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" The Deadliest Sin"

by Terry Echoes

1

Jamie LeBrau hadn't been to church since he was 15. Social studies was far from being his favorite class, and his teacher, Mrs. Wimbledon, a middle-aged woman with Marge Simpson hair, was a huge fan of oral reports done in front of the class. She was not a fan of computers, so all visual aids had to be physically printed out or constructed, and thus take up space in one's backpack. Despite not liking social studies, which Jamie thought of as just history class, he had placed in a class at the "honors" level of academic achievement. That was why he was in a class with Amanda "Mandy" Tippins and Gordon Winslow.

Mandy was a mousy-looking girl with a big chin and straight red hair down to her shoulders. She was head of the poetry club, despite being an underclassman. She was beloved by her sprawling network of friends, although Jamie had once seen her shouting complaints about gay people because she had an unrequited crush on Tommy Vercotti. Gordon had a large, creased forehead, broad shoulders, and narrow hips, making him look a bit like a human wine glass. He had a nice voice, Jamie thought, but in the fifth grade, he had said his favorite TV show was the stock market watch, and instead of saying "yes", he would say "affirmative", and not because it was a fun word to say. Gordon had wanted to start a political science club in school, but not enough people had been interested.

Mandy and Gordon had a sort of mutual gravity toward one another, which most students considered rather odd; Mandy was a poet. Gordon was the uber-geek. However, both paired well because they both shared a sense of self-satisfaction in their own intellects.

In November, Mrs. Wimbledon assigned the third oral report of the school year, but this one dared dreadfully close to actual social studies, and more uncharacteristic of her, it had creative elements to it. This from a woman who voiced that she did not agree each and every time a student said anything that was incorrect. The high school students, this class made up of 15-year-olds, were tasked with designing utopias. Jamie had forgotten what his project was about, but he was paired up with the stoner kid in the back of the class who called people the F word yet was still placed in Honors, possibly because his lawyer father had donated the football field's new AstroTurf.

Mandy had written a short story (which nobody else had done) about a man with a preternatural ability to be abhorred by nature. Because of this, the man was deemed the Second Coming, and a cult of personality swarmed around him, upon which he established a new world order in the vein of "Christian ignorance" as Mandy had termed it. Mrs. Wimbledon voiced no objections whatsoever in response to this.

Jamie's parents had never been homophobic or anti-science, and were both even more educated than they were religiously devout. It was a battle getting them to release him from the burden of having to attend church with them. He hadn't come up with a way to ask them directly to let him stay home, and so pretended to be asleep. When they "woke" him, he got upset, so they yelled at him and left without him. Jamie never went to church again.

The next year, Jamie was taking care of his computer science requirement. So were a bunch of underclassmen who wanted to goof off on the Strong Bad website all day long and smoke pot, and lucky for them, they had Jamie's work to copy off of. Jamie went right ahead and let them. He didn't even need to do anything. When he had finished, Charlie Kedron slapped his hand down onto Jamie's paper and slid it over to himself. "You mind if I copy off you?" he asked.

Jamie did not have the work he had worked so hard on. The teacher was not in the room, which was a frequent habit of his. Jamie wanted his work sheet back, but it was only paper. "Sure, go ahead," he said through gritted teeth.

And so the paper was passed around the room like a dirty spliff, and all Jamie could do was watch the door for the teacher's return. He lasted for five minutes before asking, "Are you guys done yet?"

"Nah, not yet. Hold your horses," said some fat guy Jamie didn't know the name of, but he recognized him. It was like all the guys in class were in some kind of gang, where they would gossip about teachers and call various other students who weren't in the class "fags". This was before it was hip to pretend you were cool with gay guys, not that that would have made any difference. Jamie flipped open one of his textbooks and pretended to read, all the while the agitation of getting his paper back settled in him. He stared hard at those words, wondering where the hell the teacher was anyway, watching the text appear to get bigger and smaller as his anxiety wore down his sanity.

The voice of the teacher could be heard just outside the door. "Alright, hurry up, dude. Teach is coming back," said some girl with an eyebrow piercing.

"Give me a few more seconds, man! Alright, there; I'm done. Whose paper is this, anyways?"

Some other guy grabbed Jamie's sheet and handed it back to him, slightly spindled. He tried to smooth it out while evading the new fingerprints adorning its surface.

Even Jamie hadn't noticed the one kid at the far end of the table they all sat at who had tried to grab the paper but was too late to copy off of it. Jamie didn't know his name, either, and most students in the class didn't, but his name was Randall Clemens, a skinny kid with a strong foreign accent. This was on Thursday. The weekend passed, and Monday came. When Jamie sat down, the fat kid asked him to help show him something on one of the class computers. Wondering why the heck the guy expected him to know anything, Jamie walked over.

