Chapter Text
The first time Trevor kills somebody, he is thirteen years old. He doesn’t think he means to. The events are out of order in his memory:
-He’s pulling his wet t-shirt back on.
-The man hands his mother money.
-The features of the man’s face blur into themselves, melted-looking and drooping off their structure. He brings the trophy down just to see how they rearrange with impact.
-He’s laying on his front, hands over his head, waiting for it to be over.
-His mother turns up the volume of the television in her room.
-He grabs the trophy off the end table.
-The sound of a belt unbuckling.
-Final breaths bubbling through a broken nose, the rattling of swallowed teeth.
And then, for what feels like forever, it’s just three of them; him and the body and the theme song to a sitcom moving through the wall like a ghost.
...Sunday, Monday, Happy Days...
The drying blood sticks his shirt to his skin and that feels safe, like nobody will ever pull it off of him again. He fishes through an impossible amount of clothing for two people until he finds his boxers. In the pockets of the man’s jeans, he finds fifteen dollars and some pills in a twisted plastic bag.
...These days are ours, happy and free…
It’s all hazed in a rusty monochrome. He sits on the saturated, sheetless mattress and contemplates calling Ryan. It’s a stupid idea, and he’s too afraid that if he dials he will find the number out of service. The body on the floor starts to smell like morning breath.
When he kills the cops, he’s nineteen. In between those years are two boys homes and visits with his handcuffed mother that a social worker takes notes on from the corner. He kills a few strangers between the boys homes, but doesn’t consider them significant and by the time he is seventeen he thinks he’s past all that, decides to go legitimate with his violent streak and join the military. The structure is a struggle but he cuts his hair short, learns to make his bed, spends his days dreaming of dropping the next big one. He wants to end the world.
The world ends in a room with framed degrees on the wall. There is a woman with too much lipstick, so much that it clumps like butter in the wrinkles of her lips and corners of her mouth when it forms polite, clinical terms of condemnation and confirm what Trevor’s always feared. After that, there’s no point in trying to fight it. He’s incapable of goodness, or even of any kind of organized, justified evil. The electricity that flows through him is the kind that kills, not the kind that powers.
He does what he can with that information. It’s mostly small jobs, driving cars from one border town to another. Coke comes up from the south. He drives meth down to the north. He sleeps a few hours a week, eats a candy bar every three days, generally wastes away and within a few months he is a clockwork tin soldier. He winds himself up in truckstop bathrooms. He strangles a hitchhiker a few miles from Niagra falls. It’s the kind of existence that’s unsustainability is exactly what allows him to sustain it- the implicit promise that his remaining lifespan could be measured in months is comforting.
He’s just south of the border when the trouble starts. The first car that pulls him over has two officers and they both die still halfway in their vehicle. The one that chases him eventually loses control. He watches it crumple like a tin can under the falling streetlight. It ends in a standoff in a 24 hour convenience store. Out of twelve cops, he manages to shoot ten and kill four.
In the back of the cop car, he can’t stop laughing.