The Procyon Strain: Book One

Copyright Page

Copyright © 2014 by Anthony Barnhart

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 978-1-312-68764-6

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ajbarnhart@yahoo.com

Title Page

The Procyon Strain

Book One

being the first of a six-book saga by

Anthony Barnhart

Dedication Page

This work of fiction is dedicated to

The Claypole House

of June 2011

Prologue

How do you begin something like this? Those days are dead to me, and remembering them is like leafing through memoirs under some other name and from some other place. Like autumn leaves those memories are dying, wrinkling, curling in on themselves. I fear those memories will decay to nothing, but I’m thinking decay may be the only thing we’re promised; that and death, as I know too well. My sister tells me that I should remember, that I shouldn’t forget, but she’s not the one who has to do the remembering. Already those half-remembered days are fading like yellowed and sun-bleached photographs; it’d take only a steady hand and a stubborn will to let them die and leave them where they lie. But I’m thinking, Maybe she’s right. She’s been right before.

It’s the simplest things, really, that stand out the most. My father’s quiet and confident manner, the way he’d stand stoic with that irksome smile on his face, that mischievous glint in his eyes, always some perverse joke on the tip of his tongue. I remember my mother’s shock at what he’d say, it was always different but always desert-dry, and I remember how her shock quickly turned to embarrassment, This is the man I married?, and embarrassment gave way to resignation: she loved him despite her fear of taking him to social gatherings. She couldn’t get him without all those little quirks that made her temples throb. I remember Amanda laughing hysterically at Dad’s crude remarks, and I remember fighting to hold back my own laughter, knowing Mom needed someone less heartless to take her side. And I remember how I could never hold back the laughter too long, and how by the end of things I was in on the fray; and Mom would retreat, leaving the three of us to our bantering. I miss such moments, those moments that stand out so clear to me now, moments I’d always taken for granted. They say you don’t know what you’ve had until it’s gone, but really they’re just saying hindsight’s a bitch. Those days of laughter, those days of innocence, they’re gone now, and they won’t come back. And that’s why I wonder, What’s the point of remembering?

It’s 10:45 at night and I’m sitting in one of the yellow booths at The Anchor Grill, one of the few 24-hour diners in Covington where you can drink diner coffee and smoke cigarettes simultaneously. There’s hardly anyone in the dining room, and it’s cold. I stir cold coffee with a cold spoon, everything’s so damned cold. Blake suggested I write, that it might help me come to terms with all that’s happened. I’m not so sure about any of that, but here I am with this pen and an empty moleskin journal. Maybe I’ll write well into the night, not that it matters: the notebook will become frayed and the binding will loosen and the pages will scatter with the wind to be distributed to the four corners of the world. The leaves may land in some faraway park, along the trails, and maybe some hiker will come across a single page caught in the scaled bark of a tree, and maybe this hiker will wonder who I am, wonder whatever came of me. They may like to believe, perhaps in their fairytale world, that things got better, that I smiled again, laughed again, even loved again.

It’s 11:30 now and frost scratches across the bay windows plastered with C.D.C and World Health Organization posters. Beyond the window the street’s all but empty, glittering slick and wet in the wan glow of the streetlights. People treat you differently when they know. Something changes, it’s like a switch is flipped. I’m thinking that they just don’t know how to take it. Is it murder? Is it self-defense? Is it involuntary manslaughter? (Or voluntary manslaughter?) Is it something different altogether? I’ve only told a handful of friends the unseemly details of what happened this past November. It’s not something that comes flying off my tongue on a regular basis. Really, it’s caged deep inside me, and only a few have the keys to unlock it. But the news spread, as news tends to do, and now everyone who knows me has come to know about it. People have become stand-offish, reserved, and they tend to shy away from me. They don’t talk to me as much, and they don’t try to get a hold of me like they used to. They let me die all over again. But I can’t blame them. Those days drying up were lived not by me but by someone else. I’m cold now, calloused and broken, but I’d like to think wiser. The face of wisdom has never been one of peace and tranquility, but one of coming to accept the grim, uncaring, and empty nature of the world.

