literature

The Lonely Hearts Club - 1

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Russell

Forgive the introduction. I understand it was misleading, I was only just made aware of the prologue. See, this book is in first person, not third as the prologue implies. Not just one First Person, however, but four. But I'll let you figure that one out. I'm Russell, and when asking the man who is compiling this book whether he wanted me to write like a Protagonist or an Antagonist, he would not give me a straight answer. He wants me to tell my story? So be it. I'll give you a story. One fourth of a story, at least.
Let me introduce myself.
My name is Russell Price. I owned the Lonely Hearts Club, Miami Chapter. If you're reading this, I can only imagine you find me detestable, despicable, or you want to know where everything went wrong and how everything crashed down around me like so many loose bricks.
I'll tell you right now, it's a tortured and frankly useless story. It will bring you no insight, it will bring you nothing new to turn in your mind. I am writing this to afford everyone who wanted to see me taken down get his or her satisfaction, so whoever hated me can know that they win. No reason to keep sending me hate mail or tear-stained letter written in twisted, soul-burning rage. Often it's a speech, written in a defiant tone, reminiscent of a warrior standing at the edge of a wicked king's castle, ready to strike down he who might bring scourge to this world. A speech of right and wrong and why my irredeemable soul will find no solace.
So let's leave the 'right and wrong' speech behind, because I'm not here to argue ANYTHING with you, you're the reader and chances are that you already HAVE an opinion on what happened, unless you're completely clueless to what happened. If that's the case, then this book is perfect for you.
And I hope you all realize. This isn't just my story. If it were, I'd be the only one narrating. This is all of our stories. Me, Carter, Rachel, Lindsey, Ike, this story was our story. Now it's your story.
Let's start from the beginning… or at least the most important thing I can remember.
It started off with a girl named Lindsey Howell…

