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Time is the bane of Gary's existence. It's always changing. The flow is never a consistent, constant thing.
Sometimes it moves like molasses, slow and thick and hard to swallow. Boredom weighs heavy on his tongue, stones rolled to the back of his throat and checked for by prodding, gloved fingers and flickering flashlights. His mind, so unbearably empty, thick with smog and too high of a dosage for his fog-soaked brain, the long passing hours consumed by side-effeced induced vomit and day sleeping. Is the fatigue from the seroquel, or is it from the nightmares caused by seroquel? He doesn't have an answer to that.
The psychatrist tells him some pros outweigh the cons of a medication. Gary sees but one positive to his treatment; it's a step up from a lobtomy, for sure.
On the other hand, time can be something that rushes fast and harsh as a waterfall in a rainstorm. His mind so full, so erratic, that he's practically functioning on instinct. There's no true way to translate the constant stream of urges and paranoia and the utter high of knowing just how above everyone he is.
How could he not be? The moronic zombies of Bullworth Acadamy couldn't even begin to understand what it's like to have a mind as active as his own. They roam the halls empty-headed, lacking motivation or desire for the kind of power Gary is capable of. So blind to manipulation that just the hint of flattery or insult can send them spinning. To them, those slow and feeble minded monkeys, Gary is God. He pulls the strings and they move accordingly.
But of course, having a mind that boarders on Holy does not bode well for the barely functioning public. Those in higher positions than him- as idiotic as they are and undeserving as they should be- do not want someone like Gary snatching their power right from under their noses. This game of theirs, that they will surely lose once the long game has come to an end and Gary's won his escape, it is one that depends on smothering any light that burns among the dim and dull of the community. Oh, Gary understands. He, too, would keep those smaller than himself in their places.
Those adult bastards just haven't learned that they belong under his thumb, not the other way around.
So they medicate him. Fill him up with seroquel at exactly eight in the morning and trazadone at exactly eight at night. When he's too onry, they up the dosage; forget that he's gained ten pounds despite having turned his nose to every meal. He spends his days trying to grasp onto literally any passing thought, nodding along and playing the good boy so that he might see something beyond the god-forsaken concrete walls of Happy Volts Asylum.
There is one thing that keeps him from losing himself to the maze haze of steadily increasing dosages.
Jimmy Hopkins.
Oh, how he underestimated that boy. Really, he'd thought of Jimmy as just like the rest of the thick skulled bullies, pathetic brute scum with no use outside of his willingness for violence and the strange amount of naiveté for someone so seemingly jaded. It was easy at first, to mold him, a clay figure of a pawn convincing himself a friend. Jimmy was fresh meat, unaware of the whispers of sadistic, sociopath Gary Smith. Desperate for someone to understand his distaste for the way Bullworth was being run. And Gary, equally as eager to turn the school on it's head if only for entirely different reasons, slid up to his empty side with ease. It was so perfect.
Or, seemed to be. Jimmy has a lot more brain, or heart at least, than Gary had planned for. He'd known Jimmy had some weak delusion of using brute force to urge students away from picking on the small and helpless. Pathetic, Gary had considered it. It is human nature to beat sensitivities into strengths. Anyone who couldn't handle it was to be squashed or eaten. Kill or be killed. Natural selection.
But Jimmy, naieve, deluded Jimmy, was neither naieve nor deluded. No. Gary had completely misread the boy. It was all a mask, clearly. A ploy to convince as many as possible to his side, to out army Gary, who stood mostly on his own. Friendship is for the weak, but he hadn't considered that the enemy of my enemy approach could only go so far when his opponet had blinded and and convinced minions such as Russel and the Townies onto his side.
It was smart. Too smart for someone like Jimmy. Gary became distracted with his plans, enough to miss the subtleties in his friend's mask, to look over the gears turning behind that boarish face. At first, it made him angry. He'd never admit it, not even to himself, but he'd been infuriated with his reflection, dragging his nails along the warbly not-mirror provided in the psych ward bathrooms, until dragged away by his one-to-one nurse. How could he be bested by a worm such as Jimmy Hopikins? He's meant to be smarter, better, faster. No one is supposed to even dare to be anything besides dirt on the bottom of his shoe.
Yet, yet, yet. Jimmy did just that. He became gum, sticking tight and prevailing despite constantly being pounded back into the filth of the Earth. His pudgy fingers wedged their way into the divuts of Gary's soles, worming his way forward until he made a ladder of Gary's laces, climbing gangly limbs until he could slither his way up into the cavern of Gary's ear, making a home where he could whisper tauntingly whenever he pleased.
The quack-jobs think Gary is obsessed. They've accused him of having a fixation, banned him from ever making contact with thr parasite that is his former friend.
He isn't obsessed. Oh, no. He's just finally seeing clearly once more, understanding that perhaps, as irritating as it is, he's found someone standing of equal ground to himself. And perhaps, it isn't simply annoying.
Such a notion is undeinably thrilling.
Jimmy, sardonicly optomistic, hilariously lonely, deeply influintial, beautiful Jimmy Hopkins.
Gary knows they won't keep him locked away forever. His grandfather wouldn't allow for it; who's to take on the family fortune if his only grandson is high off of seroquel and cloth cuffed at the wrist? One day, he will walk free, breathe the smog-infested, sewage stinking air of Bullworth. He will destroy that pig-stye of a school, bring it's ring-leader to his knees, watch it crumble as weakly as the cards it's built out of.
And Jimmy Hopkins will be his.