Work Text:
It had been a week since Johnny left. She’d spent every one of the seven days in a hurricane of emotions, being tossed around from bitter grief to grasping for normalcy to blinding rage. She had barely left her apartment but every time she opened and shut her door, splinters would fall from the knife mark Johnny had left in the wood. The letter lay crumpled on the floor in the corner of the hallway where she’d dropped it the day he left.
She had done everything. Everything. She’d held him when he sobbed and held his hair back when he vomited. She stuck with him when he was at his worst because she’d seen the way he was before he was an addict and she knew his potential. He was funny and creative and cute; she loved his dorky jokes and awkward loudness and the way their relationship felt carefree and casual. She knew the desperate user stealing for drug money and rambling about his dealer like he was God wasn’t Johnny. That was why she stayed. He could change; she told him it was never too late for him to quit, go to rehab, confront the trauma that festered in the black tar pit of his stomach. She had faith in him.
She shouldn’t have. They had spent every day together for months. He kissed her with boyish charm and they danced like it was their last night on Earth. They graffitied old brick buildings and grabbed each other’s hands as they ran wildly through the rain down the slick city streets away from police officers. They talked about anything and everything into the early hours of the morning. He was never pushy and always met her halfway. She had never met a boy so enthralled by the qualities for which men tended to dislike her. She knew Johnny liked her assertiveness and strength and she liked him for the softness he often tried to repress. It wasn’t enough. Johnny had something inside him buried so deep that at first she didn’t realize how badly it controlled him. Mom never called, her patience had run out after Johnny’s father committed suicide when he was a child. Brad was the stepfather, a nasty man whom she was certain did worse things to Johnny than he was willing to describe. Will was the friend who stayed behind; soon he stopped calling too. Tunny had left Johnny alone in the city after being deployed to the Middle East. The dope shut that all up, Johnny would say. It made him feel like life was okay. He could stop whenever he wanted. It was okay.
It wasn’t. Drugs brought out a side of Johnny she didn’t even consider could exist. It was controlling and jealous whenever Johnny made time for anything that wasn’t using. She knew now that he tried to use in secret; he would sneak off to bathrooms or basements to snort, huff, or shoot in attempts to quell the addict. The more he did so, the more he fed the monster. He’d have to use just to leave the apartment to score more. She’d catch him banging his head against the wall. She’d find him in a trance, only able to babble incoherently without looking her in the eye. He’d woken her up, threatening the shadows in the room before flashing a knife at her and then turning it on himself. He became utterly unreachable. In his final moments of lucidity, she saw deep shame and fear plainly on his face. She begged him to get help. Even then, she thought of the undeniably likeable boy who had scaled the fire escape and kissed her at her window. She didn’t think it was too late.
For the past few days, she’d been trying to rework some semblance of normalcy into her life. She made herself smoothies for breakfast and she washed her hair. She tried to do her makeup before she saw the black kohl eyeliner pencil Johnny would always use before they went out and she slammed her makeup drawer shut and smoked a cigarette instead. Sometimes she stood in the shower and screamed until she was bent over at the hips and her face burned. When she closed her eyes, she’d see flashes of his dead green pinprick pupil eyes and his pale, sweaty face bloody from scratching. The knife he’d threatened her with and had used to stick the letter into her door was sitting in her kitchen drawer. She thought of him and her stomach twisted with anxiety and desperation and anger. Her faith in him was spun by a false prophet; he had no hope by the end of it all. It was the seventh day. She sat in the bean bag chair on her floor, chewing on a stale piece of baguette and praying for her mind to stop churning. Her phone buzzed.
Her friends, bless their hearts, had been trying in vain to pull her out of the disillusionment she’d fallen into. No matter what words she used, they would never be able to understand the depths of the wretchedness Johnny had dragged her through and the stormy aftermath of it all. She exhaled cigarette smoke as she read the text message. hey grl, it read, party @ red hook tonite. cmon. u need 2 hav sum fun. She rolled her eyes and took another bite of bread. It was typical of Alysha to try to coax her out, especially when she had spent the past week inside her apartment and the weeks before that only with Johnny, pleading with him to get help. She couldn’t imagine what good a party would do for her. They might as well be cursed now, dredging up the memories of popping ecstasy and dancing furiously with Johnny. She thought of the moon from her window as it cast a white-pink light on them as she sat on her bedroom floor and Johnny held his lighter underneath the spoon. Flipping herself onto her stomach, she tried to breathe steadily and think rationally. Maybe a night out would help. It would have nothing to do with Johnny; it’d just be her and her girls, the way things were before she ever met him. She could do her makeup and her hair and wear clothes other than the stained old sweatsuit she’d been living in since he left. k, she texted back, ill b there.
