The Patron Saint of Monsters

Chapter Seven Part Two

By the time that Oleander reached her car’s spot in the senior parking lot she was sobbing too heavily to drive. Trent, after making himself completely visible, grabbed her car keys from her small hand and said, “I’ll drive.”

“I’m just not ready to have sex with Ian. I am not in love with him.” Oleander muttered.

“Love takes time. There’s no shame in not screwing around.” He replied.

“I want the whole disney thing. I don’t want to stare up at some random ceiling while some John with Jim Beam breath plows away at me for fifteen seconds.” Oleander said angrily.

“You deserve far better than that.” Trent assured her.

“Rebecca is a bitch and I don’t want her in my life anymore. I can’t. I’m fucking done. She is always like this.” Oleander vented.

“I don’t much care for her myself.” Trent agreed.

“Are you a virgin?” Oleander asked after a few minutes of peaceful silence.

“No.” Trent chuckled pulling into the Jameson’s driveway. “I haven’t been a virgin since before you were born.”

“You’re old enough to be my dad. Gross.” Oleander snorted, rubbing at her tear streaked, makeup stained face; further smearing her mascara.

“I suppose that I am.” Trent acknowledged the fact with a grimace.

“Good, because people my age suck.” Oleander laughed.

“Should I carry you in?” Trent asked.

“No! I’m crying not wounded.” Oleander answered.

She exited her car and walked up to her porch, she looked into her kitchen hesitant to go into her bedroom. She was the conversation she was going to have with Trent to be uncomfortable at best. She swallowed a deep breath and steeled her nerves, passing her kitchen and walking up the staircase and entered her bedroom. She sat primly in her bed with her hands folded in her lap,  she stared at Trent, “We need to talk.” she said seriously.

“About?’ He asked perplexed.

“Why did you kill yourself?” She asked back.

He sighed and pulled out the wheeled chair from her desk, swinging it over in front of her before sitting down. “It’s very difficult to explain.”

“I know that my extracurricular activities may suggest it, but I am not some vapid girl who is too sheltered to understand what it’s like to be unsatisfied with your life.” She replied with a frown.

“I know,” he frowned in return, “and that’s my fault. I should have been better. You shouldn’t be able to understand life dissatisfaction . It’s hard to explain why I killed myself, I just did, I don’t even fully understand my reasoning now. I just felt as though it wasn’t for me, that life was not the thing for me. Why would I even want to live? What is living and what is life and what is the point of it all? You  eat and  drink and piss and shit. You waste away in a school that makes you miserable and then you get a job that  makes you feel even worse. Why the fuck do humans crave so much and why are we so wealth hungry that we make each other pay for everything? Humans crave to the point where that can never find contentedness. Nothing is ever enough. Not for my parents or for the school administration. It wasn’t enough for society, I wasn’t enough, for anything or anyone. I was never going to be and I just couldn’t anymore. I couldn’t sit there and take it or swallow their bullshit! Everyday the only thought swimming around in my drug addled and alcohol soaked brain was ‘you aren’t enough.’ ‘who could ever love a fuck up like you’  and all I could think  was ‘I can’t.’ ‘I couldn’t love myself or who I turned out to be.’ ‘I just couldn’t do any of it any longer.’ So I stuck a gun in my mouth and I blew out my goddamn brains , because my brain was causing all the fucking troubles anyway.” Trent said in a  broken voice that shattered Oleander’s heart.

“I love you, Trent.”  was all Oleander could think to say. As if that fixed things, as if that could mend all of the broken pieces and parts of Trent, as if that that simple sentence could  glue together all the sharp edged shard inside of him that had been internally sawing away at him for years, cutting deeper and deeper with every day that she feared him.

“You scared of me.” He said bluntly, with a voice that sounded like he was fighting back hopeless tears.

“I was scared of you, for a long time; but mostly I had been hurt by you. Because I loved you and trusted you. You were my only friend for such a long time. You’re still the very best friend that I ever had. I wish I had more friends like you and less friends like Rebecca and Trina.  The world needs more people like you, more people who give a shit and hate seeing the pain that everyone inflicts on others. The biggest disappointment isn’t you  Trent, it’s that when the world finally gets the type of person it needs, it breaks them and makes them think that it’s their fault.” Oleander comforted him, wrapping her arms around him in a hug.

“I wish you hadn’t killed yourself Trent.” She said pulling out his arms after a long while.

At first, Trent was going to tell her that he didn’t regret it because now he had her, but then he remembered that Oleander did not yet consider herself is; and that she would have been mildly agitated at the insinuation that she needed a protector. So instead he went with, “I wish you weren’t friends with Rebecca anymore.”

“I really should shut up about  her,” Oleander shrugged, “I’m never going to nut up and do anything about it. I just like to bitch about her being one.”

“Maybe one day she’ll be gone.” Trent said.

It was an odd thing to say, Oleander thought to herself. But she neither said anything about it, nor entertained the thought for very long. Trent was a very odd thing, of course he would say weird stuff, she reasoned.