Halle Butler: Jillian

IT WAS REALLY, LIKE, 85-degrees outside already. Megan wasn’t wearing underpants and her asscrack was sweaty. She stopped feeling liberated and started feeling exposed out in the world in her pajamas. Slime under her tits, too. The light outside was so beautiful. When she thought about going back inside to clean up and get dressed she wanted to die! Oh, yes, to die! She laughed. It was dark in that apartment and dirty and it was small, it was incredibly small, and she wasn’t in the mood to be so close to someone like Randy.

She thought about “walking forever” in an abstract way, but she’d tried stuff like that before. About two hours was as much as she could take before getting depressed.

It was a weird feeling, this feeling. It was a dead-end feeling, but the dead-end feeling came from, like, the possibility of eternity. She knew she would give up everything in her life to exist in the first 20 minutes of this walk, but that was impossible, and at some point she would have to go back inside, and then the grips of her crappy mood would start in again. She wanted to do one more thing before she went in, though.

JILLIAN GOT DRESSED in jeans and put all of the dirty dishes in the dishwasher, all the trash in the trash, and all the dirty clothes in the hamper. She woke her kid up and they walked the dog to the Starbucks.

MEGAN COULDN'T THINK of anything to do. She thought about eating a leaf, but that seemed stupid. She decided to lie down in a median for a minute. If she happened to fall asleep, then maybe that would be amazing.

Pretty much, she wanted to be gone so long that Randy would worry about her. She wished she could go away and be completely alone for five years. Or she wished she would die.

“NO DOGS IN STARBUCKS, ma’am.”

“Well, could I use the drive-through?”

WHAT WOULD BE the most just vehicle to wrest me from this mortal coil? A Vespa? Yes, I want to be hit in the neck with the front tire of a Vespa, that way my face won’t be covered by a car when I die. I’ll be able to see this beautiful sky and this weird green light, which I have decided I want to be the last things I see.

BY THE TIME JILLIAN, Adam, and Crispy were almost back home, Jillian felt nasty. Her entire shower was undone. It was really, really hot out.

EVENTUALLY, MEGAN got up. When she sat up in the median, the head rush felt similar to crying. She was depressed. She said, “I’m depressed,” and sat there for a minute longer, but then she had to stand up and walk back home. It was weird walking home, because she partly wanted to go home, but why? What is there for me? I hate it there so much I want to murder someone.

She held out her hands and looked at the mulch imprints on her palms.

These hands. These hands! I am capable of it, with these hands. She made gripping claw shapes with her hands. “I fucking hate myself and my liiiiiife,” she said, there on the sidewalk in her flannel jammy pants, looking at her hands, sweating, walking and talking to herself like a fucking asshole. She had abandoned her water cup.

I would so much rather cry. I would so much prefer this if I could just start bawling and screaming here in the street. Maybe I could pretend to be so fucking crazy that someone would call someone else and then that second person would come with an ambulance and I could act so crazy that they’d have to take me somewhere with a green lawn and give me a shower and put me in a straight jacket (which actually sometimes seems like it might be comforting, if a person had a little bit of choice in the matter) and I don’t have a wallet or even underpants on, so no one would be able to tell me to go home, and then eventually someone would see me on the news and be like, “Isn’t that Megan?” and then Randy would feel like an asshole and I would get to go live with my parents for a while and it would be a judgment free zone because everyone would be a little bit afraid of me, but they would finally see that I was a person worthy of their sympathy. If I threw myself down on the street and started screaming like a freak in my jammies then people would see, and then it would be all right, you know? You know? You know?

“You know?” she whispered. “You know?” She whispered it while she looked at the palms of her hands and walked back to her apartment in the apocalyptic green light, wondering what she could do to convince people that she was crazy (therefore a victim) and not an asshole (therefore just an asshole).

“Where were you?” asked Randy.

“It’s so fucking dark in this shithole,” said Megan.

“Where were you?”

“What a dump. Hey what’s that from?”

“What?”

“What a dump,” she said.

“Ok, fine, don’t tell me where you were.”

“I was just outside, ok? Sorry if I don’t feel completely comfortable treating you like my mommy and reporting to you about everywhere I’ve fucking been, ok?”

“Oh, is that you treating me like your mommy? Because I just thought that was being a courteous normal fucking person. I mean, you walk out of the fucking house in your underwear, of course I’m going to wonder, Oh, where is she?”

“I’m in my jammies, not my underwear.”

She got a beer out of the fridge and drank it.

“Are you serious?” asked Randy.

“I guess that really depends on what you mean, doesn’t it? Do you think it’s a sign of a serious person to drink a beer at eight forty-five in the morning? Because I guess I think that makes it seem like I’m not really taking this very seriously.”

“What do you mean, this?”

“You know,” said Megan. She gestured vaguely to the apartment with her beer can.

“Oh my god, you’re being so dramatic and corny right now I could shoot you,” said Randy. Megan stood at the window with her back to him and finished the can of beer. “If someone else did this and I told you about it, you would make fun of that person.”

Megan felt like her guts and bowels and all of that stuff were dangling over a pit. She needed someone to help her, obviously, but instead here she was, staring out of the window with her guts and anus dangling and swaying back and forth over a pit like a big pair of balls. Vulnerable as balls, too, and potent as balls, too, she thought, and then felt like a pretentious baby and started crying there in the glowing green spot near the window of her otherwise dank and dark and depressing apartment and she said, “I hate you,” in a way that would maybe be difficult to decipher, and since Randy was already fed up and practically over it, he didn’t take the time to figure out what she’d said, which was ultimately maybe for the best.

“I’m going to take a shower,” said Randy. “Help yourself to some coffee.”

She turned and put her back against the window and, yeah, she definitely felt like an overdramatic idiot, but at least well, whatever. “Fucking asshole,” she whispered. Fucking asshole.

She looked at herself in the bedroom mirror to determine whether or not a shower was necessary and decided it was not. She took off her jammies and used them to wipe the sweat from her asscrack and armpits, then she put on clean underpants and dug out her shorts which were, alas, too small, but would still button. She looked at that silly fuck in the mirror, did a royal bow, and said, “Fuck you, too.”

She cleaned the apartment. It was a way to divert her nervous energy. She went on a walk. She waited for it to be night.

Jillian was either going to throw up or have diarrhea, her body hadn’t decided which yet. It was nerves. Although, maybe nothing would happen. That was possible. She thought about it while she paced around her apartment. She had four T3s left. She could take them and then maybe they would help her calm down long enough (though they were the last, the very last) to come up with a plan.