Going Home

[MurderWeasel]

((Jennifer Perez continued from Latin Girls))

Coming home was not an easy experience. Jennifer had been on an airplane before, but only twice, when she was young, going to and from the wedding of a relative she barely knew. She couldn't remember that trip well.

This time, she was aware of every bump, of every strange sputtering noise. She didn't know if the airplane was old or new, if it was in good condition or a pile of junk. She was half convinced it was going to drop out of the sky, that everyone was going to die regardless of all they had been through. She'd considered drinking a bit too much of her medicine, in case it would knock her out, but had decided against it. She didn't know if that would be dangerous for her, and she certainly didn't want to create a hassle for everyone else. A mid-air medical emergency wouldn't be good for anyone. Besides, she wasn't sure she wanted to risk dreams.

So she just sat, leaning against the window, not looking out of it. She found herself not the least bit curious as to what her home looked like from the air. Maybe far in the future she would fly again. Maybe then she would look out.

The landing set her fears ablaze all over again. She wasn't really convinced she was going to live until she had stumbled into the airport. Her backpack felt strange. Walking felt strange. Everything felt like it could almost be a dream. She stayed back a little, lagged behind the others, tried to mimic what they did. They probably knew their way around airports better than she did. They probably knew what they were going to do, what they were facing. No, no, that was being self-indulgent. That was being a martyr. Everyone had it tough. Everyone was fucked up, and everyone had fucked up. Jennifer hadn't killed anyone. Even after everything else, all the other wrongs she had committed, she had never killed anyone, and that was more than maybe ten of the others could say. She felt responsible for deaths, yes, but she had never pulled the trigger herself, had never plunged her icepick into flesh. That did make a difference. Pretending otherwise was diminishing what everyone else had survived.

She kept her eyes down and kept walking.

It wasn't long before they were outside. There was a flurry of activity, students being herded into various vehicles, being taxied home or maybe taken to the hospital for further recovery. Jennifer didn't give a fuck if someone was willing to drive her home. She didn't want to go home. She didn't want to do anything. She just needed to be alone, so she slipped off. It wasn't hard. No one was really paying attention to her. She just had to avoid Isabel. She was the only one who might have noticed, and had her own issues to deal with. No need to cause her any worry.

Then it was just a matter of finding her way into town. Jennifer still had her backpack. In that backpack was forty dollars in small bills, ones and fives and a crumpled ten, money she had brought with her to buy snack food or maybe a souvenir if there was a gift shop in the Badlands. Now, a handful of change became her fare, and soon she was sitting in the back of a bus, staring out the window at the city passing by. The vehicle was nearly empty, with just a couple bums sleeping near the front. It was better that way. Jennifer didn't look like a refugee. She'd lost weight, but her clothes concealed that nicely enough. She'd managed to shower and shave her legs and generally make herself presentable again back at the hospital. Combined with her clean clothes, she looked just like she used to.

That had the potential to be a big problem. Jennifer didn't know who knew she was alive. She didn't know if she was someone who would be identified on sight now. She was hoping that she could just fly under the radar. She wasn't an interesting person. She had accomplished exactly fucking nothing on the island. If she'd ever even cropped up in the news or the broadcasts or however the fuck the thing became common knowledge, it had probably been standing beside Nick and looking awkward while quizzing him about killing someone. She wasn't memorable. She wasn't brave, wasn't strong, wasn't heroic. She'd just been there. That was it. She'd been there, and she'd tried to help people, and in the end it hadn't mattered.

The bus let her out downtown. She couldn't tell if the bus driver looked at her curiously. Maybe he knew. Everyone she saw seemed to be staring at her, but no one approached her. Nobody whipped out cameras to try to take her picture. She was just being paranoid. That had to be it.

She still ducked into a small secondhand store. Her crumpled ten dollar bill became a pair of skinny jeans, a white blouse, a black baseball cap, and a pair of huge sunglasses that made her look like she had a bug's eyes. She couldn't even recognize herself in the mirror. For the first time since landing, she felt close to alright. Being someone else would be a nice change of pace.

