“Do I look crazy to you!?”
We give this more thought then the question has intended. Let’s see… Kyle has his hair in a normal fashion: sharply slicked back, with a few crazy dyes here and there that provide contrast to the plain walls of the room. Reds and blues and even a little green breaks up the natural black of his hair, and the natural calm on his face. But right now this calm is gone. A bad mess of tangled emotions runs through his face, the most prominent being fear. You can smell it through the mist of tingling eyes and dry tongues. You can see the veins trailing his wrists, probably still pumping the drugs through his system. His hands shake, shrill and tight, but his fingers maintain their sharp angles and unnatural twists. His nails are sharp with anxious biting and past thrills. Kyle smells of stale sweat. Reeks of it, actually. Is this a sign of madness? I don’t think so… but really what does madness look like, anyways? We all look mad. But we’re not. We’re just ‘pumped’, or ‘psyched’, or anxious. But not mad. Not crazy. The thrill of what we’re about to do is so intense though that there’s a heightened sense of danger and alert, and when this is paired with our plucked-up eyebrows and tingling flesh, you can’t hide your shiver. Though Kyle seems to be doing just that. He manages to slow the quick beating of our hearts with just his blue eyes, and I haven’t even explained really what we’ll be doing. Sometimes I think this would be more fun without him. Yes, Kyle doesn’t look crazy… until I see his eyes. They are a clear give-away. His pupils are shrunken and almost dead in the blue of his irises. If they could give off a sound, any sound, it would most certainly be a scream. The savage, real part of my fear for these eyes of his… is how terribly, sickly bloodshot they are. His eyes look like a shattered window, with the cracks and lines dyed crimson. The rims of his eyes are almost overflowing with the stuff. The color is as sick as the faded hue of an apple but as sharp as that of a cherry. However, the most terrifying part about them is their hunger. Their biting hunger. Not like the hunger one feels with an empty stomach, but the hunger of a predator. There’s something lurking in the black of his eyes… something hidden in every part that might be obscured… something ready to kill. So yes, in short, he looks as crazy as h*ll.
“It’ll be just like skydiving!” We remind him.
This is wrong. And he knows it. But you can see his veins light up. Finally he’s thinking about it like we are. The thought of the previous adrenaline high from the last dive seems to lighten his expression. It doesn’t look like enough though. We continue with the false comparison.
“You think going in there, with the blood pumping to your madly-beating heart, isn’t worth the risk?” He pauses. “I promise you, it’s the kind of thrill that creates a smile that grips your skin, even in death.”
These words come from the grinning lips of Michael. He is crazy about this. I thought up the idea, but he’s really the mastermind behind it. He’s usually not this enthusiastic though. He’s licking his lips and his eyes want to consume us. When we first met him, he couldn’t even go skydiving. He would talk about how the ‘shoots might fail’, and we’d laugh when he gave a statistic about it. Something snapped in him when his mother died, though. He wanted to do all sorts of dangerous things with us. At first we thought he just wanted to die, but after a while we could tell he was just like us inside, and loved the adrenaline. He is actually crazy, though. Doctors diagnosed him with something. Being around a man diagnosed with ‘crazy’ gets our veins pounding with fresh blood, which is why we couldn’t do without him.
Sometimes he overdoes it though. When he makes his comment about the ‘smile even in death’, we can see this is not making Kyle feel better. And we need him for this. He’s going to be holding a gun, after all. I think I can save the moment though.
“What this animal means…” I point to Mickael. Sometimes we call him ‘the animal’. We can’t tell if he appreciates the title or not. His face is always as wild as the colorful static on a Television.
“… is that if you think skydiving makes your face swell with adrenaline, you ain’t seen nothing!”
I look at his face with my bushy eyebrows and almost grey eyes. I notice his expression: it’s the same. He isn’t concerned about the thrill; he’s concerned about the risk. I try a different tactic, but before my mouth moves he speaks:
“Have you done it before?”
