. Jack was so immersed in the game that he didn’t notice the man who sat down next to him.

The croaky voice seemed to come out of nowhere. “Someone drinking that cocktail?”   “No” Jack replied without looking away from the table. “Be my guest.” He briefly saw a bony hand reach over and whisk away the glass. There was a slurping sound as the man sipped from the rim of the margarita, and then he spoke again, his voice loud and gravelly. “Hey, I know you.” Jack glanced up then in surprise, but he wasn’t talking to him. He had his dark-shaded gaze set on Violet. Jack estimated that the guy was in his late fifties, but it was hard to tell underneath the brim of his hat. He had an unsettling, yellow, gap-toothed kind of grin and the heavily lined, leathery kind of skin that you got from spending too much time out in the sun. The croupier cleared his throat impatiently and Jack tore his eyes away from the man and returned to the game.

“Oh.” He heard Violet say in response, then “I don’t think so, sorry.”

“No, no really we’ve met. A few times, don’t you remember me?”

Jack rolled his eyes at what he saw as a pathetic pick up attempt. “Punching above your weight, man” he muttered under his breath.

“No.” Violet said sharply, and she turned her whole body away from him and back to the game. Jack could hear her breath quicken next to his ear. The man persisted anyway and he pushed the empty cocktail glass away so he could lean in closer to her. “No, no really. We met at the cabaret, remember? You served my table. And then before that at the Ste-”

“Yes, okay.” She snapped suddenly “I remember you. Fine. Can you leave me alone?”

“I knew I wasn’t so forgettable, huh.” the man leered “Well you know I couldn’t forget about you…”

Jack’s concentration had suddenly vanished. He leaned forward and glared at the man. “Who is this creep?” he spat.

The guy held his hands up in defence. “Whoa, okay, cool it. Your girlfriend and I go back a little, that’s all.” He grinned at Violet, displaying a set of rancid, discoloured teeth. “Right, honey?” She didn’t answer him, in fact she didn’t even look at him, and Jack glanced at her profile, staring straight ahead towards the wall with a hard, set jaw and watery eyes.

Jack stood up from his stool and placed a hand on the man’s chest, gently but firmly pushing him away from her and placing his body between them. “Alright, I don’t care who you are, but you need to back away. She doesn’t want you here.”

“Awh come on, I didn’t say nothing. I just wanted to say hey, that’s all.”

Jack turned around to look at Violet again, and noticed that he’d attracted a small audience. Even the croupier was looking at him, with mouth open in an “o” of surprise, waiting for something to happen, but as much as Jack wanted to kick this guy’s ass, he couldn’t. Not in the middle of the Emerald Queen casino. “Okay” he said calmly. “You said ‘hey’. Now you can back off”. The man stared at him for a moment, not moving an inch, his expression indecipherable through his shades, but then he suddenly stepped away, relaxing, shrugging nonchalantly as though he’d done nothing wrong. “Fine” he shrugged “I’m going. But honey” he pointed at Violet. “I still have last year’s Christmas issue of Empire Magazine – You look great in pink. Woulda been better in the centrefold though.” His mouth contorted into another unpleasant grin. “Oh, and happy birthday, I didn’t forget.” and then he turned and swaggered out.

There were tears brimming in Violet’s eyes when Jack turned around to her again, but she wiped them quickly and fiercely.

“Hey” Jack said gently. “He’s just some creep trying to cause trouble. Don’t get all worked up about it.”

“Are you playing or what?” the croupier barked then. He was leaning over the blackjack table again, gearing up for another round. Jack hesitated and looked at Violet again.

“I’m leaving” she said, shaking her head rapidly “I’m going home.”

Jack turned to the croupier and shook his head. “We’re done here.” And he cashed in the tokens.

Violet was already charging towards the casino door when Jack caught up with her. She marched by the enthusiastic greeters and out onto the boulevard. The neon sign above the casino door buzzed and flashed and threw colour over the sidewalk. “You don’t have to follow me” she said tersely to Jack. “I’m okay.” But her eyes were red and filled with tears.

“Listen” he said “that guy… He was a creep, just forget about him”

“You don’t get it.” She said shortly.

“I… yeah I know, I get that I don’t know what it’s like, but he’s just some sick old dude and he’s gone now.”

She shook her head and then began to turn away.

“Do you need me to walk anywhere with you?” He blurted out. “I can hail a taxi for you?”

“No I’ll walk, thank you. Alone.” She turned to leave.

“Violet.”

“What?”

“I’ve got your winnings…”

She stopped walking and whirled around, she had clearly, in her distress forgotten all about her money. “How much?” He counted out her share and dealt it into her hand and her eyes became wide like dinner plates. “Eight hundred and seventeen dollars?”

“Yes.”

“Holy crap.” She quickly stuffed the money into her cowboy boot.

Jack shrugged. She wiped the tears from her eyes and the corners of her mouth twitched as though she was trying to force away a smile, but she quickly composed herself. “Well thank you” she said.

“Don’t mention it.” He stuffed his own winnings into the back pocket of his jeans. “Happy birthday, by the way, if it really is your birthday.”

“It is. And thanks.” She nodded.

“Which is it? You’re what… Twenty? Twenty one?”

“Twenty Three.”

“Huh.” He shuffled from foot to foot for a moment, then “So I mean… what are you doing to celebrate?”

She shrugged. “Nothing. Going home.”

“Are you serious?” Jack couldn’t imagine something more depressing than spending a birthday alone. “Hey” he said before he could think about it. “We can hang out if you want. How about getting something to eat or going to one of those crazy shows down the street?”

She pursed her lips. “No, it’s okay.”

“Are you kidding me? Come on, it’s your birthday…”

She shook her head and began to turn away. “You know, it’s been real nice” she said. “But I’ve got to go.”

“Violet, wait.” He wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted to say, but a part of him wasn’t ready to let her go just yet. She glanced over her shoulder at him expectantly, and the lights from the casino sign hit her face in a way that made her look incredibly beautiful. “You know if you need anything you can call me.”

She seemed to find this amusing, and looked up at the sky as she shook her head. “I haven’t got a phone.”

“You haven’t got a phone?” he repeated incredulously, and she laughed softly to herself and began to saunter away from him. He called out after her. “Can you at least tell me what your last name is?”

“Don’t have a last name either” she called back “Thought you would have guessed that by now.”

“Come on Violet!”

She laughed and shook her head, but she didn’t turn around. “Bye Jack” she called out, and in the next moment she was swallowed up in a sudden wave of tourists rambling up the sidewalk. He blinked and she was gone.