Chapter 2 – Living with Everything and Nothing
“What am I going to do now? I have all of this money but what am I going to spend it on? Can I even deposit the money into a bank account? I don’t have one and I could one, but the bankers would be suspicious of me. The news of people taking the stolen money is still fresh news so they might report me to the police if I give them even a one-million-dollar bill. I could go to Hillfall Town or some other place where the news hasn’t reached yet. But still, a kid like me going into a bank will tons of money would be weird. I could go to jail for life for having this money on me!”
“I guess all that money in your pocket isn’t as valuable as you think, don’t you think? Wouldn’t it be easier to just throw it all away?”
Jorge thinks about it for a second then decides against it.
“All I have to do is find a way to use this money and then I’ll be set for life. I could make it up to my parents and friends by using it for good!”
“But it can’t bring them back to life.”
“I won’t need to, to make them proud of me.”
“Is that what you really think?”
Jorge doesn’t answer the mouth and gets up. The main idea in his head right now is to get to Hillfall Town to deposit his money into a bank account. He’s just old enough to have a bank account but he still needs a guardian that will have to share a joint account with him. Jorge is sure that he can get someone to share his money with him especially if he finds a nice family who will accept him. Not too long ago, a popular author lost his wife and has now lost his daughter. Jorge thinks to himself that he can bring this money to him and be adopted into this author’s family relatively easily, but that’s only one of the thoughts in his head so far.
“Maybe there’s even a poor family in the city that could use the money I have. Yeah, this’ll definitely help them out.”
“You’re such a hero, aren’t you?”
Jorge chuckles while ignoring the mouth’s sarcastic remark. There are much more important things to think about to him. So many more important things to look forward to. He’s on the edge of living an easy life and now it only takes the permission of one adult to get it. With all of this pressure on him, Jorge can feel the stares of everyone, everything, and the nothing around him. Eyes feel like they’re peering at him from all angles as if they’re waiting for him to let go of the money in his pocket. A single slip of the hand could cause them to lunge out from the shadows and take Jorge’s easy pass, so he’s holding tight to it as if his existence depended on it.
“Aren’t you forgetting something, Jorge?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Your parents Jorge and your friends. What about them? You just cried about them minutes ago and now you’re completely fine.”
“I’m still sad about them.”
“It doesn’t look like it. You didn’t even think about visiting their houses to pay your respects. You have ten million dollars on you. I’m sure you can give them at least one of those to them as a way of saying sorry for getting them killed. Or wait, is that why you don’t want to see them?”
“That’s not it.”
“Why aren’t you doing anything about it then?”
“There’s nothing I can do that’s going to make it up to them! This money isn’t going to help them feel better!”
“It’s helping you, isn’t it? Maybe it isn’t?”
“Shut up. I’ll just wait for a while to talk to them.”
“Are you sure? I’m sure they’re worried about you too. Are you really going to let your guilt get to you like this?”
“I’m done talking to you.”
“I’m sure you are.”
He hasn’t noticed, but Jorge has walked into a graveyard.
“How did we get here?”
“You weren’t paying attention to where we were going. You don’t even know where you’re going.”
The wind seems to whisper to Jorge. It’s a quiet whisper that whispers Jorge’s guilts to him. It unnerves him to the point where he starts scratching the inside of his ears.
“You heard what they said. What are you going to do about it?”
The unnerving feeling in his ears spreads to the rest of his body until mouths start growing in his ears, on his body, and in it. They keep whispering the words of the wind. Jorge tries to pull off the mouths off his skin but can’t manage to. He rolls around on the ground desperately trying to quiet the whispers until he wakes up inside his room. For some reason, he’s back inside his house.
Jorge looks around and it appears that everything he remembers was just a dream. He no longer has ten million dollars in his pockets. He doesn’t even have the twenty his mom gave him. It’s like today never happened. Jorge smiles as he feels relieved. Everything was a dream and how could it not be with how crazy things were. To make sure he’s truly awake, he quietly walks into his parent’s room to find them sleeping peacefully. He breathes another sigh of relief, but then his eyes catch something strange in the dark. Jorge sees blood dripping from the bed. Panicking, he goes to wake up his parents.
He shakes their shoulder’s while saying, “Mom? Dad?”
They don’t respond and don’t even seem to be breathing anymore.
“Mom?! Dad?!”
Again, they don’t respond. Jorge rips the sheets off his parents to find that only their heads are on the bed that is now crimson red.
“No…”
In denial at what he’s seeing, Jorge runs out of the room and wakes up in his classroom. The bell rings for lunchtime and all of the students get up to get their lunches. Jorge no longer knows what to think and intuitively leaves the school to get lunch at a place that his parents used to go. Along the way he sees money flying through the air, he catches as much money as he can until he has ten million dollars in his hand. He then thinks to himself about what he should do. After a bit of thinking and hearing the gunfire in the distance, he walks away with the money and doesn’t go to get more, however, a thief that’s chasing the flying money sees him and chases him. The same things happen up to the point where Jorge and his friends are running away in the alleyway.
When he is again presented with the choice to save his friends or to run the other way, he again runs the other way. Instead of running into a continuous alley, Jorge runs into a dead end with an open mouth at the end that speaks of Jorge’s guilts.
“You’re going to have to run into it kid if you want to survive.”
Jorge is hesitant, but he runs through the mouth and ends up back where he was in Hillside City and walking towards to some kind of destination.
“What was that? I don’t understand anything that’s happening to me! Why?”
“You saw why. You barely changed your decisions when you went through them again in your head. You might feel guilty for what you did, but you sure aren’t going to change the reason why you got that guilt. That’s for sure.”
“No! That’s not it, I do feel guilty! I am sorry for what I did!”
Wanting to prove himself, Jorge takes five million dollars out of his pocket and throws it into the air, but once the money files out, it appears back in his pockets. He keeps trying to get rid of the money to no avail as it keeps appearing in his pockets.
“Jorge, Jorge! You feel guilty, but you don’t want to get rid of the money. It’d be one thing if you felt like you didn’t want to get rid of it but wanted to, that’s understandable, however, you are the opposite. You feel like you want to get rid of it, but alas, you don’t want to. You want to be rid of the guilt not the reason for it.”
Jorge breathes as if he were running on a treadmill and puts his hands on his knees as he thinks about what he should do. He then goes back to his original plan.
“I want to have a reason to get rid of this.”
“It’s more like you want a good reason that sounds good to you, but sure. Let’s go find a reason.”
He walks off while still gripping the cash in his pockets that also appear to have their thorns in his hand.
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