Podcast of a Teenage Super-Villian

Chapter Nine: Death of the Manic Pixie Dream Boy

The next day at school, Kai isn't in class. He isn't chatting in front of his locker,  lifting weights in the gym, or dribbling pizza sauce into his mouth against a cafeteria table like usual. And neither is Finn, though if Chip is honest with himself, and he usually is, he doesn't care about either of them. 

Well. Maybe that's not totally true. Kai is pretty okay, and it's hard not to feel a little tingle of admiration for someone who washed the blood out of your hair after your best friend tried to kill you. Or kidnap you. Or...it's all foggy to Chip, now, but he knows when you wake up in a stranger's apartment after a traumatic experience and a pretty boy from school soothes you and then clings to you, tittering, heating up tea, and occasionally holding your hand, you kind of trust him.

Also, Kai has a car. A car Chip needs.

Percy isn't at school either, and she won't answer her phone. It makes him extra-twitchy through the monotonous minutes. Every moment, Monet could be dying. Every moment, Max could be burrowing deeper and deeper into that monster of a city.  He texts Percy during Pre-Calc and Biology, just 'hey's and 'how are u?'s He gives up after Music Theory and during English, her  silence becomes unbearable. 

So he leaves. He doesn't speak, just slides his chair silently from under the desk, hefts his knapsack over his shoulder, and throws open the door while kids mutter and Ms. Harrison reaches for the phone on the wall. He'll always see that image, the woman's manicured nails a sheen under the artificial light. Her hand open and extended, forever reaching before the door slammed between them.

He walks through the undamaged parts of the school, the hammering and whirring of nearby machinery a constant reminder of what Monet and Max have done. He fingers crumpled sheets of paper stuffed in his pockets. Song fragments. Eventually, he escapes out the iron doors with a shove of his shoulders and continues walking. Down the sloping sidewalk, balancing on the curb, heel-toe, heel-toe. The wind whips up his hair and salt stings his skin, the streets all quiet, all crumbling tar and gaping potholes. He walks, and walks, balancing on the yellow strip of paint, his mind a cloud.

He wanted the old Max back, he tells himself, even the voice in his head a pleading, desperate sound. That's why he acted the way he did when Max hurt him. Why he returned the threats with silence, the curses with gentle touches, the bruises with...with love. With the sort of love that swells up from the brokenest parts of you. Chip thinks about this, dropping off the curb and kicking up pebbles along the side of the road. He thinks of a girl in a hospital bed and the distraught girl who was supposed to be his best friend. How she was oblivious for months.

He thinks of his own nervous laughter when she'd ask about his bruises, Max's sidewise glances. How Chip changed the way he walked, the way he stood. He started slouching more, stumbling over things that weren't there, and laughing in her presence after purposely stubbing his toe on his own amplifier. "Such a clutz," he'd say, tracing his newest bruise. "I wish I knew how to walk." And sometimes Percy would drift her eyes over his lanky body for a second too long, squinting. Maybe, she'd remembered how graceful of a dancer he'd been. He'd taught her, after all. Tango. Waltz. Foxtrot. And then she'd get distracted, by a ding on her phone or a random thought about the vastness of the universe, and Max's pinching grip on Chip's elbow would slacken and both boys' shoulders would relax.

Chip thinks about this, still wandering the quiet streets. It's October, too cold for romantic walks on the beach, and without its superheroes, Silver Dollar is a little nothing town you pass through on your way to famous beaches, its crumbling buildings and shattered city streets warning tourists away. So the cars that buzz by are few today, sputtering and whirring, filling the air with the choking reek of engine exhaust. 

He doesn't think much of this, breathing in drifts of sand and the distant smell of fish guts drying on the pier. The familiarity of home. He scoops change from his pocket and palms it as the bus stop bench creaks under his weight. An hour passes of Chip staring at the blue, blue sky, quiet and thinking. Trying to do that thing Percy wanted, trying to tease himself apart and understand all the layers of meaning. Trying to piece together what happened, why at the time, he didn't tell anyone. Reliving every moment he stood outside his aunt's door, feeling small in front of it. And that strange, creeping feeling of guilt. Like he had done something to be ashamed of, though he knew he hadn't. He relives these feelings, the knot in his stomach, the closedness in his chest, the suffocating feeling that he was thinking himself to death. He relives them, but he still doesn't understand them.