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His name is Grant Curly. He has blond hair, blue eyes, a sporty body, and a good-natured personality. Everyone loves him. Everyone worships him.
There's always a whole bunch of people around him at passing period. People fight for the right to sit at the same table with him in the cafeteria. The whole city comes to watch him play football. His locker bursts with love letters and symbolic gifts from his admirers. In the corridors, in the toilets, on the roof - all the talk about him. His framed photo adorns school's lobby.
One day this photo disappeared. It was hanging there, pleasing to the eye, and then suddenly vanished, leaving behind only a wooden border and a glass rectangle. Principal just shrugged, the guard scratched his head; in the end, everything was written off as someone's prank. Curly didn't say anything about it, just laughed. He's always smiling, this Curly. Without ceasing.
Jimmy sticks a glossy photo on the wall next to the mirror. The pride of the school, Grant Curly, looks at him kindly, showing thirty-two perfectly white and even teeth. Jimmy looks at him, studies him, memorizes everything. Then he turns to the mirror, to the dirty glass with streaks, cracks and spots of pus from teenage acne, and tries to repeat this signature, much-loved smile.
His yellow chipped teeth can't match the beauty of Curly's, but Jimmy tries to compensate for this by stretching his lips to the sides as much as possible, giving his smile as much cordiality as he can. The middle of his lower lip bursts, blood appears. Jimmy quickly licks it off with his tongue and continues to smile, periodically glancing at the photo for comparison.
Something's off. His eyes don't look right. Jimmy wonders if his iris will brighten if he stares at the light of the desk lamp long enough.
He walks up and down his room, practicing his smile, getting used to it. Smiling non-stop is actually a very difficult task: Jimmy's cheeks, jaw and lips hurt. But it'll pass over time. He just have to be patient.
He smiles when he comes to school the next day, shows his teeth in greeting and monitors students' reactions. People look at him like he's an idiot; some girl snorts into her palm, and her friend twist her finger at her temple and rolls her eyes. This is not exactly what Jimmy was hoping for. It means he's not trying hard enough.
Curly has muscle mass. He plays football, eats right, and goes to the gym on weekends. Cheerleaders spread a rumor that he allegedly has twelve abs. Jimmy only counted six, and he's incredibly happy about it.
He trains at home. Does push-ups from the bed, raises textbooks like dumbbells, does crunches until his stomach hurts and squats until his calves tingle. At the end of every workout, his tiny room heats up like a bathhouse; it becomes impossible to breathe. Jimmy opens the window, goes to the mirror, lifts up his T-shirt and looks for signs of muscles on his flat stomach. Curly smiles reassuringly from the photo.
An hour passes, and according to the the Internet, Jimmy needs to replenish the calories spent. In addition to the rotten stinking meat, there are eggs in the refrigerator, an excellent source of natural protein. Jimmy fries them to a crisp, and then eats them with chips, perfect fast carbs.
Despite the fact that any athlete needs to follow a strict diet, Curly has a small weakness: he loves sweets. He always eats some kind of pudding, a chocolate bar, a large crumbly cookie or a glazed donut on the lunch break. The girls carry sweets into his locker like offerings to the temple.
But what Curly doesn't sin is bad habits. Our righteous one doesn't smoke or drink, doesn't take anything illegal and doesn't even swear. When his friends offer him a cigarette after school, he always politely refuses and waving away the cigarette smoke like some kind of poison.
Jimmy doesn't like sweets, has never liked, but he's ready to make sacrifices for a good cause. He buys and steals these sugary bars and eats them whenever he feels like smoking. Chocolate melts disgustingly in his mouth, fried peanuts and pieces of caramel crunch nastily on his teeth. He feels sick; saliva becomes viscous, he wants to spit it out. It's unbearably tempting to let the smoke into his lungs, but he has to settle for secondhand nicotine which his mother complacently left in the next room.
Curly has his own car: black, polished, without a scratch. He drives it to school, and constantly takes his many-many friends for a ride. Sometimes they drive away from crowded places, turn on the music at full volume and hoarsely shout the lyrics of vintage songs. Curly likes timeless classics. Old school, as an enlightened person would say.
Lying on his bed, Jimmy listens to Queen, Elvis Presley, AC/DC and Kiss. All this junk sounds too boring and hackneyed for his taste, but he continues to play the same songs on repeat until their lyrics are imprinted in his head and his brain begins to like the sound. At two in the morning, his mother bangs into his room demanding to turn this shit off. Jimmy obeys, and the Bohemian Rhapsody continues to play in his head.
