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Notes: This is part of the Mary Sue Verse - see Crack!tastic for more info and the stories.
for Kita on her day.
Vinnie: The Lost Years part of MarySueVerse
Once upon a time, there was a skinny little kid from a Georgia trailer park who had his heart broken and went away to the big city to be an architect. Because he couldn't think of anything else to do with himself, and he didn't really care what he did, as long as he was somewhere else, doing something that kept him from thinking about a certain other skinny kid who had hard eyes and soft lips and a chip on his shoulder the size of a double-wide ready-made.
Vince was pretty good at looking after himself, by then. He knew how to walk down a street. He knew how to look like...well, like a skinny little kid with giant circles under his eyes, picked up and plopped down in the middle of a big, violent city where he knew absolutely nobody and nothing. But also like he might own a gun.
He had a scholarship at Georgia Tech, which was the shiniest building he'd ever seen, and where all the other students owned more than two jackets and wanted to intern for I.M. Pei. He spent most of his first year practically living in the studio. Catching up. That's where he met Juliet, who was assigned to the same table as him. She was two years older, and rich. He thought she was beautiful, even though she once said something about "redneck preacher incest" that kind of struck him wrong. But most of the time she was funny and smart, really sharp and mean but at the same time sort of charming, and it turned out she liked him too, because, as she later said, he had the sweetest, most unselfconscious laugh she'd ever heard from a boy.
So somehow that turned into a thing, and for a little while it was great, or it was fine at least. Vince thought maybe he'd figured it out. Jimmie had done it first--grown up, got married, had a baby, started a normal life. And maybe that hadn't worked out quite right, but at least he'd done it, and he had Callie to show for it. Whereas Vince never really got how to make any of that happen. He knew that's what he was supposed to do--get a girlfriend, get married, start a family--but he didn't know how to start the process and he couldn't stop thinking about Jimmie. So the thing with Juliet was good. It didn't really take his mind off Jimmie, but at least he was doing the right thing. Or she was. She mostly decided things--what they were going to do, where they were going to go--and he just went along with it. And that's how the bad stuff started.
Basically, he got up to go to the bathroom and when he came back, Juliet was doing a line of coke off the bedside table. Well, off a hand mirror. But it was on the bedside table, right next to his wallet and the alarm clock and her birth control pills, which she had to put out in sight or she'd forget to take them. He stopped right where he was and just stared. She finished the line, patted her nostril, and smiled at him. Then she offered him a line.
Long story short, he started doing drugs. Just a little at first. Just occasionally. At parties, to loosen up or get away from the stupidity and the conversations about who was where in the tennis ladder. Then, more often. Just with Juliet, just at home. Mostly blow, a little meth. A couple of times some pharmaceuticals from a plastic Ziploc bag. They made him see little squiggly lines around everything, made his legs dance without his say-so. Juliet laughed her head off at that. He smiled and tried to keep a rein on it, tried to think of something to solidify the world around him again, and all he could think of was Jimmie.
Eventually, he walked into a bathroom in a party and found Juliet in there with a few other people, a length of surgical tubing, and a pack of disposable syringes. Things went downhill from there.
Things were not good. Juliet was the center of a big, rich, constantly-changing crowd of admirers and mimics. The guys wanted to date her, the girls wanted to be her. Or the other way around, sometimes. Nobody could figure out what she was doing with Vince, the slightly retarded hillbilly kid. They went out in groups, everyone driving separately to get to the restaurant or the club or the lakeside, in their expensive parent-bought cars. Everyone but Vince, who rode in Juliet's car, sometimes in the back seat because she wanted to bring a girlfriend along too. A girlfriend who would do coke off the dashboard while Juliet drove, who'd offer some to Vince as an afterthought, with a slightly pitying smile. Nobody ever said anything to him about his clothes or his hair or the fact that he never brought his own drugs. He had Juliet's protection. But he couldn't talk to any of them, and they couldn't talk to him. There were a lot of uncomfortable silences, and he started doing more drugs so he wouldn't have to deal with them.
They flew to Vegas one weekend. Twenty of them, spur of the moment, descending on the ticket counter at the airport, with nothing more than what they found in the backs of their cars. Giggling and stoned. Flying over the strip, Vince wondered if he was going insane. He'd never seen Vegas before, and now he was seeing it for the first time with some unknown blue pill pumping pure white energy through his veins, making him feel like he could open the window and fly. The architecture was terrible, fascinating. When they got to the hotel he wanted to go out and see it all, but the others were bored with it, they'd seen it a million times, they just wanted to gamble and go to their rooms to sleep. Charged up with acid energy, he cut himself loose and took off. He didn't tell Juliet where he was going. Just walked out and spent the night walking up and down the strip, his buzz slowly fading, staring at all the weirdness. When he finally came back to the hotel, he realized he didn't have a key to the room. Knocking got him nowhere. He sank down to the carpet beside the door and dozed with his head on his knees. Missing Jimmie.