Outside again, it struck her that she was actually free. She hadn't been killed, hadn't been arrested, hadn't been locked away in a mental hospital. She was standing downtown in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on a warm summer day, wearing uncomfortable clothing—and how she fucking loathed pants, but her long skirts were just too recognizable—and free to do whatever she wanted.

She just wanted to cry.

She didn't even know what she was doing anymore. It had all made so much sense when she left the airport. She'd planned to go downtown, to go back to the places she knew, but she had no fucking clue why she was even doing this. She had no idea what she was expecting to find. Maybe it was some vain hope that she'd come across something to help her make sense of the world, some meaning from her past life that she could grab onto again. Maybe she was thinking that someone would walk out of nowhere and smile at her and make life okay.

She passed the Sunset Cinema, but Melissa didn't show up. She wandered through the alleys and parking garage of the Promenade, but there was no sign of Maf, no car that even looked like his.

Somehow, she found herself in Macy's.

She walked, past the racks of clothing, past a clearance display of frilly skirts tucked into the back corner of the shop. They were off, somehow, black and lacy and so very dreary. Funereal, almost. They made her shiver and speed up. She didn't want to think about black clothing. She didn't want to think about death. She was glad for the sunglasses. They hid her eyes, and they made it harder for her to pick out the details of the store. Everything could merge into a blur, could become a mass of shapes without meaning.

It took her five minutes to realize she was being followed. Her shadow was a young woman, an employee. She kept glancing at Jennifer, trying to be discrete and failing totally. Jennifer felt her heartbeat accelerating, the hair on her neck standing on end. No. No fucking way some random saleswoman recognized her. She hadn't even come to this store that often. Its styles were rarely things she had much interest in duplicating. There was no way she could have been identified.

She slowed, turned, and walked back towards the employee. Time to get this over with. The girl looked maybe a year older than Jennifer, with blond hair tied back in a ponytail and big blue eyes and clean white teeth.

"May I help you?" she asked, as soon as Jennifer was close enough to warrant an acknowledgment.

Under normal circumstances, Jennifer would have panicked, would have wimped out and beat a retreat and slipped out of the store as quickly as possible. Before the island, she'd have been too fucking terrified of hurting this woman's feelings to voice her discomfort. Now, though, she was more afraid of the alternative. Now, she knew that if making someone feel a bit awkward was the worst she fucked up in a given day, she was coming out way ahead.

"Um," she said. "Are you following me?"

"Oh," the girl said. "Uh, I'm sorry, ma'am. It's just, um, don't be offended if they ask to check your bag if you set off the beeper."

"Oh, um, thanks," Jennifer said. "Sorry."

Jennifer held herself together until she left the store, an event which did not set off the beeper. Only once she was outside, off in a corner of the Promenade with water fountains and restroom, did she break down in hysterical laughter. It was so fucking stupid. She'd been so worried, and the employee, some fucking college freshman or something, had mistaken her for a shoplifter. She'd gotten singled out, she was sure, not because of who she was, but because she was a Hispanic girl in old clothes poking around a department store for a long time without any seeming intention of buying anything. It had happened to her before. It was just so funny now. It made her feel better, even. She could still blend in enough to be stereotyped.

And so her mood was a little lighter as she continued to wander the town. It wasn't long before she found herself at the Varsity, seated at a table, still unrecognized, though with a blue star stamped on her hand. She'd spent more of the money she had on a platter of nachos and a fountain soda. The steaming pile of chips and paper cup of root beer were sitting in front of her. She wasn't all that hungry. She wasn't even sure what she was doing here, why she was fucking around all over town. The Varsity was nearly deserted, with only a couple middle schoolers off in a corner, laughing a little too loudly.

