Super Natural Things
The man I fell in love with was named Jason Conroy. He was my high school English teacher. I am the avid fan of Mary-Shelly's Frankenstein because of him. I am the compulsive listener of the Smashing Pumpkins because of him. And when he died I committed myself to the dark charcoal pigment of D and C Black #2 lipstick in a symbolic ritual of widowhood and shrine to him.
There is only one problem: he isn't dead.
Well, I mean he is dead, but not really. Look, Jason had this scar that he got when he was six years old riding his bike from the top of the hill near his house. Some mean kid, that he insists was his friend, stuck his toy sword in the spoke and sent him rolling face first on the pavement. The incident fractured his jaw and left this incredibly noticeable feature on his face. It's unmistakable. It's the scar I fell in love with. It's the scar I cried on when pages of my private diary were posted on every locker in Hall B leading to the auditorium. It's in all of my private doodlings. It was even a dirty smudge of prints on my bathroom mirror that couldn't be seen until the shower steamed it into visibility.
But then six weeks after he died I was headed home after a solemn night of drinking with Diane and I stopped at the Ciriko Connect to get a pack of cigarettes and there he was. He was taller by maybe six inches. His hair was now a shade lighter but still brown and he had inherited a set of crooked teeth that twisted in his mouth like an old tree in a witch-tale.
He shouldn't have recognized me because he wasn't him, but he was him. He dropped his 24 oz mid aisle and left. I wanted to chase him; find out what he was doing now and where he was living, but supernatural things do super natural things to your body and I decided to pee in my underwear instead.
I skipped my last week of school. Finals were over with anyway. It was just that goodbye week where everyone gathered in the hallways to pretend they weren't going to miss the place. Or so I was told. I was too busy scouring the internet for what I had seen. I looked up every instance of shape-shifting I could find. There was even an interview of Billy Corgan describing a brief encounter. But information was scarce on these topics. We only ever get to see what they want us to see or however that saying goes. I didn't even get a chance to throw my graduation hat. I just couldn't work up the courage to leave my room.
A few weeks later I was back at Diane's. She kept poking me the way I guess good friends do until I finally spilled it. Literally. Talking about it made me pee again. I'm just one of those girls that expresses, in earnest, those things that are likely to spill in the moment. It's a curse.
Anyways, Diane showed me this OSI App. OSI for Open Source Investigation. It was called Find Me. You could put a picture of your face in it and it would find every instance for pictures that looked like you so you could track social media accounts and what not. We were just playing at first. Diane put a picture of her ex-boyfriend Johnny McCaron inside the Drag 'N Drop and found out that he had all of these hook-up accounts. He even was a member of a BDSM forum.
'What kind of a fucking idiot puts their real picture on one of those sites? Creepo,' she said.
But then she had that brilliant idea to put Jason's picture in it. I hadn't wanted to at first. He was a perfect gentlemen to me. Distiguished. Disciplined. Wise. I was afraid I would find out something terrible I didn't want to know about him; things he'd done with other women maybe? Not that we had done anything. I knew, at least, that he didn't have a girlfriend. I was the only student from any of his classes that showed up at his funeral. It was a small group. Parents and faculty mostly along with his little sister who invited me to the wake afterward. She gave me a wallet-size photo of his senior picture and I, in turn, left a stain of mascara all over her shirt.
'What-the-hell?' Was all we could say when we scanned his photo onto her lap-top and placed it in the Drag N Drop.
'Is that the guy?' Diane kept saying as if she couldn't hear my ecstatic yes over the top of her excitement.
'Maybe it's just his brother,' Diane said, trying to be first in the game.
'With the same exact scar in the same exact place?'
'Well what if it's not a scar and he just told you it was one? Maybe it's a birth mark.'
This was the game that all teenage girls played with each other. What ifs were good ways to deduce folly from fact, but Diane could also just be obnoxious. God love her.
'Just look up the social media accounts. How many are listed?'
'Several,' Diane said.
'Well lookup that one,' I said pointing to the Yearbook account.
She clicked while I looked over her shoulder. A spread of photos became available and we began to click through them one by one until we found a tag.
'That's him,' I said. 'Victor Talisman,'
We both whispered his name as if it were a magic word. The effects of which sent Diane to her vanity drawer where she pulled an eighth of weed from the padding in one of her bra's. I was looking at the whitepages when she handed me the pipe.
'He lives at 6363 Sacred Oak Street,' I said, blowing out a toke.
'Shut the fuck up,' Diane said. 'Are you serious?'
'You know where that's at?'
'Yeah, It's right next to my uncle Charlie's house. Two blocks from here.'
