Chapter One: Round the Bend — Part 10

Daria and Jynx are both sitting with legs crossed, the wind has died to a breeze, and there is no warning of rain. Jynx turns the first print she set down, flipping it from top to bottom, setting the stone back onto it so it will not move. A young boy, maybe eleven, maybe younger, big smile on his face, black eye shining through dark skin, is revealed. He is wearing a boy’s school uniform, clean and well tended, and his smile is sheepish yet sincere. Jynx flips the next one, and the boy is older, old enough that it could be an older brother, or another person entirely. He is sitting on a bench in the sun. He’s not smiling, nor does he seem aware that he is the subject of the piece. His skin looks paler, and his hair cropped is short. If one looks closely, one can see his arm in a makeshift sling, one can see that his face, the side that is visible, is calm, as if he is drugged, as if his soul is vacant the body it is meant to inhabit. There are children his age playing in the background. They are not playing with him.

The next picture is a parody of puberty. The stitches are clearly visible on the top lip, six of them. The bruise on the forehead is pronounced. This picture shows only the face, and is framed by school bars. The pictures follow one after the other, a boy growing into a teen, into a very young man, into somebody familiar and obvious, somebody who only wears pleated skirts and who never seems to smile except by accident. Bruises are in each picture, the only constant besides the subject. Sometimes on the face, or the back of the neck, a couple of times on the upper chest or throat. The last three are the worst, because the subject is now fully aware of himself as an object. Stripped bare of all his clothes, there is nothing to protect him from the lens. The chest, the face, the back and the legs are all bare. Stripped from him as well is the hope that he might smile.

Jynx pauses over the seventh photograph. “This one, this was the one where I realized that it wasn’t something happening at school.” Jynx doesn’t say how she knows, but Daria knows that Jynx probably had her ways of keeping the boy in that picture safe, even at a distance. “This one here, this one makes me feel fuck stupid. Because it took me this long to realize he might be having problems at home.”

Daria does a quick count, it is picture seventeen. She can’t immediately see the damage done, a bad bruise across the collarbone, shoulder tense. Daria can’t see any of the pictures anymore. The last three own her entire consciousness. ChoCho looks so sad, like he’s a thousand miles from anything that might make him happy, even though Jynx must be right in front of him, on the other side of the lens. In one blood has dried between his legs, and in the second there are bruises everywhere. There is pain, fathomable, palpable, physical and psychic, etched into ChoCho’s face. The subject, the object, the person, is somebody more important to Daria than she had ever realized before this moment. She can’t speak, she can’t think.

“I took these pictures to protect him. His parents weren’t good people. How they made somebody as gentle as him I have no idea. I had plans to make certain that if his parents tried to put the police on him, to pull him back into their home like a runaway dog, that I would put a lawyer on them, and these would be the pictures that would cut his leash. Strange how the storm took care of all that drama, just pushed it all away.” Jynx says.

Daria reaches to the fourth picture from the end, the one that showed the blood on his leg, two fingers tracing the length of his leg, up to the source of that blood. She isn’t moving. ChoCho is so beautiful, so fragile, she doesn’t know what to do but think about everything she has said to Paige, to fret over every thought she’s had of ChoCho, every thought about breaking him, making him another of her toys. She thought he was any other man: A source of life giving spunk that would someday let her make child, and expendable as soon as Jynx grew tired of him. She could not think of him as some fractured creature, as something in need of special care, and still see him as an inferior creature.

“Did that blood come from his father, or his mother?” She asks, not knowing what else to say.

“Neither. A boy took him in and put him down.” Jynx says quietly. “It was dealt with. Anybody who hurt ChoCho has been dealt with.”

“I think I’m hurting him.” Daria says this suddenly.

“You think?” Outside Jynx is all sarcasm, though inside she is a mix of surprise and relief.

Daria’s next explosion of behavior catches Jynx off guard. The paladin’s façade is shaken, and her body starts to tremble. In a violent patter of blows, Daria starts hitting her own face and cheeks, squealing and crying, her pale skin flushed a horrific shade of red. Jynx quickly puts the pictures into a pile and wraps them up as Daria becomes more self abusive, her squall turning from a childish outburst to a full blown explosion of self loathing and choking sobs. Daria’s fists keep flying against her, her nails digging into her skin, her screams carrying against the breeze. Jynx stares at her, considering what must eventually be done, though it will be a minute or two before she realizes that it is she who will have to do it.