NINETEEN NINETY NINE
Kyle had never intended to get involved in any of this political crap. He just wanted to see Terrance and Phillip: Asses of Fire, and eat some popcorn and drink an Icee that Cartman would inevitably steal, but then it all went to hell. The next thing Kyle knew, one of his best friends was dead, and his mom had declared war on Canada, and he was sneaking into a USO Show with some French kid who smoked too much, and really hated God. Kyle had the feeling that the next time The Mole called God a bitch, one of them was going to get struck by lightning.
He liked Christophe, mostly because the first time they'd met, Christophe had had the balls to tell his mom to fuck off, but it hadn't been like Cartman's hysterical scream. Rather, he said it with the exact same disinterested tone Kyle felt when his own mom started taking his new DVDs off his shelves, saying they were bad, bad movies. Christophe was just as fed up as Kyle was with this poser soccer-mom bullshit that people like Kyle's mom fed their kids; he was just more forward about it.
As the two of them sneaked under the gate, Kyle, who had never had the interest or guts for political activism thought that sneaking into places and blowing them up with Christophe might be the coolest thing ever to do when he grew up.
Then the guard dogs came, and Kyle had to see another of his friends die, bleeding on the snow until the rats came.
He remembers thinking that Christophe probably didn't come back the way Kenny always did.
TWO THOUSAND FOUR
Two weeks into high school English, they sent home a letter to Kyle's parents, and the next thing Kyle knew, he had the guidance counsellor breathing down his neck, reading over his shoulder.
"What are you reading, Kyle?"
"The biography of Albert Fish."
"Who's he?"
"A serial killer."
Kyle likes giving Mr. Hewlett something to work with. Sometimes he pretends to hear voices, or to be suicidal, just to see if the counsellor writes any more on his little yellow legal pad.
Once, Mr. Hewlett gets called out in the middle of their session to help a girl whose best friend died, and Kyle filches the legal pad. There isn't much on the page other than the scrawled, "this kid is bonkers -- look at his hat!" and a series of hatchmarks where Kyle's guidance counsellor repeatedly lost to himself at tic-tac-toe.
He doesn't wait around for Mr. Hewlett to come back, instead he steps out of the office, and walks down the hall; he has thirty minutes until he has to get to biology, which is plenty of time to find something more interesting to do. As he walks past the study hall, he slams his fist against the puke yellow door in a quick rhythm before continuing down the hall to step out onto the side stairs into the school.
Part way through his cigarette, the door opens behind him. Kyle lifts his head, and Kenny must have picked up on the code. Kenny's slim, skeletal fingers reach out to take Kyle's cigarette from him, taking a drag off it as he leans against the brick of the school. "Study hall is fucking retarded," Kenny murmurs around the paper, smoke drifting out of his mouth with each vowel.
Kyle lights another cigarette, with his allowance, he can afford it. "Hey, at least you don't have to spend it with that fucktard, Hewlett."
Kenny shrugs, and the cigarette dangles from his closed lips as he looks past Kyle to the too-pale October sky. When he speaks, it ought to fall from his lips to the ground, but somehow manages to hover pressed into his bottom lip, "Wanna cut out?"
There's a part of Kyle that immediately jumps at the thought, nearly burning the tips of his finger on the cherry of his cigarette, "Are you fucking kidding? My mom would kill me!"
"Fuck your mom," Kenny answers. He pauses for a second, then giggles slightly.
"Dude, that's sick!" And Kyle can't help but play off Kenny like this; it's how it's always been.
"Seriously. You wanna skip?" Kenny asks, ignoring Kyle's indignation.
They don't get very far from the school, only down to the park a block away, when they stop, and climb to the top of the jungle gym. They talk sitting on the monkey bars, legs swinging below them, dropping the spent butts of their cigarettes to the mulch below them. When the cars stop driving past, their mouths meet, one of Kyle's hands off to the side, cigarette held between thumb and forefinger, his other hand tightly gripping the bar of the jungle gym.
When he pulls back to smile at Kenny, Kenny shifts his weight a little, and leaning back, cracks his head on the metal bar behind him. His body goes limp and falls down to the mulch below.
