I don’t want to be here. I just went to a graduation party for a kid who is really important to me. I wrote all through last night, almost 11,000 words, starting with Aunt Easy Part 1 and ending where you just turned the page. I want to go hang out with my family. I want to go talk to them about the way this story is changing me. Talk to them about the man I want to be now that Guardian’s War is over and I am not in battle mode anymore.
Black. It is not my color. Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, makeup artists long ago found out that certain colors work well with certain skin tones and hair and eye color. And they can be expressed with these terms. Black sits proud in the Winter category. But I am royal blue, which is Summer. It was my favorite color. It was the color I looked best in. It is completely gone now. I wear only black. It clashes with my personal season and so it has been effective for decades. Me in black is jarring. It wars against everything I do and am, and I have been draped in it for decades, purposely creating discord in everyone who sees me.
And there is more. Combat is a way of life with me, but it wasn’t always. I used to be Junebug and the Degenerates. I used to be the guy Bekah fell in love with. I do not even know what that guy did to himself to become what I am now. And how do I go back?
Certain things have to go. Colors, jewelry. Certain ideas need to be pared back in my mind. I am very overweight, but I can’t be their Butterball anymore. I have to shed this weight and become the man I was always meant to be.
It all starts with three songs. “Don’t Take the Girl” by Tim McGraw. “Live Like You Were Dying” by Tim McGraw. And “I Hope You Dance” by Lee Ann Womack. That is the direction I want to go. That is the man I want to be. This story has shown me a taste of what I could be again. I want to go get started on that now.
But first her. I have to get this last bit of Aunt Easy out. Show you the trip that ruined our lives and give you the secret to why I bought a Nova. When I am done, I can start talking about the next big movement in this story. I can put this woman behind me where she belongs, and I can focus on what happened to me and Uncle Ball after the horror of the trip. So let’s start. It all starts with a phone call. We have heard one like it before.
So Grasp’s godfather was Mumble’s nephew. He was an adult when I was three and now I’m fourteen, and he has been grooming Grasp since Grasp was an infant. Grooming him for this trip. Preparing my little brother for this time, this age. Eight years old.
The idea was simple. Godparent visit. Grasp’s comes to pick us all up. Each godparent gets to have us for two weeks. Then we all get driven back. Grasp is broken here. I know he got back and told my parents. I know there was no way Mumble was going to call the cops on his nephew. I know Rose had to find a way to make it okay. Not a big deal, she told Grasp. Not anything we need to worry about.
Guilt ate her and Mumble alive, and being told that nothing was wrong in the warring mind of Grasp made him have to prove it. The trip did all of that. But it did so much more as well.
I only stayed with Uncle Ball and Aunt Easy for one week. After that week, Uncle Ball said he had to do something and he dropped me off at Uncle Savior and Aunt’s house. Uncle Savior could see. I didn’t realize it until last night, but he knew when I walked into that house that something had happened the week before at Uncle Ball’s. He knew that Ball throwing me away a week early was wrong. The whole thing stunk, and he tried to do what he could. He tried to get close, ask questions to one of his favorite people in the world. He was trying to get the truth out of me. Started with the car.
“Come on, dinner’s over. I want to show you something,” Uncle Savior said. We got up, me confused. We walked out of the Mocking Family House and to the garage. And I knew what to expect. Savior had been living here for over a year, but that kind of time doesn’t change this sort of thing. Not the garage. The Mocking Family Garage was a sty. It held everything that could have and should have been important. All of it had collected here over the years. That drum set that Uncle Ball had when he was fifteen, that Stone hated and forced in the cold wet garage, and every drum head split the first real snow that hit. The old car that no one knew how to fix. Boxes of trash stuff that was so precious the Mocking Family did not want to throw out, but was just unimportant enough to never get used, never get cleaned, never get looked at ever again.
I get it some things we just don’t want to get rid of. We cling to them, be they objects that once brought us joy. Ideas that were once so sweet we can’t help but hold on to them now even though we know they are lies. And memories. No one wants to get rid of these things. And all the decades the Mocking Family had lived in this house had collected every bit that no one wanted to get rid of, and they had all been shoved in this garage. I knew what to look for when I got in.
I was looking forward to seeing Ball’s drum set again. I could still remember the look he had on his face when he held the sticks and pounded on it. An old memory that now was gone. The garage I walked into was unrecognizable.
Every unneeded thing was gone. The place had been painted. Scraped clean, and lights hung fluorescent and bright. There were three work benches holding tools that I had no name for, with walls behind them that hung more tools I had no name for.
I stopped and I stared, and I tried to get any idea of how I was going to shift my mind.
“The car, Jesse. Look at the car, please.”