Now he knows by heart I Was Made for Lovin' You and Highway to Hell, eats tons of sweets, can do fifty squats in one go and constantly smiles. But for some reason, no one gives a fuck about it. Jimmy sits in the history classroom, smiling, but no one is in a hurry to approach him. Jimmy rests in the cafeteria, eats chocolate and washing it down with acid soda, but no one is eager to sit down with him. Jimmy walks down the hallway, singing Can't Help Falling in Love, but no one thinks to join him. Jimmy casually (but in a sexy way) wipes sweat from his forehead with the bottom of his T-shirt, but no one looks in his direction.
He wants to smoke so much, but instead he eats sugar. He eats so much of it that the contents of his stomach nauseatingly bubble, and his face covers with a scattering of red pimples. Going to the bathroom to throw up is nice. At least he can stop smiling at these moments.
There's always a lot of commotion around Curly, and Jimmy genuinely doesn't understand why. They do everything the same, they actually live the same life. So why does everyone love one of them and nobody cares about the other?
Appearance, Jimmy guesses. Exactly. He need to change his appearance.
Most often, Curly comes to classes in dark blue pants, a yellow polo shirt, red sneakers with snow-white laces, a denim jacket and a denim cap. With this list in his head, Jimmy goes to a second-hand store, where he finds a yellow T-shirt with some Disney character, faded bell-bottomed trousers, red slip-ons and a blue baseball cap with the 'Go Get Them New York Yankees!' writing. He has a denim jacket at home, thank God, got it from some cousin from New Jersey. In general, it turned out to be quite cheap and similar to the original.
By the way, he stole the cap.
At home, armed with paper scissors, Jimmy gives himself a haircut under the guidance of Curly from the photo: he cuts off all this long tangled mess from behind and trims his bangs. The result is a little uneven, but the original smiles approvingly. The only problem is that Jimmy's hair doesn't want to curl beautifully in any way and just hangs like bunch of snots.
He asks his mother how to make his hair curly, to which she responds with some kind of unpleasant look and meaningful silence.
Jimmy opens a pack of hair bleach, mixes its components in a soup bowl by eye and applies it to his hair with his bare hands. Holds it until his scalp starts to pinch, and then goes into the bath, wash off the dye with cold water. At some point, his mother finds him doing this, then sits in the kitchen all evening and asks her invisible company where she made a mistake, why her son has a picture of another boy in his room and what she should do when he starts wearing women's clothes. Jimmy wipes his hair and notices with displeasure that a frighteningly large part of it has remained on the towel.
The color turns out to be dirty yellow, completely unlike Curly's natural blonde. Here and there his hair didn't take dye, especially at the roots. His scalp is red and itchy, and clumps of hair continue to fall out. His hands turned white and the next morning they began to peel. Jimmy dresses up in new clothes and continues to smile.
At school, he is greeted with laughter, but by no means friendly. Classmates point at him, hysterically bang their fists on the tables, and shout witty comparisons. Curly looks at him and doesn't smile.
He doesn't smile.
Jimmy wants to smoke the whole pack of cigarettes at once.
Maybe it's because he's misrepresenting himself. He needs to be more open, cheeky. Keep his head high and his back straight. Maybe it's because he feels too insecure in his new image. Maybe if this is fixed, people will stop considering him a freak.
Jimmy follows Curly as he saunters home from training. Jimmy adjusts to his pace, repeats his steps, spreads his shoulders wide and parodies his relaxed pose. They walk like this for about two minutes, until Curly suddenly turns around. Jimmy freezes, his lips reflexively stretching into a smile.
But Curly isn't smiling, and Jimmy wants to yell at him for daring to shirk.
"Are you following me?" Curly asks.
Still smiling, Jimmy lies that his house is in the same direction.
"Want to walk together then?" Curly asks.
Jimmy doesn't know what to do.
"You know, you don't have to pretend to be someone else with me. You can be yourself." Curly says.
Jimmy doesn't understand him at all.
They walk together, a dialogue ensues. Jimmy sees this as a great opportunity to gain the necessary knowledge. He notices the intonation with which Curly speaks, how loudly, how vividly he does it. He memorizes how his eyebrows move, how his eyes squint, how his hands behave. They exchange stories with each other, and it hurts Jimmy to realize that no matter how hard he tries, he won't change his past, won't have Curly's happy life completely. But, at least, to any other person, he can easily lie about the course of development of his fate, borrowing from the tale of a more fortunate person a little less than all the facts.
"I want to become a pilot in the future," Curly says. "Like my father."
Jimmy's heart skips a beat. Finally, a match!