By the time Kyle's found the presence of mind to slip down to the ground, a pool of blood is starting to form beneath Kenny's head, a ruddy, liquid tint to his lips.
This is why he sees Mr. Hewlett; Kyle knows better than to talk about things now.
TWO THOUSAND EIGHT
The kitchen table is piled up with envelopes from over a hundred colleges: little colleges with fancy names that probably look better in Hebrew, state universities with fancy letterheads, smaller state colleges with typos in their applications. Kyle's mom specifically told him to go through every last envelope, choosing schools to send in an application. "You ought to go to a good, strong, liberal arts college, Kyle. You'd make a wonderful lawyer," she said before she got in the SUV to take Ike to basketball practice.
He doesn't like words; he likes numbers. Kyle's walls are covered in pieces of paper covered in numbers and passwords. Even in elementary school he already had free codes to porn sites, now he has more money in his savings account than he ought to. Kyle would make a horrible lawyer.
Kyle picks up the cream colored envelopes with elaborate Hebrew characters and throws them in the trash while his mom is out, before looking longingly at the envelope from the computer science department at University of Colorado. Underneath that envelope is a matching one from the mathematics department. He folds the thick white envelopes over themselves and stuffs them in the ankle pocket of his jeans. His mom would never think to look there.
Closing his eyes, Kyle's hand closes around a few envelopes. He slaps them down on the kitchen counter, with a note in his scrawled hand written on the one from the University of Arizona. "HERE'S THE ONES THAT LOOK COOL MOM."
He goes back upstairs to his room with a can of soda and a sandwich, and sits back down at his computer to get back to today's work.
TWO THOUSAND NINE
Kyle goes to University of Colorado, in spite of his mom's insistance that he apply to one of the Ivy League schools, or at least Brandeis. His dad makes faces behind his mother's hair, and Kyle knows that his dad could afford it, but doesn't want to.
Once he gets to school, he lives in a suite with five other guys, most of whom are pretty average, and make the proper sympathetic faces when he tells them he's from South Park. His roommate is a nice Mormon kid who doesn't even drink hot cocoa and tries to get him to read the Book of Mormon for the first two weeks of class. After that, Kyle's sufficiently altered his sleep schedule so he doesn't wake up until eight in the evening, and goes to bed just before his roommate wakes up.
He probably keeps poor Joe awake with the insistent clicking of the keyboard every night. It took Kyle a few days to fully crack the school's firewall, but once he'd managed to get around *that*, he was good to go.
Sometimes, on Saturdays, he leaves his room, and finds his way into a taxi and out to some club, where he dances unenthusiastically, and mostly thinks about international corporations and government conspiracy. He brings pens with him and makes notes on napkins under the black light by the bar.
He's biting his lip and scrawling a series of numbers and letters from memory, trying to crack the system of this particular message, when a hand lands on his shoulder. The girl is wearing something that might be called a dress, and might be called a shirt, depending on how generous the caller was feeling that day. "Hey," she mouths, since he can't hear her over the music, and he raises his plastic cup of beer to her in acknowledgement before leaning back over his napkin.
"What are you doing?" She shouts in his ear, and this close he can smell her makeup.
He looks down at the napkin, covered in numbers and letters written over other numbers and letters, and he shouts back, "Epiphany."
She has a fucking pacifier around her neck, like she's two, and Kyle isn't even wearing his hat. He isn't sure what he's supposed to say, he's never picked someone up at a club before. She leans in and kisses him on the cheek, her lips sliding over skin to press to his mouth. He jolts a little at that, not because he's innocent, but because he'd never expected that.
His hands come up to rest at her hips, and she leads him to the dance floor, his napkin safely stowed in the back pocket of his jeans. As his thumbs dig into her hipbones as they move, he is struck by the fragility of her bones, and the knowledge that she probably wouldn't come back. He isn't sure what that means, but when he kisses her again, the red at her mouth is glossy plastic, not the taste he became accustomed to at home.
TWO THOUSAND TEN
Kyle has to take a political science course to graduate, which is, in his opinion, pretty stupid, because it's not like that has anything to do with higher mathematics. His advisor told him to suck it up, because everybody had to put up with the general education requirements.
