#2

After the water pretty much scalded the dirt from his skin, Jackson found himself wandering around the house wearing cargo shorts and nothing more. He doubled back to his room and grabbed a shirt. Something from one of those stores he'd been dragged to, an oversized - even for him - green thing with no collar but full length of buttons down the middle.

 

As he slipped it over his shoulders he tried to remember the name of the store. Face something. Something face. Whatever. It didn't matter. Jackson headed back downstairs, leaving only the top three buttons open. He was still hot from the shower, his skin steaming slightly in the cool air.

 

"Hey." Jackson muttered as he walked into the kitchen. The promised food - in Jackson's case his very, very late breakfast - was being served up onto three plates. David was not a good cook, but his pancakes were to die for.

 

There was another boy sat at the table, long brown hair and a pale complexion. He was actually white, although darkly tanned, and relatively well-off looking, which was strange for David's assortment of friends. Poor kids tended to be the only people that David had any real affinity for, although Jackson had been gone a long time and maybe more than a few things had changed.

 

The boy was probably twenty something, although he looked a lot younger, he would definitely get carded on his way into any club.

 

"You good?" The boy asked, not actually paying much attention to Jackson.

 

"Yeah."

 

The kid looked up, his wire frame glasses caging his eyes and forcing them to be larger than life. He smiled, his face actually softening into a genuine human face instead of some kind of mask. "I'm Polter, by the way."

 

"Polter?" Jackson reasoned it had to be a nickname, or else his parents must have seriously hated him.

 

"Geist." David added, placing a plate in front of either boy. "Like the ghost."

 

The kid smiled and waved his fingers, which were cased in lace gloves. Definitely not David’s usual crowd. "Woo!"

 

"You live here?" Jackson asked, eyebrow raised. He picked up a fork and began slicing his pancakes with the side, cutting rounded triangles out of the food. The caramel that David had drenched the batter in oozed out of the cracks and filled the plate anyway. He'd have to eat quickly or else his pancake would become pan-gloop instead.

 

Polter grinned and shovelled two thirds of a pancake into his mouth before he responded. "Not technically but I ended up here last night and now I'm not sure I can leave."

 

"Huh?"

 

"He got high as s**t and can't drive home now." David translated, waving his fork around. "His roommate's kind of a d****e. Anti-anything fun. Welcome back to the Bible Belt, baby."

 

Jackson nodded, but didn't reply. Instead, he looked over the boy; definitely a rich kid. Probably came from a town or two over and never actually left. He wore black skinny jeans and an oversized Cure t-shirt, faint smudges of eyeliner rimmed his pale brown eyes and he had a bauble shoved through his lip. Not as metalhead as he'd thought at first glance. Cute though, if you were into that thing.

 

He wasn't in the habit of making friends with rich boys. They tended to believe that there was no way he could not be a drug dealer. He fought off a deep sigh. It upset him to even think about it, and instead he turned his attention back to the boy sat opposite him. "Polter is, uh, an interesting name."

 

The kid shook his head. "Not a real name, nickname. I'm Stan. You're gonna wanna remember Polter though. It's part of the stage presence."

 

A blank look at David had Stan explaining. "I'm part of a band. The Ghost. There's four of us, I'm the guitar player. Lead singer, Sam, his stage name is Ghoul. It's kind of cool when he does his thing. And Hunter, the drummer, who goes by Spectre," that drew an amused shake of his head from David, but another complete blank from Jackson, "Uh, then there's our bassist, Danny, who chose to piss us all off by going for Phantom."

 

"Like the show?" Jackson smiled.

 

"Yeah. F*****g a*****e." He paused, thought for a second. "You should come see us play. If you hang around tonight, we're doing a set down at Uncle's."

 

"Uncle's?"

 

 “Oh, Stan, I'm taking Jax to Uncle’s now,” David said through a mouthful, “the club I promised to show you.” The second half was directed at Jackson, who nodded. Stan cast a glance over Jackson.

 

“I need to be there for sound check anyway. Mind if I tag along?”

 

There was an awkward pause before Jackson realised Stan was talking to him. “Not at all.”

 

The pancakes were finished with light chatter. Jackson learnt that Stan’s band wrote their own material and Stan loathed writing lyrics. When David mentioned Jackson’s catastrophic experimentation with poetry when they were sixteen, both the boys that weren't Jackson had huge grins on their face. David’s was s**t eating glee at the sheer embarrassment on Jackson’s face, while Stan’s was a rather more subtle grimace of relation. Clearly, he had gone through the same thing.

 

By the time they left the house - without locking the door because David had left his keys somewhere and Stan didn't have a set - Jackson found himself warming to Stan.

