The Dead Zone

━ 06 | before

Four years ago, James Barrow had failed his freshman year.

Not because he wasn't smart, as the pitying glances from some of his teachers implied, but because he was lazy—and the teachers who realized this never seemed to take a liking to him. He fell asleep in class, he left homework assignments festering crumpled and untouched at the bottom of his schoolbag, and sometimes he was so disoriented he couldn't even bring himself to remember to bring a pencil. They didn't know that his mother's violent, drunken screams kept him awake throughout the night, that the transition from middle to high school had been too difficult for him to handle when his parents were in the midst of a tangled divorce. Jimmy's father always had been terribly susceptible to beautiful women. He'd seen enough that he knew he would never be that way.

So this was his fifth year, and not his fourth, at Lovecraft High, and thankfully, his mother was finally out of the picture. He couldn't say he particularly liked it—school, that is—but he would certainly rather have been around his friends than his family at any given moment. He definitely hated woodshop worst of all. Any physical activity was too much effort in his opinion. He hadn't picked the class, had never enjoyed the class, didn't like most of the people in the class, so on and so forth. If there had been literally any other electives available, he would have taken them, but since it was mostly a participation grade, relief came in the form of an easy A.

It did sort of bother him, though, the smell of sawdust that somehow still lingered on his clothes as he rode the bus home.

Jim ducked straight into his room, being sure to lock the door to keep his stepmother out, and changed immediately out of the clothes he'd worn to school, dumping them in the basket in the closet where his father wouldn't find the aroma of whatever he'd smoked with his friends during lunch period and he wouldn't have to be reminded of construction class with that persistent sawdust smell. The closet door creaked shut and he sunk into his bed, mind wandering into a prediction of the routine that would shortly occur. The car was pulling into the driveway already. Soon the keys would turn in the front door and Ariel would come home. "Keys," he mumbled under his breath as he heard the lock click from afar. "Shoes," he whispered, and her shoes were discarded on the rack in the front hallway. "Purse." It dropped onto the counter. His father would not be home for another half-hour, or more if traffic was bad, so he only really had to hide out in here until then. Same as every day. Same as always.

He settled onto his mound of squished pillows, reaching around the headboard for the wall vent that he always left loose. It creaked softly as he opened it, making him wince, and with practiced care he pulled the bottle of vodka that he kept stashed there. It was nearly empty. He frowned, thinking that he'd only just acquired this one days ago.

His father had been so disappointed when he failed that first year of high school. He'd looked at him with tired, weary eyes, face lined with the exhaustion of dealing with a disaster of a woman and falling for one that would be something even worse. We used to call you gifted, kid. Well, maybe not worse, maybe Jim's hatred for his stepmother blinded him, but at least equally disastrous. Ariel might not have locked him in the bathroom for hours while she disappeared to the bar, but she'd done... other things. But it was very likely that like his mother, Ariel would come and go. Jim would always stay. Deteriorating, dust settling around the shape of what could have been or what once was, but here all the same.

His phone buzzed silently, and he lowered the bottle, contents sloshing and cap twirling in his fingers. Jim considered it for a long while before bothering to pick it up and check the message. Group chat text. Taylor wanted the answers to the history homework. A junior class, one he wasn't in, but he sat up slightly, clicking on the photos he'd sent of the worksheets. Absentmindedly, he began typing out answers, timelines and historical facts and faces of figures forming in his head, warping, and fizzling out again. It all branched together in a network of knowledge, things he'd learned and would scarcely forget. Dates, names, locations, battles. This sort of thing was easy, even through the fog of his muddied mind.