Chapter Text
Do as the cricket does. Skip town.
Naively he figured it would be harder to move to an entirely new city, but with nearly nothing in this world, he just gets the bus. A greyhound. Some of the new age Philly hippies would be gagging to get an ounce of this freedom, but it's freedom dependent on being nothing to no one anywhere, which is, of course, another kind of prison. He took some money off a sleeping guy to pay for his ride. It’s happened to him before and it'll happen again. Give and take. Eye for an eye. That’s something he learned in seminary school, you know, back when he was a man of god. Now he barely feels like a man.
His seat neighbour on the coach moves away and a few rows forward when they make a stop in Norristown. That makes sense, he stinks like shit and he might have been talking to himself, but he couldn’t really hear. Washing up at water fountains is never easy work, since he tried to get clean in parks at the sprinklers, but he scared the kids and probably the adults too. There's nothing more frightful than ugliness. He doesn’t know where this coach is going because he was off his face when he bought the ticket, and vaguely remembers the lethargic desk lady having to force his change back into his hands. However much she gave him, it might be enough for a bump. When the shock cold of metal coin hits his hands, that’s always where his mind goes; the next hit, a stronger one.
And Greyhound. Such a strange name for a coach company. They always looked so wimpy to him, the dogs, that is. And when he tried his hand at the races, they creeped him out, quivering in the box, snapping free like ripped elastic, flying. Even while chasing the livewire track to its end, their faces were still with sadness in the frantic movement of it all. Sad-looking, even when they won. So fuck them.
Now, he’s inside one. By the power of the dog, he’s getting out of Philadelphia and realising he hadn’t left this town in maybe three years now. It would have been nicer if he was leaving on his own terms, clean and grounded, but anyone with half a brain could tell you that was a pipe dream. Either way, he’d like to think that the guy he owed big time would be hot on his heels, pursuing him. But he knows that his banisher is no mafia boss, he’s just another junkie like them all, and by the time he’s scored again, he’ll have long forgotten about the cricket that fleeced him.
As it turns out, he can’t sleep all that well inside a racing greyhound. He’s only wearing a t-shirt and it’s not some fancy heated vehicle. He needs to warm up, and soon.
Bored, he tries to shoot up at about 3am according to the coach clock, if it’s even right. Like clockwork, they drag him off of the bus. They took his fucking gear too. Salt in the wound, as they say.
He doesn’t even see the face of the guy he bites, and when he tastes the skin and blood, it's his first communion in years.
The first time Matthew Mara came to know God was when the evangelicals tried to pray strength back into his legs. They were a group of cool Christians, who hadn’t paid any attention to him in the halls before. But here they were, and Matt Mara was their own little anti-science-fair project.
They gathered round and put their hands on his body, nothing happened, and Matthew had a hard time believing that anyone in that room actually thought something would come of this. But their hands were warm, and then sat there, firmly, on his chest and shoulders and biceps and hips and calves. The hands stayed there, unflinching, and so hopeful, and alive.
Warm hands, and the candles they’d lit smelt really nice. He felt it then, a cosy, tender, care rising in his throat and staying there, not from the Christians who were here to get divine brownie points, but from a larger, wider, denseness that surrounded him.
He realised he hadn’t been touched by another human in months, excluding being shoved at between classes.
Maybe, foolishly, he mistook that for a god. Or better yet, that’s all God is.
The town where they kicked him looks normal enough in the dark. The coach station is pretty fancy in all honesty. But there are still some people loitering about who could probably sell him something to get by on. Realising he left his cash on the bus, cursing the god he used to praise, he just gets walking before he can think too much about how fucked he is. Back in Philly he knew groups he could sleep with at the parks in summer, or in that old mall development in winter. He had guys who would lend him shit if he begged or bartered. Here was just a quiet, quaint looking place, getting slightly more harrowed as he stumbles on and the sun starts to shed a little light on the situation.
Before long he sees a shabby looking group where he might fit right in. They're crowding round something, so of course his first thought is that someone’s come across a stash and he can score for cheap. To his horror, they’re just giving out soup and blankets. These people are junkies for sure, but they’re not tough like the Philly bunch, and he almost laughs at the sensation of pity he feels, a rare emotion in his life. Nevertheless, keeping his distance lasts about three seconds before he smells warmed bread.
The sun begins to rise like an afterthought. He blinks a little and focuses his eyes, then comes to regret it, because the place he’s at is a fucking church. The house of his father. He takes a soup in a polystyrene cup as it is pressed into his hand. It tastes of nothing, and it burns pretty bad.
Matthew was disabled as a kid. Although that wasn’t usually the term other kids used for him. Their vocabulary was more colourful. He had these huge clunky leg braces that started to make this humiliating squeak about 3 months into having them. To be honest, there were models that would have been able to fit under his cargos discreetly and allow him to walk a less ‘rickety’, but these were so expensive and his mom was already skipping meals for his surgery.
He never told his mom about the way the metal dug into the back of his thigh so painfully sometimes. He put on a brave face during physical therapy. He got to hang out with Dee, who was really pretty and could understand just what he was going through. When she wasn’t trying to be cool and it was just them, they could talk about music and bands, most of which Matthew hadn’t heard of, but he said he had, because she was just so pretty.
One day, he took his leg braces off, it took ages, like half a free period, and he stashed them in the quieter bathrooms on the third floor. Physical therapy had been going well so he figured he had this in the bag. Then, Dee could see him walking on his own for a change. Prom was coming up, and Matthew got the feeling that if he just asked her, she might just say yes. He fell before he even made it out of the bathroom.
Knees weak and smashed against the tiling, he lay awkwardly with his right arm trapped under his own torso. It took him a couple of minutes to drag himself to the last stall where the braces were, at that point coated in piss residue. So there he cried his eyes out. Because he was 16 and had never been invited to a party, or kissed a girl, or run a mile. These are the kind of metrics that mattered back then. God, they almost still matter now. Because Matthew could hear the seniors fucking around in the outdoor canteen, just below the third floor bathroom window. Yelling like hooligans, and possessing an air of eternal, of “try me”, of golden.
After skipping a whole day of classes that way, his teachers didn’t even care to give him detention. Through this show of sympathy, he realised that this world didn’t even see him as a person. Punishment, perhaps, would make him real.