Jem…Chapter 87 by Bailey Summers Copyright © 2013 Bailey Summers All Rights Reserved.

Jem…Chapter 87

Chapter 87

Previously on Jem…

“It’s not funny.”

“No, it’s not…it looks like it hurts.”

“It does.”

“Kind of like cramps huh?”

“No…that’s not fair I can’t have those so you don’t get to play that card with me okay.”

………………………………...

“Fuck you Angel, you don’t ever get to tell me or anyone else that we don’t get the right to bitch and talk about stuff that’s going on with our bodies!”

“No?! Why so I get to be the odd girl out and you get to rub my face in the fact that that might be something that oh so fucking bad to you but someone like me would be fine with even fucking happy about!”

“I don’t care! You don’t have the right, my body my period my right!”

“What about my rights huh?!”

“Aaugh fucking guys…” She doesn’t yell that but hisses it at me.

………………………………........

“Where are you!?” She yell-sobbed into the phone.

“Home.”

“How’d you get home?” She still sounds upset and crying. Like hurt and stuff but still like she’s mad at me.

“I hitchhiked.”

“You what!? Angel that’s not safe!”

“Doesn’t matter right? I’m a guy I can take care of myself!” I cry into the phone and hang up on her and turn my phone off and I don’t really make it anywhere…I just hit my bed and grab a pillow and bury my face in them and cry.

And Now…..

*Rayne…………

I…I’ve never been that way before, that mad before with someone. I was just trying to be funny. To ease the tension and make her smile a little and then she just lost it on me.

And then I…

I just I put up with Summer and her bullshit…to get yelled at because of my period, of just trying to lighten things up…I wasn’t trying to be a bitch.

But getting told, almost ordered to what I can say or not say…?

My mouth’s been shut before and I could just not take it this time and what Angel had said well it just hit this wrong nerve somewhere and I just kind of bitched back.

And then it all came out of me in this completely fucked up rush.

And the fact that she was so angry with me and it just felt like she was blaming me.

It’s not my fault what happened to her happened and it’s not my fault that she can’t have kids.

I’m about halfway to the pharmacy inside Wall-mart when I realize she’s really not there with me and that we had a big fight and….

And then it starts to sink in as I’m sort of cooling off and my brain kicks the heck in.

Angel might really feel that way…

I mean I wasn’t doubting her…was I?

I mean I’ve never really met or known someone that wasn’t in the right body before and I have no idea what that feels like.

And I said….

“Oh merde…Oh t’abbernac!”

I pace around chewing on my thumb and even bite a bit down on the web between my thumb and my forefinger to keep from swearing and after a few minutes I head outside.

Angel is not in the parking lot or by the van.

Gone.

I know in my head that she stormed off angry with me but it doesn’t stop the knot that’s forming in my gut.

I get in the van and I start to drive in the direction that I seen her storming off in and I drive slowly looking for her.

My head is replaying our fight and almost in these slow motion cut scenes with her sitting over from me and she looked nauseous, and in pain and here I was making sort of fun at that and as much as I was alluding to that hurting like a period can I really don’t know just how that felt.

I don’t have the parts for that kind of insight.

And then the argument…I should’ve seen how touchy and nerved up she still was I mean we went through all those tests and she was so scared and no…no I just was a complete moron and shoved both feet in my mouth so deep I could get a job for Circe de Soleil.

I can’t find her anywhere.

I try her phone; I try her phone just about at every stop light I hit driving through town looking for her and all I get that she’s out of service. Not even voice mail…she must have turned her phone off.

Part of me is so pissed off at her and part of me is so scared too.

It didn’t take much for Angel to almost decide on going back to being Jason before and this was definitely way worse.

I mean we had a fight a big fight and I yelled at her…I yelled at her just like my dad used to yell at me. I mean I loved my dad but he wasn’t perfect and I wasn’t the daughter that he wanted. I was gothy and punk and I didn’t do what he said or wanted and I didn’t do the dress nice and be polite and be a nice girl.

He just wanted me to be something that I couldn’t be and we fought…a lot and he grounded me a lot.

Grounding doesn’t sound bad but add in him being that kind of guy that puts a lock on your bedroom door and screws your windows shut….okay yeah I did run away twice before he did that stuff but home.

Home was dad and my brothers and just about every male member of my family winning every argument just because they were guys. I’d seen my mother and sisters and aunts just be okay with taking whatever was being said and not arguing about it.

Good catholic girls, good french catholic girls do what they’re told.

And all the guys that I dated in junior high were like that. I went to one of those schools where it was a public school but the bulk of the kids were white and french there and we really didn’t mix with the other kids. Well the guys did sure and you could have non-white non french friends too sure but not good french girl was going to hook up with someone that was going to bring shame on the family.

