Of Rage And Love

He lit another cigarette, staring out across the 7/11 parking lot. His best friend was at his side as they sat on the kerb, branching off from the group they'd arrived with. For some reason tonight, neither of them particularly wanted to get involved in whatever crazy scheme their friends cooked up.

"Tunny?" Jimmy looked across at the other boy. Tunny was younger than him by ten months, but sometimes it was easy to forget that. They'd lived one block away from each other their whole lives, and that had cemented their friendship over the years.

"What?" Tunny inhaled the smoke from his own cigarette.

"Have you ever thought about leaving?"

"Oh come on, J, we've done this before." He sighed. And we both know we're stuck here 'til we drop dead, so why bother trying to make things any different?

"No, I don't mean in an 'oh wouldn't it be great to go to the City and piss around for a few years' way. I mean to actually leave. Leave and never come back." His eyes always lit up when he spoke of getting out of Jingletown.

"I know what you meant." Tunny swiped another cigarette from the packet Jimmy held loosely in one hand. "Has Brad been on your case again?" He asked innocently, flicking the lighter and watching the flame dance before he sparked up.

"Is it really that obvious?" Jimmy hated his step-father. His real father - whom he'd idolized - had died when he was ten years old, leaving his grieving, prescription-drug dependent mother to fall into the arms of the alcoholic, sweet-talking Brad.

They were a match made in Hell, in Jimmy's completely unbiased view.

"What was it this time? 'You're a disgrace to this family!'? 'Sort your hair out!'? 'Get a job, you freeloader!'?" They both laughed, despite the fact that Brad had said all of those things at some point over the last eight years. In fact, that's probably what made Tunny's impression of him so funny.

"It was pretty close to that last one, actually." Jimmy admitted after they'd calmed down. "Bastard told me that since I'm eighteen now I'm not his problem and I should, and I believe this is verbatim, 'get out of this goddamn house'. Mom intervened, pulled the 'he's just a kid' card."

"So, Jesus, are you actually gonna do it?" Tunny flicked his cigarette butt across the asphalt, watching it burn out.

"Do what?"

"Get out of that goddamn house. What did you think I meant, moron? Hey!" He protested as Jimmy elbowed him in the chest. "Fuck, take a joke!" But the brief grin his friend flashed him told him that it was all in good faith, and he let it go. "Anyway, as I was saying, I gather Brad being a possessive ass over the house has gotten you back on your whole 'one way ticket out of Jingletown' thing again?"

"Well, yeah. I mean all it would take is a bus ticket into the City, wouldn't it?"

"Would you go on your own?" It was the question the conversation had been heading towards since the beginning, and they both knew it. Tunny wasn't about to let his lifelong best friend run off to the City without him.

Question was, would the Jesus of Suburbia be accepting disciples?