Closer to Fine

[MurderWeasel]

((Jennifer Perez continued from the past))

It was summer again, and the year was 2010, and despite the economy the world felt like a much better place to live in. Two years had come and gone without even a hint of further kidnappings. Memory of the attacks, for many people, was beginning to fade. For Jennifer, that was not the case. She still thought about everything that had happened often. She felt like she'd stopped growing up the day she got on the bus, like she'd not aged even a little bit since then. She wondered often what her life would have been like had she not been taken. She wondered whether she and Maf would have maybe found something, whether she and Nick would have ever talked, whether she and Melissa would still be friends.

But she only wondered some of the time. Mostly, she was too busy.

Her high school friends were, for the most part, gone. They'd all graduated and gone off to various colleges and gotten married and stuff like that. They'd all grown up. Jennifer was in college. She was transferring now, from the community college where she'd been for the past two years. She was going to a real university, and she was scared. She was majoring in costume design. An attempt at more conventional fashion design had very quickly showed Jennifer that it entailed all the sides of sewing she didn't care for at all. What she liked was the creativity, the time and detail put into a single garment. For that, nothing beat theatre and film.

She was still living with her family. They ate dinner together almost every night. Samuel was in high school now. Bayview was still in operation. The youngest class at the time of the kidnapping was going to graduate next year. Jennifer asked Samuel about the school sometimes, especially about the teachers. None of them really talked about what had happened. Nobody wanted to remember, at least, not outside the safety of memorials and other forms of prescribed grief. That was fine. She didn't want to remember either. The only concession to acknowledgment she made was when she told Samuel she didn't care what he wanted, she'd never forgive him if he went on his senior trip. He told her he wasn't planning to anyways. After that, she stopped making references to it altogether.

It didn't matter. She could never escape the memories, no matter how hard she tried to bury them.

Sometimes it was stupid things, Chinese food, pulling her socks off, the smell of exhaust. Sometimes it was more serious. A week before the end of the term, a boy had asked Jennifer to the movies, and she'd been a fucking idiot and said yes. They'd sat through some boring comedy, and he'd driven her home, and he'd tried to give her a kiss goodbye, and she'd jerked back and started crying and they'd ended up sitting on her porch and she'd told him all about everything that had happened and that she'd never even been kissed and he said it was fine and patted her on the back and avoided her for the next week and never called her again.

The fucked up thing was that she was happier that way.

Sometimes, after dark or on rainy days or in the dead of winter, she'd just go and get lost somewhere in town. Saint Paul was a big city, and Minneapolis was within reach, especially now that she'd finally gotten her driver's license. The wonderful thing about the world was that, no matter how much she explored, there was always more, always something new, some little restaurant or park or graffiti mural on an alley wall. Discovering the beauty in those little things was what kept her going during bad days.

But the bad days came less and less frequently.

Jennifer still had things that mattered to her, after all. She still had people she cared about greatly. She spent a lot of her free time with her sister. Monica had finally found a steady boyfriend, one who looked like he might become a permanent fixture in the family. He seemed like a nice guy, though it was hard for Jennifer to judge these things. She'd never quite worked her way up to judging people again. Everything in normal life, all the little lies and infidelities that plagued people's existences, seemed almost petty to her now. Maybe that wasn't quite right. Maybe she'd always felt that way. Maybe that was why she was so good at sorting out other people's messes and so terrible at getting herself in order.

It didn't really matter. There were less conflicts to delve into now. Jennifer still had friends, but they were past the high school drama that had made up so much of her life.

She kept in contact with Isabel. It helped that they hadn't really known each other before the island. It helped more that they hadn't met during their time there. Jennifer had never worked up the courage to seek out Bounce or Samantha or Allen. She knew that she hadn't made a good impression. It was hard to think back to those times, but she could recall the nervous giggles, the ominous misspeaks, the toying with the icepick. She'd been asked a few times, by those who didn't have manners, whether she'd been considering playing. She'd just told them no. It wasn't like she gave a fuck if they believed her or not.

What bothered her more was the term. Playing. Like it had all just been a game. She knew it was nothing more than slang, a little piece of unfortunate vernacular, but she counted it chief among the terrorists' propaganda coups. That members of a nation of rational, generally kind people could refer to a terrorist attack and mass slaughter as a game was horrifying.

Still, Jennifer was not too worried about the future of the world. She knew it was full of atrocities, full of wars and famines and terrors that made her stay on the island seem utterly insignificant, but none of that mattered. What was important to her was that she could still close her eyes and pick any place in the city and find beauty. What was important was that she could sit and watch any group of people interact and find something to admire. What was important was that, for the world, life went on. Most days, that was enough to see her through.

