Faithless

Chapter 1

I often wondered if there was a god. The kind of thing that controlled everything, watched over all of us, and then determined if we were worthy of eternal happiness. What did that even mean? "Eternal happiness" was always such a vague phrase that meant nothing to me. Happiness with no sorrow would not be happiness. There was nothing to distinguish it in such a way. But no one sticks around for the philosophical questions on whether or not happiness could really be considered happiness if there was no anguish or pain. Eternal happiness, at least on paper, is enough to draw people in.

My hands quiver whenever I write. I'm often marked down on exams for my terrible handwriting. But my tremors are common all the time. I just happen to have it worse when I try to write. Typing is always easier. I don't have to worry about whether or not my writing is legible because it's always in the same pristine stamp as it hits the parchment. It's a simple issue that can be explained away, maybe even forgotten about on better days.

No one can really forget things done by the mentally disturbed. There's something about the strange and unfamiliar that remains in the minds of the mentally sound. They can still sleep easy at night, but you can never seem to forget the demeanor of that mentally ill man you saw on the street on your way home from work that day. I suppose it's only natural that humans are drawn to strange things anyway. The average middle-class white person doesn't have to worry about much—often blessed with the privilege of comfort and money from early on. Romanticizing or obsessing over things like this is common. If god is real, it has quite the twisted sense of who to give such a privilege to.

God bless the privileged, right? That's what my mother always says. My mother, whose name is Dahlia, had her life planned out for her from the day she was born. A trust fund girl, whose husband was delivered to her practically on a silver platter. I don't know much about my father, Jared, just that he's an average office worker with an average and uninteresting upbringing. Right, no wonder they ended up together.

My sister isn't much different from my mother. With a name like Daisy, how could she be? But even with such an adorable name that any old woman would smile at, I wouldn't describe Daisy as anything other than a menace who was meant to be another copy of Dahlia when she grew up. Not that I really cared all that much about what would happen to her. It was simply an observation I carried with me as I watched her grow up.

That brings it all back to me. Who am I? I'm not entirely sure myself. My identity was scattered in fragments long before I was born and I've been left to pick up the pieces. Quite unfair, if you were to ever ask me. I'm sure that any passerby would see me as just an empty husk, drifting along, and I doubt they'd be too far off. With no idea of what I even wanted to do with my life, or even a semblance of my place in the world, I could be just exactly that, a quiet observer. But not exactly. I don't exactly pride myself on my observation skills and the way my brain works, but I'm at the very least more aware than most people would think. Though I'm often not taken seriously. What kind of normal person takes the word of the gloomy kid with shaky hands and a bottle of pills sitting in the front pocket of his backpack?

My name is Jay. Short for Jayden. Not my idea, but it works well enough anyway. Dahlia spoke obsessively of blue jays, and I assumed that was where she got my name from. More creative than most, if I'm being honest. If I were unlucky like half the boys at my school, I'd be walking around with my dad's shitty name.

I was idly working all of this over in my mind when the blonde-haired girl sitting next to me jabbed me in the shoulder roughly with her index finger. This was Hannah Taylor, my so-called girlfriend. She asked me out at the school's fall festival by a dare from her friends, and not expecting to be answered with a cautious yes, she'd been reluctantly sitting through this relationship with me. We hardly ever looked at each other, despite sitting together at lunch every day and walking home together after school. The only times we went out was when she was with her other friends and the only time we kissed was to prove to her friends that we were actually dating. The kiss lacked anything resembling feeling, and she tasted like stale sweetness mixed with the dryness of a saltine cracker. Still, sitting with her shitty friends and them being forced to put up with me exempt me from the general harassment I often had to deal with.