Then Randall jumped on his back. His armed wrapped around Jamie's throat, and Jamie let out a choked gasp as he felt as if his esophagus had slid out of alignment in his neck. The stink of this unfamiliar kid was on him, and before he could even think to do anything, he was stumbling backwards. Randall's feet were completely off the ground. In that moment, Jamie remembered a film he loved dearly called _The Princess Bride_in which Andre the Giant's character was jumped from behind by the dread pirate Roberts. Jamie did try to pry the arm from his neck, but all he succeeded in doing was tugging Randall into him. Jamie let himself continue to stagger backwards until he slammed up against a metal cabinet in the wall. It was so effortless, he amazed himself. He was dimly aware of his peers laughing, but he knew better than to think they were just laughing at Randall, or just at him. They were laughing at the spectacle of it all. He was going to be labeled as one of the "fags" who got into a fight that Monday afternoon. Didn't matter he didn't start it; he had _gotten into a fight._So Jamie slammed back against the cabinet again. And again. And again. He would slam Randall into that cabinet all day if he had to. Part of him wanted to, part of him just wanted to get Randall to let him go. But then what would happen?

It was a mercy that the teacher returned from one of his mysterious sojourns. By the time he was in the doorway, the fight had broken up, everyone had distanced themselves from Jamie, and no one looked any more suspicious than they always did. Jamie scowled at the teacher. Where the fuck had he been? He was about to say something, but maybe it was the adrenaline that sped up his thoughts. What was the teacher going to tell the house master? That he had walked away from his classroom and left the students under the charge of the Lord of the Flies? Jamie didn't want to waste his time. Even if the teacher did decide to incriminate himself for his own incompetence, the house master would only try to settle things in private. Settle. Not solve. Nobody would know what would go down behind closed doors. A forced handshake, they could imagine, but that handshake didn't solidify any paradoxical friendship forged in hatred and fear, but a symbol to say, "This conflict is real."

So Jamie sat back down in his seat. Instead of tears welling to his eyes, his neck and face burned with rage. He did something then he never thought of doing in his life: He vandalized his text book, going through page after page, inking in the eyes of every person pictured within. When he got home that afternoon, he stayed in his room and jotted down more acerbic vitriol into his text books. In his history textbook was the image of a veteran soldier who had had his arms amputated or blown off or something. Jamie etched in a new epithet for the man who was long since dead: "Henry 'No Legs' McLegless".

The next day, Jamie found himself heading to the cafeteria in an empty hall. He had tried to ask his homeroom teacher if he could stay in homeroom during lunch period, but she was having none of it. She had a pack of Camels with her name on it. Randall happened to walk past him, but Jamie truthfully didn't recognize him. He just asked Jamie not to tell any of the faculty about their altercation. Jamie just wanted to forget it. "No, it's cool," he said dully. And that was that.

The next year was no more merciful than the last. Jamie had big bags under his eyes and stopped combing his hair. It wouldn't obey him anyway, and the best he could do with it was make himself look like a dorky Adolf Hitler, so he thought. Nobody had signed his yearbook last year, nor the year before, and this year was going to be no different. This was the year he had honors-level physics class. Despite the high academic accolades implied by this level, he was still in another class filled with pot-smoking preppies with all the emotional maturity of a John Kricfalusi cartoon.

On his schoolbus, Jamie had the displeasure of permitting a pasty white fat kid share seats with him, because the bullies at the back were tormenting him. Jamie had been staring mournfully out the window when this kid, whose name was Hank Fabio (which earned him plenty of insults on its own), asked if he could share the empty space beside him. Jamie didn't even look up; he just said, "Yes," and kept looking out the window, even as he was slowly suffocated by the unwashed body odor of this kid.

Hank was making a reputation for himself. He would wear a kind of diaper worn on the head called a "do rag" and he would recite rap lyrics out loud to seemingly nobody in particular and make gang signs with his hands. He would consistently quote Eric Cartman from South Park as if he was some kind of role model rather than the personification of a spoiled manchild's cry for attention. Hank was not a nice person, even if he was picked on and had no friends. He was also in Jamie's physics class, and sat right in front of him.

The teacher this time was a man named Julius Truckman. He was a distractible type, the sort who loved his work, loved Shrek, and would scratch his crotch after writing on the chalkboard, so that he ended up with chalk prints on his pants. Obviously this did not evade the notice of the students who liked to mention it two or three times a day. Jamie opted to ignore it and try and keep his head down, but keeping your head down isn't a sustainable tactic.

Somehow, word had gotten out about his father passing away that summer. Jamie wanted to ignore that, too. It didn't matter what his father would no longer be able to do certain things for him, like teach him to drive, or help him with any adult life lessons. Jamie said good-bye to the sort of man he would be if his father had survived the cancer, and shuffled on as he always had, the visage of his father's disappointment etched in his mind like the statue of Ozymandias. Jamie wanted to much to slice his nose off to spite his face, but why bother? He wasn't worth the effort of torturing, he thought.

This year was a strange one for Jamie. An underclassman named Maria Haughton had taken a spontaneous interest in him out of left field. He had no idea why she would want to hang out with him when he wanted to hide out the lunch period in a stairwell somewhere. He tried not to look at her, tried not to speak because he knew he would say something she wouldn't like sooner or later. She would talk to him, though, about things she found funny, and she would show him outfits she designed for the hell of it in her notebook. He wanted to admit she was cute, but he couldn't. On one occasion, she even hugged him outside of class, and he didn't know what to feel. Who the hell would hug this monster? She had no idea what she was getting herself into.

