Jeremiah Quick by SM Johnson

this with nothing to do but think.
     
     

     
     
    Here was the thing: she'd always understood
well the power of her cuteness, and the fact that she could easily
get boys to want to sleep with her. She had no reservation about
her ability to seduce, to capture.
    It was her power to keep that was
lacking.
    This created such a profound sense of
insecurity that Pretty's happiness was frantic. Hold and cling and
say anything. Give and give and give some more, until she felt
herself disappear. Once she had , she didn't allow herself to want . She had no needs. She expressed no strong opinion,
because she had no convictions of her own, and because she used all
her strength to catch. And then, in the end and always, she pouted
that she wanted to be loved for being HERSELF, but even Pretty
didn't know who the hell that was.
    She was a chameleon, changing to suit, and
it never worked.
    Jeremiah left at the end of her tenth grade
year. He left before graduation. He left without goodbye. He was
just... gone.
    The summer was survived. School started
again, but there was no point to it. Eleventh grade, her
seventeenth year, the Year That Drew Died.
    A time of existing, not living. A time of
trading sex for marijuana, of pursuing boys she didn't even want,
of fucking them and sucking them and not caring about them at all.
Just activity to break the monotony of not feeling anything, for
anyone.
    She could name them, for the most part, but
did it matter?
    They weren't relationships.
    She was giving Jesse a blow job in the
wooded area across the street from the school when everyone else
found out Drew was dead. She emerged from the woods to see several
of her friends hovering at the edges of the sidewalk, sobbing.
    Drew shot himself. Drew did. He said he'd
kill himself if he had to go back home, and he did. He did.
    No. She can't think about that right now,
here in the dark, the silence. It hurt too much.
    Think about Jesse instead, or Andy, who
stood her up for her senior prom.
    Oh, that fateful prom. She'd gone anyway, in
jeans and leather and boots, because some angel at the Burger King
told her Jeremiah was there. It was the last time she'd seen
Jeremiah, until yesterday. She'd always been grateful for Andy's
failure.
    But before that, before that...
    Jeremiah was gone. Drew was dead. Pretty was
completely fucked-up in love with an ex-boyfriend who wasn't taking
her back, ever. She'd begged, pleaded, and debased herself. Yeah,
he'd fuck her – who wouldn't? They were teenage boys, after all –
but that boy and Pretty never did get back together as a
couple, not for real.
    Truth was… he was gone, too. He just hadn't
left yet. And she knew it.
    She was a slut. So fucking what?
    Who was anyone to judge her about it? She'd
always done the best she could with what she had, and for a girl
without a boyfriend and no real interest in the heaviness of love,
sex wasn't a bad way to pass the time.
    Her attention span was about three
weeks.
    She worried about AIDS, marginally. She knew
more about it than a lot of people, because she'd found Shilts'
gigantic tome of a book at the library shortly after it was
published, and read it out of horror, out of fear, out of trying to
make sense of how this disease could target certain of segments of
the population. She didn't believe in the conservative middle-class
version of God, so she knew it wasn't justice being meted out from
some mystical invisible being.
    One of the boys she slept with was Native,
and poor, and Pretty's parents were appalled. They sneered about
him when he wasn't around, but put on achingly nice, non-prejudiced
faces when Pretty invited him to dinner.
    This amused her.
    She wrote poetry about his silky black hair
entwined with her white-blonde strands, making comparisons of the
night to the moon. But she didn't love him.
    She didn't love any of them.
    More than one of them wanted to trade
marijuana for sex.
    She understood boys would do just about
anything to get sex, and didn't