She forced herself off of her bean bag chair and stared herself down in her bathroom mirror. Her eyes were dark and bloodshot and she had black circles sprawling from underneath her eyes. The creases on either side of her mouth were deep from scowling and screaming and she busied herself with pulling open her makeup drawer and looking at what she could do to make herself feel human again. “I don’t need you,” she said, picking up the kohl pencil and tossing it into the garbage can. She dabbed concealer under her eyes, filled in her eyebrows, smeared bright pink pigment on her eyelids, and swiped black mascara on her eyelashes. “God,” she murmured. She felt that she looked a little bit like a crazy woman trying to pull herself together through the repetition of a routine, which is exactly what she was, but she figured it didn’t matter anyway. She had no one to look attractive for anyway–she embraced looking as raw as she felt on the inside. She pinned her hair into two buns on top of her head and finished her look with shimmery lip gloss. As satisfied with her appearance as she thought she could get, she threw open her closet door to search for an outfit.
It was working better than she thought it would. She was momentarily distracted and grounded by the thought of leaving her apartment and escaping the cycle of drowning in her thoughts that she was trapped in by the constant reminders of Johnny. She was especially looking forward to seeing her friends again and feeling comforted and uplifted by how they banded together to divert her away from the pain and guide her back towards the path she had been on before Johnny had interrupted it in his terrible, intense way. She pictured herself at the party with her leopard print miniskirt and her pink boots and she breathed a sigh of relief. She and her friends could build her confidence back up again; she could be herself again. The past week had been so full of uncontrollable emotions she was almost afraid she lost herself.
She met her friends on the street outside the party. The streets were damp and the street lamps glowed a nostalgic orange above the women as they embraced one another. They hugged her and pulled her in by her leather jacket, tenderly gripping her waist and telling her how glad they were to see her. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” she said.
“We’re just glad we can be here for you,” Alysha said.
Leslie took her by the hand and pulled her towards the building. She felt adrenaline heating her face and stomach as she entered the building flanked by her girls. The familiar sound of thumping music and loud drunken conversation washed over her and she let her friends guide her towards a corner of the room opposite the stairs. She watched the crowd of partygoers curiously as Alysha brought her a beer; she found herself feeling alone despite standing in a throng of her friends. Still, she nodded her head to the beat of the music and sipped at her beer in an attempt to steady her nerves. She was determined to try to enjoy herself, or at least not hate the experience, as weird as it felt for her to do without Johnny and with her girls after so long. It wasn’t bad. She almost felt as though her body was at the party and her mind was somewhere else until she heard a yowl from the staircase and she looked over to see him.
It was a large city. There must have been thousands of places at which he could’ve been partying. She didn’t even know if he went to parties anymore. She certainly never expected to see him at the first party her friends convinced her to attend but there was Johnny. His hair was greasy and falling over his shoulders as he stumbled down the staircase with a scrappy grin on his face. He gripped the banister with one hand and held a glass pipe in the other. His eyes were droopy and half-closed and smudged with black makeup that hadn’t been washed off in days. She stayed frozen until he reached the bottom of the staircase and then she shoved her beer into Leslie’s hands and screamed at the top of her lungs.
She thought he was different. At first, he had been goofy and open with a softness she never saw in other men. He was a punk who happily indulged her in mischief and vandalism and laughed along with her as they felt the high of pissing off cops and running to safety. He’d talk about his childhood with an anger that quickly gave way to gentle vulnerability. She never once had to dull herself down to fit his perception of her. She had been wrong. He was just like every other man she’d been with. He leeched off of the effort she put into their relationship and refused to put any energy into listening to her and improving himself. She demanded nothing and only pleaded with him as she knew that the road only had two forks, sobriety or death. He sucked her dry of her effort, energy, and emotions and then abandoned her in the most violent, insulting way a man had ever treated her before. It had been too late, both for Johnny and for her. It was over. She couldn’t look back and see him for the person he had deceived her into thinking he was in the early Spring. She could only see him as he was now: callous, manipulative, and irreparably delusional.