Not that either of them would have to worry for much longer. His neglect became too much to bear, but it was after the incident with Hank that she never spoke to him again.

Hank had somehow heard that Jamie's dad was dead and, for reasons entirely his own, thought it would be bad ass to mock him about it. "D-D-D-D-Daddy's dead!" he would say repeatedly, mock-stuttering as if to emphasize Jamie should feel traumatized. Jamie wasn't sure just what the fuck he had done to become the subject of Hank's ire, but he needed the excuse to demonstrate he was pissed. He wanted the right to feel, and he exhibited this with a show of unprecedented strength, wrenching Hank's desk and chair aside and in the process slamming his offender to the ground.

This didn't make Mr. Truckman happy in the slightest. "Jamie, go to the office!"

"He's the one that should go to the office!" Jamie squeaked, but that wasn't going to work.

Some tall kid sitting across the room whom he didn't even know told him, "Don't be such a baby, Jamie."

Even as Mr. Truckman told Jamie again to head to the office, Jamie was already gathering his things and fleeing the room. He wanted to die. He wanted to throw himself down the fucking stairs, but he was too scared of pain. Too much a coward to hurt himself, or to bear the abuse from strangers. This was Jamie's life story. The rest of the year had him branded as a volatile, violent-prone outcast, and if only he could deny the accusations, he might have been a sliver happier.

Halfway through the year, Jamie found a pool of white on his chair in physics class when he went to sit down. So without a word, he sat down in one of the empty seats across the room. Mr. Truckman's dander was up from this action alone, and he asked Jamie "What are you doing?" with all the airs and grace as if Jamie had just started pissing on the teacher's desk.

"There's glue or something all over my seat," Jamie protested. Mr. Truckman didn't bother to look, but for some reason, he relented and allowed Jamie to change seats. By then, Hank had been suspended for some reason or another, and the tall kid who called Jamie a baby had been sitting in the rear center of the room for a while now, having changed his own seat without notice.

By the time college rolled around--and his mother insisted he go--Jamie took some relief in what little he could achieve to distance himself from the student body. He commuted rather than stayed in a dorm. He sat in whatever available seat was closest to the exit and never asked any questions. The professors couldn't force him to speak even if they had hot pokers, and at times they seemed hellbent on doing so. Not against him in particular, but professors were a slightly different animal from high school teachers. Instead of chain-smoking, they were huffing a different blend of something called life, and liked to encourage oral exams, oral reports, and so forth.

Of course, just because this was_tall_ high school didn't mean Jamie wasn't getting bullied. One of the buildings the college didn't need was a new student union building, and tuition would certainly have been more affordable without it, but the building was here to stay, and Jamie thought he wanted to try the new food court at least once. He ordered what some call a submarine sandwich, or a hoagie, or a grinder. It was longer than any he'd ever had before, and he thought at the time that it was a good value for his money. He was hungry now, wanted lunch to settle his growling stomach, and thought he'd eat half now and save the rest for home.

He was about ten bites into his lunch when some guy he didn't know and didn't want to know sat down across from him, uninvited. "Hey, are you Gobbleguts?" he asked, though he mumbled his speech in haste so Jamie didn't really register what he had said.

Jamie shot him a death glare. He didn't know he was doing it, just knew he was scowling, but the look he gave made the stranger blanche on the spot. Whatever the hell he had asked, Jamie's answer was, "No."

The guy stood right back up, said, "I was just looking for Gobbleguts; I thought you might be him."

Jamie's indignation was comical to look at. He couldn't be there anymore in that food court, in that room. His lunch had been ruined. The fact that it was edible was the only real benefit. He stood up and threw his food out into the trash. No take-homes for him. He never set foot in that building again.

2

Jamie's first camera phone was a blue flip phone with clicky buttons. He still didn't have a job yet (Wal-Mart wanted him to work overnights, which didn't gel well with his early morning classes), and his mom paid for everything, so he didn't want to ask the widow for any money he didn't absolutely need. He only asked for oatmeal to fix for himself for breakfast and abandoned all plans of buying lunch at college. That was why he didn't have any games on his phone. He felt so weak and exhausted when he got home, that he often kicked off his shoes and dropped his backpack on the floor and passed out on the couch. Sometimes his mother would wake him up and ask him how he expected to hold a job if he was so tired all the time. Jamie didn't have the fight in him to say anything, let alone to urge to speak against the woman who lost her husband only a few years ago. Instead, he shifted his much-beloved naps to his bedroom.

Even the daytime felt like twilight to him. He kept the shades down at all hours, like some weird, fucked-up recluse, though sunlight still managed to creep through. At times, he would spend an afternoon watching the light on his wall shift as the sun slowly set, casting his room into total darkness. Lately, Jamie was thinking more and more about the serated steak knives in the kitchen, and wondering how difficult it would be to draw his own blood with them. Ideations like this were creeping up on him, subliminal, but he put them out of his mind like everything else and just...

Carried on.

