Free Jayden's Revenge: The Tale of an American Family by Dirk Knight

1.
    Jayden gives her feet a rest outside the library , smoking and wasting time until school is out so she can catch the bus home . In front of the library, surrounding the fountain is a ring of hills that provide s 360° cover . S o , as long as no one walks up on her , she can puff and brood undetected. It i s beginning to rain – no surprise to her – and she is prepared with Philip’s hoodie covering her black hair . I t doesn’t smell like him anymore ; she has worn it too many times and her own fragrance has melded with the jacket.
    She ha s always preferred the taste of Marlboro, her mother’s cigarette brand, but with her gone, she is stuck swiping Pall Mall ’s from the old man . She pulls a long draw into her lungs and is comforted by the warming sensation that hits her throat and eventually filters through her entire bod y. She stuffs the carton of Pall Mal l back into the oversized kangaroo pouc h – his oversized kangaroo pouch – and lets her rage escape with the exhaled smoke.
    When she had first confiscated this hoodie, the pouch had contained a bag of weed and a CD. The weed was long gone and the CD, although she hated it after a single listen, she had ripped to her computer and put it as a playlist – labeled “Philips S tupid Techno Crap ’ –on her iPod . She is somehow comforted , just knowing that it is there and that she doesn’t have to listen to it. She misses being able to waste time with Philip, which is why she is out here alone now … with nothing more than a hoodie and a crappy playlist.
    All she has now is her alcoholic father, who has become a burden to her as the months have passed. More often than not, she will enter the living room to find him passed out drunk on the couch, sitting upright, fork in hand, plate on the table, and kernels of corn on the floor with a cup of whisky in between his legs. She is forced to watch over him constantly. Pat hetic. When she manages to usher him to bed he doesn’t sleep long before he is awakened by his own screams; she will find him once again passed out on the couch when she awakens herself for school the next day . Then she will make him coffee so he can get her to school on time … and away from him for a blessed while.
    If the police pick her up again for truancy he will get a fine, so she has to show up and get her name on the books , and then she slips the campus confines and runs across the lot to the hideout she shared with Philip last year . She discovered this library fountain the previous year; h er English teacher had walked the class over, when the weather was nicer, and let them sit on the knoll and write poetry about true love, world peace, and democracy – or whatever the hell happy little seventh graders wrote about. Hers talked about death , but she didn’t share it with anyone.
    She can’t handle the happy smiling faces that the halls hold . School Spirit? This school is chock - full of a bunch of snobby brats making fun of the other snobby brats who didn’t get an iPad for Christmas. Her dad wouldn’t notice anything in his state and wouldn’t care if he did – unless the cops brought her home again ... Last Wednesday was her birthday and he didn’t even notice that . N o one had .
    Philip is always on her mind. She wishe s that things didn’t work out the way they did for him. She pulls her phone out , scrolls through s ome pictures of the two of them, and stops on t he one of their first day of school here ( the first day they were Wildcats toget her ) . She begins to cry softly; surprised she still can manage tears after everything she saw this fall. He was a few years ahead of her in school and last year was the first time they had walked the halls together since before she was old enough to have an opinion. Today was supposed to be like the good old days , but when she entered the giant double doors, hearing the bustle of hundreds of students echoing off the vaulted ceilings and marble floors , she imagined