After Before and After

Conclusion: Chapter 18

It was perfect, and it should've felt perfect too.

The pieces of his life were coming together like a nearly finished puzzle. He was getting Bs in his senior year classes without trying, and As on the days that he did. He was grossly in love with a boy who's heart was as perfect as his smile. His escape from a house that was never a home brought him to a place he could walk from to get to that perfect heart and smile any day of the week. Community service wasn't the dreadful punishment it was supposed to be. The world would soon be at his fingertips as he could see his eighteenth birthday coming up in the distance.

It had never been closer to perfect, this little life of his, and he should've felt perfect too.

Except Jack Merridew was stuck. He was stuck trying to figure out what kept him trapped inside his own mind, a prison that held him for nearly eighteen years. Almost everything he had ever wanted as a little boy was right there in front of him for the first time in all his life; love, family, academic success, a true and permanent escape from abuse, the freedom to make his own choices.

It was perfect, but what he felt was short of it.

As 1994 turned into 1995, Jack was consumed by frequent thoughts of a life he was forced to leave behind. Sandy feet, sunburnt skin, tattered briefs, breezy nights, real freedom. It could not be emulated in this world that he was returned to far too soon. In no other place on earth did that kind of freedom exist. It was strange how something that was supposed to be traumatic provided so much relief.

Except nobody else saw it that way.

The other boys, including the love of his young life and his twisted best friend who got a taste for blood, they all wanted to go home. Even the ones who had fun on the island wanted to go home. Everyone except for him. The island wasn't their homes, but it was the first one Jack ever had.

The chant he and the other boys belted out on the beachfront on the night Simon was killed echoed in Jack's dreams often. "We like it here, we love it here, we finally found a home." He convinced himself they all wrote it and they all meant it, but really, it was Jack's song, the happiest and truest one he knew.

It was hard to let it go, the love he held for the very first place that ever felt like home. Even at the end of his recent and happiest days, Jack dreamt of the island when he closed his eyes. Even after winning his team the baseball game in gym class, even after laughing through three hours of community service with his friends, even after the most enthralling sex he and Ralph ever had, even after some of the best days of his life, he dreamt of the island.

Even though he was almost an adult, Jack couldn't figure out where his unconscious mind's sudden all-consuming obsession with the island was coming from. Before Ralph started getting serious help with his drinking problem, Jack only dreamt of the island maybe once a month at the most. But lately, it was every night without fail.

What Jack failed to understand was why now? Why when everything seemed to finally be working out for him did this nagging reminder of what he lost when he was rescued haunt him each night?

January soon faded into February, and Jack found himself thinking about the end. The last few days on the island, the days after Piggy died. How close he'd been to ruling everyone and everything on that godforsaken island. That if the Marines showed up only five minutes too late, he would've won. He would've had complete control. That thought and the memory kept bugging Jack even when he was awake. How close he'd been to winning before it was all ripped away by the real world and its real rules and real adults who always got to win.

But Jack couldn't forget that Ralph, the person he loved more than life itself, would've had to lose his life for Jack to win that day. Jack knew for certain that he really didn't want that. At least not anymore. He was fiercely protective of Ralph now. So much so that he hated himself for being angry enough at the younger boy to let things get so bad between them on the island. Why couldn't he have just been honest with Ralph before it was too late?

That alone could've changed the tragic ending of the last couple days on the island. It could've saved Ralph's life and prevented the rescue altogether.

It was hard for Jack not to dwell on that now.

Nonetheless, Jack was consumed with nagging thoughts of the island and the way he lost on the very last page of that story. He didn't tell Ralph, or Jeffery, or Laurie, or Paige, or even his therapist. Keeping his true feelings about the island buried alive was one game Jack was good enough at to win every single day.

But for how much longer could he do it? The rest of his senior year? The rest of his childhood? The rest of 1995? The rest of his life?

His life felt like a losing game, Jack realized, no matter what way he spun it. And he was tired of losing, tired of having what he needed held over his head by someone or something he couldn't touch. Jack couldn't stand the thought of finishing another year in last place. Though, he'd never been given a fair opportunity to win.

But that didn't mean he couldn't make his own.