The first day of class, the old man at the dais, who is probably four hundred years old and only has hair coming out of the back of his neck and his ears, starts talking about revolutions. Kyle pulls down the front flap of his hat, so no one can see his eyes, and folds his arms under his head, preparing to fall sleep and drool all over his syllabus.
He's nearly floating into a dream state when he hears a thick French accent. "That is bullshit!" Kyle sits up slightly in his seat, lifting a hand to push up the flap of his hat. The voice came from a tall, wiry, blue-haired boy with a bookbag that was apparently made of belts and patches.
"What's your name, son?" The old professor asks.
The boy, who is standing, and who seems oddly familiar to Kyle, folds his arms across his chest. "Christophe. Why? Are you trying to keep my opinion on your filthy portrayal of revolutionary theory quiet?"
The old man frowns as some of the members of the class snicker. "Son, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to sit down, we have a lot to go over today--"
"Bullshit. You are planning to read us the syllabus as though we are all illiterate!" The boy looks around at the other students in the class, and smirks, before he reaches in his bag, and pulls out a pack of Lucky Strikes. He pushes his way out of his row, and lights his cigarette just before slamming the door open and walking outside.
Kyle scrambles to his feet, legs getting tangled in his hurry to push back the fold-out lecture hall desk. His syllabus in one hand, and messenger bag clutched in the other, he speeds after the blue-haired boy, because he's just so *familiar*.
He's barely stepped out the door, when the blue-haired boy spins on his heel, turning to face Kyle. "What?"
Kyle stops, and pushes his hat back up his forehead with the back of the hand holding his syllabus, papers shuffling in front of his face. "I just--" He isn't really sure how to say it, so he pauses, itching his forehead slightly.
"What do you want?" the boy demands with heavy accent.
Kyle isn't sure if the boy's trying to sound tortured or reclusive, so he ignores the inflection altogether.He still hasnt' figured out what to say, and eventually, he just blurts out, "Look, aren't you supposed to be dead?"
Christophe's eyes widen, and for a moment, he looks less like the jaded revolutionary he'd been presenting himself to be. "How... How do you know of my borrowed time?" he asks, and when he speaks around his cigarette, it reminds Kyle of Kenny.
Kyle isn't sure what to say except, "I know someone else it happened to." Christophe's eyes seem to size up Kyle, a slight tilt to his right eyebrow when his eyes reach Kyle's hat, but in the end, he smiles, and hoists his bag over his shoulder.
"C'mon."
TWO THOUSAND ELEVEN
The dilapidated house on Mill Street serves as their headquarters, and while Christophe spouts his ideology in the room at the back of the house where the walls are covered with black sheets. Kyle usually stays upstairs in the loft, the curtains pulled tightly closed, and the electronic equipment scattered around him. He still pretends to go to school, and passes most of his classes, but what he spends his time doing is what he did before he moved off-campus. He sits at his computer and leans forward, forehead nearly pressed to the screen, and every movement beyond the slight touches needed to type sends a flurry of post-its fluttering to the floor.
The sounds from downstairs, shouting and singing, come up through the floor, and Kyle rubs at his forehead, fingers pressed to his temples, and he remembers being seventeen and being able to work at this for longer. The red numbers on the display of his clock read 6:13, and he knows he used to go forty hours without sleep easily. He reaches for his can of Mountain Dew, but when he brings it to his mouth, the can is empty.
Kyle sets the can down with an unsatisfactory crunch, and he pushes back from the desk. When he lands on the sagging matress, his eyes begin to flutter shut at the first touch, and he isn't even curled up beneath the covers before he feels himself floating off to sleep.
He wakes several hours later at the touch of hands at his shoulders. To the side the frame hovering over him, the clock read 9:31am. Kyle's eyes are starting to adjust to the ruddy light coming from the Christmas lights taped to his ceiling, and the familiar bitten hands at his shoulders push down slightly, as the other body climbs into bed. Christophe is still wearing his fatigues, the chains at the pockets clattering against the metal frame of the bed. Kyle doesn't particularly care, and he curls in closer as he falls back asleep.
When he dreams, he does not dream of broken girls with platic mouths, but the splatter of meaningless blood at masculine lips. He is not sure whose they are, but the smell of cigarette smoke is heady, and the copper taste is undeniable.