He wished he could sleep forever. There was nothing to his life; post-graduation, everything seemed to collapse in on itself then spread away like an expanding galaxy. Pretty soon, the only star he could see was his own fading glimmer, and so he looked inward, drawing only from himself for inspiration. He decided dreams were his only source of happiness. The only place he could touch anything and feel it. Waking was the cruelty. The thought of self-harm was like slapping yourself to forget about the searing paper cut you'd just poured lemon juice on.

Yet, even if he believed dreams were his only route of escape, even his dreams were sometimes laden with the mundane daytime horrors and ennui. The stairwells at his old high school enlarged taller and taller, and the march down their rickety, disintegrating steps to breach the outside and rush to the bus stretched down into infinity. He was in the bowels of Hell, and there was no coming up for air until, again, the sadistic waking moment when he realized he was the dreamer, not the butterfly.

"Fucking Christ," Jamie muttered under his breath.

He dozed off after forcing himself to play Snake on his flip phone for the umpteenth time. Knowing he was drowsy and falling asleep, he marveled at how light his chest felt, as opposed to how hollow it usually felt. Saving him from another spiral down the plummeting, recursive thoughts of his misery and asking himself what the fuck he was doing with his train wreck of a life, sleep came.

Earlier that day, he had photographed a teeny-tiny turtle on the sidewalk, and this was where he found himself again. The turtle was about the width of two fingers in size, but it kept turning in circles, over and over, first spinning this way, then that way, always evading the lens of the camera whenever Jamie wanted to snap a picture. The turtled disappeared among the grass, and Jamie stepped off the sidewalk. This was a mistake. The ground rose up underneath him, and he went sliding down a hillside, the dirt battering his pants. His arms flung upwards, and he hung onto his flip phone with all his might. His body rolled this way and that, heading down to a large, polluted lake. He was sliding closer and closer, unable to brace himself with the heels of his sneakers, and then the lake rose up like a shimmering carpet, and he was swallowed up by the darkness underneath.

Skulls rattled around. He couldn't see them, but his dreaming mind told him that's what that noise was. He flicked open his phone like he'd seen his peers at school do for concerts instead of raising lighters. He couldn't quite see where he was, but he tried dusting some of the dirt off his ruined pants. Slowly trees faded into view as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. His phone was lit up but didn't seem to be illuminating anything, yet still a vision of woods came into view. They were the woods the next block over from the house he lived in until he was 10. In the nighttime that fell, they were beautiful and mysterious and infinite. He checked back over his shoulder. There would be no getting up that cliff to the street. There was nowhere to go but forward, into the black, in between the tall, tall trees.

At first, Jamie didn't dare stray from a straight line ahead. but there was a brief glimpse of lucidity that told him this was only a dream. He roved off to his left, holding his phone ahead of himself. It didn't really function as a flashlight, even though it had a flash on it, but in his dream, it lit up a good portion of the ground ahead of him. The light itself was a tad realistic, looking more like a spotlight from above than anything else.

And then he reached the cave of darkness. A rectangular hole yawned up at him from the ground, and a trickling fear creeped down into his chest. Here, his dreaming mind told him, were where terrors hid. Things unnamed that could break all the rules and kill you in your sleep.

Jamie walked right on inside. The tunnel sloped down into the earth, and then stretched ahead forever and ever, into permeating darkness and invisible malice. He kept his flip phone at the ready, and to his horror, pale white faces, brightly illuminated, appeared on his phone's screen. They looked terrible, colorless, mouths gaping and heads tilted back, rushing forward with their maws and noses. He tried to snap photo after photo, clutching his phone in both hands, but it was too late. He felt a thud against his torso, and fell to the ground.

The impact jolted him awake.

Jamie let out a groan with the realization that if he was awake, then he'd have to marshall himself off to college. He mentally kicked his way through the fog of waking up, and something told him it was evening. The room was comfortingly black, but there was the faint sliver of an orange streetlamp intruding from behind the blind. He fumbled on the nightstand for his flip phone only to realize it had fallen to the floor. He checked the time, but was surprised to find the screen displaying something he had never seen before. At least, he couldn't remember seeing it. It was a photo taken with the phone's camera, a night scene judging from the lateral sides, but the rest of the image was obscured with a blinding white light of some indistinguishable shape. All he could do was let out a "The hell?" as he failed to puzzle out when such an image had been captured.

More important was for him to check the time. Crap. Jamie remembered his music history course wanted them to attend a performance. A mandatory performance in which the professor would be performing. They would have to write a paper on it and everything. "Oh, for fuck's sake." Jamie wanted nothing better than to lie back and give up, but no, the eternal struggle of self-mortification had to continue. He lumbered out of bed and out of his room and out of his house and into the car. If he hurried, he would just make it. He didn't like driving at night. Too dark. The headlights never felt like they illuminated enough for his comfort. And there were always assholes who wanted you to drive faster, even though it was a rule you had to reduce your speed in the dark. Jamie muttered angrily to himself as his car purred down the long stretch of road that headed into college town. Some stretches of the road didn't even have street lamps. Maybe somebody thought they would be a waste of power and maintenance time, but he'd sure feel a hell of a lot safer if he could only see where in the hell he was headed. Still, he managed the journey without incident. Now it would only be a ten-minute walk from the commuter parking lot to the building whose lecture hall was being used for this performance. At first he was worried someone might try to mug him as he'd overheard had happened recently to a student, but this thought was scared away by the panic that he didn't remember what room he was supposed to go to. Maybe he should just turn back now and admit he was a failure.

