* J *

Part One: Chapter 3: Strength

It was another typical night in the Napier home. James is at that uncertain point of being drunk. The point that's just between laughter and belligerence. That point that all it would take is the smallest occurence for everything to turn dark. Just one wrong word. Valorie is high, too high at the moment to care about James' risky state. She is currently too busy peeking from the windows in the throes of drug induced paranoia. She feels like someone is secretly lurking in the shadows to watch her. She's completely oblivious to the life altering disaster that would befall her family that night.

Jack sits on the floor with a book and silently reads as his father loudly cheers on his favorite football team on the television. Jack is reading a book on hunting. It's not necessarily something that he's interested in, it was simply the only book he could find in the house that he hadn't read yet. The page he was on now was illustrating the proper kill zones to take the animal down without suffering. They called it a clean kill. It listed every area you could have shot the animal and described the animals suffering from each unclean shot. Most would feel sympathetic for the animals in the drawings, but Jack sees them as merely pictures on paper.

Jack was a boy who had to desensitize from reality most of the time. Too many bad things kept happening. The only way Jack can cope is by always standing just outside of everything. Life for him became equivalent to watching television. It was as if it mostly happened to someone else. He invests very little emotion into anything. Jack knows that if he allowed himself to feel that he wouldn't be able to take it. Feeling meant pain, it meant anger, it meant fear, and Jack finds these feelings problematic. It was feelings like that that lead to deep dark depressions. Depression prevents one from thriving. If one can't thrive how can they ever be able to better their bad situation? Jack already knows that his only chance is to go away to a place where his current life couldn't follow. He knows how important his education is. It was what was going to give him more in life.

Two years have passed since Jack first heard the voice of the man in his head. Not a day since has he been silent. It wasn't constant, just a comment here and there, but the voice makes itself known daily. Jack has become accustomed to the man. Sometimes he felt like the man was the only person who cared about him at all. But sometimes the man was mischievous and would talk Jack into doing things that got him into trouble. Like drawing dirty pictures, telling him things to say, baking a mockingbird for his mom to find, and even pouring out his father's liquor supply. Most would say Jack is a troubled child. They only see an outwardly action committed by Jack. They don't understand that its not Jack's own actions. They can't see the voice that controls him.

Some days the man wouldn't shut up. He would plague Jack with singing, telling jokes, absolute nonsense, or dark loud laughter. On those days it was hard for Jack to carry out the simplest of tasks. He would have trouble hiding the man's presence in his mind. It was tough when it happened on school days. Someone always caught him talking to himself. It didn't take long for the kids at school to realize how incredibly different Jack was from them.

Jack chooses to see his differences as an advantage. Things that mystify and preplex his peers are things that are effortless to Jack. It's hard for him not to have an arrogant view. It's just that he sees things others miss. He reads into things when others are incapable of the depths his brain delves into. Jack can often predict outcomes before they occur because he understands every avenue an event can go down. Jack thinks of everything. He is never shocked, never surprised, because he is always anticipating every angle.

"What?" Valorie says whipping her head around when James curses at the TV.

James glares over at her. Her wide eyes don't help her hide her condition. Not that James really cares as long as he has supper on the table and she puts out when he wants. But sometimes laughter just had to turn into belligerence...