The TVs were on, though, and as Jennifer looked at them, spacing out a little, she suddenly realized that some of them were tuned to the news. That was unusual. More than that, there were images, shots from the game, shots of the boats. There was, thankfully, nothing violent. Intercut with the images were some reporters, talking about something or another. Before long, there were shots of the airport, of a hospital. They were probably talking about the rescue. They were probably mentioning that students had been returned home.

Seeing that, being reminded of her own luck, Jennifer felt really fucking guilty. Her family might know she was back. They might be wondering where she was, frantically calling all the hospitals in town. People could be looking for her. Everyone could be worried that she was dead anyways, and here she was, wearing a fucking disguise and eating chips in a bar.

Coming back to reality meant learning how not to be selfish again.

Jennifer finished the rest of her nachos as quickly as she could, drained her soda, refilled it, popped a travel cap on it, and left the Varsity. She didn't turn back to the TVs. Luckily, the sound had been off. She could almost pretend she hadn't seen anything. She could almost pretend she'd done the right thing and headed straight home.

As she approached her house an hour later, the sun was beginning its descent. Her neighborhood looked completely foreign. The nice, neat houses looked nothing like the houses on the island. They were arranged in lines that were too straight. There was no mountain looming in the background, no smell of salt and death on the air. There were cars parked around, and there were cars moving, too, driving along at twenty-five miles an hour, assuming they were abiding by the law. She'd never noticed the cars before, had never really appreciated all the little ways in which a city showed its life.

She was walking more and more slowly, dragging her feet, trying to delay the inevitable. She was trying to figure out backup plans, things she could do if her parents really did throw her out. She knew she was being stupid. She knew they wouldn't. Even if they found her despicable, even if they thought everything she had done was completely fucking revolting, they'd take her back, or her sister would. She was worrying to worry. She was giving herself things to think of to distract her from her guilt. It was easier to keep herself from thinking about the dead if she was worrying about where she'd sleep tonight. She really had to get in touch with a therapist.

And then, there was nowhere left to hide. She was standing at the walkway in front of her house, eyes skimming over the half dozen newspapers lying in the driveway. Her shoulders hurt. Her backpack felt heavy. She wanted to go inside, just like she did every day after school, and throw it on the couch and plop down on a chair and pour herself a glass of orange juice and watch something stupid on TV for fifteen minutes and say hi to her family.

She walked up to the door and knocked. She had her keys, still, in her backpack. The door was rarely locked anyways. It didn't feel right to just walk in, though.

For a few moments, nothing happened. Jennifer was raising her hand to knock again, not sure if she should, wondering what she'd even do if her family wasn't in, when it swung open and she found herself face to face with her mother.

For a moment, the older woman just blinked at her, and Jennifer looked back. The recognition clicked in her mother's eyes at the same instant Jennifer realized that she was still wearing her hat and sunglasses, that she was wearing jeans, which she never did. She reached up and removed the sunglasses and then dropped them to the ground as her mother pulled her into a hug. Before she knew what was happening, they were both crying.

By the time Jennifer had regained control of herself, they'd moved inside. Her mother was talking to her, saying something, but Jennifer couldn't tell what, couldn't focus on anything except that she wasn't being thrown out, wasn't being shunned and disowned.

Finally, she forced herself to breathe deeply, to calm down enough to force out one question:

"Did you watch?"

And her mother just shook her head.

---

Time passed. Jennifer mostly slept on her first day back. Her family didn't bother her, didn't ask her about what had happened. The television was gone from the little cabinet where it had once stood, replaced by vase full of tulips. Jennifer felt like a stranger. She felt like the world had changed without her, like she was from another century rather than two weeks in the past.

She didn't cry. That was done, over, something she couldn't relate to now that she was home. She felt sad, but it just built up like pressure inside and then eventually dissipated on its own. She didn't question the process.

By dinner, she was feeling alright enough to sit at the table. Her father was there. He'd taken off from work the second he heard, had driven straight to Saint Paul. His clothes were dirty and he smelled a bit of sweat, but he was in wonderful spirits and, for once, he got along perfectly well with her mother.