The waitress pours me a fresh cup, and I’m thankful the coffee’s hot this time. I’m not alone now: an older man’s nestled into the next booth over, and he doesn’t acknowledge my presence. I don’t want him to, and I’m keeping my eyes down to the paper, fearful that our eyes will meet. There’s something cryptic in that man’s slow and painful movements, the way his liver-splotched hands tremble as he unwraps the creamer packets, the way his back cackles as he leans forward with eyes clenched shut to take the first sip. There’s coffee in his wiry and unkempt beard, and when I look up to steal a glance towards the bathroom, his eyes are looking right at me. Sunken eyes in sunken sockets, eyes filled with nothing but a clouding regret; and for but a moment, a wrinkle in time, I’m looking not into the old man’s eyes but my own, and it’s fifty years from this moment, and I’m seeing myself hobbling into this very same diner, lips etched into a scowl and brow wrinkled with lines drawn like fishing nets across weathered and talon-sawed cheeks. I see myself sitting down in this very same booth, drinking this very same brackish coffee, adding the routine two packets of cream and two spoonfuls of sugar; and I see myself lonely and returning to an empty home littered with bundles of tattered newspapers and stacks of moth-gnawed journals telling the same story over and over again, and I see myself perched on the edge of my bed drowning shots of bourbon to muffle out the noise of the world. But the bourbon doesn’t work, and I drink until I can drink no more, until the world begins to shift and shudder, and I drink until I pass out in my clothes, because like Lady Macbeth I can’t get the blood off my hands.

Sometimes I’ll see the boy in the corner of my eye, standing half-hidden in a doorframe or wrapped in fog behind a window. But when I snap my eyes to attention, he’s gone. Sometimes my neck tingles, the hairs standing on edge, and a strange sensation floods to trembling fingers, an incessant paranoia of the worst kind. Oftentimes at night I can see twin shadows through the crack beneath my bedroom door, and I know it’s the boy standing in the hallway on the other side. I can’t shower with a curtain and I can’t sleep with blankets. But can you blame me?

Mom’s favorite flower was the lily, and on Mother’s Day last year I bought her a bouquet of lilies. When the sun came and fled and came again, the  petals had wilted and frayed and turned chocolate brown. Some flowers, like the lily, and like the hibiscus and evening primrose, have flowers that last only a day; and yet they’re some of the most splendid flowers, claiming to themselves such magnificence and scent that lovers are wooed. Something beautiful, something loved, gone so quickly, in the time-span of a stuttered breath.

They say you never forget your first, and I haven’t forgotten mine: he’s there every damned night, haunting me from the cobweb-strewn corners of my dreams. He was eight years old with hair white as sheep’s wool and eyes blue as the wine-dark sea. I remember the way the boy looked at me, the way his mother fucking smiled. When time’s laid waste to memory, only the smallest things remain, and I’m damned sure that smirk will never leave me. I lost my innocence on the first of November, but all this started long before, in Hilton Head, South Carolina, and that’s as good a place as any to start.

Chapter 1

This is how it begins. Tourists flooded the grocery, and as I moved down the aisle, I dodged them like boulders strewn across a whitewater canyon. There was a line for the eggs, so I stood there with my eyes glued to my feet to avoid being awkward, surrounded by the hot mess of it all. Think Grand Opening, except just another random June Sunday night with tourists stocking up for their week-long vacations. The person in front of me took a carton of those $5 jumbo eggs, which would’ve been only $2.50 on the mainland, and when he shuffled on his way, I knelt down beside the refrigerated case and began scavenging the remains like a vulture pecking through road-kill. Each of the remaining cartons had at least one cracked egg with yolk oozing out like magma through a fault-line. The people behind me stirred and pranced their fingers, mumbled about how long I was taking. A baby started shrieking bloody murder, and her mom cradled her like she was an annoying, scraggly pup.

Abandoning the quest for eggs, I stood up and my spine crackled, and I lost my balance and staggered backwards into this petite homely girl with freckled pale arms and a disjointed smile. I ducked away and apologized, and I plunged through the crowd to find Amanda grabbing up juice bottles and ranting on and on about how healthy they are.

The store, it was so loud.

Kids shrieking, shrill and blasting.

Couples arguing over whether to buy asparagus now or asparagus later.

A five-year-old kid with light-up sneakers crashed full-speed into my legs, then darted away without a slightest word. Frustrated that I didn’t get eggs and mad at the heat—we’re talking Saharan heat—and annoyed that the kid in light-up sneakers was wheeling about and coming back in my direction outfitted with a Nerf gun this time, I thought To hell with this and mumbled something to Amanda about needing space and a cigarette, but she didn’t hear me as she kept talking about how Bolthouse Smoothies were far healthier about their Naked counterparts.