He decided to at least try going in the building. Fortunately for him, the room was obvious: Musicians were carrying instruments into one of the amphitheater-style lecture halls right near the entrance, and so he chose himself a seat at the far back, so nobody could try anything behind him. So he sat, and scribbled notes into his notebook of his thoughts during the performance while filtering out any that had nothing to do with the music whatsoever. He did notice absolutely nobody else had brought writing materials to take notes with, so he had to contend with feeling more foolish than he always did when he was out in public.

God, he just wanted to die. He wanted to close his eyes during the performance and pass away, and the performers and students would file out without even noticing him, and he wouldn't be found until morning. And even then, maybe someone would just think he was early to the lecture and fell asleep, and he'd go through several classes until his corpse really started to stink and they'd drag him out and chuck him in a ditch somewhere.

He cast away these thoughts and any inward cuss words with which to admonish himself, and he listened to the music. He had a difficult time thinking what to write about it, other than the notes went up and down, and there were various instruments he couldn't identify by sight alone. None of it moved him. None of it reached him. None of the music whatsoever had any kind of effect that the professor so firmly believed it had, and which his student performers thought they believed it had just to unconsciously win some sycophantic favor. The music wasn't displeasing at any rate, although it all sounded very same-y to him. He wasn't planning to mention that in his paper. At one point, some woman--or girl, if she wasn't yet 21--strolled out of the hall in the middle of the performance to answer her cell phone. She never came back, but the professor did remark that walking out of a performance was like saying "fuck you" to the performers. It was the first time Jamie had ever heard an educator use the F word, and its usage just made him want to give up even harder. Could you do that? Were there magnitudes of giving up? It seemed like such an apathetic response to him that an amplitude of quitting hardly seemed relevant beyond the act itself. At any rate, the audio was stuck in his brain of his professor using other various swear words, particularly the other F word while toking up or something.

Eventually the music did end, long after Jamie wondered if the professor didn't have classes to teach in the morning. He made a habit of hurrying to leave the premises to evade the capture of any potential unwanted attention from his classmates whom he was conditioned quite thoroughly to avoid. He did notice, however, that as he crossed the bridge overlooking the street on his way to the commuter lot, that he was utterly alone. Everyone had taken some other route, and he wondered why this was. Perhaps he was too damn stupid to realize he could've just used the visitor's lot at this late hour, or perhaps they were using the faculty lot because the rules never seemed to apply to anyone but himself.

There was something peaceful about the uncomfortable chill that ripped around him as he stood there halfway along that bridge. He allowed himself to entertain some immature wishful thinking as he looked out over the street, such as hoping maybe some handsome, intelligent guy would catch him off-guard, appearing like a ghost in the night, and tell him not to do what he was thinking. He'd be tough, but loving, a fusion that would be capable of teaching Jamie's charred and flayed heart to love again. Fucking shut up, he thought to himself. This is why people call you a faggot. You deserve it. Pitiful. Nobody's going to save you from your own fucking despicable laziness.

Jamie set one foot on the bottom rung of the metal fence that ran along the middle portion of the bridge. There was no chainlink fence here like he'd seen on street bridges over the highway that seemed to prevent the possibility of climbing over. He certainly wasn't athletic enough to do so, which he accepted as one of the many reasons everyone hated him. Selfish. You think everything's about you. Even his involuntary self-hatred couldn't escape criticism. There was no escape. Not for him. Unless...

Jamie set a second foot on the bottom rung of the metal fence. He gripped the top rung tight with both hands. To actually look down, the road seemed so much lower than he ever considered it before. Nah, he thought. With his luck, he probably wouldn't die. Just paralyze himself and become an even more severe burden on his mother. Poor dumb fag tried to kill himself. "Lol".

Jamie was seriously considering taking up drinking. He wanted to wreck himself somehow, but that only placed his problems in a nutshell. He'd overheard many a time from people how you're incapable of having fun if you don't drink. And yet, if he drank, he always imagined that somehow he'd be belittled for that, too. Dumbass hypocrite drinks. Doesn't even do it right, either. Somehow, he'd do it wrong. Can you even imagine him in a bar? He'd be goin' home to masturbate by himself every night.

Jamie stepped off of the fence. Killing himself was something he wanted to get right on the first try. He was looking forward to crying himself to sleep when he turned to continue down the bridge.

He stopped in his tracks. Something felt familiar. He flipped open his phone and checked that image he'd seen earlier. His camera app "thingy" had been on before, so he thumbed open his phone's photo gallery and checked. The very edges of the image were of this very bridge. He was sure of it. Just as he was looking right now, the photo matched--save for the glowing light obstructing the middle of the screen. But this time he gave the light a second look. It didn't seem so misshapen and white as he at first thought. He stared hard at the screen until he could see the colored edges of each pixel, and realized he could see what looked like wings. Lots of wings. Above and below, arching up and folded downward toward the bottom of the image. And amidst all the glow there looked to be numerous eyes, countless eyes, all spun at various angles, all staring somberly out at him.