Never applied to the guys.

Nothing ever applied to the guys.

And neither did the word no to some of the boys that I was “Allowed” to date.

I’m not saying that we were racist, we weren’t but we were there was a lot of mixed french and other families too and on the surface that looked just fine but coming from home because there was so many mixed families there was this whole thing where yeah…it was better if you dated french on french and white on white.

Getting felt up because of that little cultural crap was oh so much fun and yeah I fought them off and slapped faces and got a reputation for being difficult.

I developed a pretty strong bad taste for a lot of guys, boys, and men from that even before I found out that I was a lesbian.

Which led to more fights at home.

And my mom was no help.

So when I met Summer and I fell for this radical very English very in your face white girl that told me I was worth so much more than that I fell for her pretty hard.

And I took her bullshit and her passive aggressive stuff and even the worse that things got between us the more I just kept quiet because I’d burned all my bridges and I didn’t have any one left to turn to or love me so…

So I became my mother…

Until Angel…

So with her I became like my dad?

I pitch a mini-fit there at a stop sign thrashing the steering wheel and screaming out a stream of profanity that had some poor old guy walking his dog staring at me from across the street.

I wipe my eyes and I grit my teeth and I roll up my window and pull away.

I try her phone again as I pull into the local Tim Horton’s there hoping she might be sulking over a coffee. I don’t see her there but I go inside hoping she’ll be in the bathroom.

“Oh thank god it’s ringing.”

“Where are you!?” I yell-sobbed into the phone.

“Home.” She still sounds upset and crying. Like hurt and stuff but still like she’s mad at me.

“How’d you get home?” Please. Please don’t tell me you hitched…you’re…

“I hitchhiked.”

“You what!? Angel that’s not safe!”

“Doesn’t matter right? I’m a guy I can take care of myself!”

And that’s when she hangs up on me.

She’s a guy she can take care of herself…. I’ve never heard her that hurt and upset since the stupid shit I did running out in front of that car…well into the street and she saved my life.

And I hurt her.

I called her a fucking guy…and I didn’t mean it…I didn’t mean for something that fucked up to come out like that.

I leave without getting anything and get back in the van and I’m crying there in the parking lot because I know this was a huge fuck up.

I hurt the best thing that had come along into my life by being…I don’t know by being my dad…angel has been such the girl in our relationship so far and that sort of made me the butch one the guy…even though there shouldn’t be such a thing in a real lesbian relationship…but I haven’t had one that wasn’t messed up.

Summer and my dad…the way that he treated mom…I wasn’t much different I guess.

I’d cry longer but I just need to get home and I need to think of some way to make this right too.

I have no idea what to expect either and I’m nervous and I’m all knotted up inside as I drive home and I’m very sure that I was speeding a good bit of the way there well at least on the highway. I slow down in town since we’ve had run in with the cops and I don’t want them to have an excuse to pull me over and be assholes.

In the mood I’m in I’m not sure that I could keep my mouth shut.

Though I can feel my tongue feeling like lead as I pull into the yard and get out of the van and walk to the house.

Goddamn it I hate this feeling, when Summer and I were bad I dreaded coming in the door.

I have to use my keys to get in and I can hear music hard and fast and very heavy stuff being played as I’m opening the door.

*The Trooper* By Iron Maiden I think and it’s right in the start of that high speed guitar only I can hear it being played along with live and Brooklyn and Kim aren’t home yet.

I walk in and Angel is in the living room without a bra and in one of her old hockey shirts and these basketball shorts tied tight enough to stay on and her hair is wet and loose making it a darker color but she’s definitely boy moding it or well honestly she’s trying to. She does have the angry guy posture down though feet planted wide and the shoulders are sort of hunched with the way she’s playing.

She still looks like Angel to me just very hurt and very pissed off and playing out the hurt and the frustration that I’ve caused.

She looks up at me and I’m not sure exactly who I’m seeing there looking at me. I mean I know Angel, or I think I know her pretty well but I didn’t know Jason and as much as things with Adam are her hiding out from him after things went way too far with that psycho. Jason had that side where Jase fought back.

I’ve really never seen this side of Angel until now and I really don’t know what to say…where to start or even how to.

What I said, how I said it the way that we fought to her, to Jason all that has ever meant was pain…

I come into the living room and sit on the end of the couch and pull my legs up and watch and listen.

There’s some tears staring to fill in my eyes as she’s giving me this hurt hard stare and she plays the song out and I’m wiping the tears away as they’re coming and trying to repeat to myself in my head you’re not your father…

The song ends and she grabs a bottle of coke and she starts taking a long, long drink.

“Angel…”

She looks at me and she reaches down and she touched off something on the computer she’s been using and pauses the track that she’s been following.

“Don’t you mean Jason?”