Juliet turned up around nine, from parts unknown, cold as ice. He tried to explain--he'd needed to get away, he'd been tripping--but she had no sympathy. Somehow, he talked her into driving out into the hills with him. Just the two of them. Away from it all.
It was quiet out there, and hot. The air was dry and pure. For the first time in more than a year, he felt like he could hear himself think. It was scary.
Juliet was bored, and still in a bitchy mood, and he couldn't get Jimmie and Mary Sue out of his head, so when she asked whether he was done now, could they get back to civilization already, he snapped back at her. She shrugged and went back to the car she'd rented, started it up, and drove away. Leaving him in the middle of the desert. Alone.
He hitched back to the city. It took hours to catch a ride, and he spent the time thinking about the swimming hole, about the trailer park, about Katy. Thinking he was a million miles away from everyone and everything he knew. Thinking he'd really, really fucked up.
They flew back to Atlanta and he went back to trying to keep his grades up, trying to get work done, trying to turn in projects on time so he wouldn't lose his scholarship. But it wasn't really in him anymore. The thoughts he'd had in the desert were just under the surface all the time, now. They ached. He couldn't stand feeling it, so he made sweet to Juliet and she fed him more stuff. She taught him to shoot up, and he discovered that the cool full-body wash of heroin was the best thing in the world for rinsing away a bad feeling. He started giving Juliet any extra money he had, as a good faith gesture. And so she'd keep buying the drugs.
It all just kept rolling along and it could have kept rolling forever, right off a cliff, except that the summer came and Juliet told him one Tuesday evening, stubbing her cigarette out as she spoke, that she was leaving for Jamaica the next day. It was the first he'd heard of it. His first thought was: what about the drugs? Instead of asking that, he smiled and tried to bluff his way through with the first person plural. She looked at him unsmilingly, and said she'd see him in the fall. Too late, he realized this was the axe, falling.
He cried, and tried to make it seem like it was about her. She knew better. They'd been sleeping apart for a couple of months, even if they were in the same bed. He knew there were things about him that bothered her. Not the money he didn't have--unlike her friends, she wasn't that shallow. But the dreams he had, that he never told her about. The fact that he never talked about his childhood. The way he sometimes woke up in strange places, not the bed where he'd lain down, but the floor beside it or the couch in the next room or the bathtub. He freaked her out. He could understand that, he guessed. He freaked himself out.
She left, and he decided to use the summer to clean up his act. To stop using and start studying again. That lasted two days, until he realized he was going to die if he didn't get something soon, and he withdrew his last hundred bucks and took the bus to go see this guy that Juliet used to know.
It didn't go so well.
He dragged himself home on foot, because he was ashamed to ride the bus with a black eye, and he was shaking so much he was afraid he'd get arrested. He spent the next day and a half in a miserable daze, all his muscles cramping, freezing cold. Throwing up anything he tried to eat. It was a week from the first and he had no money for rent. He lay curled under a blanket on his crappy futon, crying and hating himself and wishing Katy were there. He couldn't take the thought of Mary Sue or Jimmie, but Katy was a dog and she wouldn't judge. He missed her so much it felt like he was being stabbed.
He woke up in the bathroom, naked except for his underwear, a cigarette filter in his fingers and a long burn mark in the floor beneath it. For a while he just sat there, trying to think. He had to do something. Figure this out. He had no idea how.
Then he thought of Mary Sue, taking him and Jimmie to the mall for new Pumas, a million years ago. They were just two dirty, screwed-up redneck kids. They weren't anything to her, but she did it anyway. So maybe she'd do it again.
He got up and looked at himself in the mirror. He looked like shit. He couldn't go back there with his eye like this--he'd have to wait until it healed up some. Even more, he couldn't go back there shaking this bad. He just needed some rest, and then he'd call her up. See if she'd let him go home for a while. Just till he got his head straight.
He took a long, hot shower and came out of it feeling almost normal. Then he gathered up all the drug stuff he could find--papers, lighters, blackened knives and spoons--and threw it all away. The effort exhausted him, and he fell asleep on the futon, under the cheap comforter. He dreamed about Jimmie, a good dream this time. For the first time in years, he dreamed Jimmie was smiling at him.
Two days later, his eye was good enough to call. He sat on the edge of the futon, his nails bitten down to bloody stubs. Then he picked up the phone and dialed.