It was hotter outside, the evening humid with that sickly-sweet ripe smell. Seagulls shit in the palm trees and a candy bar wrapper fluttered by my feet. I never liked the feeling of smoke in my lungs, especially in heat like that. Alaska’s optimal for cigarettes: cold, rainy, mist cloaking everything, drones of miniscule jellyfish bobbing listlessly in the surf. Amanda joined me outside and the wind wrapped her flowery dress around her ankles and she leaned against the stone wall, bent down, fingered the strap on her sandals.

Do you think they’ll have jellyfish? I asked.

What? she said. Who?

Jellyfish. At the beach.

I don’t know. Probably. It’s a beach.

Okay.

Do you not want to get stung?

How big you think they are?

Her eyes lit up. If you get stung, you have to pee on it.

I’m not going to do that.

Seriously, though! It kills the poison or something.

Urine neutralizes poison?

"It does something." She started retelling the story of her friend Adam from Montana who went to the beach in southern California and got stung by a jellyfish and had to go to the E.R. I wasn’t really paying attention because I’d heard the story before. My attention abandoned her story but then found itself reinvigorated, and I snapped my head to her and my cigarette went limp between my fingers and I asked her what she said.

You weren’t listening, she pouted.

I am now.

Yeah, because I said her name.

You did?

Yes. Because you weren’t paying attention.

If I get stung by a jellyfish, I’ll pee on it.

What if it stings you in the back?

"Then I’ll have you pee on it."

Umm, no.

Do you know how sometimes you can imagine something you don’t really want to imagine? How a simple thought, no matter its origins and intent, becomes a picture in the mind’s eye? Nothing more than a snide joke, and then I saw myself lying face-down in the sand, with her squatted above me and peeing on the sting, the urine dribbling in converging and diverging rivulets, pooling in the sand like a gossamer musk. I shuddered at the thought and simultaneously wondered if it’d tickle. What the hell’s wrong with me?

I know you’re thinking something, she said.

What?

You have that look.

You mean when I get that quirky smile and tinkle in my eyes?

I don’t think you know what you’re saying.

I meant twinkle, not tinkle.

Yeah, I bet.

I tossed my cigarette to the curb and turned to go inside. She whined for me to wait but I didn’t, and she hiked up her dress and followed me back into the store where a gust of cool air hit us only to be repelled by the lingering humidity. I traced my way through the throngs, started feeling anxious again. I looked behind me but Amanda had lost interest at a rack of Cosmos, and the distance between us was filling with people, so I hurried down the way a bit and ducked into an almost-empty aisle. I stopped to take a few breaths, felt like a marathon runner who’d just burst through the finish line tape, riddled with both victory and exhaustion. Realizing how awkward I must’ve looked, I began scanning the shelves so as not to be conspicuous, and what I saw sparked an epiphany.

Cheese and rice. They’re two different things.

What?

Someone behind me. I launched into panic mode, my throat knotted up and my heart pounding behind my ribs, the adrenaline flowing like water through a broken tap. Sweat popped over my face and my cheeks flared red as a beet. Damn my rosatia. I turned to see that freckly-armed girl with her fingers tapping at her belt and her blue shirt used to read something but it had faded.

What? I said.

You said cheese and rice are two different things?

What? Oh. No, I know that, I meant… It’s an expression.

Cheese and rice?

It’s like ‘Jesus Christ,’ just not blasphemous.

Okay. What’re two different things?

These. I pointed to the shelf stocked with pads and tampons.

You didn’t know those were two different things?

Well, I don’t use them, really.

Okay…

I’m shopping for my mom, I blurted, so as not to make it look weird. It was a lie, of course. Pure fabrication. She mustn’t see me for what I was afraid I was, a creeping weirdo totally detached from reality. And in hindsight, I probably could’ve come up with a better scapegoat.

She needs you to buy her stuff?

She’s sick. And on her period. Simultaneously.

Behold: a pure, unfettered, unbridled train-wreck.

Soon the spectators would gather; I’d give them one hell of a show.

So what do you need? she said. A tampon or a pad?

Both, I guess? Just to be safe.

What’s her size?

They come in sizes?

Why wouldn’t they?

I just thought they’d be anatomically proportioned.

What’re you talking about?

You know, like a universal fit.

What?

I have no idea what I’m saying right now.

She hid a laugh, but I couldn’t tell if it was mockery or shared amusement. She scoured the shelf and pointed out her favorite brands, and I couldn’t believe it’d come to this, and then she was walking away and I stood in the aisle clutching boxes of feminine hygiene against my chest.

