Scar Girl (The Scar Boys #2)(55)

Truth is, and no disrespect to the dead, I always thought we were a better band without Johnny, even as far back as that first night in Athens. Everyone thought Johnny was the center of the band, but from where I sat, he was the odd man out. Part of me wonders if he thought that, too, and that’s why he, well, you know, did what he did.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Johnny’s book is the proof.

The record advance was enough that Cheyenne quit her job, and Harry and I got an apartment in New York City. Chey still lives at home, technically, but she doesn’t sleep there a lot. She’s living the rock-and-roll life. Harry still worries about her, though. Even when he doesn’t tell me he’s worried, which is, like, all the fucking time, I can see it. But from where I sit, we gotta let Chey be who she’s gonna be.

One of the biggest changes is that Harry has a girlfriend, Thea. She’s got something wrong with her face, too. I don’t mean that to sound bad; she’s actually totally hot, but her chin and the side of her face are all discolored. She says it’s a giant birthmark, something called a port-wine stain. I don’t know anything about that stuff, but I actually think it makes her look kind of cool. It’s like one of Mother Nature’s tattoos.

When we started to get popular, we got a lot of people whose faces were fucked up in some way or other turning up at gigs. I mean, they saw Harry as a kind of hero.

Harry, the jerk, was pissed off all the time when he started dating Thea. Some bullshit about how disfigured people should date normal people to prove some point or something. Harry always saw his scars worse than the rest of the world did. Well, worse than I did anyway. Luckily, he got over it, because she’s awesome. She’s kind of become our unofficial road manager.

As for me, I try not to worry about things. Hell, I’m just happy I get to play the drums every day. I mean, people are paying me to beat on shit. How cool is that?





HARBINGER JONES


I found myself back on Dr. Kenny’s couch a week after the wake. I was feeling so messed up that I thought I might explode. Kenny had lost a patient to suicide a couple of years earlier, and I figured he might be able to offer me some perspective.

“That was quite a memorial service,” he said. I didn’t even realize he’d been there. That was pretty much it for the small talk.

“Harry,” Dr. Kenny began, lowering his voice until it was in tune with the Force, making sure I had no choice but to listen. “This is not your fault.” He paused. “Do you understand?”

I nodded, but it was a reflex. Of course this was my fault. It was everyone’s fault. Johnny needed us, and we’d abandoned him. I could’ve blamed Jeff and his bullshit “no friendships” rule, and part of me did, but if I was being honest, I knew I was the culprit, I was the bad guy. Johnny told me that first day I’d visited him after we came back from Georgia that he needed me, and I didn’t deliver. I was the worst friend in the entire history of friendships.

I’m not sure what Dr. Kenny thought as he watched me go through those mental calisthenics, but he knew I needed help. He was good like that.

“Harry,” he said again, “it’s not your fault.” He looked me in the eye and did some kind of Svengali thing that stopped me from looking away. I started to cry.

“How can you know that?” I asked. “How can you possibly know that?”

“Because,” he answered, his voice weaker than I would have hoped, “at the end of the day, suicide is a choice that is made by someone who is sick, mentally ill, and doesn’t have the capacity to choose between life and death. It’s an incredible tragedy in part because the victim isn’t of sound mind.”

“Johnny seemed like a lot of things, Doc, but he didn’t seem crazy.”

“Depression doesn’t mean crazy, Harry. You know that.”

“I just don’t understand.”

“I know, son,” he said. He’d never, ever called me son before. It gave me comfort, but in a weird way crossed a line, too. “That’s the hardest part. Knowing that you will never understand. Knowing that what you really want, more than anything, is a chance to ask Johnny why, and knowing that you will never get that chance. But sometimes, there isn’t a why.”

“I can’t believe that,” I said, wiping the snot on the back of my sleeve. “There has to be a reason.”

“Look, there are a thousand reasons Johnny could have been driven to this, but most of the literature, in a case like Johnny’s—”

“A case like Johnny’s?”

“A suicide that follows a debilitating injury, particularly an amputation.”

“Oh.” It never occurred to me that there might be precedent for this.

“The literature suggests that Johnny was at greater risk than the average person because of who he was.”

Dr. Kenny paused, looking for the right words. I just waited.

“Harry, Johnny was a narcissist. Do you know what that is?”

I nodded. I didn’t know the clinical definition at the time, but I looked it up later, and my working understanding—a person with a big ego whose world is defined by himself—was close enough.

“He had such a strong sense of self, of power, of control, that losing it was very hard for him to reconcile. If Johnny had been shy and retiring—”