 

The lace gloves were just for show, as was most of the aesthetic he lugged around with him. The all black outfit made his pale skin worse, and he complained about being unbearably hot under the last of the sun’s rays.

 

They walked through the streets, David happily smoking the cigarette he had managed to keep behind his ear, Stan entertaining himself with a humming noise that Jackson assumed was meant to be a rendition of a song that had been on the radio recently, and Jackson himself recalling what had happened on each street in his past.

 

The main street was full of so many memories, Jackson thought he would be overwhelmed. His first taste of alcohol happened just around the corner there; stolen from the store across the road, the rum was piss poor but Jackson's father didn't drink at all, so he had never had the chance to discover the delights of alcohol intoxication.

 

The first time he had ever kissed a girl had been there, on that corner, for a dare. And that store, the one with the boarded up windows and the "everything must go" sign plastered on the door, which had been the best clothes shop this side of... Well, the best clothes shop in the town. That wasn't saying much though.

 

David turned a corner, gently guiding the others behind him. Jackson felt sort of weird, following his friend around a town he once knew so well and was now realising he didn't know at all.

 

So much had changed in such a short time. Six years was both a moment and a lifetime, so it was natural for the town to have changed. Jackson realised he had been hoping that the inhabitants hadn't changed with it, although he knew that hope was futile.

 

The building they were about to enter was one of the rare few with a brick front, faded orange bricks turning to red-brown dust. Jackson realised that they were in the east of the town, out where the kudzu grew over graves and trees reclaimed field-lands.

 

The poor side of town, which was barely poorer than the rich side of town, but it had more of a rundown feel about it. More windows boarded up and more rusted out Junkers parked on the corners. Not that the other side didn't have those things too, just less. There was no sign of life outside of the building, but David pushed the door open and walked in, so the others followed him.

 

Inside, the building looked less abandoned. The rusting metal and the rotting wood in here was for decoration, not actual structural issues because the building was brick, so the metal and wood would have no place in it.

 

The floor was a dark polished and well-kept wood, the ceiling the same, but the walls were beautiful. The far wall was half covered by a raised stage, a flat wooden box big enough for four people to set up their kit on and that was about it, on which rested a sorry looking drum kit and a few ratty looking guitar amps.

 

The wall itself was painted to look like a pair of rouged lips with a forked tongue curling over them. Surrounding that mural were handprints of every colour imaginable. Painted hands pressed against the walls had left a mixture of beautiful colours. He stared for a little longer than was necessary.

 

David was leaning over the bar and ordering something, he'd called to Jackson but the boy was lost in the artwork.

 

The hands were so small, some of them looked like they belonged to children. Real actual children. The handprints trailed their way around the entire building, so many pressed against the walls that it seemed the entire town had been here to help decorate. The handprints started getting sparse closer to the door, the white walls visible behind the paint. He wondered why, but not enough to ask.

 

"Jack?"

 

He turned around and caught an eyeful the man behind the bar. At first he saw the shirt, a dark grey tee with "Uncle Albert" printed across it in a faded black. Then his eyes dragged themselves upwards, and he was looking into the face of a tall white boy who had grown out of his rounded face and ended up with pink cheeks and a button nose, as well as stubble that looked like it could be used as a cheese grater. "Simon!"

 

"Hey!" Simon beamed, showing off the missing incisor that Jackson had punched out years ago.

 

Simon handed David a bottle of something, then he slid one of the same over to Stan and placed one down for Jackson, who picked it up and looked at it. The text was hard to read in the half light of the bar. It didn't look too bad, so he took a sip. He was wrong, but kept drinking anyway. The others didn't seem to have an issue with it.

 

"It's been so long." Simon smiled at him.

"Mm, yeah." Jackson agreed, trying to swallow the mouthful of piss he had just taken. "Yeah, it's been ages."

 

Simon nodded at David, "Dave's been telling me about what you've been up to. He's had your number for ages, but never gave it to me. Unfair, right?"

 

Jackson nodded.

 

"So, anything you didn't expect?" Simon asked, his grin not yet faded. Jackson ached to punch him. He had a very punchable face. Last time they had both been a little bit drunk, and Simon had been very insensitive and something of an a*****e. Jackson liked that memory, although he didn't actually like violence. Much.

 

He nodded. "Some stuff I really didn't expect to change, but... The world moves on, right?" He took a drink of the beer in his hand. He was starting to get used to it. "Can't expect everything to stay the same. Not even here."

 

"Tell me about it," Simon shook his head, "but hey, I got this place so it's not all bad."

