Rafe Vang, D2 [done]

Rafe Vang

"Fiend"

Fifteen

Divergent

Working for the church while my family dies

Your little baby sister's gonna lose her mind

Every spark of friendship and love will die without a home

Hear the soldier groan 'we'll got it at alone'

Neon overlapping orange, bursting into shades of blue that bleed off the wall. A tag of a name unknown stretches along the concrete. No real sin, but a crime nonetheless.

You haven’t been picked up by the cops since you were twelve, and they let you go because they believed the lies out of your mouth. You sold the boys you ran with right up the fucking river because they didn’t know any better. Friendship was a four letter word, and you weren’t going to get set to some detention center, or worse. Not for stealing a pack of cigarettes and some booze, laughing at the sight of the man chasing you from the bodega down the street, his overcomb blowing up from his bald head.

When you were four you learned that your father was a ripe asshole. He cheated on your mother when he was supposed to be watching you. It’s one of your earliest memories. You remember sitting on the hardwood floor of your apartment, watching the television blink some colorful show about a horse. All the while you could hear the creaks and moans coming from your father’s bedroom, the sound of a broken box spring screaming at three in the afternoon. You remember that the woman that came out was all the things your mother wasn’t – red hair, painted red lips, a shirt cut low and skirt short, and two beautiful black boots – the sort of woman that you imagined was all glamor, magnetic. She smelled like roses.

At six you were between two houses. A mother that spent Saturday afternoons sheparding your older brother and sister to training, working a long shift at the hospital, forgetting to pick you up from your aunt’s, then showing up at half-past eleven to say that she was ‘so sorry I can’t believe I forgot him again.’ They used to whisper in the kitchen about your father. Around the old wooden table they’d smoke their cigarettes and she’d sigh, long, stick straight blond hair crowding her face and shitting on the man who’d gone on without her. ‘What did he do this time,’ your aunt would whisper, pouring another glass of wine for her.

Your father liked to plant you in front of the television so that he didn’t have to be bothered. He was always working at something new. One time he was starting a barber shop. Another time he was selling used electronics. Another time he was going to open a grocery store, but that was four months of talk before he realized he hated the thought of having to do inventory (that sort of work is for suckers, he taught you). Funny enough, at fourteen, your job was a bagger at the local market.

He settled on a jewelry store, or rather, an upscale pawn shop as you liked to remind him, time and time again. There were always widows selling watches for too low a price. Women who’s engagement rings needed selling. People who were desperate because their life never worked out the way that it should have. For all the stories they bought of a happy ending, they sure had a lot to sell off after. And your father was all too happy to take in their misery, for a price.

You remember how a woman cried over her dead brother’s ring. She needed the money to pay for some sort of operation, or a mortgage. Or maybe drugs, because that was sometimes the reason covered up by all the veneer. You could always tell the ones looking for drugs, though. They stared a little too long at the money that wound up in their hands, like they wanted to hold onto it forever, but knew that it was going to be gone just as fast as they’d gotten it. The woman cried when she handed it into your father’s palm, and told him that he’d been the sort of man to always be there for her. And he smiled, opened the register, and told her that she could have a nice day, but crying in the shop usually scared away the other customers.

You faded through school as a career. Not because you were stupid, but because you didn’t really see the point in learning things that were a path to nowhere. You had as good a chance as any to wind up dead on television. Sometimes you took out tess for fun, because you liked to be the sort of shit head that could announce at the reaping just how much you took out this time, as though it was a badge of honor. The same sort of swagger that gave you a fat lip for going a bit too far.

You didn’t much care for the people in your class. Then again, you’d never much cared for anyone.

But you could never help getting a rise out of people.

You started with your baby sister. Well, half-sister. She wasn’t really part of your family.

You’d pull her pig tails when you were kids, simple things that could be thrown off as sibling slights. But you grew up, found that words could be far more cruel and meaningful than any sort of physical action. Oh, Emilia, You once said at the breakfast table, Did you gain some weight? You look different. The sort of negging that you claimed was to make her stronger, when in reality you knew would leave deeper scars (you did read her diary, after all).

Cory never gave you the time of day. He was three years older, and after your parents split, he talked even less than you did. Except where you’d grown roots in the barren concrete of the city, he’d kept his head down and fostered a world of accomplishment. The kind of, hair-parted, big muscled, idiotic boot-licking brother that when asked, ‘are you guys related? Once said that he didn’t know.

You spray on another top coat to reveal the only thing that you enjoyed, tagging your calling across the empty and abandoned buildings on the wrong side of the tracks of the district. Usually late at night, under black hoodie and by flashlight, you set up camp, scrambling harder than you did during training, spraying out words or symbols, animals defecating on top of peacekeepers, all the things that came across your head.

You take a nice long drag of your joint and breathe in another masterpiece.

They’d say you were too young to already try to numb the world, but you just tell them to fuck off. It helps you to laugh, to see the colors, to know that you can feel a settled steadiness below your feet.

Better to be on your own, than to have to let anyone else in to mess all of it up, after all.

You high tail it back to your mother’s apartment when the sirens sound. You're little and white, and too skinny to really get a hold of. More bone than brute.

You get one last good look at the fist you’ve sprayed across concrete when you jump the chain link fence.

And so you slip back into darkness, alone. Again.

Intervention, Arcade Fire