A Handful of Stardust

I, TIME BOMB

CHARACTERS: Jesús Echeverría, others in passing

TAGS & TRIGGERS: running away, mentions of drug use, Catholicism, death, familial/parental issues, discrimination/transphobia, angst

WORD COUNT: 1,063

Cold water trickles down the sides of his face, T-shirt soaked through, sitting over the drain of the rusting shower. Jesús tries to shake himself awake, but the water just makes him feel number. Fuck.

He stands and yanks the shower curtain away from him so hard it nearly pulls from its tethers. He stumbles to his room. Nobody else is home. He begins to pack.

Remnants of words echo in his ears, none of them undeserved, yet none of them drawing from him any sense of guilt. He is his own person–now Jesús, once somebody else that he tore up and threw away. With a father too devout to accept this new man–that's what his mother says, because everything fucking comes back to him and his new name–he drank himself to death. Not very Catholic of him, though it was that religion that set him off, supposedly; it was Jesús' rejection of it in the cutting-out of his identity to become something else, then a girl, now a man. What-fucking-ever. His dad never liked him anyway.

A drunk for a husband and a druggie for a son. Why can't I get anything I want? He doesn't care, yet can quote that argument from memory: Why couldn't you have grown up normal? I thought I gave you enough. Christ, are you even listening to me? You're gonna join him soon enough. Don't say I didn't warn you. She thought he was off his face, eyes glazed over, staring like a dead man. The words instead wriggled into the furrows of his brain and stuck there, dumb motivation for his stupid actions. And when he could feel his tongue again, enough to speak, he slurred fuck you, I'm gonna run away–she didn't hear him, just watched without an ounce of sympathy as he struggled to force words from his uncooperating mouth. And he could see her blaming everything on the ice she'd found in his room weeks ago, which I didn't even take, I wasn't going to, you're gonna report your own son to the cops? They hate us. Nothing even entered her mind enough to consider it for a moment, and she didn't try to decipher his ramblings; Honey instead lamented over a child lost, even though he wasn't dead yet.

Jesús decided then, and it is fixed now, to disappear completely: for all intents and purposes, he is dead, as she so clearly wishes, just as he is dead in Cancún and Albuquerque and El Paso. The difference is that Honey doesn't know; she isn't orchestrating it all to protect herself (always herself, never him, he thinks–so fucking selfish, all the time). She didn't get involved with the wrong people this time, or suffer accusations of killing Jesús' father for money that she had more of than him; Jesús is moving under his own steam, packing the way he was taught. He has wads of hundreds in cash from when his mother didn't report him, and the times before that, though he didn't sell after the argument. Still, he has saved up close to twenty thousand; he has a shitty car, but it'll do; and he is going to Canada. Saskatchwan is far, nearly two days straight driving, but it seems to him obvious. His mother came from there, and left something behind.

A lot of his memories of Honey, at least the later ones, come from arguments–but this one, overheard, was (in his mind) a net-positive. It was in their apartment in Cancún, in the '90s sometime, with his father, back when his father tolerated him as a little girl. That girl–he doesn't think of himself as being her, but rather floats above her when remembering things, like a ghost–sat with toys limp in her fingers, listening to her father complain about someone in Canada her mother still talked to, a man, she learned; Honey claimed she had to, to check on things back there. I need to see how things are with Celia. / I thought she wasn't your daughter anymore? I thought we'd fucking moved past that. It's been ages. / She isn't. But she's still like me. Jesús never figured out what 'like me' exactly meant–something about a mother's love, something he assumed more and more to be reserved for this mysterious daughter–but discovered that she was from a different father, that they lived in a town that didn't show up on many maps, just as Summer didn't, and that there was something very wrong with her that cropped up in every phone conversation he listened to since their arrival in New Jersey, when they finally got a house phone and Honey wasn't leaving to make the calls. They became fewer; and never did he manage to hear Celia's voice, only her father's; but he'd know her when he found her, and he could stay with her for a while because they were technically siblings, technically family, and there was something wrong with him too, something fundamental that he figured could be traced right back to their mother.

He's not stupid enough to be that hopeful, but at least finding her could help a bit; and a new location is a good starting point, anyhow, for a new life. That is what, maybe, awaits him in Normal.

Before she gets home, hours before, Jesús has escaped through the back door. A weight shakes itself from his shoulders as he jams the key into his car, something unspeakable; and something new sinks its claws in. This is a stupid fucking idea, to disappear on a whim without telling anyone–he's probably going to end up dead or worse, but any fate is better than what he senses awaits him in Summer; a rotting away, slow and agonising, until he is old and bitter rather than young and stupid, until he wastes and wastes and finally dies of an overdose or something; and his mother won't mourn because she's already mourned, before he'd even let himself die by remaining in this stupid town. By running he is saving himself. In finding Celia, maybe he will understand his mother more, turn his life around. More likely he will end up renting an ugly flat with drug money, but the possibilities keep him, though he chides himself for it, at least a little optimistic.