Kyle had never intended to get involved in any of this political crap. He just wanted to see Terrance and Phillip: Asses of Fire, and eat some popcorn and drink an Icee that Cartman would inevitably steal, but then it all went to hell. The next thing Kyle knew, one of his best friends was dead, and his mom had declared war on Canada, and he was sneaking into a USO Show with some French kid who smoked too much, and really hated God. Kyle had the feeling that the next time The Mole called God a bitch, one of them was going to get struck by lightning.
He liked Christophe, mostly because the first time they'd met, Christophe had had the balls to tell his mom to fuck off, but it hadn't been like Cartman's hysterical scream. Rather, he said it with the exact same disinterested tone Kyle felt when his own mom started taking his new DVDs off his shelves, saying they were bad, bad movies. Christophe was just as fed up as Kyle was with this poser soccer-mom bullshit that people like Kyle's mom fed their kids; he was just more forward about it.
As the two of them sneaked under the gate, Kyle, who had never had the interest or guts for political activism thought that sneaking into places and blowing them up with Christophe might be the coolest thing ever to do when he grew up.
Then the guard dogs came, and Kyle had to see another of his friends die, bleeding on the snow until the rats came.
He remembers thinking that Christophe probably didn't come back the way Kenny always did.
TWO THOUSAND FOUR
Two weeks into high school English, they sent home a letter to Kyle's parents, and the next thing Kyle knew, he had the guidance counsellor breathing down his neck, reading over his shoulder.
"What are you reading, Kyle?"
"The biography of Albert Fish."
"Who's he?"
"A serial killer."
Kyle likes giving Mr. Hewlett something to work with. Sometimes he pretends to hear voices, or to be suicidal, just to see if the counsellor writes any more on his little yellow legal pad.
Once, Mr. Hewlett gets called out in the middle of their session to help a girl whose best friend died, and Kyle filches the legal pad. There isn't much on the page other than the scrawled, "this kid is bonkers -- look at his hat!" and a series of hatchmarks where Kyle's guidance counsellor repeatedly lost to himself at tic-tac-toe.
He doesn't wait around for Mr. Hewlett to come back, instead he steps out of the office, and walks down the hall; he has thirty minutes until he has to get to biology, which is plenty of time to find something more interesting to do. As he walks past the study hall, he slams his fist against the puke yellow door in a quick rhythm before continuing down the hall to step out onto the side stairs into the school.
Part way through his cigarette, the door opens behind him. Kyle lifts his head, and Kenny must have picked up on the code. Kenny's slim, skeletal fingers reach out to take Kyle's cigarette from him, taking a drag off it as he leans against the brick of the school. "Study hall is fucking retarded," Kenny murmurs around the paper, smoke drifting out of his mouth with each vowel.
Kyle lights another cigarette, with his allowance, he can afford it. "Hey, at least you don't have to spend it with that fucktard, Hewlett."
Kenny shrugs, and the cigarette dangles from his closed lips as he looks past Kyle to the too-pale October sky. When he speaks, it ought to fall from his lips to the ground, but somehow manages to hover pressed into his bottom lip, "Wanna cut out?"
There's a part of Kyle that immediately jumps at the thought, nearly burning the tips of his finger on the cherry of his cigarette, "Are you fucking kidding? My mom would kill me!"
"Fuck your mom," Kenny answers. He pauses for a second, then giggles slightly.
"Dude, that's sick!" And Kyle can't help but play off Kenny like this; it's how it's always been.
"Seriously. You wanna skip?" Kenny asks, ignoring Kyle's indignation.
They don't get very far from the school, only down to the park a block away, when they stop, and climb to the top of the jungle gym. They talk sitting on the monkey bars, legs swinging below them, dropping the spent butts of their cigarettes to the mulch below them. When the cars stop driving past, their mouths meet, one of Kyle's hands off to the side, cigarette held between thumb and forefinger, his other hand tightly gripping the bar of the jungle gym.
When he pulls back to smile at Kenny, Kenny shifts his weight a little, and leaning back, cracks his head on the metal bar behind him. His body goes limp and falls down to the mulch below.