Michael’s eyes meet mine. I know he hasn’t done anything crazy before his mom died, but me…? No, I haven’t. I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before though. It seems so exciting! My head’s really pounding with nerves now, and I want to get this started. I give a quick ‘no’. Kyle looks surprised, and the fear is coming back... actually it never left. We’re going to lose him. I know Michael won’t do it unless there’s a third party member. My mind races. Stories flash in my mind before dissolving at further investigation. There’s a blur of color and images, and I lie comes out.
“Actually there was one time,” I blurt out. “A year ago.”
Kyle is listening now. I’ve stopped his journey, but his eyes still linger towards the destination: a door… a door out of the dorm room and out of our next thrill. I’ve got to catch him.
“It was a blast!”
The last word comes out as an extreme annunciation. His eyes, his hungry eyes, are on mine now.
“What was it like John?”
As he says my name a breeze of remorse crosses my mind. Kyle’s my friend. I don’t like lying to him to get him to do something risky. But as I end the story short I find I’m smiling.
“I can’t explain it, Kyle! You just have to do it, to know it, you know?”
I realize the sentence didn’t make much sense and sounded like a true lie, but Kyle buys it, and reluctantly says “Okay.” Michael is so ecstatic at this that he laughs a thousand laughs and is silent, still licking his lips as we prepare. I can’t help but wonder what he was diagnosed with…
After a bit of planning, teaching, as well as improvisation and raving on Michael’s part, we’re ready. I feel a little helpless without a gun like the ones Michael and Kyle carry, but if the thing blows up in our faces, I might get some leniency. My heart’s like a rock, and my veins just as hard. I’m hoping I don’t black out from the adrenaline before we even do it. Kyle did that once when we went base-jumping. We had to scrap the whole thing so we could get him home. But we’re not going home this time. We’ve got to do this. I can only imagine the pounding I’ll feel when we get in there. It’s times like this that I remember why I do insane stuff on a daily basis. It’s the adrenaline.
Finally, with no masks, and only crazy long hair (except for Kyle’s) to cover our faces, we step through the sliding doors of the bank. No one notices us at first, but Michael gets excited and forgets everything. He pulls out the gun from wherever he’s been keeping it, flips the safety and fires into the ceiling. This wasn’t really planned, but now everyone is down on their knees or hiding behind something. Michael grins madly. Now the weirdest feeling of doubt, of regret, of danger crosses my mind, and I look at Kyle’s nervous but excited expression and wish I hadn’t lied. The feeling goes with Michael’s yell.
“Everybody down!” He screams, breaking his voice.
Kyle aims his gun around the room, shifting the barrel from person to person. Here comes the pounding. It’s loud and extreme, and the blood rushed to my eyes. They look a lot like Kyle’s now. Has he done this before? But I’m still waiting for the smile Michael talked about: the one that ‘grips your skin, even in death’. This image is fresh in my mind, but I lose it when unexpectedly, from nowhere, Michael breaks our hodgepodge of a plan, points his gun at a police officer on the floor, and fires.
Kyle loses his footing and falls, dropping the gun in the pool of blood that forms around the body. Michael has snapped. Some inner working in him has failed with the adrenaline. The police officer next to the dead one is now on full alert. He draws his gun and gets off a shot, which enters Michael’s crazy skull. He falls to the ground. At this point I’m covered with blood. So is Kyle, but he’s fainted. My heart triples in weight. I’m on my knees. It takes me a while to realize I’m not breathing. I try to… I really, really do, but nothing will come out of my mouth. I want to go back to the dorm; I want to redo it all. I want to go home and do the essay that was due a week ago! Anything… just let me leave! This is not how anything was planned! I’m not smiling! I’m dying! Choking on my own throat! Choking with the adrenaline! I fall to the floor. I’m still thinking of that smile, the one Michael said ‘grips your skin in death’. How can such a thing exist! But then I see Michael when I’m blacking out. There’s a bloody hole in his head, and blood drips across his lips. The smile cuts across his face and still grips his skin in death, just like he promised.
