he'd taken to prefacing so many things with well, in my head โย a thing not super encouraged by that court appointed therapist, not when the implication was so doused in diminishing the integrity of whatever the hell he was about to say. ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ข ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ was preferable, say ๐ง๐ณ๐ฐ๐ฎ ๐ฎ๐บ ๐ฑ๐ฐ๐ช๐ฏ๐ต ๐ฐ๐ง ๐ท๐ช๐ฆ๐ธ. but that felt a whole lot more like translating one language to the next with nothing on hand but a shitty tourist dictionary, like one word was ever a true equivalent for the other, like the meaning between the lines &. all the blank spaces didn't say a thousand things. in my head, in my head jacob sports counselor custos was the little wooden flag pole stuck in the dirt, marking a space, keeping a measurement, in my head jacob was this . . . focal point. this tether, this แดแดสษด สแดแดแด ษดแดแดก sign. you think too hard, and for too long, and it'd been easy using him like that, when he'd needed to turn back that film reel to a time before he'd known the way his friends looked caked in each other's blood, back then when it was just jacob sitting out on the island deck &. shooting the shit with nick, with kaitlyn, and then felt a realization like a static shock that in dylan's head, he'd never really looked at him without anyone else sharing the frame, never really handled the whole subject of him without the contextualization of kaitlyn's, emma's, nick's, mr. h's. it's a funny thing to zero in on as abruptly as that train of thought'd come careening through, to put a stopper on the permanent lens that'd glued itself to every mundane decision from there on out ( keeping pill bottles uncapped now, cutting open a bag of chips with a pair of craft scissors, choosing what to order based less on taste &. more on what did and didn't require an extra hand with an extra utensil ) and it's a funny thing to tuck his wrist into his jacket pocket and to lean forward in his seat, to look at him clearly under so much fluorescent lighting and wonder for the first time if his resting face'd always looked so somber, if he'd always taken as long as dylan did now to just pick some random plate off some basic menu.
in his head, there were these objective facts about shit that'd happened that summer, all laid out in black &. white bullet points like he were reading it off a true crime wiki, like he'd had no part, like he hadn't been there : he knew in some unattached way that jacob'd been upset, and at the time'd felt . . . disproportionate. inconsequential. a passing foot note, because the ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ข could've found any willing rebound after the van would've dropped him off, in dylan's head, from his point of view, from his shitty obscured perspective. he knew jacob'd gotten his ankle all fucked up, had been . . . somewhere. somewhere else. it'd all boiled down to words scrambled up in some police report somewhere, some case file gratefully put to bed in every area but the cavity of his own aching head. it's when dylan had brushed the french fry salt of his fingers that that weird fragile layer of roleplaying as the sort'a well adjusted adults you see on old late night sitcoms warped out of place, when he'd mention some obligatory shit about keeping in touch &. doing this more often, when he'd been too fried in the head to attach a ๐ ๐ข๐๐๐ฃ, ๐ฃ๐ค ๐๐ค๐ข๐ค to the tail end of the request that jacob let him punch in his cell number to alleviate kaitlyn of middle man duty โโย just to forget for a split second, to reach across the table with the wrong arm, to stare in some far removed numbness where his fingers should've been, where there was just a curve of skin &. bone knocking against jacob's phone and making his lock screen flash.
the eye contact's always the worst part, isn't it ? when jacob speaks, it's a stuttering floodgate, an irregular faucet without a stopper, and it blankets heavy on dylan's lighter shoulder the ever - present option to shimmy out of his side of the booth &. interject a bathroom break intermission ( had the twitchy dejection in everything he'd never known jacob to be not suggested that he too would've melted into the sticky floor tiles, given half the chance. ) โ you couldn't have just, โ and dylan sags in his seat, his back to the padded plastic for the first time that outing, lifting his forearms off the tabletop &. holding his wrist loosely against his sternum, โ dealt with the rejection ? like we all did ? โ but it's . . . the way the words fall out to tumble in those chasms of discomfort, they're room temperature at best. lacking heat, but not icy, nearly just hypothetical in their dull probing, and a flicker of a sharp smile yanked on a harsh exhale, like a shuffling of every feeling sitting on standby while he organized the entire mess of it. these were the objective facts, what he knew, from brain to the thumping pulse tightening in his chest : one. nobody was actually upset about a shitty van shitting itself. two. nobody knew their summer camp safe haven for grade school kids was actually a death trap by way of calendar pages &. piss poor planning. three. nix all the shit that'd gone weird, the only one that would've left that night any worse for wear was jacob, jacob and his shitty idea and his beat up heart. ( and four. ryan was always gonna go wherever the wind blew him. nothing changed that. not them. not dylan. )
โ you, โ and there's that little hesitation, the flash of a smile more teeth and confusion than anything malleable before he'd picked up one overcooked fry and traced out a wobbly circle in a little pool of ketchup, filling it as he spoke &. gestured, โ you created a condition where all this shit that wouldn't have happened, happened. and outside of that little isolated bubble was ๐ข๐ญ๐ญ๐ญ๐ญ๐ญ๐ญ ๐ต๐ฉ๐ช๐ด ๐ฐ๐ต๐ฉ๐ฆ๐ณ ๐ฃ๐ถ๐ญ๐ญ๐ด๐ฉ๐ช๐ต โ โ another circle then, outside of that circle, messy and jagged and glaringly red. like an eye. โ the bigger circle is mr. h and his whole fucked up family's entire fucked up operation, okay, and yet it wasn't mr. h's fault you broke down the van. right ? you'd agree, that was your choice. so then ? same rule applies to your circle. wasn't your fault abi ran into the woods, that werewolves exist, or that i . . . โ &. it's there that that spontaneous well of tenacity dried up quick, curling those clipped words into something sour on his tongue, something pulling him to tear his eyes down towards the mess of red smeared across his plate, to run his tongue between his teeth &. to close five fingers over the jut of his empty wrist, drumming, breathing, relaxing the stiffened slope of his spine. โ this wasn't your fault. i mean . . . i'd know if it was, i was sort'a there. โ
ห [ @thequarrey ย ] jacob ย : โ ๐๐ข ๐๐๐๐๐. ๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐. โ โโ