When it wasn't, she went to the park and looked at the sky and wondered what it all meant. She wondered about life, and about death. It was still scary for her, the thought of nothingness. She hadn't quite been able to recapture her sense of teenage immortality. It was something that set her apart from the others in her class. While they laughed and goofed around and got drunk and fucked at parties and treated the world as a joke of a playground, Jennifer stood in the background and thought about how lucky she was to get a chance to do the simple things she had always taken for granted. She tried to enjoy every meal, cherish every conversation, because there was no telling which one would be the last. She always had the vague worry that she would get hit by a bus or something, killed by some random whim of fate. Every night when she went to bed, she had to reassure herself that she would wake up the next morning.

But it was, overall, a pretty good life. It was certainly better than what she had experienced on the island. It was better than what she had, for a week and a half, thought would be all she would ever know again.

---

And so, it was summer, and it was night, and Jennifer was standing on the sidewalk watching the cars and people pass her by. It had been a bad day, for no real reason, and so she had gone out to find a cafe. She had been coming back from dinner, when it had suddenly all come crashing down on her and she'd had to just stop and stand and clench her fists to avoid crying. She didn't like this, didn't like feeling like she was out of control of herself. She'd thought she'd gotten better. She had imagined that, somehow, everything would eventually be alright. She'd gotten some fucking perspective, had forced her goals into order.

So how was it that she found herself shaking? How was it that she was fuming, furious at the world, hating everything? How was it that she, who had been blessed in every conceivable way, who had been saved time and again when others had fallen, now found herself wanting to kick the wall, to smash a window, to do something to burn off all the tension she felt? There was no reason for this. It had been over two years. She had adjusted. She had moved on.

Except, apparently, she hadn't.

For a few minutes she just stood, her breathing slowing down, her hands loosening. It wasn't long before she was calm. The people passing her by hadn't noticed. Nobody around her was any the wiser. Nobody seemed to understand. It was funny. For so long, she'd been afraid of being recognized. She'd feared what people would say, had been terrified of their false sympathy. Now, she just needed a kind word. She just wanted something to ground her. She didn't even know what had happened to most of the other survivors. She talked with Isabel, and she knew others loosely, but some of them could have even died by now, for all she knew. She sure as fuck hadn't kept up with whatever happened to the winner.

Maybe that was the problem, really. Maybe she'd focused too much on getting better, on trying to get her life in order and becoming productive. She'd rushed, had rushed into school, had rushed through therapy, was now rushing to get a degree and a job. It was a coping mechanism. In a way, it was exactly like leaving the house when there was a fight. All she was doing was avoiding the hard feelings, pushing them out of the way and hoping that they'd wither and die. She was pretending she was someone else, someone she wasn't, someone wise and pragmatic and able to take the long view, but she was just faking, and that was starting to build up. Jennifer had felt like she was losing herself before, but never this acutely.

And so she hurried straight home, and she went to the restroom and just looked at herself in the mirror, noticing all the little changes she'd made, consciously and subconsciously. Her hair hadn't been cut since her return from the island. She was dressed normally, in a knee-length grey skirt and a white t-shirt. She hadn't worn earrings in a long time. She looked her age, maybe even a bit more. She looked mature, like she fit in in college.

It only took a few minutes to find a pair of scissors. Jennifer knew very little about hair styling, but she figured she'd get it touched up at a salon if she fucked up too badly. Half an hour later, she'd restored her old hairstyle as much as she could without gel, and she had changed back into her colorful clothes, the ones she had spent so much time on, which had been crammed into a drawer in her closet. She'd found a set of earrings, and she'd found her CDs, the ones from high school, the stuff she'd been listening to senior year. She'd shut the door and cranked up the volume and was now sitting on her bed, crying a little every now and then, and just thinking about it all, not life and death and all that metaphysical stuff, but about the little things, the real things, about Melissa and Maf and Nick and all the people she'd never even known, all the ones in the yearbook she'd never picked up. She wasn't trying to hide anymore, wasn't trying to bury it or pretend it had never happened, wasn't trying to minimize the implications.

She'd been kidnapped, had been forced into Survival of the Fittest, had tried her hardest, had seen friends die, and had, somehow, made it out. She had the rest of her life ahead of her. Like fuck she was going to spend it hiding and running away.

Once, in those first few days that she'd been on the island, she'd thought that the real way to win was to avoid being changed. Now, she saw more clearly. Winning wasn't living or dying. Everyone died eventually. It was making the best of things, choosing to change rather than being forced into it by fear, never forgetting who you were and why you were that person, never losing anything important and never clinging to anything bad.

She was ready, perhaps, to start again. She was changing schools, was moving on, was looking forward to a future and a job and a whole life's worth of experiences. She couldn't possibly hope to make the most of things if she was terrified of feeling bad or being reminded of all that had happened. She couldn't hope to be happy if she held herself aloof from everything and forgot how to smile and have fun.

So the next day, she had her hair touched up and bought some gel and some bright fabrics and she called her old therapist and said maybe she needed to schedule some more appointments.

Life didn't magically become perfect, the world didn't magically become right again, but, little by little, it got better in a real way. That was all she could really hope for. It was enough.

((Jennifer Perez continued in the future))