Red

Chapter Five: Peanut Butter, Jelly, And A Baseball Bat

AN: Music for this chappy: "You're So Last Summer" by Taking Back Sunday. They're so good! Believe me, I was the last person around here to jump on the TBS bandwagon, but seriously! You must listen to it!

XxX

Something about Dr. White was just begging me to smash his face in with the Florida Dolphins paperweight that he kept on his desk.

Maybe it was because he supported the Dolphins…

Let me go back a bit and explain about Dr. White. He was a tall black man with glasses and moccasins. He liked to focus on my relationship with Chris, as he was apparently the reason behind my suicide.

Dr. White was crazy. I mean, yeah, I said some stuff about Chris to Helena, but I didn't say, oh, I fell in love with a guy over the course of a week and when he left I was so distraught I tried to kill myself.

Yeah, whatever.

Anyway, as a direct result of my suicide attempt, I was forced to sit in Dr. White's cramped, un-air-conditioned office for an hour every other day. Sometimes he talked and sometimes we sat in silence. I guess I shouldn't have been so mad at him for assuming my suicide was about Chris. I mean, it's not like I gave him anything else to work with. But really.

Anyway, like I said, Dr. White was he kind of person that made you want to scratch your own eyeballs out of their sockets. He didn't seem bothered that I didn't speak to him. The first few sessions he even tried to interpret my silence. That means that he asked me 'what does your silence mean' over and over until I wanted to scream at him that don't you know that means I'm not speaking, dammit?

You would think he would know. He certainly went to school long enough. If people knew what their problems were they wouldn't be going to him! Sheesh.

After the first week or so he stopped asking me what my silence meant, and after a month he stopped speaking at all. I think he was waiting for me to decide on my own to talk. In reality all I did was nap. Seriously, he had a comfy couch.

"You dream a lot, don't you?" Dr. White asked me one day when I woke up at the end of a session. I shrugged. I did, actually. I dreamed of random things, sometimes (once I dreamed that I was preparing our house for a roach extermination), but other times I dreamed about my suicide and Chris. They didn't always go hand-in-hand. Sometimes I would dream that I had succeeded, and I was looking down at my casket at the funeral. Other times I would dream that Chris came back.

That dream was the hardest for me to stomach, for some reason. When I woke up and realized that he wasn't there it was like losing him all over again.

I didn't tell Dr. White about my dreams.

It was none of his business.

XxX

"I don't want to go back to Ezekiel," I told Mum. She looked up at me and sighed.

"Justin, love, I know last year was hard on you, but—" she began but I cut her off.

"Hard? It wasn't hard on me! It almost killed me!"

"But it wasn't the school's fault."

"Mum!"

"Justin!"

"Please don't make me go back there. I just want to start over. I just want to forget everything," I said pitifully. Mum sighed.

"Always trying to forget everything isn't a real way of dealing with life. You have to take experiences that might have not been so great otherwise, and learn from them. You can't throw out whole parts of your life because they were painful," Mum said, calmly. She was speaking from experience, I know, but that didn't make her answer any easier to stomach. "Besides," she continued, dropping her eyes to the newspaper she had been reading when I came into the kitchen, "if you don't go to Ezekiel, I have to enroll you in private school and I've already bought this year's uniform for Ezekiel, so I would have to come up with the money for a new one, and then there's tuition. I'm sorry, but I don't think we can do it right now."

"But Mum," I protested, "how can you expect me to get better if you throw me back into the environment that I was in before?"

"It's like the question about the criminal, isn't it?" she said absent-mindedly.

"What?"

"If a prisoner who served their full sentence and had seen the error of their ways was released into the area in which they had previously committed their crimes, would they return to the life of crime or would they lead a new life as an upstanding citizen?" She looked me right in the eye. "You'll be fine, Justin."

"What about South Raleigh?" I asked.

"What?"

"South Raleigh. It's a school in Raleigh. It's technically a private school but there's no tuition. They get their funding from somewhere else. All I would need is the uniform."

"Justin—"

"Please?"

"Justin, love, I don't know… I'll think about it, okay? But southern Raleigh is about forty-five minutes away. It would be hard to get you there every day. We'll just have to see."

XxX

AN: Sometimes my writing makes me want to hit myself with a baseball bat. I don't know how you guys put up with it…

So anyway, this is the last torturous chappy of Red. I'm gonna start Blue as soon as I can. It will be longer, probably, because of the whole thing with Jerry. So um… even if you didn't review for the other chappys, please review this one, okay? And if you've made it this far into the story without walking away from your compy in disgust, thank you so much!

Dennis-dude: WHY CAN I NOT REMEMBER YOUR SCREEN NAME? Sigh. Anyway... Thank you so much! I lurve your reviews! They make me happy. So yeah. And... you were the only one. God, when did I turn into such a greedy review whore? Seriously, though, you reviewed every chappy and it made me feel all fuzzy inside. And I'm so glad that you can live bicariously (that is definately spelled wrong) through my stories. Cause you're missing the gene that makes you love. Although if it would make you go all Justin-like... I'm rather glad you don't.

♥'s and X-Rated Thoughts—Luci-chan