--The End.
We give this more thought then the question has intended. Let’s see… Kyle has his hair in a normal fashion: sharply slicked back, with a few crazy dyes here and there that provide contrast to the plain walls of the room. Reds and blues and even a little green breaks up the natural black of his hair, and the natural calm on his face. But right now this calm is gone. A bad mess of tangled emotions runs through his face, the most prominent being fear. You can smell it through the mist of tingling eyes and dry tongues. You can see the veins trailing his wrists, probably still pumping the drugs through his system. His hands shake, shrill and tight, but his fingers maintain their sharp angles and unnatural twists. His nails are sharp with anxious biting and past thrills. Kyle smells of stale sweat. Reeks of it, actually. Is this a sign of madness? I don’t think so… but really what does madness look like, anyways? We all look mad. But we’re not. We’re just ‘pumped’, or ‘psyched’, or anxious. But not mad. Not crazy. The thrill of what we’re about to do is so intense though that there’s a heightened sense of danger and alert, and when this is paired with our plucked-up eyebrows and tingling flesh, you can’t hide your shiver. Though Kyle seems to be doing just that. He manages to slow the quick beating of our hearts with just his blue eyes, and I haven’t even explained really what we’ll be doing. Sometimes I think this would be more fun without him. Yes, Kyle doesn’t look crazy… until I see his eyes. They are a clear give-away. His pupils are shrunken and almost dead in the blue of his irises. If they could give off a sound, any sound, it would most certainly be a scream. The savage, real part of my fear for these eyes of his… is how terribly, sickly bloodshot they are. His eyes look like a shattered window, with the cracks and lines dyed crimson. The rims of his eyes are almost overflowing with the stuff. The color is as sick as the faded hue of an apple but as sharp as that of a cherry. However, the most terrifying part about them is their hunger. Their biting hunger. Not like the hunger one feels with an empty stomach, but the hunger of a predator. There’s something lurking in the black of his eyes… something hidden in every part that might be obscured… something ready to kill. So yes, in short, he looks as crazy as h*ll.
“It’ll be just like skydiving!” We remind him.
This is wrong. And he knows it. But you can see his veins light up. Finally he’s thinking about it like we are. The thought of the previous adrenaline high from the last dive seems to lighten his expression. It doesn’t look like enough though. We continue with the false comparison.
“You think going in there, with the blood pumping to your madly-beating heart, isn’t worth the risk?” He pauses. “I promise you, it’s the kind of thrill that creates a smile that grips your skin, even in death.”
These words come from the grinning lips of Michael. He is crazy about this. I thought up the idea, but he’s really the mastermind behind it. He’s usually not this enthusiastic though. He’s licking his lips and his eyes want to consume us. When we first met him, he couldn’t even go skydiving. He would talk about how the ‘shoots might fail’, and we’d laugh when he gave a statistic about it. Something snapped in him when his mother died, though. He wanted to do all sorts of dangerous things with us. At first we thought he just wanted to die, but after a while we could tell he was just like us inside, and loved the adrenaline. He is actually crazy, though. Doctors diagnosed him with something. Being around a man diagnosed with ‘crazy’ gets our veins pounding with fresh blood, which is why we couldn’t do without him.
Sometimes he overdoes it though. When he makes his comment about the ‘smile even in death’, we can see this is not making Kyle feel better. And we need him for this. He’s going to be holding a gun, after all. I think I can save the moment though.
“What this animal means…” I point to Mickael. Sometimes we call him ‘the animal’. We can’t tell if he appreciates the title or not. His face is always as wild as the colorful static on a Television.
“… is that if you think skydiving makes your face swell with adrenaline, you ain’t seen nothing!”
I look at his face with my bushy eyebrows and almost grey eyes. I notice his expression: it’s the same. He isn’t concerned about the thrill; he’s concerned about the risk. I try a different tactic, but before my mouth moves he speaks:
“Have you done it before?”