By the time Kyle's found the presence of mind to slip down to the ground, a pool of blood is starting to form beneath Kenny's head, a ruddy, liquid tint to his lips.
This is why he sees Mr. Hewlett; Kyle knows better than to talk about things now.
TWO THOUSAND EIGHT
The kitchen table is piled up with envelopes from over a hundred colleges: little colleges with fancy names that probably look better in Hebrew, state universities with fancy letterheads, smaller state colleges with typos in their applications. Kyle's mom specifically told him to go through every last envelope, choosing schools to send in an application. "You ought to go to a good, strong, liberal arts college, Kyle. You'd make a wonderful lawyer," she said before she got in the SUV to take Ike to basketball practice.
He doesn't like words; he likes numbers. Kyle's walls are covered in pieces of paper covered in numbers and passwords. Even in elementary school he already had free codes to porn sites, now he has more money in his savings account than he ought to. Kyle would make a horrible lawyer.
Kyle picks up the cream colored envelopes with elaborate Hebrew characters and throws them in the trash while his mom is out, before looking longingly at the envelope from the computer science department at University of Colorado. Underneath that envelope is a matching one from the mathematics department. He folds the thick white envelopes over themselves and stuffs them in the ankle pocket of his jeans. His mom would never think to look there.
Closing his eyes, Kyle's hand closes around a few envelopes. He slaps them down on the kitchen counter, with a note in his scrawled hand written on the one from the University of Arizona. "HERE'S THE ONES THAT LOOK COOL MOM."
He goes back upstairs to his room with a can of soda and a sandwich, and sits back down at his computer to get back to today's work.
TWO THOUSAND NINE
Kyle goes to University of Colorado, in spite of his mom's insistance that he apply to one of the Ivy League schools, or at least Brandeis. His dad makes faces behind his mother's hair, and Kyle knows that his dad could afford it, but doesn't want to.
Once he gets to school, he lives in a suite with five other guys, most of whom are pretty average, and make the proper sympathetic faces when he tells them he's from South Park. His roommate is a nice Mormon kid who doesn't even drink hot cocoa and tries to get him to read the Book of Mormon for the first two weeks of class. After that, Kyle's sufficiently altered his sleep schedule so he doesn't wake up until eight in the evening, and goes to bed just before his roommate wakes up.
He probably keeps poor Joe awake with the insistent clicking of the keyboard every night. It took Kyle a few days to fully crack the school's firewall, but once he'd managed to get around *that*, he was good to go.
Sometimes, on Saturdays, he leaves his room, and finds his way into a taxi and out to some club, where he dances unenthusiastically, and mostly thinks about international corporations and government conspiracy. He brings pens with him and makes notes on napkins under the black light by the bar.
He's biting his lip and scrawling a series of numbers and letters from memory, trying to crack the system of this particular message, when a hand lands on his shoulder. The girl is wearing something that might be called a dress, and might be called a shirt, depending on how generous the caller was feeling that day. "Hey," she mouths, since he can't hear her over the music, and he raises his plastic cup of beer to her in acknowledgement before leaning back over his napkin.
"What are you doing?" She shouts in his ear, and this close he can smell her makeup.
He looks down at the napkin, covered in numbers and letters written over other numbers and letters, and he shouts back, "Epiphany."
She has a fucking pacifier around her neck, like she's two, and Kyle isn't even wearing his hat. He isn't sure what he's supposed to say, he's never picked someone up at a club before. She leans in and kisses him on the cheek, her lips sliding over skin to press to his mouth. He jolts a little at that, not because he's innocent, but because he'd never expected that.
His hands come up to rest at her hips, and she leads him to the dance floor, his napkin safely stowed in the back pocket of his jeans. As his thumbs dig into her hipbones as they move, he is struck by the fragility of her bones, and the knowledge that she probably wouldn't come back. He isn't sure what that means, but when he kisses her again, the red at her mouth is glossy plastic, not the taste he became accustomed to at home.
TWO THOUSAND TEN
Kyle has to take a political science course to graduate, which is, in his opinion, pretty stupid, because it's not like that has anything to do with higher mathematics. His advisor told him to suck it up, because everybody had to put up with the general education requirements.
