The Empty Ones Read Free Page B

reach out to try to touch him. We had an awkward conversation.
    Obviously.
    What do you even say to somebody like that?
    â€œHey, funny thing—I learned to pleasure myself to your poster above my bed. You know, back when I was twelve. I used one of those squiggle pens with the battery-powered motor. Working on anything interesting lately?”
    Jesus Christ, it was a nightmare. I tried to bail, but Jackie volunteered him to take me home, and I very nearly stroked out from embarrassment. But then the impossible happened: He said yes.
    What?
    Nobody gets that chance. Nobody gets to slip out of some glitzy showbiz party with their teenage crush and glide away into a masturbation fantasy turned reality. Well, nobody except me.
    All of my preteen puberty dreams—those confused young fantasies that kept cutting out right as they got to the good parts, all stuck partway between disgust at the gross mechanics of sex and the desire to finally experience them firsthand—they were going to come true. I was there, in Marco Luis’s expensive exotic car, and he had his J.C. Sable smirk on when he leaned over to kiss me.
    It wasn’t exactly how I’d pictured it. I had imagined some rock ballad blaring softly from the stereo while the full moon cast a pale and romantic light through the foggy windshield, his lips just brushing me at first, and then harder.…
    I did not picture Marco then trying to drain the humanity out of me because he’s some kind of immortal sociopathic monster. Didn’t imagine the army of faceless people at his beck and call, and the screaming balls of light they worshipped as “angels.”
    Haha, listen to me! This is my life. This is what I would say, if I ran into an old acquaintance at the supermarket and they asked what was new.
    â€œOh, you know, just running from a former teen heartthrob and his army of half-people because I somehow managed to kill one of their energy-gods. How about you? Got rid of the braces, I see…”
    Of course it has occurred to me that I’m completely, gibberingly, smear-my-crap-on-the-walls-to-insulate-against-the-government’s-thought-rays insane. It occurs to me every single morning, when I wake up in another scabby anonymous motel and briefly wonder where my life went. I had a good one, you know—not great, but waiting tables and doing low-grade stunt work on the side was better than huddling behind the closed drapes in a Motel 6 by the highway. It occurs to me that I’ve gone mad every single time I step into the stained and forever broken shower to stand under five minutes’ worth of tepid water that smells like pennies. It occurs to me when I eat my breakfast of stale chips from the vending machine—maybe fast food, if Jackie or Carey weren’t too hungover to go out in the morning. The notion is occurring to me right now, as I’m narrating my own life to myself, swaddled in a scratchy comforter that looks like something Vanilla Ice would have worn. But if I’m insane, the pills aren’t working. Maybe I’m not crazy. Maybe this is all just some impossibly elaborate prank.
    It would be really funny, if it was.
    â€œYou got me!” I yelled, louder than I meant to. “You got me good! Come on out now. Come on, guys—I see the camera. Right there in the sad plastic fern thing. Pretty sneaky!”
    I waited for a response. I rubbed at the sixth finger on my left hand. The ugly, malformed little extra digit that had hurt me every day of my life, except for three: The night my sister died, the first time I saw an angel … and the first time I killed one. It hadn’t hurt for a single moment since.
    â€œâ€”she’s never going to come,” said the TV. A scrawny, weaselly-looking dude moped into a bowl of cornflakes.
    â€œI bet that sounds familiar,” Charlie Sheen quipped back at him.
    A fat child looked at the camera, smiled and shrugged like, “what are