Page 44 of Overkill

He Walks Different

Melody

Fuck this stupid town.

I sat in my truck, waiting for the high school to let out. They were on a weird, shortened schedule without busses, so I was surrounded by the parents of my old classmates as they parked up and down Main Street.

I hated Main Street. I hated that the Grays were at every corner. At the church, where they had their own pew right in the front. The school, which had a statue of Ethanuel Gray, who founded the town back in 1774. Then there were Grayfarms, Graystone, Graystables. Everything was motherfucking Gray-this, Gray-that. They even wanted to change Mourningkill High to Ethanuel Gray High School.

It almost passed. Thank God it didn’t.

The guy had been a religious creep who believed in bigamy, and he’d married his youngest wife when she was only twelve. Not a fucking role model in my book.

I got out of the truck, just so I could stretch my legs, and walked up Main Street to kill the time.

There was never much parking, which meant I had to get there early to avoid getting backed up around the corner and left idling down the line. The school was built long before the creation of the modern pickup line, and we still hadn’t quite caught up with the times.

None of the town had, to be honest.

That was why people liked it.

It was also why I hated it.

I stopped in front of Timeless, the only jewelry shop in town. Who was I kidding? There was only one of everything. One bar, one hardware store, one hairdresser. We didn’t have the population to merit two of anything.

But this was the one place I had never entered, despite always longing to. Or longing for someone to enter it for me.

Timeless had a row of engagement rings ranging from obnoxiously large to absolutely miniscule and affordable, and I liked them all. It was the idea of real jewelry that didn’t come from an easter egg. I could never justify it, of course. Nor did I ever think anyone would ever want to marry me.

I stared at the glass as I positioned myself, shifting until the jewelry fit perfectly on me to give the illusion the rings were on my finger and a matching necklace was around my throat. Like I was trying them on.

It was a rather bitter pastime, coveting something I could never have.

But sometimes bitterness tasted better than nothing.

This was a cursed town, and no one ever escaped. Once you were here, Mourningkill got its claws on you, and you were stuck forever. No one left.

It’s why everyone was related. Outsiders like my mom and I were an anomaly. She’d been pulled in to work as an ICU nurse for an understaffed rural hospital, and it felt like we’d been dropped into a whole different world.

New people moving in was rare, and generally unwanted by most of the locals.

It was why Greg Vedder and his friends were such a breath of fresh air.

It had been two whole days since I’d seen him, but he was never far from my mind.

Even his name reminded me of some indie rock star with a guitar, and a whole life philosophy the likes of which a rigid town had never heard of. He was Johnny Depp in Chocolat. He was the knight in flannel, promising to chase away demons. Handsome, with strong hands, and likely the kind of body that belonged to the top half of a centaur. I could only imagine the bottom half matched, too. The kind of weight that made him walk different.

And I…needed to stop thinking about him that way.

Madness lied. All my madness, in particular.

It would break my heart if the only person in this town who thought kindly of me saw my most festering wounds and was disgusted.

Some things just weren’t for people like me.

Life was hardship and suffering. Believing it wasn’t would just make me vulnerable. It was better to keep my eyes on my own paper.

I turned away from the shiny jewels, and put my attention back to the school.