 

There was a sudden yell of Simon's name from the lips. Or rather, from behind the lips. He sighed and shuffled out from behind the bar. The yell came again, and then he yelled back and it stopped. Simon walked around the side of the wall and down a small corridor that Jackson had completely missed. It was built into the artwork, which was cool. Stan finished his drink and went to follow Simon, waving a hand at the duo left at the bar.

 

"Simon's gotten fat." Jackson said quietly. Why he chose to say that, he had no idea. But it was true. He had definitely put on a lot of weight, but the height that he'd gained had made it less obvious until Jackson thought back to their teenage years.

 

David shook his head and took another drink from behind the bar, he resurfaced with two more of the piss beers and slammed a five down on the bar. He cracked the top of one and drank half of it. Jackson was still wondering how he could do it, but then he remembered that David had always been able to drink and eat the most disgusting things.

 

"Boys!" Simon shouted from across the room, having magically reappeared from the hallway of hands. "If one of you man the door tonight, I'll give you the next lot for free."

 

Jackson looked down at his beer. It was almost empty, but his stomach was roiling. He wasn't going to be drinking another one of those for a while. "You got anything else?"

 

"Take your choice of the s**t up there." Simon pointed at the wall above the bar. Various bottles of spirits lined the shelves. There was one that caught his eye, a deep black rum.

 

"Yeah I'll do it, for a rum and coke with more rum than coke." Jackson said, swigging the rest of his beer down and slamming it on the bar. "And I'll buy the one after that."

 

Simon beamed at him. "Right."

 

David chuckled. "That's a double whammy."

 

"Huh?"

 

"He's never had a chance to make a rum and coke before. Most of the kids here are seasoned BoHo drinkers, so never get anything else. Or they're too young." David raised his beer in a mock salute. "I'm off to the kitchen."

 

Jackson frowned, "You're cooking?"

 

"God no," Simon laughed, padding back over to the pair, "as if I'd let him poison my customers."

 

"No, I let you keep that pleasure for yourself." David smirked.

 

Simon looked offended. "F**k you, I cook well."

 

"Like f**k you do." A voice Jackson hadn't heard before came from around the corner of the lips.

 

Stan appeared again, followed by a man taller than Jackson dressed in a loose black shirt with a ribcage painted across it. He had a pair of skinny jeans almost the exact same as Stan's, but a few punk patches covered the thighs. The overall look was quite cool, if you ignored all the loose threads in his jeans and moth holes in his shirt. This, he assumed, was one of the band members and the man that had spoken.

 

"Sam, don't start. You gave Dave food poisoning."

 

Sam flipped him off, smiling. He took the beer from David's hand and finished it in a single gulp. Jackson suddenly felt incredibly left out, but that was soon remedied by Sam's hand snaking around his waist. "You don't think I'm a bad cook, do you?"

 

Jackson raised an eyebrow. The only kid he knew called Sam had been in the year above them at high school, but he had been a white boy with blonde hair and the bluest blue eyes to ever blue. This guy was Mexican, at a guess. Wild curls and a sharp profile, a long straight nose and dark skin. His eyes were deep brown, almost black. He grinned and squeezed Jackson's stomach. "Come on."

 

"I've... Never..." Jackson started.

 

"You've never had any of my cooking?" Sam looked disappointed, sighed, and then perked up. "You'll need to come to my house sometime then. I'm sure I could teach you a few things."

 

Stan groaned, head in hands. "Sam stop flirting for like, three minutes. Please."

 

David laughed, stood up and tugged Sam's neck down to his face level. "You've got to wait in line for this one, ok?"

 

Sam laughed, a deep booming laugh. He was bent double over just to talk to David, but somehow he got smaller while he was laughing.

 

Jackson could feel himself blushing. He was just so glad no one else could see it, thank God for his dark skin. David's eyes turned to him and the corner of his mouth tugged up. "You're blushing."

 

"No." Jackson said quickly. Too quickly. F**k, damn it.

 

David smiled triumphantly. "You are."

 

Jackson groaned, Sam beamed and placed a fat kiss on the side of Jackson's cheek. "You're a darling, but I'm mostly straight." He paused, pulled away from Jackson and offered a hand. "I'm Sam, and now Polter owes me twenty bucks. Sorry about that."

 

Jackson took his hand and shook firmly, a smile playing on his lips. He liked Sam, despite everything. The tall boy was easy going, a little weird and attractive as hell. And mostly straight. Jackson wondered where the mostly came into it.

 

Stan waved at Simon, who threw a beer at his head and slid a glass of golden honey liquid over to Sam. Stan managed to grab the beer and drink most of it before Jackson registered that he even had one. David had disappeared, but now returned with a large plate of sandwiches. Thick bread oozing mayo and fresh lettuce and tomato with a slice or five of thick ham.