Hey, I said. Wait.

She turned around, going not a step farther.

You live around here? I croaked. Was I hitting puberty?

I’m on vacation, probably like everyone else here.

Yeah. Okay. So am I.

Cool, she said.

Okay. Well. See you later.

Her eyebrows raised, her forehead scrunched, her eyes: perplexed.

I shook the boxes. Thanks for the help with these.

Okay. Sure. You’re welcome.

Okay. Bye. I turned and ostrich-walked down the aisle, stealing a glance behind me to see her shrugging as she walked away. I turned back around and nearly collided with some Maltese-looking man in a Hawaiian tie-dye shirt, and I cursed as I went past him and then Amanda came up with a Cosmo magazine.

She saw what I was holding and stopped dead.

I’m not buying these, I told her. Get the defense rolling.

You’re just holding them?

Someone dropped them. I was going to restock them.

That’s weird, but okay. Are you buying anything?

No.

Then let’s go. Amos is checking out.

I put the pads and tampons on a shelf with discounted boxes of Captain Crunch and followed her out of the store.

Amos pushed the cart across the lot, and Amanda pointed out that there weren’t any places to deposit used carts. We unloaded Amos’ groceries and put our bags in the back of the Celica, and I slid the cart up into the grass. We left the store and headed back towards our rented condo. Amanda was in the front seat on her phone and Amos was peeling a scab in the back and my window was down and replaying everything with that girl over and over in my head like a song I can’t get enough of, the song we’ll dare to believe will never get old but which invariably gets old in about a week. Amanda ended the call and rolled down her window and the wind blew her strawberry-blond hair around her head in a whirlwind. She asked if we could do AC and I said yes. We rolled up the windows and Amos curled up in the backseat—It doesn’t matter if it’s a ten minute drive or a ten hour drive, he once told me, "I will sleep in the car."—and Amanda asked me what was up with me and that girl back at the store.

Which girl? I asked.

I know there wasn’t more than one.

You mean the one with the blue shirt? The petite chick?

Is that what they’re calling them now?

How’d you know I was talking to her?

I was behind you at the end of the aisle.

How long?

I was there when she was helping you find tampons. You’re a hot mess, you know that? But, God, I love it. She bent down and readjusted her sandals. These straps keep coming undone.

Maybe use some wood glue, I said.

Or I could just buy more sandals. They’re like ten bucks at Target.

Plus wood glue might not work on rubber, I don’t know.

She leaned her head against the window. The driveways off-shooting to plantations and resorts along the road were bathed in the white-hot light of passing cars and seagulls waded at the trunks of the furry palms and the sun threatened to set at any moment. So that girl, she said; Were you flirting with her or something?

If you could call that flirting.

Everyone flirts in different ways.

How weird is it that I asked her for help finding tampons?

Pretty weird. But she seemed somewhat interested, strangely enough.

Thanks.

No, what I mean is that even though you did something that could be construed as creepy and borderline psychotic, you pulled it off. You were charming, in that weird but innocent kinda way. You have innocent eyes, you know that? And a nice smile. You don’t give yourself enough credit, you really don’t. And then you gripe about having no luck with girls, and she was totally going to give you her number, but you kept stalling, and then you flipped your shit and got the hell outta dodge. Why’d you do that?

I can’t do anything to jeopardize things with Jaclyn.

Her voice steeled over. Seriously, Anth? Her again?

She didn’t like to talk about Jaclyn.

I just want to be wise, I told her.

Wisdom would tell you to give up on that girl. She’s not into you.

"But she is into me."

Okay, but not the way you want her to be. And you can either sit here on vacation wondering why you aren’t good enough like you always do, wondering why life’s hard, or you can say, ‘To hell with it’ and embrace something different. She sat up in her seat, body rigid as if riddled with electric current. Her eyes, they were afire, piercing and soulful, and they bore into me. We should go back. Let’s go back. You find that girl, get her number, and you do it in the most un-awkward way possible.

You want me to get a girl’s number without being awkward?

"Without being too awkward. We just need to limit your awkwardness. Put a cap on it. I mean, she said with stifled laughter, we don’t want to scare her away."

"But what about—’’

If you say her name, I’ll slap you. I swear I will.

The resort was up ahead on the right. I cursed under my breath and did one of those five-minute-long turnarounds, weaving down different one-way streets and trying to stitch a route back to the main road. Amanda was shaking her head the whole time, had given up trying to play navigator. I never listened, always had to do things my way, the ‘classic’ way. I managed to get onto the main road and went back towards the store. Her frustration wore off and she practically leaped up and down in her seat. This would be the most action she’d get all week, so I didn’t blame her.