Michael’s eyes meet mine. I know he hasn’t done anything crazy before his mom died, but me…? No, I haven’t. I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before though. It seems so exciting! My head’s really pounding with nerves now, and I want to get this started. I give a quick ‘no’. Kyle looks surprised, and the fear is coming back... actually it never left. We’re going to lose him. I know Michael won’t do it unless there’s a third party member. My mind races. Stories flash in my mind before dissolving at further investigation. There’s a blur of color and images, and I lie comes out.
“Actually there was one time,” I blurt out. “A year ago.”
Kyle is listening now. I’ve stopped his journey, but his eyes still linger towards the destination: a door… a door out of the dorm room and out of our next thrill. I’ve got to catch him.
“It was a blast!”
The last word comes out as an extreme annunciation. His eyes, his hungry eyes, are on mine now.
“What was it like John?”
As he says my name a breeze of remorse crosses my mind. Kyle’s my friend. I don’t like lying to him to get him to do something risky. But as I end the story short I find I’m smiling.
“I can’t explain it, Kyle! You just have to do it, to know it, you know?”
I realize the sentence didn’t make much sense and sounded like a true lie, but Kyle buys it, and reluctantly says “Okay.” Michael is so ecstatic at this that he laughs a thousand laughs and is silent, still licking his lips as we prepare. I can’t help but wonder what he was diagnosed with…
After a bit of planning, teaching, as well as improvisation and raving on Michael’s part, we’re ready. I feel a little helpless without a gun like the ones Michael and Kyle carry, but if the thing blows up in our faces, I might get some leniency. My heart’s like a rock, and my veins just as hard. I’m hoping I don’t black out from the adrenaline before we even do it. Kyle did that once when we went base-jumping. We had to scrap the whole thing so we could get him home. But we’re not going home this time. We’ve got to do this. I can only imagine the pounding I’ll feel when we get in there. It’s times like this that I remember why I do insane stuff on a daily basis. It’s the adrenaline.
Finally, with no masks, and only crazy long hair (except for Kyle’s) to cover our faces, we step through the sliding doors of the bank. No one notices us at first, but Michael gets excited and forgets everything. He pulls out the gun from wherever he’s been keeping it, flips the safety and fires into the ceiling. This wasn’t really planned, but now everyone is down on their knees or hiding behind something. Michael grins madly. Now the weirdest feeling of doubt, of regret, of danger crosses my mind, and I look at Kyle’s nervous but excited expression and wish I hadn’t lied. The feeling goes with Michael’s yell.
“Everybody down!” He screams, breaking his voice.
Kyle aims his gun around the room, shifting the barrel from person to person. Here comes the pounding. It’s loud and extreme, and the blood rushed to my eyes. They look a lot like Kyle’s now. Has he done this before? But I’m still waiting for the smile Michael talked about: the one that ‘grips your skin, even in death’. This image is fresh in my mind, but I lose it when unexpectedly, from nowhere, Michael breaks our hodgepodge of a plan, points his gun at a police officer on the floor, and fires.
Kyle loses his footing and falls, dropping the gun in the pool of blood that forms around the body. Michael has snapped. Some inner working in him has failed with the adrenaline. The police officer next to the dead one is now on full alert. He draws his gun and gets off a shot, which enters Michael’s crazy skull. He falls to the ground. At this point I’m covered with blood. So is Kyle, but he’s fainted. My heart triples in weight. I’m on my knees. It takes me a while to realize I’m not breathing. I try to… I really, really do, but nothing will come out of my mouth. I want to go back to the dorm; I want to redo it all. I want to go home and do the essay that was due a week ago! Anything… just let me leave! This is not how anything was planned! I’m not smiling! I’m dying! Choking on my own throat! Choking with the adrenaline! I fall to the floor. I’m still thinking of that smile, the one Michael said ‘grips your skin in death’. How can such a thing exist! But then I see Michael when I’m blacking out. There’s a bloody hole in his head, and blood drips across his lips. The smile cuts across his face and still grips his skin in death, just like he promised.
--The End.
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