Wanna Know How I Got These Scars?

~~~~~ 1994 ~~~~~

I was so excited as I waited for Jack to come get me. I wore a dark purple crushed velvet babydoll dress with my cherry red combat boots. I wore black and white striped tights with matching opera length fingerless gloves. I wore a choker necklace with a garnet pendant dangling from it. My waist length red hair hung in loose waves as I slicked on my black lipstick.

I’d been waiting for months for The Crow to come out. Just the fact that Brandon Lee had been killed during filming was dark enough, but it was based on one of my favorite graphic novels. To add to the festiveness, it opened on Friday, May 13, 1994. Jack and I had been planning to go for months, and I guess that’s why it felt more like a date than our normal hanging out.

Jack Napier was my only friend at the Brentwood Academy. We’d passed each other in the halls for months before we discovered we had so much in common. Brentwood had a strict dress code. They weren’t satisfied until we all looked like clones. Jack had been walking by when I dropped a CD out of my locker. My Bloody Kisses disk by Type O Negative skittered across the hallway and directly into Jack’s path. We’d eaten lunch together and discovered our mutual love of all things macabre and a shared disgust for authority.

It hadn’t taken long for me to fall head over heels for Jack. He was beautiful. He stood over six feet tall compared to my 5'7". He was lean but muscular with dark blond curly hair and eyes like strong coffee. He was masculine but graceful, and his deep voice gave me shivers. If he felt the same for me he was keeping it a secret, though. We spent almost all our free time together, but not once had he intimated anything but friendship. It chewed at my insides, but not being around him was even worse. So I took what pleasure I could in his bittersweet presence, and I hoped, one day, he’d love me, too.

I was listening to Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magic by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and painting my fingernails black when Jack came bursting through my bedroom door. If my parents had been home I’d have had to sneak out to meet him. They couldn’t stand him, which made me want him even more. "Chili Peppers?" He scrunched his nose.

"I like it... besides, you like ‘Suck My Kiss’ and ‘Breaking The Girl.’" I defended my music choice.

"I like anything with the words ‘suck’ or ‘breaking’ in it." He shrugged, ripping the disk out of my player and tossing it across the room like a Frisbee. "Listen to this." He said, putting a new disk in. He flopped down onto the bed beside me, and my heart raced. He looked so good. He’d tinted his hair the same shade purple as my dress and bedspread. He wore a pair of black cargo pants, black combat boots, a black wool overcoat and a ripped up black t-shirt with Charles Manson’s face on it in white. He laid on his back, staring at the ceiling where I’d hung up some of the sketches he’d done for me.

"I’m almost ready... is this Nine Inch Nails?" I asked, recognizing Trent Reznor’s voice but not the song.

"Yeah, it’s new. Listen to the lyrics." He said, singing along to the chorus. "I want to fuck you like an ANIMAL... I want to feel you from the inside..." He purred, and I felt a gush of desire. When he turned his gaze to me I felt sure he knew how turned on I was. He stared at my mouth long enough to make me uncomfortably self-conscious.

"Is something wrong with my lipstick?" I asked.

"No... is it usually so glossy?" He asked.

"Oh... I put some clear gloss over it. Does it look dumb?" I questioned. He considered it for a moment.

"It’s not dumb... it’s... well, it’s kinda sexy. I thought you were going for dead, is all." He shrugged after he’d sat up.

"What? I’m not allowed to look sexy and dead?" I joked, feeling a twist of anguish at his words. I popped up off the bed and grabbed a tissue to wipe off the lipstick. Jack sighed and came around to face me. He frowned at me for a moment and then began digging through my makeup case.

"If you want to look sexy..." He said, twisting up a tube of blood red lipstick. He took my chin in one hand and began coloring in my lips with the dark cherry colored lipstick. I had to lock my knees to keep them from shaking. "... and dead, then this is the way to go." He finished, stepping back to admire his handiwork. I looked in my makeup mirror and chuckled. He’d done a sloppy job. The red was wobbly and leaked over the edges of my lips.

"I look like a clown." I laughed, using my thumb to wipe a little away. He stayed my hand.

"Like a sexy, dead clown." He said with a serious face. I looked up to him over the rim of my makeup mirror. "Give us some sugar, baby!" He cackled, imitating Ash from the movie Army of Darkness. I punched at his shoulder, and, in the process of fending me off, he made me drop the mirror. It hit the hardwood floor with a crunching crack. I didn’t know who I was more angry at, him for teasing me or me for believing him. I knelt to pick up the broken mirror, and he bent down to help.

"You always have to be such a joker." I grumbled.

"Why so serious?" He asked, and I didn’t know how to respond, so I lied.

"I really liked this mirror." I said, picking up a shard of it. I hissed when it sliced into my skin.

"Seven years bad luck for both of us." He said, pulling my bleeding fingertip up to inspect it.

"Ow! Jack!" I exclaimed when he roughly squeezed my finger to make it bleed more. He pulled my finger to his mouth and traced it across his lips. The blood smeared his mouth, and then he sucked the tip of my finger. A shiver of desire rocked me, and I was sure he’d felt it, too. Rimmed in black eyeliner, his eyes glittered as he released my finger.

"I wonder if we both get seven or if it’s three and a half for each of us." He said, rising and pulling me up as well. He held the cracked mirror out to show our reflection as we stood side by side. The jagged crack cut between us and spiderwebbed over the reflection of his perfect lips. "Hmm, now we match." He said.