Page 112 of The Bonds We Break

Then another.

People sit next to me. But sometimes I feels like everyone else’s lives are on fast forward, blurring by me while I just sit here. Like I’m in the very eye of a storm.

People think I’m weird, but my president just made a woman he held as a fucking hostage his old lady. Any weirder and this would be an episode ofJerry Springerif that show still existed.

I tap my fingers on the top of the bar. I need some action.

Movement.

Anything to burn some energy.

Fuck it. I’m going home. I glance around for King to tell him I’m leaving, but I don’t see him.

The night air is cool, and the hit of nicotine is potent as I stand in the club’s yard and watch the night sky. It’s clear as a bell. A billion stars. Bet Rae would have some Shakespearean quote about it.

That’s another thing. King quoting Shakespeare to her. It’s like some fucked-up kink between the two of them.

I roll my neck from side to side.

I’m hopeful we’ll be back into some real action soon. The Righteous Brotherhood deserves to be buried. While it’s great that Vex is fighting them from afar ... a one-man electronic war ... I prefer to meet my enemies head-on. Mano-a-mano.

Truth is, I’m bored. Always have been. Hyperfocused on something one minute. Ten thousand things flying through my brain a mile a minute the next. Sudden urges to learn how to do something, then I’m bored rigid by it five days later.

I remember the summer I became aTitanicexpert. I found I was good with my hands. Art. Carpentry. Building things. I suck at paying attention. Once I chopped up my neighbor’s rooster because I wanted to be a butcher. In hindsight, I should probably have killed it before cutting into it with a scalpel I stole from school. But man, was there a heady feeling watching the blood drip from it and watch its wings flap, to feel it’s body strain beneath my hands as it died.

Mom asked if it was because of my ADHD. The doctor told her no, it was because I already had the makings of antisocial personality disorder at nine, but I had to be a teenager for an official diagnosis.

As he told Mom that, I wondered what it would feel like to cuthiminto pieces and see what it felt like as he bled to death in front of me.

I run my finger down the scar on my face.

A reminder of what can happen when I’m bored.

Only two things have stuck with me: drawing, which became my outlet and my career as a tattoo artist, and baking. Yeah, unexpected, I know. But nothing rights the tilt my brain sometimes goes on than sifting flour.

With a bottle of Jack sloshing around in me, I decide to walk. It’s cold, but I have an alcohol blanket wrapped around me. My cut is on my bed in the clubhouse, but I can’t be bothered to retrieve it. I wonder what the temperature is right now. And if it’s this cold here, I wonder how hot it must be on the opposite side of the world. Which makes me wonder where the actual opposite side of the world is to Asbury Park, New Jersey. Is it actually Australia somewhere, or the middle of the ocean?

I’ve got the urge to bake. Chocolate chip cookies. Don’t even know if I have flour, but it suddenly feels imperative that I make cookies tonight.

And I’m still imagining the taste of chocolatey sugar, when a bag is pulled over my head and I’m knocked out cold to the sound of a woman’s voice.

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