Johnny had left her for his drug dealer. I never liked you anyway, he had written, St. Jimmy rules. That was his dealer. He was a miraculous, godly thing whom Johnny waxed poetic about but she never met. St. Jimmy was Johnny’s best friend and roommate. Johnny would ramble about how St. Jimmy had saved him from dying the night Tunny was consumed by the war machine and how he’d introduced Johnny to her. St. Jimmy was a miracle-worker who seduced Johnny further into the drugs he sold over the course of their relationship. According to Johnny, St. Jimmy was a well-loved drug dealer whom everybody knew and everybody wanted. According to Johnny, he was so lucky to be so close to St. Jimmy. She had been born and raised in the city and she had never heard of St. Jimmy before Johnny told her about him. St. Jimmy knew that Johnny was the Jesus of suburbia, the martyr of some backwater West Coast town. St. Jimmy was sharp and charismatic and he told Johnny how to get the girl. St. Jimmy was vile and possessive and he told Johnny how to leave the girl. St. Jimmy was the trauma that poisoned Johnny’s mind and the addiction that told him drugs were the only way out.
Johnny had flinched as she screamed, stumbling backwards and catching himself only by slamming his back against the wall. They made eye contact and she felt her body ignite. She felt nothing but burning rage so fierce she saw nothing but his eyes, now as wide as they could be in shock. She was in front of him in an instant, grabbing him by the collar and pulling so that she could feel him squirm uncomfortably against her grip. Her nose almost touched his as she yelled. “You’re not the Jesus of suburbia! St. Jimmy is a figment of your father’s rage and your mother’s love–made me the idiot America!”
At her last words, she yanked him to the side and threw him to the ground. He twitched as though he was going to attempt to curl up into a ball but she stood over him with her feet planted firmly on either side of his body. Her friends surrounded the two of them, holding each other back from pulling her off of Johnny. She needed this. The uncontrollable flood of memories and the ferocious heat of injustice that washed over her blinded her to anything but her and his sickly body stuck beneath her. Johnny had wormed his way into her life with charm and dismantled it without a second thought, leaving her behind as nothing but scorched earth. She didn’t know who or what St. Jimmy truly was but he was always Johnny’s leverage, serving Johnny’s interests through supernatural control. She thought of the emotional abandonment and the abuse from Johnny’s childhood he had tried to coolly describe. There was never a real, physical St. Jimmy; he was never a man, nor a saint, but something that existed to validate Johnny’s delusions and encourage his destruction. Johnny had played her as he had played himself. She had done everything to keep him alive and he betrayed her faith. Leaving him behind was her opportunity to take back her own life. He was no longer her burden.
“I can’t take this place! I’m leaving it behind!” She stomped a foot down and leaned over Johnny, grabbing another fistful of his shirt and yelling so loud that the party she had completely forgotten about in her rage stopped around them. “Wake up!”
Johnny flinched again, his face twisting into genuine horror. It was more emotion than she had thought he was still capable of expressing. She stood up straight again and her eyes welled with tears. For a split second, the gravity of the pain she’d endured hit her. She never imagined that any facet of her life could’ve spiralled as fast and as intensely as her relationship with Johnny did. She didn’t want Johnny to be so fundamentally hurt, as harmful as he was. She breathed through a moment of grief and stinging regret for the fact that their relationship had to end the way it did. It was not a want but it was a need. It would be fatal to stay absorbed in the miserable disillusionment that had plagued her since Johnny left. It was Johnny’s life he had ruined; it was not her responsibility to fix. She was done with pouring her energy into him whether he be physically with her or just existing in her mind’s eye as the focal point of those terrible few months of her life. Their eyes met as she stared down at him. “I can’t take this place. I’m leaving you tonight!”
She left him curled up tightly in the fetal position on the floor. She didn’t look back.