No tires. Up on jack stands. Primer instead of paint. No hood, and as I walked around this car, I could see it was different in a way I had no name for.
“What is it?” I asked.
“This is what we call a Project Car. You buy it cheap and busted up, and when you have time to play around, you come out to a place like this and you just slowly build it into something beautiful. Then you drive it for a few weeks, then sell it. Big profit. Then you buy a bigger project car and you can afford cooler, more kick ass parts for it, and it goes on and on until you find the car that you can’t get rid of.
“This is not that car. But I get closer every time.”
“What is it?” I was unaware I had just asked two different questions with the same three words twice.
“This is a Chevy Nova.”
“Why does it look like that?”
“Because it’s not finished yet.” He laughed and elbowed me playfully.
“No why does it look like that?”
He went quiet. He knew he had accidentally stumbled upon an important moment in my life. “Jesse, this is a Muscle Car. They don’t make them anymore, but you can still find them.”
“What’s a Muscle Car?”
“Well, you have seen them and you have experienced them, but you didn’t realize it. A muscle car is like the street thug of cars. Every other car on the road knows not to mess with it.”
“Wow.” I heard the word come out of my mouth, but I was so far away from my body that I never could have spoken it.
“When I am done with this one, it’s not going to be a thug, though. This beast is going to be a gangster.”
I said it before I thought it. “I used to be a gangster.”
He chuckled for a moment until he looked at me and knew I was not telling a joke. He turned and leaned against the front bumper. “Tell me.”
“Well, it was when I lived on 36th and Grant. That neighborhood had a gang and one of the members liked me. They took me in. Taught me how to fight with a knife, taught me about their code and what they did. I was young, but for a little while in Bender Territory, I was a gangster.”
He grinned. “Wow.” I think he heard himself say it, but he was too shocked to have spoken it himself.
He took me camping at the end of this trip. We went up north and canoed and fished and camped and I think you might remember a night when he asked me in the dark of the tent before we fell asleep.
“Jesse, is there anything you want to tell me?”
I remember it clearly. I remember barking out an answer about Less. But this that I am about to write was what he sensed and what he was talking about.
When Uncle Ball moved back to Milwaukee, he moved back in with the wife he had cleverly forgotten to divorce, and they were back in business. He fucked everything that walked and got to come home to her sex. She did things with her body he could never prove, but never really wanted to know about, so he barely looked.
He worked and so did she, and I slept on the couch.
The first night, she stood over me. She was naked, standing above me limp. Looking down at me from right above me. Her hair framing her face and falling to hide every bit of it. It was a horror I never remembered until just now. No features. No mouth. No idea if she was smiling, snarling or drooling. No chin, neck, no eyes, just a black hole with hair hanging around it. She didn’t move. She didn’t speak. She just stood, staring at me, completely naked. I didn’t know what she was thinking, but I knew she was hungry.
Smilin’ Jack, and now the memory is blurred. I wake up thinking I had a weird dream, but knowing things always got strange when I was in the room with Aunt Easy.
One week. She had me for one week before Uncle Ball could not take it anymore and he sent me to Uncle Savior’s house. One week.
She brought porn magazines out and had me look at them while she sat in an oversized t-shirt and panties sucking her fingertip. She came to me when I was asleep, knelt beside my bed and whispered filthy, perverted things to me about the things she had done with men and the things she wanted to do still.
Then one day she is at work and Uncle Ball puts me in front of a Nintendo, and the game Castlevania. Whips and monsters and castles and fantasy and everything is great. He is gone for hours. I get all the upgrades and am almost to the final boss when she walks in. She sets her bag on the table and swings Little Ball’s car seat in the crook of her other elbow. She takes him in his room and closes the door.
I am frozen. I can’t breathe. Can’t move, can’t think. I want to get out. I want to hide. I want to crawl away but there is nowhere to go. Then like Satan’s hottest succubus, she is in the hallway door frame.
She is wearing pink lace.
“Do you masturbate, Jesse?”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t move.
The rest I can’t remember.
Two days later. She is in Little Ball’s room. “Jesse, come in here. You have to see this.”
She sounds like she is playing, not hunting, and I jump up, eager to find a different side to her. Maybe me and her are going to play with Little Ball. Maybe we will— But when I get to the door, she is naked, standing next to the crib, looking down at Little Ball.
She turned to me. She put her finger to her lips. “Shhh,” she said. “I finally got him to sleep. Now we can get started.”
I remember her coming closer to me. I remember her opening her mouth to say something.
Shush put his finger to his mouth and said, “Shhh.”
“I’m sorry, Jesse. I can’t. I get loud.”
I would never be in a room with her again.
I would see her one more time.
Jesse Teller 
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