The food itself was nothing special. The house's stores were pretty well depleted, implying to Jennifer that nobody had been shopping in some time. Her mother had ordered pizza. Jennifer liked pizza alright, but it wasn't her first choice. Tonight, though, it was the best food in the world.

They talked, too. Very quickly, Jennifer noticed that something was wrong. It was far too quiet. Jennifer was not the usual center of attention in the household, but no one seemed quite comfortable saying anything that didn't in some way relate to her. It made her want to sink into her chair. It wasn't right. She was making her own family feel ill at ease. There was a gap between them, one she couldn't even fully understand.

She went to bed early. Her father went to stay with his cousin in Minneapolis.

After midnight, hours after she had retreated to her room, Jennifer was lying in bed, staring at the darkness, trying to force her mind to shut down. Thoughts spun around her, images of what were and what might have been. She heard the screams, saw the blood, but it wasn't a flashback, wasn't some PTSD-induced hallucination. It was nothing more than her imagination. The worst of it was, she still couldn't figure it out. The whole time on the island, all she'd known was that she couldn't kill, but even now, even when her choice had been validated, even when everything had turned out not okay but better than it had any right to, there was no logic to it. She couldn't remember what she'd told Melissa. She couldn't remember the words they'd exchanged. She couldn't remember the last look on her friend's face.

She didn't even know what she wanted.

The tears came again. Jennifer lay in bed, sobbing to herself, trying to stay quiet so as not to worry her family, when there was a knock at her door. She froze for an instant, then buried her face in her pillow to try to muffle the noise.

The door opened. Jennifer felt someone sit on the edge of her bed. She mumbled, "I'm fine."

"Bullshit."

Monica, then. Her sister had seemed the least interested in everything that had happened. Jennifer was glad it was her here now.

"Yeah," she said, turning from her pillow. "Yeah, you're right."

How strange, to be honest for a change.

"You will be, though," her sister said. "I know you'll be just fine. You're tough."

"Um," Jennifer said. "That, um, I, uh,"—deflect, time for a joke—"bullshit."

Monica chuckled and then said, "No."

When Jennifer stayed silent, she continued.

"No, you are tough. You're tougher than you could ever know." A pause, a yawn. A glance at the clock: one in the morning.

"You keep us together, Jen. We missed you, and, and no one watched, but I know what you didn't do, and I know that means you're strong."

Plenty of questions that raised, all best left unanswered. It didn't matter how Monica knew. What was more important was what she didn't know.

"I, um, I was with a killer," Jennifer said. "He, um, we were, um, we were friends. Are... I mean, um, he wasn't a bad guy. I don't understand."

"You don't have to," Monica said. "That's what therapy's for."

Always the wise one.

For a long while, neither of them said anything.

"What now?" Jennifer finally asked.

"What do you mean 'what now'?"

"I, um, I mean, um, what happens to me?" A pause. No answer. "I, um, I don't know. I just don't know. I don't even know what there is to do in life. It's like, it's like I've just... this horrible thing happened, and now I, I said it wouldn't change me and it did and I just want it to be gone, but they, I mean, um, I mean I don't even know, you know? How can I just go on and act like nothing happened? How can I go to college or grow up when everything happened?"

She was crying again, wondering how she had ever thought the tears behind her, but she kept talking.

"I wanted to save someone, or to do something, or to just be myself, but I didn't do anything and now there's nothing left. I just want it all to be okay again."

And her sister pulled her into a hug and said, "Don't worry," and said, "It'll all be okay," and said, "You'll be fine," and said, "I promise."

Jennifer slept until noon the next day.

---

It wasn't okay right away, but maybe it didn't have to be. Jennifer spent a lot of time with therapists. She spent a good amount of time getting checked out in hospitals. She learned that she was not, in fact, suffering from PTSD. Small miracles.

She also discovered that her friends had not forgotten her. It was perhaps two days after her return that she logged onto her old computer again, just to see. She hadn't checked her emails for the week before the trip, and she had a vague feeling that there was something important there, some message from someone who had died, some piece of wisdom that would have saved her from all she had suffered.