What a strange effect, his waking mind tried to tell him. When he went to put the phone away, he got the shock of his life.

A figure stood there, but not a human figure. No, most assuredly not. Some parts seemed human, certainly. The figure was dressed in a formal black suit with a shiny green tie, but he was wearing a golden toga-like sash from his left shoulder down to around his right hip. That was where the human-like attributes ended, apart from having two arms and two legs. The head was the head of a sheep, and its horizontal pupils were fixed squarely on Jamie. Its fur (wool?) was white as snow, its face black as the darkest of chocolate. It didn't have shoes, but stood on two hooves. It had two wings radiating out from its body like leafy branches that fanned out into flaming solar hues.

The surrealism of the figure standing before him drove Jamie to his knees. All his life flashed before his eyes, which he always expected to be accompanied by the theme song to America's Funniest Home Videos. He had spent so much of his youth pretending, praying, and yearning, but none of it meant anything because none of it was ever real. He had never seen any of those things outside of his mind's eye, but this monstrous entity before him was real, was in his sight. This wasn't some spiel from an evangelist making bold claims with nothing but volume to back them up. This wasn't television's fantastical world of lies. Jamie was kneeling on this bridge, far from home, far from his car, freezing himself in the November wind, staring at this physical entity whose wool and wings buffered in the breeze, and whose wet eyes blinked, and whose nostrils drew in and exhaled breath.

And then it spoke. It spoke in a melodic voice that was just slightly masculine and very eloquent in tone. "Stand to your feet, Jamie LeBrau. Be not afraid; I have been delivered unto you from on high. I am your guardian angel, Asaliah."

Jamie was having a difficult time grasping his situation. Asaliah noticed this, and asked, "Thou may have not perhaps believed that celestial beings would look like you?"

Now, Jamie had been a smart student, but at a time like this, logic just wasn't something he could deal with. Logic was for real-world problem solving. He couldn't even ascertain just what sort of a problem he was up against here. No train of thought would leave the station, let alone head to any destination that would be appropriate for this outside-the-box context. Maybe if he took some deep breaths and tried to calm down, the vision would fade. Maybe he ought to have committed himself years ago.

"I have thought both long and hard about the dangers to thy life," Asaliah said. "I can conclude and strongly so that loneliness is what ails thee. Thou must a friend in confidence seek."

"Hah!" Jamie was kneeling on all fours now, so when he laughed hard, his spit spattered onto the concrete. "I've survived this long without one. Angel comes down from Heaven just to mock me. I suspected God had it in for me."

"God's indifference is imperative to your holiest free will," said Asaliah. "Were you not a minute ago tempted to end your life in vain?"

A hot rush of familiar shame washed over Jamie's cold cheeks. Then he felt his body being hoisted up by nothing; his heels felt lighter than air, and before he knew it, he was standing. The angel was upon him in just two strides, and his warm hands clasped Jamie's shoulders. His wings closed around the both of them, and all Jamie could do was tremble in fear. He felt a tear run down his cheek, and by the time it reached his chin, Asaliah's wings were folding neatly away, and they were both standing in Jamie's bedroom.

Jamie emitted a gasp of shock. "Wha? What about the car?" was his first thought.

"It is outside," Asaliah told him.

Jamie pushed the blind aside to peek out onto the street below. The car was indeed there alright, but... "It's upside-down! You dingus!" He shot the angel an incredulous stare, then glanced back down to the street. This time, the car had righted itself.

"Sorry about that," Asaliah said.

Jamie began to pace his room, grabbing his head. "What is happening here? I'm losing it. I'm losing my marbles. It's finally happening." He stopped, walked over to his bookshelf, and pulled out a book to flip through, just to check he wasn't dreaming. Alas, he could read the words just fine, although he couldn't concentrate on the text. "No, I'm too lucid to be dreaming."

"Jamie, we really need to discuss your loneliness, and what a danger you are to yourself and others."

"How about let's not and say we did?" The last thing Jamie wanted was to rub salt in the gaping wounds of his life. "I already know what people think I need. I'm never going to get it."

"Why do you think that?"

Jamie was trying not to look at the angel, which was next to impossible. He gave a look at them again and felt an involuntary shudder. He'd seen cartoon characters before, but this...person was clearly not an animated drawing. He wasn't sure which would better preserve his own sanity: Throwing out all he knew about animals and people and angels and anthropomorphic characters, or embracing all these false assumptions to pretend this wasn't so far-fetched. He'd once seen a bumper sticker that read, "No gods. Never were." What had this angel said God was? "Indifferent." Okay. Indifference he could do.

"Because I've never met anybody like me. And before you suggest I meet someone different, just stop. The only way I could meet anybody who was different would be if they were like me. Emotionally tortured. Bullied."

Asaliah was pensive for a moment. "Tomorrow morning, you will have a friend. You will depart from this home and move into a new one." He then reached forward, tapped on Jamie's forehead, and Jamie fell asleep on the spot.

