Jeremiah Quick by SM Johnson

If ever something screamed keep your distance , it was
that jacket.
    It wasn't Goth back in nineteen-eighty-nine,
not in their conservative town. Nearest thing was punk underground.
It was – from what she gathered from Jeremiah – anarchist,
anti-Christian, political, and angry. At school, "punk" somehow
equaled "freak", and Jeremiah got hassled something fierce.
Punched, kicked, rolled into snowbanks. Often right in front of
other students. In front of Pretty.
    Maybe Pretty should have been afraid of him,
but she wasn't. She was fascinated.
    The urge to get close to him, the longing
for him to see her , was irresistible.
    His friend Chill was... well. Chill was
different.
    He was a quiet guy, soft-spoken, highly
intellectual, probably genius actually – and had, in an Egyptian
mourning ritual, shaved his eyebrows off. It was a thing , at
school, that earned him all kinds of derision and harassment,
although Pretty could never figure out why so many people
gave a fuck about Chill's eyebrows. Perhaps just because he was
weird – his olive green flak jacket, his lack of speech, his whole
persona a lurking sense of strange.
    Later he would write her long, rambling
letters from college that she would read as fast as she could,
frantic for news of Jeremiah. She never knew Chill well, though,
and when the letters started sounding depressed, she stopped
replying.
    There were things she didn't want to know or
take responsibility for. And yeah, how to save a life, and all
that, but even if it made her a total asshole, Chill drained her
emotional reserves, writing to her as if they'd shared some magic
moment by the bonfire… as if the feeling was mutual, when it
wasn't. And he'd never had any real news about Jeremiah.
    She hoped he hadn't done anything awful.
She'd never looked for him . The fact that he was laying his
depressed shit on her , who didn't particularly even know
him, was a tremendous burden. There was a saying that that once
you've saved a life, you're responsible for that life forever.
Well, she didn't want any part of that, didn't want to earn Chill's
undying gratitude. The fact of the matter was that even though
Chill was always around, he didn't talk . So the most Pretty
knew of him was from his piteous, whining letters, and by then she
was too damaged to respond.
    All she ever wanted from Chill was some
link, however weak, to Jeremiah.
    Jeremiah's dyed-black hair went past his
shoulders and was, technically, a Mohawk, but Pretty didn't know
that until Halloween, when he spent his sleeping hours making it
stand up in eight inch spikes.
    Pretty and her friends were shiny-faced
tenth graders, new to the school, while Jeremiah and Chill were
seniors. It might have given Pretty and Co. status, except Jeremiah
and Chill were outcasts.
    They were so interesting it made Pretty want
to be an outcast, too.
    When schedules got smoothed out, Pretty
didn't have a single friend who shared her lunch period. Except
Jeremiah.
    So she offered him little rectangles of
chocolate, and he took them.
    Bait.
    Jeremiah was so polar opposite of every
other person in her whole world that Pretty couldn't stay away.
Even when he was mean to her.
    "Why are you here?" he asked the first day,
baffled or irritated that she followed wherever he went.
    "I don't know anyone else," she
answered.
    "You don't know me, either."
    "But I will," she'd said, ever the optimist,
although she understood his "ha" in response was not intended to be
funny.
    In the mornings before school, and during
break time, he stayed as far away from her as he could, while still
behind the red smoking line. Red-liners, they were called, the
people with cigarettes, trapped behind the wide line painted on the
black pavement. It was laughable, but surely better than the
tobacco-free schools of now. Jeremiah's friend Chill made eyes at
one of Pretty's friends, and so in between his infatuation with
that girl, and Pretty's infatuation with Jeremiah, the group just…
kind of