She had over two thousand messages. None were from anyone else who'd been on the island.

What they were were messages from people all around the world. It turned out Lena and Meg and Lindsey, Jennifer's little clique of juniors, had set up a website or a Facebook page or something to track her and send her wishes. They'd updated it, day and night, posting comments from people and keeping everyone informed on her progress. They'd assumed she was fucked when her death was announced, so they'd published her email address for all the strangers who'd come along to send their goodbyes. Thousands of people had poured out their thoughts to the blank slate of a presumably-dead girl they'd never met.

Jennifer didn't read any of them. It didn't feel like her place to do so. She tried to figure out how to reply and realized just how bad she was with computers and eventually called Lena to ask for help but instead they just talked for an hour and she forgot her purpose entirely and had to call back again five minutes after hanging up. Once she'd figured it out, her psoted message was simple:

"Thx for the kind thoughts, guys. I'm sure you saw on the news, but I'm home."

Then she shut the computer off and started with the other phone calls. She hit up everyone she could think of, every distant relative and old school acquaintance, just to talk, to hear voices that she knew. She even called her grandmother, who only spoke Spanish, and fumbled her way through a conversation. She cried a lot and she laughed a little and she felt alive again, really alive.

There were three calls she did not make.

The first was to Melissa's family. She'd figured she'd call them and apologize, and they'd all cry together and they'd tell her it wasn't her fault, they didn't blame her at all, she'd done the best she could and she was a good friend to their daughter. Jennifer knew that wasn't really that likely, and didn't think it would make her feel better even if it was what happened. Nobody needed salt in their wounds, and hearing from the girl who hadn't saved their daughter wasn't going to help them feel any better. There would be a time and a place for interactions of that sort, maybe, and Jennifer was ready to trust that her therapist would be able to help her pick both.

The second call she didn't make was to Maf's family. She had not researched his eventual fate beyond what she had been told. She had not tried to watch the recordings. She knew, from some little list she'd seen somewhere online or in the paper or something, that he had killed Nick, that he had been killed by one Ema Ryan. Jennifer had no clue who that was, and didn't give a fuck anyways.

The press overall seemed clueless. Nobody knew what had happened, who had won. Jennifer, though, she was pretty sure she knew. There were no winners, not in Survival of the Fittest. Everybody lost; the only question was how much. Maf's family had lost plenty.

She didn't even know if he had siblings. All that, and she didn't know if he had brothers or sisters. She didn't know what his favorite color was. She knew what foods he liked, but she didn't know what bands he listened to.

She cried a little before she didn't call Nick's family.

If Maf was something of a mystery, Nick was a total enigma. Jennifer had to retrieve his number from the school directory. She held the phone in her lap for a time, staring at it. She was stuck using her old corded phone, then one she'd spent hours laughing into in middle school, back before she'd had a cell phone. Her cell phone was lying in pieces in a tunnel somewhere. She actually dialed a few numbers, but didn't finish. She had questions she wanted to ask, or, more accurately, she had one question she wanted to ask in many different ways: Why?

Why did he talk to me? Why did he run off? Why was he always decent to me? Why was he different when he was alone?

She didn't want to know why he'd killed. She didn't care.

But, in the end, she didn't call because it wasn't right. It was a selfish desire, a personal need for understanding. It wasn't to mourn lost friends. It was to get someone else to pat her on the back and say that it would all be okay, and she'd already had more than her fair share of that. She had lost friends, but who hadn't? And, no matter what she'd thought or hoped or wanted or feared, they had only been friends. Any attempts to remember things otherwise, to ascribe some meaning to events only she had survived, would be dishonest and disrespectful. The memories were to be cherished, not corrupted.

There was one call she did make.

Jennifer picked up her phone, and she punched in 635-4772. She waited until the ringing stopped, and then she said her goodbyes.

