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Jason Dean had seen the world. He’d hidden from it. Built walls around the innocence he had left and shoved it far away where it would be safe. He learned to cook his own dinner three months after his mother blew herself up in a demolition site owned by his father. He learned to pay rent a year after that. And within that month, they moved away from Texas forever.
Time went by fast for JD. So fast he forgot everything his childhood had left. He didn’t cry when his father ridiculed him for keeping his stuffed Triceratops toy in his bed. He threw it away the next morning. He didn’t cry when his father refused to feed him or forced him to collect money for rent, he powered through it and stole.
Crime had been a part of JD’s life since he was just 10 years old. He’d pickpocket strangers in the street, desperate for any money to pay rent. Hundreds of dollars each month. Hundreds of families confused where their money and wallets had gone. JD was just glad he didn’t get beatings anymore.
But even all that wasn’t enough. His father kept him around weaponry and explosives when he was young. So much so that when Bud raised a gun and aimed it at JD, he didn’t even flinch anymore. The old man depended so much on him, he knew he could never pull the trigger.
JD was too valuable to him. Stolen tv dinners, stolen rent money, even a few eggs stolen here and there. Crime and violence was written on his grave before he was even a teenager.
JD had never gotten caught before. No one ever saw him. Or maybe they took pity on the worn holes in his shirt, or his running shoes that didn’t have laces anymore. Maybe it was the look in his dull, green eyes. There wasn’t a shine, just sadness. Unhappiness.
Jason Dean never cared though. Kids would make fun of him, push him around, toss him aside and treat him like middle school lunch. He didn’t care until his father started beating him again at age 14.
He started fighting back. Using his college level reading books to smack the other kids in the face. Watch them run, then he’d steal their lunch money. He’d used his tray to beat a kid over the head with who insulted his favorite shirt. It was his only shirt.
When he saw other kids smile, he could only feel resentment toward them. How could they be so happy? What kind of life were they living that he could never have?
Why couldn’t he be happy like that?
When he was 15 years old, he stopped blocking away his childhood memories. The childhood that got ripped away from him. He let down his walls and peered inside.
He forgot how fascinated he had been with dinosaurs. Extinct animals that people found the bones of underground. His mother used to buy him dinosaur books, and on Christmas and his birthday, she would get him dinosaur toys, and a few vhs tapes of movies. We’re Back! and The Land Before Time were his favorite movies. Somewhere in one of his old moving boxes, those vhs tapes were still there, covered in years of dust. Maybe even a decade by now.
Those were some of the only remains of his childhood he had let himself hang onto. Over recent years, he’d picked up college-level reading books. He wasn’t good in school, but the knowledge he gained from the books he read made him feel smarter than any kid in any grade above him. Sometimes he felt smarter than his dad.
But by the time he was 16, he was suicidal. Even now that JD knew how to defend himself, his father still beat him. Any friends he ever made he never saw again. They were constantly moving, constantly switching schools. So JD was constantly depressed.
He’d stolen Bud’s pocket knife one night and cut himself open. It didn’t make him feel anything besides a sting of pain, but somehow he found clarity in the fact he had blood and he was a living creature, unlike the dinosaurs. Like he was superior to them. Like god favored him over his other creations.
Some nights he felt like god.
It was almost September now, 1989, and 4 months from his 18th birthday. Four months until he was free from daily torment. Their next stop was a town in Ohio. Ohio, the state who worshipped shit the most. Full of nothing but christ-lovers.
Perfect for a 17-year-old who thought he could be god.