What about Amos? I said.

What about him? She craned her neck to look at him. Aw, he’s so cute.

Is he sleeping?

He’s like a little baby in the womb.

Is he asleep?

Yes, Anth. Geez. He’s asleep.

Okay.

Are you nervous?

Sure am.

Don’t be. Just find her, have some fun, tell me how it goes.

Okay.

I pulled into the lot, parked, got out of the car. Before I shut my door Amanda crawled into my seat, looked up at me. I’m not coming. You need to do this alone. And if it goes wrong, don’t get all emotional about it and think everything’s hopeless. I’m turned down all the time. Lots of guys don’t like red hair. We gingers have a bad rap. It really only looks cool when you’re super pale, like you are, but I’m not.

You think my paleness makes me look cool?

No, with your blond hair you just end up looking albino.

Except my eyes aren’t pink.

Now hurry before she leaves. And if you lie to me about it, she added as a warning, I’ll know. She relaxed in her seat. Just try, okay? Really try this time.

I went back into the store and walked down the front of the aisles hoping to spy her. My heart hammered in a nauseating concoction of bridled excitement and unbridled terror. The very concept of talking to a girl for the purpose of a hook-up drew forth scenes from my past, all awkward and heartbreaking.

How many good things had I ruined by being a total freak?

Or at least by coming off that way?

My mind was clouded yet clear, and that fast-paced tunnel vision set in, the world blurring all around me, my focus pinpointed solely on finding that homely girl in the blue shirt with faded white lettering. And then there she was by the packaged meats, fondling a sausage. With the blinding resilience of an American soldier ‘bout to hit the Normandy beaches, I forced myself to go to her, and she heard me coming and then I leaned against the edge of the meat case beside her and the meat case shifted and I plunged into the bay filled with ground meat. I shimmied out and brushed my green-yellow plaid shirt as if I’d soiled it with dust.

Do you need help with the meats, too? she said.

I didn’t know how to respond; really, I had no need for meats.

And then I remembered a movie where a super-awkward fellow hit the gold mine by not answering questions but turning them around. "Do you need help with the meats?" I countered.

"Do I need help?"

I pointed at the sausage in her hand. In the off-chance you’re not dead-set on that one there, I’m more than willing to help you find the perfect one. Since you were kind enough to help me out, after all. ‘Pay it Forward.’ It’s just the kind of guy I am.

She looked at my empty hands. You’re not buying them?

Huh? Oh. No, they’re in my car, I lied.

So you went outside and came back in? She looked off to the side, her lips trembling as she assessed the situation. She returned her attention to me, said, So you came in to find me and fix what you fucked up back there?

Something like that. But I did forget something. Don’t think it’s just you.

She crossed her arms, the sausage flicking with the beat of the dim grocery store music. What’d you forget?

Chick peas, I told her.

Chick peas.

Garbanzo beans. To put in a salad. Do you like salad?

Sure.

Maybe you could come over tomorrow and enjoy some salad? With chick peas in it.

She relaxed a little bit, unfolding her arms, nodded her head. Okay.

"I’m telling you, it’d be a good time. I make great salad."

I just told you I’d come. What’s your address?

What? Oh. Okay, yeah. I didn’t know the address off the top of my head. Just another condominium in a slew of condominiums. How about I just give you my phone number? And you can call me. Or should I get yours? Which is the right one?

I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Just give me your number. She started digging her phone from her purse and handed it to me. Dainty fingers with a bit of chub around the joints. I liked that. This girl, she was a lot like me. We were about the same height, around 5’4". I was underweight but I looked like a hippo when I took my shirt off. Whilst not an exact resemblance, its appearance in a certain light would take you straight back to the Congo. Her fingers were cute, and she was holding her phone, telling me to take it. But I couldn’t stop looking at those fingers, thinking that if I were on the Titanic, I’d sure as hell want to draw them. And then draw her naked, too. She was beautiful in that homely sense, and What’s your number? she demanded, her frustration surging me back to reality.

I gave her my number and apologized. I took NyQuil like half an hour ago, I lied. I have insomnia during the summer. I think I took too much.

She just held her phone, looked at me weird.

I told her not to worry about it. NyQuil’s non-addictive, a swell sleep aide.

She said she didn’t care.