---

A month later, sitting in the park in the sun, Jennifer could almost have been a different person. Her hair fell loosely, allowed for the first time in years to grow out to any noticeable degree. She'd stopped spiking it, too. She wore a knee-length grey skirt and a white t-shirt. She'd retrieved the sunglasses from her lawn and had taken to wearing them around. She hadn't been recognized often, and she was thankful in the extreme for that. It was easier to push the unpleasantness to the bottom of her mind when people weren't asking her what it had felt like and whether she was happy to be home. She was fucking sick of that one in particular. Of course she was fucking happy to be home. It beat being dead, like so many of her classmates and friends.

That wasn't to say she didn't second guess herself every night. The second week had been spent obsessing. She'd mulled the situation over, tried to come up with ways she could have saved all of them, or, failing that, could have saved just one of them. Her therapist had tried to help her let go. It hadn't worked too well.

But she wasn't suicidal, and she wasn't depressed, and that was a pretty miraculous victory. She put it down to her family, mostly. They never pushed her. Sure, within a couple days her father had gone back to Wisconsin amidst a flurry of arguments with her mother, but that was fine. That was normalcy restored, right along with the return of laughter and teasing to the dinner table. She could even brush off arguments a little bit better now, she found. Nobody was going to kill anyone else, so some nasty words seemed pretty fucking minor.

And then, of course, there had been her friends. They'd all wanted to see her in person. That had been tough, because they had watched. They knew what she'd been through, but they didn't come anywhere near understanding. They'd lost people too, of course. They'd lost friends and siblings and crushes, but they hadn't been there, and so it was nothing more than an abstraction. They figured it was a simple thing, come home, talk to a shrink twice a week, life goes on as normal. They told her she hadn't done anything wrong. They told her it was so badass when she disarmed Jimmy. They told her Jimmy had killed a bunch more people before getting himself blown up, and they didn't understand at all when she cried.

After that, Jennifer did not spend very much time with her friends. They seemed to accept it. Most of them were working summer jobs or far too caught up in their own hobbies and lives to bother much with hers. Her status as a novelty faded very quickly. There were other survivors, many of whom had been in far more interesting and violent situations and many of whom were far more willing to discuss it all. Jennifer, for her part, refused to speak to the press, and they quickly gave up when they realized she wasn't going to flip and curse at them or anything interesting of that sort.

So now she was in the park and she was looking at the sky through the lenses of her giant sunglasses and she was thinking about the last time she'd just watched the sky like this, when Melissa had been alive and they'd been sitting on the roof of a building and the whole world had still been open to them. In a way, she thought, the game might have even been liberating. There was no need to think too much about the future on Survival of the Fittest, no need to worry about growing old, no need to focus on anything except your friends and yourself and keeping what was important to you safe.

Jennifer didn't know what was important anymore. A community college had called a week before, offering her a full ride scholarship. That didn't really amount to too much, just tuition, really. She'd still be living at home. She didn't know what she wanted to study. She'd researched what it took to work in schools, and it turned out it was pretty fucking complicated. Melissa had been right, anyways. She'd have made a terrible counselor.

She didn't even want to think about the future. Everything she'd once taken for granted—that she'd grow up and find a career, that she'd get married, that she'd have kids some day, that she'd stay in close contact with all her friends and relatives—seemed hollow and pointless and unlikely. She was happy enough just living, just enjoying her own continued existence. She didn't want to be forced to rejoin reality. She certainly didn't want to have responsibilities like school. She didn't know if she could ever sit at a desk again without panicking.

For the most part, Jennifer drifted. She spent time at home, but she also spent a lot of her time wandering, watching people and going to new places, parts of town she'd never seen before. She had hiking boots, now. They were a gift from her mother. They'd gone on a few excursions together, treks in parks and drives into the country.

But at the end of every day, she still found herself feeling totally empty and lost. She didn't need purpose. She didn't even want purpose. She just wanted everything bad to have never happened. It shouldn't have been too much to ask, but there it was.

The world could never be right again. It was really just that simple.

((Jennifer Perez continued in the future))