This War Paint

Butch


There were a hundred reasons why I was the way I was. A thousand really. Not least, because of my screwed up parents and the way I’d been judged before I’d even been old enough to pronounce my first swear word. It was no wonder I was such a screw up, it had been destined ever since I was born. Any child of theirs would have been.

I hated them for that, and for my body, and for the fact that I would never amount to being anything more than a small town’s rebel. I was a child omen. I was what everyone wanted and no one wanted to be. They needed me for the reason why things went wrong, their scapegoat, bred from the perfect combination of destruction and violence.

But I would never fucking let them know how much it kept me up at night, teaming with the uncomfortable blanket and muggy air that my car wasn’t built to weather. I knew that my main strength was the indifference I held the world at, or at least pretended to. It was my ability to make those around believe I was living behind my haze of smoke, of drugs, unable to take in the way their eyes tried to cut me like glass. I felt them though they just didn’t leave as many scars anymore.

And that’s why Jane Hathaway was going to be such a challenge for me. Sure, I liked challenges. The first cigarette I ever tried was done for a bet; the first fight I got into was against a guy twice my size; the first girl I slept with was just to piss off her ass of a boyfriend. I revelled in the challenges I was set, but this was something I couldn’t afford to screw up. Jane Hathaway was definitely something I wasn’t going to let slip through my fingers.

I had to prove to her that I was a human too and not just the big bad wolf parents told their children to stay away from. I had to re-teach her, start from the very beginning, make her understand that it was them who had made me Butch! I’d never wanted it – I’d been born into it, like some kind of skewed legacy. I’d inherited the aura of an outcast from my parents just like she’d been raised to be perfect by hers.

Just how I was going to do this, though, remained unknown. Of course, I was always so aware that she was miles out of my league, that everyone would constantly remind me and her of this, she could do so much better. But maybe I was that asshole everyone thought I was. Maybe I would just take her like I’d taken Mandy and the countless girls before her, seduce her with the bad-boy image tattooed to me alongside the real things.

Her name was there too. On my skin. Hidden, always hidden.

“Seriously man, if you don’t ease up on those things you’re not going to be able to wake up tomorrow, let alone work.” Max’s voice of reason intercepted the tangled thoughts caught up in my brain.

I shook my head. Not just at him but to clear the smoky veil that had collapsed down before my eyes. I could suddenly taste the joint between my lips again. Earthy. Like a cigarette but with a few added kicks, that’s how it was sold to me, because God knows I needed those kicks when I started. And I needed them now, so I took another long drag and eased it out of my mouth, staring at the various blunts lying by my body.

“Whatever Max,” I mumbled eventually after a long, pitiful silence. I watched him vaguely as he rolled his eyes, not really caring what he did as long as he didn’t leave me alone here.

We were propped up against Max’s roof tiles, sitting on concrete as car engines faintly rumbled both in the distance and close by. It wasn’t hard to climb out here from his bedroom, not even when I was high. There was a ledge near the guttering which we sat on and wasted hours of our time.

You could see almost the entire town from up there, could watch people walk by without them ever knowing. It felt good to be the one watching others for a change – and it felt even better to be completely invisible, no black mark against my name. It would have been perfect if I could have just stayed there and never moved. I had my drugs, and the view and my sick little thoughts, I deserved nothing more.

“You’re going to stink up my house with the smell of weed Butch, my Mom will freak. If she finds out I’ve been smoking again and hanging with you I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Don’t worry about it – I’ll find another way down so I’ll avoid your room. She’ll never know,” I took another drag, unmoved. This was the reason I couldn’t stay here and definitely not take up residence in Max’s house. Sure, he knew I was sleeping in the back of my car – the entire fucking town knew – but he was a good boy at heart and listened to his Mom more than I thought he should. She hated me with a passion and would have cried just knowing I was breaching her wonderful home with my heavy footfalls. If she knew what we were doing up on her roof she would undoubtedly call the police. I didn’t need the cops right now.

“Come on man you know I’m not going to let you get down from my roof when you’re fucking wasted,” Max stated bluntly. He was still my best friend despite what his Mom told him and despite how he heeded her ignorant words too often.

“I’m not high enough to kill myself Max so I wouldn’t worry.”

My best friend sighed beside me and lit up a joint of his own.

“Baby’s going to kill me for this. I told her I’d quit,” he groaned, mouth already around the cigarette.

