InsaneJournal

journal
[The journal is slipped under Boyd's door after this. If she's watching, it goes halfway in, pulls halfway out again, and then after a moment's hesitation is slid quickly into her apartment before he can change his mind.]



The journal is a little more careworn than it was when he received it, the spine well-cracked. The entries in it tend to be short and perfunctory, clearly not meant for anyone's eyes but Shane's. They are intensely private, ranging a wide variety of subjects.

One common theme is that of research. Personal entries are interrupted by grids that seem to be schedules of movement and tables of information. The lines that make them up are usually heavily indented and dark, but by the time the text reaches the bottom the print has evened out and looks more like the rest of the entries. Clearly they were something he was doing to work out whatever had him on edge. The grids that are schedules of a target's movements have small, neat read dots in the upper right hand corner of the boxes where the target would be alone or otherwise vulnerable. Some of the names are crossed out, but not all.

The grids stop abruptly towards the end of February, and after that the entries grow further apart.

'had a dream last night. wasn't a nightmare, just a memory. jeremy was in it. we had a dog. forgot we had a dog. he was running through the front yard while we played tag.

lexus came barreling down the street. think it was a lexus. could be wrong, wrong side of town for that. the car hit the dog then took off. we ran over. it was dead, bloody all over. made me sick.

i try to hold on to that, but it won't hold on. that seems foreign. bloody things made me sick, once. still do, the innocent ones, but i don't think i'd feel the same way if i saw that now. not the same sickness. just another body.

death and i hadn't got acquainted yet.'

There is an entry, undated, that presumably was written after one of his many conversations with Boyd about finding 'something else,' something to fill his time.

'peace should not be this evasive. it isn't for other people.

didn't go to college, so an office job is out. couldn't do it anyway, sitting around doing nothing. need to find something productive, something that works [the sentence breaks off and restarts in new ink] something that means something. that helps someone. not just a card punch job.'

Another entry, one of the most recent entries in the journal.

'boyd mentioned helping kids left behind by the families and the gangs. might be something to it.'

A little further down the page there is a business card taped in, for the director of a local intervention organization.

There are not so many entries about Boyd as one might expect. They are in there, mixed in with the dark and the mundane. One has a sketch of her in profile, not particularly skilled, but done from memory and with an obvious amount of care. He's gotten all the details right that come from long watching, the right curl to her hair, the expression of amusement on her lips.

Underneath the drawing is a small note. 'no doing her justice. should just ask her for a picture, some time.'

There are several pages with drawings on them. They get the point across well enough despite being rough, and are generally unlabeled. One, done on its side, is a sketch of a dim cement room with two chairs knocked over into a puddle in the center of it. A long line snakes into the puddle, identifiable as a cord only because of the small prongs at the end.

Another page houses a grid. Inside the squares are rough outlines of houses. There are a dozen of them, all shapes and sizes, all with different details-some with stick figures out front, some drawn at night.

At the bottom, almost as a caption. 'the first four houses, asked to go back for pictures. lots of blank stares and quick strikes. stopped asking after house number five. that's alright, though, replaced the Family album'

Deeper into the book is a page with several started sketches of wolf's heads. Most of them are scribbled out. Beside it there is the beginnings of another entry.

'like music
can't remember the last movie i watched (could fix that, there must be something)
don't watch tv (drivel. hate it. reality shows.)
read some
these people, i don't
tired of small talk. tired of fake things, lying
but if you don't lie, what's left to say?
can't exactly walk up to people and tell them
need to just work around it.

can't even do sex properly.

someone ought to have classes on how to be a fucking normal person.'

There are no entries around the period where he was living with Boyd, and there are no entries immediately following being locked in Ella's apartment.

One page contains a quick run down of the details of the packages Cole and Ileana received from their mysterious stalker. A few pages later, in an entry dated just before the moon, there is an entry in spiky black writing.

'what am i, anyway?
bit cole. hurt boyd, hurt boyd more times than i can count on one hand. no wonder i get locked up. worse animal than the wolf is.
why am i doing this? why am i doing this, again?

nothing gets better. what if i just keep getting worse, until everyone has to keep their hands outside the cage?

i had morals'

On the last page of the journal, there's a note.

'Boyd,

I didn't take anything out. I probably should have. You asked me to be honest. I don't get more honest than this, since I wasn't planning on letting anyone read any of it.

I don't want you to hate me.

I want you to be happy. I want you to be with someone who can take care of you. If you can read the things I put in here and you still think you want to be with me, you'll at least have to admit that anyone would call you crazy.

You know I'm in love with you. You also know I've been nothing but trouble and misery and obligation for you since you met me.

it's not You can leave. You can break up with me. You can back out of this. I'm not going to force you to stay, and I'm not going to kill anyone if you say you don't want anything else to do with me.

I don't want to be with someone who doesn't know everything about me, who doesn't know exactly what they've gotten themselves into. You know that. Maybe this will drive it home for you, make you realize I'm not what you want.

Don't say you want me because you're worried if you say anything else I'm going to go tear something apart. We're both just going to stay miserable, if that's the case.

[There's a space here, where he apparently stopped writing for a while before finishing.]

But if you can read the things I wrote in here and still want to be with me, I will do better. And if it turns out I can't, I'll leave rather than hurt you again.

I want you to be happy. If you're going to be happy somewhere else, go there. Don't stay here until the bright, beautiful, maddening girl I met is gone. I'm not worth it.

shane