He says his father was a test pilot. Unfortunately, he crashed during one of these test flights, when his son wasn't even a year old, but he instilled in his boy a great love for planes. And the fact that this love was awakened just a moment ago, Curly doesn't need to know at all.
"Cool. Maybe we'll go to the same flight school."
Maybe.
When Jimmy gets home, he asks his mother if they still have anything from his father's flying past. Some kind of uniform, helmet, dog tags. His mother looks up from watching the talk show, eyes her son ruefully and says, taking a sip from the bottle:
"Jimmy. Your father got behind the wheel completely drunk and drove off at full speed into the river, where he drowned with his rattletrap. I lied to you. Didn't want to hurt your fragile child psyche."
Jimmy asks what his father's job really was.
"A sales consultant at hardware store."
Jimmy goes to his room and eats two bars of milk chocolate.
The next day, Curly sits down with him for lunch. Other people look at them in confusion, but don't say anything. In a brief moment of absolute honesty with himself, Jimmy, realizing all his worthlessness, asks Curly why he decided to spend time with him.
"It's very easy and pleasant to talk to you." Curly replies.
After class, they go for a walk.
Curly doesn't drag him to surf shopping malls or wander culturally through manicured parks. Instead, he asks Jimmy to give him a tour of places where a person with an average income and above won't set their foot. Jimmy takes him to abandoned buildings, slums, and the trailer park where he spent a significant part of his childhood. Jimmy tells him that stealing is actually not that difficult. He shows from which shops on the outskirts he successfully took out Snickers, from which he took out M&M's, and from which supermarket he managed to get out only because the guard took turn too fast and bumped into a fruit cart on full speed.
Curly laughs almost to tears after every story he tells. Jimmy memorizes his laugh (ha-ha-ha) and later, at home, tries to repeat it. It doesn't turn out quite right (kha-kha-kha) and he wonders if it can be fixed by drinking a few gallons of honey.
Filled with the experience of communicating with Curly, having memorized his habits and manner of speech, Jimmy again tries to please someone, and again he fails. The girls, when they find out about his presence, pack up and leave, and the guys whisper nasty things and throw slobbery lumps of paper at him. Only one person expressed a desire to chat with Jimmy: a nerd with round-rimmed glasses asked him if he has Angelman syndrome.
Violently gnawing a lollipop with his blackening teeth, Jimmy realizes that he's still not trying hard enough.
He joins the school football team. He persuades Curly to buy him a gym membership. Agrees to join a volunteer association and help poor pensioners on weekends. One of these clients of compassionate schoolchildren is a one-legged veteran who talks for an hour and a half about how various fragments of bodies flew apart in the war, how his fellow soldiers burned alive and how he had to run through the jungle from the cunning Vietnamese. Curly, God bless his kind soul, begins to cry unironically. Jimmy bites his cheek until it bleeds and manages to squeeze out a single tear from his right eye.
After the karma cleansing session, they go to the car dump. Curly picks up stones from the ground and, bursting into childish laughter, throws them into the windows of old vehicles. Jimmy licks the bleeding wound in his mouth and thinks what all these cool, fashionable and exalted guys would say if they saw their beloved golden boy rummaging through garbage cans and knocking down the headlights of rusty clunkers with a piece of pipe.
One of Curly's friends, a covered with hundred of makeup layers cheerleader in a tasteless leopard skirt, asks with perplexity and (oh if, oh if) disdain disguised as plain interest why her prodigal friend has a huge hole on the sleeve of his jacket. Jimmy, who happened to be nearby, honestly replies that the jacket fell victim to sharp rusty fittings. Curly, laughing awkwardly, runs his hand through his hair and admits the inconvenient truth. The cheerleader frowns her plucked eyebrows. Jimmy feels his smile involuntarily widen, ignoring the limits of the physically possible.
Wider and wider and wider, as Curly begins to be late for classes because of their nocturnal adventures, dress more nondescript and spend most of his free time with the outcast.
When Curly refuses to come to Tiffany's birthday party (and this Tiffany isn't just anyone, but the most popular girl in school), preferring instead to storm the grocery store, Jimmy burns with glee so much that he almost faints.
Curly is living a good life, a great life. He has a large two-storey house in a prosperous area of the city, almost a mansion. A garage with a capacity of two cars, a backyard with a swimming pool and a snow-white gazebo for romantic dates under the moon. His room is the size of Jimmy's four rooms, and inside everything is filled with computers, game consoles, plasma TVs, expensive construction sets and other evidences of his parents' ardent love. He has a golden retriever named Gabby. When Jimmy brought home a puppy from the street, his mother threw it back outside.