3

Nancy Rogan lived just off-campus in one of the more beautiful available rented properties in the illustrious city of Albenwall. There were no windows in the first floor, and sunlight shone in through the walls of the cupboard. It did have high ceilings, though the leaky pipes of the upstairs bathroom were visible in the downstairs bathroom. The lead-based paint was peeling from the exterior wooden siding, and the yard was overgrown with zombie-like dead shrubberies and pricker vines. Within a one-mile radius of the address were no less than six churches and one hundred registered sex offenders.

Nancy wasn't her _first_first name. Her parents had filled out her birth certificate with the name Henrietta, which she felt lacked sex appeal, so as a self-styled "emancipated" teen, she had changed it based on the girlfriend of a musician she admired. Most of her college courses took place in the art and music building, and her favorite course that semester was metal working. She hadn't expected there to be a course offered in it, but it didn't feel like a class--it felt like fun. She'd learned quite a bit so far, and this knowledge transferred over to certain necessitated repairs to the property she paid rent on. Sure, she had to get her arms dirty, but getting the shower running was the only way she was going to be able to wash those arms off.

Her life was a balancing act, not unlike the rickety stepladder she was balancing on to work the pipes in the ceiling of the downstairs bathroom. She was an avid subscriber to all manner of extracurricular groups, but at the same time, she was busy with rebuilding the apartment she rented, and then there were college courses and homework and then she needed to work to make money. Between carrying advocacy signs and funding trips to the hardware store, for Nancy, there were 48 hours in a day. She felt fortunate, then, that she would soon be getting a second pair of hands today.

Jamie LeBrau was that second pair of hands. He was standing at the front door, clutching his messenger bag nervously in both arms, when she answered the doorbell. She forced a smile and flung the door open for him. "You're Jamie, right?"

Jamie did not know this person. He had no idea what he was getting himself into other than walking to this address from campus on the recommendation of a freaking angel. How did she know his name? How had the angel arranged this? "Um, yes," he said, as she walked away from him and back to the bathroom to resume working. With more than an air of uncertainty, he stepped into the living room, shutting the door behind himself.

"If you need to use the bathroom, you're gonna have to hold it, Jamie." Nancy was already up the stepladder. "Unless you wanna help by handing me the spanner."

Jamie had a growing suspicion that she must have mistaken him for someone else. Some other Jamie, who knew her name and knew what a spanner was.

"That's not a spanner, Jamie! Get me the--get me the wrench!"

"Sorry." Jamie grabbed the only wrench on the sink and held it up toward Nancy.

She took it and began tightening something on something connecting the pipes, as far as Jamie could tell. "You shouldn't say you're sorry, Jamie. People won't believe you when you mean it." She glanced down her shoulder at him, and he worried she would topple off then and there. "Well put your bag down. Make yourself at home, chop-chop. You gonna help me with this?"

Jamie wasn't sure he wanted to let go of his bag just yet. He didn't much care for the way she kept saying his name over and over, either. "Listen, uh..." He paused as he tried to think of a question that didn't involve a talking, bipedal sheep. "How did you hear about me?"

Nancy grunted as she finished whatever the heck she was doing up there, and she stepped down from the stepladder. "I posted on some of the bulletins around campus. I figured you e-mailed me about that."

Angels use e-mail? Jamie thought. That was when there was a pounding at the front door. Rather than ask him to move aside, Nancy pushed right up against Jamie to exit the bathroom. She flung open the door and welcomed in two of her friends, a man and a woman whom Jamie didn't know in the slightest.This is too many people, he thought. I want to leave. A second thought occurred to him as he saw how the three of them got along: She has friends, and I don't. Is she the one Asaliah meant for me to meet?

Jamie noticed that Nancy's face didn't change much to match the excitement in her voice as she greeted Ted and June. Ted had a similar build to Jamie, somewhat tall and broad, but he was wearing thick-soled shoes, so he appeared taller. He was wearing a worn-out black leather jacket, a plain white t-shirt, and a pair of blue jeans. June also wore jeans; she was somewhat short and a bit on the rotund side. She was wearing a t-shirt with some sort of complicated logo on it that Jamie couldn't read (and didn't dare). She also had a knitted cap on her head and long, brown hair with low-hanging sideburns. Jamie did wonder how warm the cap would be, knowing that winter was fast approaching.

Nancy introduced the three of them by saying their names a whole lot. Ted gave Jamie a friendly wave which Jamie found a touch aggressive. Jamie could feel his eyebrows knit, and tried to make it stop without breaking his concentration so they wouldn't think he was glaring at them. "Good to meet you," Jamie mumbled.

"So are we gonna watch shit or what?" Ted asked with a grin. He flung himself onto the couch, and June sat herself on his lap. Nancy stood behind the couch and eagerly switched on the TV and flipped channels to some show that the three of them apparently watched as a group. Jamie just watched awkwardly, then stared at the floor.

"Jamie, sit the heck down and take your bag off," Nancy said. For some reason, Jamie felt compliant, so he occupied the last available seat, what with Ted sitting sideways with his legs stretched out.

"Um, where are you gonna sit?" he asked Nancy.

