Of Saints and Sinners

Julian Pierce. Anyone who heard my name almost cringed in fear that they’d have to deal with or put up with me. Teachers begged for me to be swapped out of their classes and would pass me even if I was failing just to get rid of me. Kids would part out of my way in the hallways, thinking my corruption would rub off on them if I so much as breathed in their direction. My own parents strayed away from me, not dealing with me as much as they could get away with. I was a walking black mark to society.

I think it started when I was a kid and I started playing baseball with frogs and tying cat’s tails together and throwing them over a clothesline for them to fight to the death. I have a younger sister and when she’d leave her dolls out, which she should have known better than to do, I’d pry their eyes out and rip their heads off. And then once, when my Aunt Dory came to visit, she brought me scissors and some of that liquid paste as a gift. Needless to say, the family cat got a new haircut and some hair “gel.”

Long story short, I've always been meaner than shit and it only escalated as I got older. By seventh grade I was smoking cigarettes and going to high school parties. By ninth grade, I was drinking fifths of liquor by myself and winning two on one beer pong tournaments with ease. In tenth grade, I was smoking pot and messing with acid and ecstasy. My junior year I was sleeping with every skirt coming and going. They were lined up at my door on their knees. By my second junior year, I’d slept with seventy different girls and I can say that I keep it clean, no STD’s and no pregnancy scares. Now as a senior, I just lived to piss everyone that I could off.

From ninth to twelfth grade, I have been in over fifteen different public schools, six private schools, three boarding schools, and even a couple of military schools. I was unstoppable, my attitude uncontrollable, and my path of destruction uncontrollable. I took pride in the hell and havoc I created anywhere and everywhere I went. This was my twenty-seventh school and my parents were paying close to a hundred thousand dollars a year to keep me here. That’s enough tuition for five children to go to this school. Our Lady of the Mountain’s calmly overlooked nearly anything I did, even when I was stamping on and crossing the line of expulsion. I was given a slap on the wrist and maybe some Saturday school.

The ironic thing, though, is that I’m attending a religious school, yet I’m as big of an Atheist as they come. I’m surprised that my skin doesn't melt off when I’m forced to touch a Bible or I don’t burst into flames where I stand sometimes. I used to believe in God, but that was many, many years ago. After praying to something that wouldn't answer me, I formed my own ideas that “He” just didn't exist. I prayed for my parents to be better at parenting and be a little worse at their jobs. I stopped believing in God and started believing in myself. I am the captain of my own ship.

Many people, especially my parents, cannot help but ask why I’m such a bad person, why is it that I thrive off having such a bad reputation? To them I can’t help but say that there was no real reason, it was programmed into me before I was even born. I was meant to be hell on wheels, you could say. For every good person in the world, there had to be a Julian Pierce.

What I’m not admitting, though, is that I wasn't always this way. I used to be a good kid when I was four and five, but after my sixth birthday, that’s when it went downhill and will continue to go downhill until it drives me six feet under. It’s cliché as fuck as to what happened, but that’s only because it happens so often. You’d think parents would realize that and pay attention to their kids.

My dad, a dead ringer for James Dean and too smart for his own good, reached a breakthrough in some sort of psychological studies and stayed at the mental ward of the hospital working the mass majority of the time. We used to build stuff and then set it on fire when I was a kid, in all reality; he probably started my fascination with burning things to the ground, both literally and hypothetically. He always told me I could do anything I set my mind to.

My mother, a beautiful lady inside and out, was a renowned real estate agent; she sold houses to people like George Clooney and Johnny Depp. She was sold more houses in a month than some people sold in their entire real estate careers. She had the warmest eyes, almost the color of honey and made even the coldest days of the year seem a little like summer. Before she got so big in the real estate game, she and I would bake cookies and things together. I don’t care how gay it sounds; baking cookies with my mother was some of the happiest times in my life. She always told me that nothing I could do would take her love away, and I sure as hell put her to the test. And she failed.

I dealt with a nanny a lot up until the time my parents considered me old enough to watch after myself and then there was just a nanny to watch after my sister. I couldn't be trusted because every time I was with her I somehow managed to make her cry every time. I couldn't see why, though, she acted as if me ripping the heads off her Barbie’s and me drawing faces on their nubby necks wasn't cool.

Honestly, one could compare me to Sid from Toy Story.

Anyway, having said all of this, I guess I’m not really providing an “excuse” for my behavior. I’m just providing an explanation for all of the times I've been asked as to why I’m such a piece of shit. It’s in my blood. I've got a bad reputation and I don’t give a damn.

I’m going to bring society buckling to its knees and the world is going to burn to the ground at the hands of Julian Pierce. No one and nothing will ever tame or stop me. If you think I've been bad so far, I’m just getting fucking started.

For now, though, I had to start small and ruin one person at a time. And tonight, I had a feeling that heads would roll. You see, tonight was Wednesday and even though the Catholic church didn't have services on Wednesdays, Our Lady of the Mountain believed in having their youth group meetings on this night. Tonight would be the first night that Julian Pierce stepped into the OLM ‘place of worship’ in the entire year and a half I've been here. If I don’t spontaneously combust, it’ll be a fucking miracle.