The first day of class, the old man at the dais, who is probably four hundred years old and only has hair coming out of the back of his neck and his ears, starts talking about revolutions. Kyle pulls down the front flap of his hat, so no one can see his eyes, and folds his arms under his head, preparing to fall sleep and drool all over his syllabus.
He's nearly floating into a dream state when he hears a thick French accent. "That is bullshit!" Kyle sits up slightly in his seat, lifting a hand to push up the flap of his hat. The voice came from a tall, wiry, blue-haired boy with a bookbag that was apparently made of belts and patches.
"What's your name, son?" The old professor asks.
The boy, who is standing, and who seems oddly familiar to Kyle, folds his arms across his chest. "Christophe. Why? Are you trying to keep my opinion on your filthy portrayal of revolutionary theory quiet?"
The old man frowns as some of the members of the class snicker. "Son, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to sit down, we have a lot to go over today--"
"Bullshit. You are planning to read us the syllabus as though we are all illiterate!" The boy looks around at the other students in the class, and smirks, before he reaches in his bag, and pulls out a pack of Lucky Strikes. He pushes his way out of his row, and lights his cigarette just before slamming the door open and walking outside.
Kyle scrambles to his feet, legs getting tangled in his hurry to push back the fold-out lecture hall desk. His syllabus in one hand, and messenger bag clutched in the other, he speeds after the blue-haired boy, because he's just so *familiar*.
He's barely stepped out the door, when the blue-haired boy spins on his heel, turning to face Kyle. "What?"
Kyle stops, and pushes his hat back up his forehead with the back of the hand holding his syllabus, papers shuffling in front of his face. "I just--" He isn't really sure how to say it, so he pauses, itching his forehead slightly.
"What do you want?" the boy demands with heavy accent.
Kyle isn't sure if the boy's trying to sound tortured or reclusive, so he ignores the inflection altogether.He still hasnt' figured out what to say, and eventually, he just blurts out, "Look, aren't you supposed to be dead?"
Christophe's eyes widen, and for a moment, he looks less like the jaded revolutionary he'd been presenting himself to be. "How... How do you know of my borrowed time?" he asks, and when he speaks around his cigarette, it reminds Kyle of Kenny.
Kyle isn't sure what to say except, "I know someone else it happened to." Christophe's eyes seem to size up Kyle, a slight tilt to his right eyebrow when his eyes reach Kyle's hat, but in the end, he smiles, and hoists his bag over his shoulder.
"C'mon."
TWO THOUSAND ELEVEN
The dilapidated house on Mill Street serves as their headquarters, and while Christophe spouts his ideology in the room at the back of the house where the walls are covered with black sheets. Kyle usually stays upstairs in the loft, the curtains pulled tightly closed, and the electronic equipment scattered around him. He still pretends to go to school, and passes most of his classes, but what he spends his time doing is what he did before he moved off-campus. He sits at his computer and leans forward, forehead nearly pressed to the screen, and every movement beyond the slight touches needed to type sends a flurry of post-its fluttering to the floor.
The sounds from downstairs, shouting and singing, come up through the floor, and Kyle rubs at his forehead, fingers pressed to his temples, and he remembers being seventeen and being able to work at this for longer. The red numbers on the display of his clock read 6:13, and he knows he used to go forty hours without sleep easily. He reaches for his can of Mountain Dew, but when he brings it to his mouth, the can is empty.
Kyle sets the can down with an unsatisfactory crunch, and he pushes back from the desk. When he lands on the sagging matress, his eyes begin to flutter shut at the first touch, and he isn't even curled up beneath the covers before he feels himself floating off to sleep.
He wakes several hours later at the touch of hands at his shoulders. To the side the frame hovering over him, the clock read 9:31am. Kyle's eyes are starting to adjust to the ruddy light coming from the Christmas lights taped to his ceiling, and the familiar bitten hands at his shoulders push down slightly, as the other body climbs into bed. Christophe is still wearing his fatigues, the chains at the pockets clattering against the metal frame of the bed. Kyle doesn't particularly care, and he curls in closer as he falls back asleep.
When he dreams, he does not dream of broken girls with platic mouths, but the splatter of meaningless blood at masculine lips. He is not sure whose they are, but the smell of cigarette smoke is heady, and the copper taste is undeniable.