“So you lied to a girl,” I shrugged “what’s so bad about that now?”

I didn’t have to look at Max to know he was sending me the look. The look he always shot me whenever I talked about Baby as anything but the most perfect girl in the world. God knows she wasn’t perfect. No Jane Hathaway. She was Max’s girlfriend though so I’d never tell him that.

“Sorry.”

He nodded and turned his gaze straight again, watching the town wheeze in and out, straining to breathe. It never ceased to amaze me how our tiny town still functioned miles away from proper civilisation, with no big city around to help keep it in order. Most people were proud of our false self sufficiency. It only made everyone quicker to stereotype though as its heightened sense of community ran riot. That’s what led to people like David Armstrong being worshipped. This idea that some were better than others.

“Do you believe the rumours?”

“What?” I would have shot him a perplexed look if the muscles in my face hadn’t felt so slack. It was the drugs. I liked that about them. It made it even easier to remain nonchalant.

“What that Armstrong kid said. About Jane popping her cherry with him in a toilet. I heard that she was pretty good for a virgin...”

Max’s voice trailed away, his eyes wide in panic. My jaw was tense, my eyebrows furrowed, the joints in my jaw frozen as my teeth ground together. The hands which had been comfortably resting by my side were clenched into fists and held half way in the air, my mind not yet deciding whether to punch his fucking lights out or not. Not even the drugs could disguise the anger coursing its way through my thick veins.

“I forgot Butch… shit I’m sorry, I forgot.”

“Forgot what? That David Armstrong is a lying prick who’s probably never been with anything but his right hand?”

“I know. I know. It’s the weed, it makes me forget stuff.”

I rolled my eyes at his pathetic apology. The drugs didn’t make me forget Jane, or the fact that I had to sleep in a car, or the inevitability of school the next day. It just dulled them – made them bearable. I didn’t have to pine for Jane when I was high, I just desired her. Heavily.

“Whatever Max, don’t talk about it again. Jane’s not just another girl like Mandy, she’s special.”

I heard myself say the words and couldn’t help but inwardly shudder. God, I sounded like Max during a rant about Baby! It sickened me in my current state to realise how fucking love-struck I was. How pathetic it was for an eighteen year-old boy to be so deep for a girl who barely knew his name. Did she remember it now? Wherever she was, did she remember me as Fraser or Butch?

“You really love her.”

It wasn’t a question. Max sounded sure of himself as the words were uttered, the drugs no doubt giving him conviction.

I didn’t reply, the joint in my mouth feeling too heavy to remove. I did though, I did love her. It was stupid of me to feel that way for a girl like her. She could never return the sentiment and it burned me up to know this. There were a hundred reasons why I was the way I was but none of it mattered. And, to Jane Hathaway and the entire world, the end result was the same – Butch was created, Fraser left forgotten somewhere, gone just as completely as Mom had.

“Shit,” Max hissed “Mom’s home!”

I lazily watched the car pull up into the driveway. Beside me, Max was cowering back into the tiles and stubbing out his joint as ferociously as if it has burned him. She couldn’t see us from the angle we sat at but it didn’t stop Max from practically shitting his pants, cursing words even I didn’t use.

“You have to disappear man! We have to get you out of here right now!”

I smirked at his panic, feeling a small flavour of satisfaction rise, as if this were payback for his words about Jane. It certainly didn’t bother me that his mother was only a few metres away or that she could easily discover us by looking out most windows on the second floor. I was high, slightly pissed off and deeply relaxed, all at the same time. Max’s Mom didn’t scare me.

“Ditch that thing,” he snatched the still smoking joint from my lips and squished it beneath his foot. I would have been furious if I hadn’t caught the flash of red at the edge of my vision, making its way slowly up the street. A deep, long red which swished with motion, some of it pinned back in a style I couldn’t quite make out.

“You’re going to have to jump Butch, there’s no other way you’re getting out of here without Mom seeing now. I knew we should have gone somewhere else, I don’t know why you insist on lighting up here. There are plenty of covered places around town and you have to pick my roof to get high on.”

“Max,” I snarled “shut the fuck up will you? Can’t you see what I see?”

He swivelled quickly, probably thinking I was watching his mother notice us and open her mouth ready to give him his elongated punishments. But it was Jane he saw, my hot gaze easily traceable. It was the eighteen year-old girl we both watched silently as she sauntered along, her top baggy enough to reveal a creamy white shoulder.