I told her to have a good night, and bid her good luck with the sausage. My face went red like I’d just been cattle-branded, so I turned and walked away without looking back, and the aisle was too long and too empty and I never wanted to be lost in a crowd more than I did at that moment.

When I got back to the car, Amanda was waiting along the curb and Amos was right where we left him, hadn’t even shifted his position. I spied what could’ve been drool in his beard, but it could’ve been no more than a smudge on the window he’d conked out against.

He hasn’t moved? I said.

Not at all.

And those cushions are like bricks.

So? she teased, getting to her feet. How’d it go?

Be proud: I kept the awkwardness toned down. Except for one comment at the end. She was dying to hear it, scrunching her hands up by her chin like the paws of a squirrel. I told her to have good luck with her sausage. Because she was buying sausage.

I’d certainly hope so, she said with a quirky smile and rolling eyes.

"And she has my number, said she may call me."

Do you think she will?

I think she may have fondled her sausage a bit.

In a sexual way?

How do you fondle something without it being sexual?

We got back in the car and headed towards the resort.

Damn it, I said.

What? she said.

I meant to get some chick peas.

Chick peas?

Garbanzo beans. To put in a salad. I can get them tomorrow.

Chapter 2

A one-week stay at the Palmetto Dunes Oceanfront Resort on Hilton Head Island. A vacation we’d spent months waiting and working for. Originally there’d been five of us tallied up to go, but circumstances and finances kept two leashed back home. All this to say that Amos, my sister and I had a three-bedroom condominium to ourselves. The resort’s entrance road snaked through thickets of oak trees dripping Spanish moss, and after a bridge into the condominiums palmettos decorated the front of each building, giving the condos that southern tropical feel. We parked and Amos trudged up the steps and keyed open the door and put away his groceries and without a word went into his room and locked himself in. Amanda and I went our separate ways, she to her room and me to the balcony.

I smoked a cigarette and stared below at the mulch-covered and fern-peppered slope leading down to the murky inlet, the water black under the condo’s backlights. Our welcome package had told us not to swim there, because alligators would pop up. I smoked and heard something hissing in the ferns and leaned over the railing to see if I could spy an alligator and then Amanda came out onto the porch with one of her bottled fruit smoothies and said, You think that girl’s pretty?

Sure she is.

You have a different type of taste than most guys.

I like them chunky.

You like them homely. It just happens that most homely girls are homely because they’re fat.

Your tastes are weirder than mine. Jungle Fever to the max.

She sighs. I do like me some ‘black attack.’

I don’t think that’s actually a phrase.

It’s true, though: she really does like black guys. Or at least foreign guys.

The details about Amanda, a.k.a. Ams: she’s my closest friend, my prized confidant, the wind in my sails pushing me along when I’ve got no energy nor desire to do so. I’ve been in this world for a ripe 26 years and she’s been there for 24 of them. She was there for my disillusioned life checkered with grandiose hopes and equally grandiose disappointments. Sometimes she rested in the peripheral and sometimes she was front-&-center, but she was always there nonetheless. She knows everything there’s to know about me, and she loves me despite it all. All through high school we were the best of friends, and like a parasite she snatched up my closest friends as her own. As it was in my pre-college days, so in my post-college days: almost everyone she was close to was someone she met through me. Parasite, free-loader, call it what you want, but I’ve got my own theories on the subject: either I’ve got talent at picking great friends, or there are only a few types of people who can embrace the weirdness that is what I am, and Ams is just as weird (though her beauty, charm, and feigned innocence keeps that weirdness hidden beneath the surface). My friends, those people I loved, they accepted me for what I was; and Ams, in the same boat as me, connected with these people, too. Brother-&-Sister, we’re fucked up but we don’t give two shits ‘cause we’re brother and sister, and that’s not a bond easily torn asunder.

Enough about us, more about her. She’s 5’5", built slender like a sapling. A strong breeze will make her stumble down the sidewalk. She’s got a long neck that takes you straight back to the Jurassic. Sorry, but I’m locked in this paradigm of perceiving everyone as dinosaurs; she’s a cross between a Diplodocus and a Parasaurolophus, and if you know me, that’s a compliment. Dove-like eyes and strawberry-blond hair curling around her neck like a wedding veil. She’s beautiful, more-so than most, and more than half my friends have had nauseating crushes on the girl. None of them were good enough.

Most beautiful girls, they’re pretentious little bitches.

But Ams, she’s goofy and down-to-earth, and she makes good decisions and treats everyone like human beings.

Most