It all starts with Lindsey Howell. First of all, this is High School, I am Fifteen and she is Sixteen. I am a Sophomore and she is a very old Freshman. She'd always tell you that, no, she was not held back. She'd be right. Her parents kept her out of school for an extra year when she was a child. Why they did, I'll never know, all I know is that because of it, she's always held a strange heir of superiority over her other Freshmen. I was a friend though. I'd always tell you that I skipped a grade, but I'd be lying. Ironically enough, I was put into school a year early… my parents were not the brightest people in the world; they truly thought that earlier was better. If I were put into school a year early, I'd be developing a hell of a lot faster than anyone else. They didn't count on me shitting my pants in kindergarten. Too young to feel embarrassed, too old now to think about it. So Lindsey and I had the same problem, we were put into the public school system when we weren't supposed to. A lot of things we did were things we weren't supposed to.
"Why should I live up to their expectations? They should live down to mine!" She'd say. The way I remember Lindsey in High School was that she was taller than me, brown hair always put into a ponytail, too skinny for her own good, a bony face with small breasts and disproportionate shoulders until her senior year. She liked wearing grey and blue things for reasons I never understood. They were her favorite colors and gave no explanation otherwise. Grey and blue, it's all she would wear.
One lonesome autumn day, we decided to spend a day together. This wasn't a huge deal for either of us, I was a latchkey kid and she was rebellious. My parents didn't get home until 8 or so and even if they got home early, they'd know I was out. Plus, honestly, my parents were pushovers. So we spent the day together. We walked all around our suburban little town. We even walked through the really bad neighborhoods for the sake of the "danger". We talked about people we hated, music we liked, what music the other person liked that we hated, what do you think happens after you die, will the circus ever come to our town, could you use gas for things other than cars and motorcycles if you purchase it from a gas station, why is Baskin Robbins called 31 flavors if they have so many more, how many samples did we think we could mooch off of them, and why being single wasn't all that terrible. We convinced ourselves of this time and time again, and it worked every single time. We always decided it was easier to fly solo, throwing heart-warming justifications and upward cries of independence at each other.
We walked around with our ice cream cones; we eventually decided to just buy one after mooching a few good samples. She paid extra for the waffle cone. We walked and walked until the sun started to set. We got our hands sticky, ate the cones and left the little paper on the cone to the Earth, deciding Mother Nature could stomach one more piece of trash. We ended up at a field. A field where construction workers and managers, people of the world we were not yet a part of, decided they would build. They never got around to it. We were half a mile away from the homes near us. We watched the sun set past the mountains. We decided that maybe suburbia wasn't all that bad. We watched and watched… I started to fall asleep, my too short, too curly dyed blond hair and me. I started to fall asleep until I felt the soft touch of a grey hoodie sweater on my elbow. She had moved just a little closer to me.
"Ask me something, Russell."
I asked her what she wanted me to ask.
"Something bizarre. Something most people don't ask."
I asked her why she always wore grey and blue. Every day, I'd never seen her in red. She sighed, moved a little closer and said
"That's what I expected you to ask."
I told her I was sorry to live up to her expectations. It was an inside joke.
"It's kind of a goofy story."
I told her I was kind of a goofy person.
"Then I'll tell you."
Glimmers of sunlight began to die off of the withering blades of grass one by one, and she pulled her sweatshirt tighter around her.
"One morning, I was in my bed. You know what my room looks like…"
Yes I did, it was sterile, white with a bed, a small crappy TV with rabbit ears and a closet with nothing in it but gray and blue clothes.
"I woke up… and my CD player was on."
It was on?
"Yeah, I listen to the radio when I sleep."
If you knew Lindsey like I did, this was not surprising. It's not surprising anyway though, really.
"My CD player emits a neon blue light when it is on… and I woke up one morning, it was much earlier than I usually wake up… and there was no color anywhere. Through my blinds, I don't know how it happened. The only color I saw was the neon blue shining on my stuff. It was like nothing I'd ever seen, you can't believe what I saw. There were no light tones, no dark ones, just grays and neon blues."
At this point, I couldn't tell if the story was more or less banal than I was expecting. I felt nothing, but the story of a pitch gray room too early on a cold weekday morning was not my idea of sublime vision.
"I can't remember what happened the rest of that day, but I felt like I was sitting in this pool of gray and neon blue for ages and ages. I never wanted to leave, because it was the most beautiful experience of my life. I want so badly for it to happen again, I've been setting my alarm for earlier and earlier, so if it happens again, I won't sleep through it. I forget to turn music on as long as my CD player is on. I even got a neon blue club sign to light it up even more. I wait and wait for the day it happens again, but it will. I know it's a silly, stupid story, I don't know why I kept that a secret. Sorry."
She gave a longing, apologetic look to the sunset away from me, apologizing for what didn't, couldn't ever really hurt me. It was then that I remember saying something specifically, to this day; I can't tell you why I said it, but I did.
I told her "You haven't said a lot of things, have you?"
Her eyebrows furrowed in and she stared harder outward, then slowly turned her head toward me, wide-eyed. She wasn't offended, I didn't even think it was a big deal, but she just stared.
With her big hazel eyes, her face twisted through many emotions, shock, query, thought, resolution, and finally, her face began to soften and her lips began to curl into a smile.
The sun was finally gone and the orange, purple haze of the dying sky draped darker and darker over us. She stole the moment, the silent opportunity, to lean over and kiss me.
I froze, but when she kissed me, she never firmed her lips. It was my first. In High School, all we had was each other. No one close to us to break us or tear us asunder. She continued to kiss me, softly, lacking the lust and excitement that kisses have in today's books. It was an innocent kiss, probably my first and last. It was simply her, with her soft lips, bony face and hazel eyes, her lips meeting mine, the dorky little kid who was short, had short curly blond hair and had a weird birthmark on his inner thigh that he's still self-conscious about. It felt very natural, as if your hand touched someone else's, our lips just touched. It wasn't wet, wasn't slobbery, we didn't open our mouths.
When it was done, I was still frozen. We were lying on a hillside and the sun had set completely. She didn't have a sunset to look at anymore, she simply looked at me. I had her attention
"I can tell you things… can't I, Russell?"
I didn't realize exactly what she was saying, but I told her of course she could.
She was quiet for a long time, she stared at me with those giant eyes.
"I love you, Russell."
And she leaned in to kiss again. For my female readers out there, I must stress this, you cannot say this to a man, and expect him to be ready to kiss you immediately. A man needs his time after a woman says that. It's like a very romantic punch to the face. Well I only wish that someone had told that to Lindsey. As she leaned in, I remember dodging her face. I said her name, quietly. I don't remember what it was I was planning on telling her, but it wasn't "I love you" back. Well I didn't get a chance to say anything.
Her shoulders drew back and her eyes carried the weight of either horror or disillusionment. I couldn't know then.
"Thank you, Russell. Thanks for everything." And she lifted herself up off of the hill and started walking home. I got up, quickly, possessed by feelings I couldn't place, telling her to wait, telling her to listen, but as any man in my situation knows, it never goes well.
She began to walk faster and faster away from me, never truly breaking into a run. But I did run and I got in front of her, begging her to just wait for a second. I needed to catch my breath too.
"Russell" She spoke my name through some pretty rough tears. "Russell, I hate everyone else, everyone else can go die." And at that age, I tended to agree. Maybe I still do. "You're the only person I've ever had." This was true. "Russell, let's make the world miserable. Let's make them hurt as much as we do." This is where the agreement ended.
"Lindsey?" She kept her face inside of her wrist, wiping away embarrassed tears from her eyes. "Lindsey." I had to speak out to her again. Her face wouldn't lift up.
"Lindsey, what do you mean?" I remember asking. I knew what she meant. I absolutely didn't need clarification. I had no reason to ask.
"Russell, I don't know why I'm crying." She said through heavy sobs. "I just am, and I just hurt and I wish I knew why. Why don't other people feel this way?"
"I'm sure they do." I said, not knowing a correct or poetic answer, just speaking what I felt. "Everyone hurts sometimes, I guess."
"What about them?" She said, finally bringing her eyes up to mine.
I had to ask her to clarify who "they" were.
"The people who don't hurt. The assholes who's only fucking problem is how expensive their next slutty dress is going to be!"
I knew what she meant now. She was going to clarify, I couldn't stop her, so she continued.
"The assholes who fuck around with every girl and think that not caring about anything is how to be some hot badass."
I could argue the benefits of nihilism these days, but at the moment, I was lost for answer or solace.
"I just wish they could hurt too."
"We don't have any right to hurt other people, Lindsey, who the hell are we?" I thought the concept of hurting other people for no reason was unnecessary then.
"They deserve to hurt too. We could show them, Russell."
"Why? What did they do to you?" I said, still in a rushing mire of misunderstanding.
"… You don't know what it looks like to watch people, happier than you could ever be, ignore the things that are hurting you."
"I guess I don't." I thought that was a really poignant line at the time.
"I think you will someday, Russell." And she turned to walk away. I had no words for her then. I decided to leave her anger stew. It was anger beyond what I could understand. I should have tried harder.
I should have made every attempt to quell her. A hug at least. But I didn't. And we grew up to be monsters.
The next chapter of my rewrite of my novel.

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