“As much as I’d love to stay here and check Jane Hathaway out all day,” he neatly dodged a swipe I made for him “I’d rather get you off my property before Mom finds us.”

“Whatever.”

“Aim for the bushes,” Max instructed carefully as if I hadn’t done this a hundred times before. Maybe he had a point about lighting up at a more intelligent place. I didn’t mind spitting out leaves and taking a few scratches, but I sure as hell didn’t want Jane to see me do it.

“Fuck off Maximillion,” I smirked, pushing myself up and moving behind the chimney before Jane could catch sight of me. Not that she was looking. The girl had her eyes focused on the pavement in front of her like it was the only thing stabilising her to the earth.

I didn’t have time to contemplate what was going on behind those clear blue eyes as I crouched down at the far edge of the roof. My sights were momentarily shifted from Jane to the soft looking bushes directly beneath me. Max’s house wasn’t really that tall but landing firmly on the ground or at an angle would definitely cause some damage.

So, with a last mocking glance back at my best friend who was kicking me out, I tipped myself off the tiles to fall. Fall. Landing in the bushes was far from the graceful disembark I had imagined in my lucid head, and I cursed so loudly it probably caused Max to have a heart attack.

I rolled onto his lawn with blood from various tiny scratches wetting my shirt. I grimaced down at myself, at the slits cutting through some of my tattoos, temporarily disfiguring them. Real blood was smudged across the barbed wire tattoo on my upper arm, as if it was part of the design, as if it had always been there. The rest of my body didn’t look so fitting.

“Are you okay?”

I looked up, startled from my self-examination, to see Jane watching me anxiously. She was still on the public path along the street but was eyeing me as if she’d very much like to just continue. I frowned dazedly. Surely it was the drugs or perhaps a blow to my head that had made me envision her? She couldn’t be showing concern towards me, towards Butch?

So I smiled stupidly at her and nodded my head, wondering how long the hallucination would last. I’d royally fucked myself up if I was imagining her now, and I wouldn’t hesitate to do it all over again. Her cool words washed over me, bathing me in bliss, just looking at her looking at me was better than any of Mandy’s orgasms.

“Are you high?” her tone was no longer concerned – in fact it was rather disgusted.

I frowned then, because no hallucination of mine was going to disapprove of my drug taking.

“Like it matters,” I replied to the red-headed vision that had placed her hands on her hips. I caught a flash of purple nail varnish. And the sparse freckles on her shoulder which soaked up Florence’s summer sun.

“So you are high,” she nodded as if this proved all of her theories correct. They probably did. Still, hallucination Jane shouldn’t be judging me. “Do you need help getting up?”

I realised then that I hadn’t moved from the lawn and still sat with my legs uncomfortably stretched out beneath me. The blood from my cuts had most likely stopped but it didn’t remove the red stains from my shirt, the tiny patches dotted around like bullet holes. I felt the dark burn of an embarrassed blush catch my face.

“No thanks, I’m good.” I hoisted myself up and squared my shoulders, trying to puff myself up as big as I would go to make up for the previous blunder. I had a sneaking suspicion that this Jane was in fact the real one and not my imagination. Her voice cut through me too deep and I definitely didn’t have the brain power to create such a perfect Jane Hathaway.

I made my way off Max’s lawn as if it was a normal occurrence for me to just be sitting there. Thanks to my high, I wasn’t able to subtly study Jane, but instead never took my eyes from her. And even then it wasn’t enough. It was like I couldn’t quite drink all of her in, as if I were studying a blurred photograph. I hated the drugs then. For making a fool out of me and causing that disgusted look on her face and stopping me from seeing how beautiful she was.

“It seems our roles have been reversed,” I pointed out after a few tense seconds during which I finally made it to the pavement. At Jane’s confused frown I couldn’t help but grin. How adorable she was. I would have leaned in and kissed her right then if it hadn’t been for the fact I simply wasn’t wasted enough to not care about her feelings. She wouldn’t want some Neanderthal to kiss her, some stranger. And I cared about what she wanted.

“The last time we talked it was me asking if you were okay,” I poorly explained.

“You remember,” she seemed surprised.

“Well yeah, of course I remember.”

That definitely surprised her. It was only a few days ago we’d first spoken and yet, with her before me, it felt like weeks. I missed her, I had missed her, and only being with her dissolved that. By her expression I knew she’d been sure I’d forgotten all about her. If only she knew how wrong she was.