"Oh, I'm not, Jamie. Don't worry about me."

Ted slid a couple of bottles of hard lemonade from his jacket and handed one to June. They cracked them open, clinked their bottles together, and drank. Nancy was reminded she had a bottle of something called Schnapps in the otherwise empty fridge, and she fetched it to join in the drinking. She asked Jamie if he wanted some, but he declined.

So the four of them watched some very noisy show Jamie didn't recognize; he wasn't much a fan of sitcoms. He wasn't sure what was going on in the slightest, but some guy with an Australian accent was being spied upon by his nosy neighbors. The neighbors' wife had a rather raspy voice, and June made everyone laugh by imitating her, saying, "Ned, I want you to rub my feet!"

Even Jamie laughed. Caught up in the moment, his guard was down, and he, too, imitated the voice. "Ned, let's have another baby."

To his shock, the others laughed. June was bouncing up and down from how hard Ted was chortling. "Dude, that was so spot-on!"

Jamie blushed, but he could feel himself smiling. The smile quickly dissipated as he had to wonder if they were all slightly buzzed and that was why they laughed so easily.

He didn't care for much of the jokes on the show; they were rather formulaic and awkward, but the others didn't seem to even notice somehow that they didn't laugh every time the canned laughter thought they should.

And then the show ended. It ended up being quite shorter than Jamie was expecting. Nancy clicked off the television. "Did you guys want to run out to the hardware store?" she asked.

"Nah, I dunno," Ted said. "It's late, and we're hungry."

"Yeah, but Ted, didn't you say you'd help me out by running to the hardware store?" Nancy asked again.

Ted exhaled, but smiled. June hopped off his lap. "Yeah, let's go. I'm kinda restless," she said.

"Can you guys wait for me in the van for a couple of minutes? If I'm not there in five minutes, go ahead and leave without me," Nancy said, handing off a list and a fifty dollar bill to Ted.

Ted screwed up his face in puzzlement. "Uh, don't you think you should come with?"

"Yeah, I just need a few minutes," Nancy said. When Ted and June had been rushed out the door, she turned to Jamie. "Did you want to come with us?"

"Uh, I don't know," Jamie said, averting his gaze.

"I think it would be good to get out of the house, Jamie," she said.

Again he deliberated. "I think they're a little intense for me," he said just above a mumble.

"Oh," Nancy said. She said it again. "Oh."

She walked over to the door and closed it tight, then turned off the overhead light. Only a table lamp that sat on the floor of the opposite corner remained on. She strode over to Jamie, that blank look in her eyes, and sat down at his side, right up against him. "Are you not used to talking to people?" she asked him squarely.

Jamie blushed hotly. "No, not really." He couldn't hide the indignation in his voice.

Nancy let out a heavy sigh as if he was deeply inconveniencing her. She then swiveled about, suddenly straddling Jamie's lap between her thighs. Her hands slid down his body and began to work loose the button and fly of his pants while he protested. "N-no, what are you doing?"

"I'm gonna bang you, so you won't be so scared of people," she said with the exact same tone as when she was asking him for a spanner earlier that afternoon.

"How the hell does that work?"

"You're a virgin, aren't you?"

"I don't _care,"_said Jamie. "That was cut off for me a long time ago. I don't want this. I'm not cheap--"

Nancy stood off the couch suddenly and turned away, cupping a hand to her face.

"Is something funny?" Jamie asked.

Nancy shook her head. "No, it's just...nevermind. Forget I did anything, okay? If you change your mind about staying a virgin, let me know."

Jamie felt as if he was crying, but no tears appeared on his face. He quickly fixed his pants. "You say it like it's a vaccination. I don't give myself out that easily. I can't give myself to somebody like that."

"It's not about giving. It's about taking what you can get," Nancy said. "Let's not talk about this."

"What were you planning on doing when we finished keeping your friends waiting?" Jamie's face was red, and he was getting short of breath. His hands felt like they were throbbing with anger.

"Look, I've had my share of bullying growing up," Nancy said. "If you do this with me, or anyone, then nothing they've said will matter any longer."

Jamie shook his head. "You can't rewrite history. Not one line. I don't want to be used. I want to be loved. And I can't love you. Where the hell were you all the years that I needed someone?"

Nancy looked at him with that same expressionless look on her face, like a dog being shown a magic trick. There was a long silence where Jamie waited for her to yell at him, but she didn't. Instead, all she said was, "Do you wanna come to the hardware store with us? It'll help you to get out, Jamie."

Damn it, Jamie thought. It felt so stuffy and uncomfortably hot in here. He wanted to duck out, to drink in the cold fresh air outside (or as fresh as it got in the city). "Fine," he said, knowing he'd never have another excuse any time soon. All those years ago in his mind were moments apart, almost simultaneous, but being outside and being cold was something he could feel.

Outside was a rusty old van with half a painting of a tiger on it. Nancy rapped hard on the door. "Ted, give me my money back."

The door slid open. In the back of the van, Ted and June were half-nude, clearly having been making out.

All Jamie could do was let out a heavy sigh as if he was being inconvenienced. As he boarded the van, he asked, "Say, do any of you know how to Madison?"