 

"Want one?" Simon asked, "I made them for the sale tonight. Gotta serve food to make this place all ages. Otherwise I'd end up just serving Sam and Hunter."

 

"Yeah, thanks." Jackson smiled, taking one of the sandwiches from David. Stan grabbed one and ripped it in half, leaving the other half on the bar. Simon tutted at him as Stan bit into the half in his hands.

 

Jackson decided to cram his face full of the sandwich while he could, and the taste was exquisite. Actually beautiful. The bread was thick and warm with a slight crunch to it, toasted but not enough for it to show, and the fresh vegetables had their own crunches. Simon may not be a good cook by the others standards, but this was a perfect sandwich.

 

Suddenly, as if he had appeared from nowhere, another man joined them. He was a pink-from-the-sun white guy with a shock of dark blonde hair that spiked up of its own accord. He was stocky, short and handsome.

 

Stan picked up the other half of his sandwich and shoved it at the boy, who took it and bit into it. The mayonnaise burst over his chin and he swore, muffled by the full mouth.

 

"Easy there, Hunt." Simon warned, wiping down the bar where the sandwich had been a second ago.

 

The room was still empty, but the small crowd that had gathered at the bar were all immersed in small conversations. Jackson looked around, David was darting around and bringing the food from the kitchen, placing it on a table opposite the bar; Sam and Stan were chatting about something with the new guy - Hunter? �"; and Simon was happily cleaning a glass with a wet rag.

 

Hunter was dressed much like the other two, but with looser trousers and a dark blue shirt instead of a black one. He had tattoos on his knuckles, "WERE WOLF", and a sleeve of rather nerdy references up his right arm. The Lord of the Rings references weren't lost on Jackson, although there was a blue box that he did remember from a British TV show but he couldn't remember the name of it.

 

"Alright boys, go do your s**t. Dave, food table is all yours tonight. Jack, if you wanna stand by the door; the cover is two bucks if you're under eighteen and five if you're over. Be prepared for the entire freak population of the surrounding three counties to show up." Simon beamed, evidently really happy with himself for getting so much help.

 

David waited around the food table, now piled high with sandwiches and baked pastries. Jackson finished his sandwich and walked over to the door, looked out and nearly fell over. There was a line almost around the block. Freaks was right, these children were beautiful.

 

The first group contained a peroxide blonde boy with a crew cut that left his fringe dangling over his eyes, enough metal to set off a detector at an airport was pierced into his skin and he had a net vest on, showing his skinny body and white scars that laced his arms.

 

The girl next to him, whom he was clearly infatuated with, had fiery orange hair and a mohawk. She had a sweet smile, but there was something about her that Jackson didn't want to get close to, like an attack dog. These beautiful, ugly children lined up and waited for the club to open. The club, Jackson realised, must be the only place that accepted them.

 

Simon stepped up behind him and rested a gentle hand on his bicep. "Welcome to freak central." He placed a stamp into Jackson's hand and smiled. "Just hit their hands once they've paid you. You've got two hours here and then the band starts, so I'll get someone else to do it then. You don't want to miss the Ghosts."

 

Jackson opened the door and felt the energy coming off of the tiny fragile bodies. Excitement and hope and fear and lust tangled in the air around him, washed over him and faded into background noise.

 

The red haired girl stepped forwards, a five in hand. Jackson took it, placed it in his pocket and stamped her hand. The boy was next, two bucks from him. That, Jackson realised with a smirk, would be why she didn't care about him.

 

The crowd flowed into the club, a stream of dyed hair and metal faces. These children filled the club, their voices becoming a soft lullaby for Jackson's ears. There were only a few times when he had to ask for ID, but each time they would give him a five instead. They were all honest enough, but it took a prompt.

 

A young girl walked in near the end of Jackson's two hours. His back pocket was stuffed with crumpled bills and coins, his throat was parched and he wasn't really paying attention to anyone any more. Just taking their cash and stamping their hands. The girl looked about seventeen, lost and a little bit worried. But she smiled at Jackson and handed over a five dollar note.

 

"It's only five bucks if you're over eighteen." He explained, "How old are you?"

 

She was beautiful, almond eyes stared out of a dark skinned face. Her lips were just about to open when another Asian girl, this one looking decidedly paler, grabbed her arm and screamed, "I can't believe you came!" This girl's voice was like a foghorn, attracting the attention of the party-goers around her.

 

"You know her?" The girl nodded and blushed. "Just go in then. It's my first time too." Jackson handed back her five bucks and watched her get dragged away. She didn't look like part of this crowd, his stomach twisted slightly, he hoped she'd be okay.