Art Therapy

We go in there and he tells me to get comfortable while he gets set up. He's opening a bunch of cabinets and pulling out boxes of stuff. He spreads it all out over the table. There're magazines, sticks of glue, paper, markers, crayons, all that shit. I feel like I'm in a goddamn kindergarten class.

"Make whatever you want," Jordan says. He tells me I can use whatever I fancy, and I can cut stuff out from the magazines and glue it and make something called a collage, which is a big mixture of different things. I don't really know where to begin, so I just sit there.

"Start with this," he tells me, and he hands me a piece of paper. It's black. I stare at that a while too, and by then, Jordan's off doing something in the other corner of the room.

I go through the magazines first. There's a picture of a mad-looking dog. I like that, so I tear it out. There're a couple of words too, and I tear those out too. I keep tearing stuff out, stuff I like. These are all kinda mean-looking images I'm talking about. So, I'm tearing and cutting and gluing and I'm starting to feel like a girl, but I don't care. I don't want to admit this to anyone, but I was having fun at that point. I'm calm. In a different place and all that. I'm only calm when I'm high, and I don't get high often. Jakely and I used to get high, but he's dead now. Maybe the highs made his brain crazy.

Jordan comes over and looks at it, and he's putting his hands on it. He's probably going to take it away so I'll never see it again. Mean of him. But no, he doesn't actually do anything with it. I mean, he picks it up and looks at it all intense-like and he walks off with it, but when he comes back, he's still got it. He gives it back to me and I hold onto it real tight.

"I'm going to need the original back for my portfolio," he says, "but I'll give it back to you as soon as the term ends. I promise, buddy. Here's a photocopy for now."

I'm holding on even tighter. I want it. Fuck him.

"You know what? I'll see about giving them photocopies. Keep it."

[Unedited. Can't 'ya tell? Anyway, this novel is in a sporadic journal format, so Daron switches tenses quite often. It makes things fun.]