Lucky Shot

Pt. VI

A lot had happened in the few hours of the morning, and by the time that it had come to lunch, Jed said he had things to do. I asked of course, what do you even do if you're not on a mission?, but all I got as an answer was our apartment door shutting between the two of us as he left. What an asshole.

How did he expect me to keep little secrets like the balcony if he was going to shut me in the apartment and only take me out when he absolutely had to?

For a while I sat in bed on my phone, unsure what to do. I clicked through the channels of the television in the living room, noticing that every channel from HBO to Starz was at our disposal on demand. We even had a movie collection in the television stand, with all of my favorites. I popped in the only movie that could make me laugh when I'm upset, Shrek. For a while, it held my attention, but my mind began to float to Jed's room.

He shut it earlier and I didn't get a chance to see what it looked inside. It's probably locked, I told myself. I needed to know. With my heart pounding heard, I walked over to his door and gently touched the knob. The guy wasn't even home, what did I have to fear? Slowly turning the knob, I felt like I was going to get in trouble at any second.

The door cracked open, and my eyes caught immediate sight of a mostly-nude poster taped to the ceiling over his bed. Classy, I thought, cringing at the image. At least it wasn't a mirror up there. He didn't have a lot of substance to his room, it looked almost the mirror image of mine except there was a guitar in the corner, and an Xbox strapped under the bedroom television. I almost dared to check out his bathroom, but that felt a little too invasive. The same minty smell wafted around his room, gentle and pleasant. 

With all the security leading to this apartment, you'd imagine that there would at least be locks on the bedroom doors, but I guess not.

When it hit lunch time, the only thing I managed to scavenge from the fridge were frozen chicken tenders and a bottle of ketchup. Other than that there were numerous takeout containers, but who knew how old some of them were. A lot of them were mostly eaten, too.

After finishing Shrek and cleaning up lunch, I hopped back in bed and decided to hook up my phone to the speakers next to the bedroom television. I was playing music from my phone, Twin Sized Mattress by the Front Bottoms was on, and my heart ached for a message from Luke. This had been our song. I had no clue if my phone even received messages at this point, I knew that I was not supposed to have contact with the outside world. I wouldn't be surprised if somehow numbers were blocked from the receiving end.

Putting Luke out of my mind, I was curious as to when Jed would get back. It had been a few solid hours, and to be honest I was starting to get bored.

Something inside of me told me that he wasn't even doing anything important. Maybe he was horsing around with Drew and company, complaining about how I had beat him on our race up the stairs. Or maybe he was calling me an elf-sized airhead. While I didn't really like the thought of him making my only potential friends hate me, I guess I had to just trust that he would keep his own problems to himself. The two of us would eventually get along, we had to. Right?

We'd be murdering together eventually. As my dad told me, it gets easier, but I can't imagine the toal that it takes on your overall view of the world. Did Wilkes provide a free therapist for us? I wasn't too fond of baring all of my feelings to Jed. I wasn't sure that he would completely understand me.

Sweeping it from my mind, I needed to stop worrying about it until the time came. Otherwise, I'd make myself sick everyday, and I would see a person in the way every time I tried to shoot a gun. Was that what I wanted? Of course not. I needed to shape up, and figure this whole life out before it blew my mind to pieces. Why did things have to be so difficult?