Melodramatic Teenage Nihilists

A Story by wcf

Stylized short story about two high school students who may or may not be okay. They are driving around one night. Conversation, action and observation ensue.

Dean is the angel of ruined suburbia.

He was. He has fallen and now he is low with me smoking in a s****y Grand Marquis.

We often drive around town when it’s dark out. First beginning with acquiring something to smoke, then followed by deciding on the music, and then we speak and the car becomes safe. We circle the lake the way you circle the small of her back with your finger, scared not to break the invisible feeling that holds the scene together.

Smoke makes your tongue taste bad and you stick your head up out the sunroof and the black is shot by nothing like the brilliant stars you want. They sky is very normal.

When Dean speaks and if I close my eyes sometimes I can’t tell it’s him. He’s good at sports and could play in college. He can study anywhere he wants. He’s smart and his grades are better than mine. Before he spoke with excitement �" confidently releasing strings of pretty words. Now he speaks stupid without predictability, words coming out in jumbled Delta blues rhythm.

We find ourselves at the View looking into the city. The View’s a group of luxury apartments up on a mountain.

We talk about anything. I talked about this sappy movie I liked and then he talked about a lot of things.

He talked about this Senior girl who was crazy but who was a Nymphomaniac, and I was interested because I like conversations like this and because I’ve never had sex, and how they f**k twice sometimes three times a day and how she kept making him feel unethical and un Christian like when she wrongly accuses him of liking other girls.

I asked if they used protection and he said no.

Then I asked if she was on birth control and he said yes.

�" So why are you mad �"

Because she is making me feel like I’m a bad person and she does it because she knows she’s not pure but damned and because it’s not just girls like her but guys too and not just youth but old esteemed men with perversions for nymphets and tiny ladies who use bible passages to beat down nice people who are different and…

I really didn’t understand any of this, or maybe I did. I don’t study people anymore because they’re terrifying and because I know I’m no better.

He seemed really angry and his face got scrunched up and got ugly. He looked out at the distant metropolis. The mocking lights. He wanted to be under them and feel their warmth. He wanted to be in the city beside the men with no shoes and no shame. Homeless oracles enlightened by amphetamine, the wisest with distant visions and limp face painted by smack and the ugly street lights. Dean says they have everything because they have nothing.

Dean told me he feels different and that his brain might be broken. He says he’s permanently outside of himself. I said nothings permanent and he said ok.

We drive off to everywhere except to where we’re supposed to be. We don’t go home because why would you want to do that. We don’t tell the other to because we’re not sadists. But we drink too much, my flask is the equalizer and makes me feel warm and bigger than you. My boots crunch on little pieces of the cosmos and its nice because I found the stars they’re on the asphalt, what surprise, and the street light hit each tiny world showing Saturn and Venus and many different moons and stars and I found them all in the most unlikely of places in the windshield of your car!

We offer the lake our baseball bat for penance and drive back.

We drink too much. He’s lost in the lovely malady his father is buried with and I’m driving around and he doesn’t remember anything he says. He tells me his fantasies and tells me he’s a good person. I wish he remembered the things he told me so he can tell me he takes them back.

It’s almost too cold and Dean wonders if the apostles would have stayed with Jesus if Jerusalem was cold like Antarctica or even slightly nippy as it is and they could not wear jackets. WHAT A FRAUD! Ha! How gadamn easy it was for them to be saved. It’s not always easy like that to be saved and he leans against the railing expelling profanities like F**k you f**k them f**k me in this laconic drawl of his. I asked what I did and he said I don’t know.

Behind us the throbbing neon of apartments hummed in the cadence I imagined Dean took to the Nymphomaniacs body. Or our throats drawing in heavy smoke.

------------------

In the school parking lot later that week I came across Dean contorting his neck towards the sky squinting at the sullen shade of gray and cursing God, the idols of those queer little pygmy men of the nations called Guinea and to whomever pretty girls pray to to absolve them of their vanities and post coital guilt.

I keep looking, sad that we are so similar and that I’ve never let him know.

I say something and he says something back.

I look at the cars and at the reflection in their windows. I see a junked up anemic face �" a mohawked fool.

Dean walks to his car and I follow, this conspiring martyr �" this fallen angel �" his semi holiness still fading as we bring light to our tobacco.

© 2016 wcf

Author's Note

Comments, advice, and constructive criticism are welcome and encouraged! Also the alternative title is 'Dean' - let me know which one you believe to be better.