Despite all this, Curly says he would like to visit Jimmy. Spend his time in tiny two-room apartment in a residential area, which is unacceptably close to the industrial district from an ecological point of view.
Jimmy waits for his mother to leave to clean floors at the hospital, and brings Curly to his abode. In such a close environment of poverty, the golden boy shines like a golden nugget. He looks at the peeling walls as if they are covered with frescos. He breathes in the smell of mold and dampness as if it's the scent of flowers. He is so inexplicably happy to be here that Jimmy feels out of place in his own home.
They go to his room. Real Curly meets Curly from the photo and chuckles softly. They're so different from each other, these two Curlies. One of them, for example, is not smiling.
"You should know how many times we've redone this photo," Curly says. "They wanted me to be perfect."
Curly touches the glossy paper with his fingertips and sighs somehow sadly.
"I was so glad when it disappeared," he admits. "This falsehood no longer bothered my eyes."
If Curly from the photo had had such opportunity, he would probably have winced with resentment. But he's only capable of positive emotions.
"Do you happen to have anything to smoke?" Curly asks.
Jimmy climbs under the bed, pushes aside a barricade of wild berry-flavored cupcakes and takes out a pack of cigarettes with a lighter. Silently, he hands it all to Curly, and he wants to yell at him for daring to compromise his own principles.
"Should I open the window?" Curly asks.
Jimmy says he shouldn't, otherwise he'll let a black cloud of industrial filth into the room.
Curly lights a cigarette, takes a drag, and coughs. Jimmy breathes the smell of nicotine through his mouth, through his nose, through all the pores of his body.
"What a bullshit," Curly says and takes another drag. "Always wanted to try it."
Curly sits down next to Jimmy on the bed, leaving the cigarette smoldering in his hand like incense. With bright blue eyes, he glances at the covered with cracks and yellow spots ceiling. He looks indescribably peaceful, but at the same time somehow lost. Jimmy continues to smile, and therefore considers himself a winner.
"Can I be honest with you?" Curly asks.
Jimmy nods.
"I envy you."
Jimmy raises his brows in surprise.
"You live in a completely different world. In such free one, in such real. No one tells you what to do, no one tries to mold you into someone you don't want to be. You are free to behave as your heart desires. And I always have to live up to someone's expectations."
Curly, who won the lottery of life, says he doesn't like his role.
"Have you ever had the feeling that you aren't living your life the way you would like? I always have it. I constantly catch myself thinking I want something that isn't this. I desperately crave drastic changes."
Curly, who lives on a huge estate and is drowning in money, says he doesn't want any of this.
"No one knows the real me. Everyone sees only my gilded shell. I don't want to pretend to be anyone. I want to be myself."
Jimmy asks if Curly is afraid that people will stop loving him as soon as they find out who he really is.
"You know..." says Curly, taking a drag. "Fuck people's opinions."
Curly, beloved and revered by everyone, don't give a damn about this love.
Jimmy, who is not fucking wanted by anyone and forever despised, wants to put out the cigarette on Curly's hand.
What an ungrateful bastard Curly is. He has everything. Everything you can dream of. Handsome appearance. A big house. Caring parents. Pockets full of money. Lots of friends. Obsessive admirers. He is literally the chosen one. The gods themselves love him.
But he rejects this love when some people don't even get a crumb of it.
A spoiled prick who knows no hardships.
Jimmy wants to strangle him. Jimmy wants to feast on sugar and die.
A selfish bastard who ignores the sorrows of everyone except his own.
Jimmy wants to carve a permanent smile on his face. Jimmy wants to stop smiling.
A brainless idiot who voluntarily renounces the highest value.
People should hate you. People shouldn't notice you. Know the loneliness. Know the pain.
Jimmy looks in the mirror and for one beautiful moment his brain, deceived by rage, manages to believe that the real Grant Curly, this egocentric guy who showed his true face to the world, is actually uglier than his cheap copy sitting next to him.
And then Jimmy thinks that others, in theory, can see it too.
If others realize who Curly really is, that he's a liar, a garbage lover and a thief, that he wants to dig in the mud and run through scrap metal fields like a pig, collecting a bunch of diseases, they will be disappointed in him and go look for a new idol.
And they'll find Jimmy.
One sun will go out, another will light up.
A balance in which one is certainly loved and the other is certainly hated will be maintained.
And everyone will be happy.
Like the guy from the photo.
"Hey, Curly."
"Huh?"
"You ever wanted to be a brunette?"