It's Hard Being Alone

Jared wasn't too happy, not that he was unhappy. But it's always a bit hard finding out that you are the only adult male patient on this whole island. Most guys would be thrilled to be surrounded by girls, but this being an asylum he wasn't too sure what to expect from them. Would they be mostly normal besides a few weird tics, or would they be completely nuts. He sighed, wishing for the upteenth time that he could just be normal "If only." he said with a sigh, putting the finishing touches on the small space that was his. All his clothes had been put in their proper place, valuables hidden. All he had to do was put a few personal touches including some photos and a few graphic novels. He shuddered slightly, they had taken his bottles of germ X, but they had let him keep his wipes to his relief. With that done, he had grabbed his sketchbook, pencils, and a bottle of wipes, ready to explore.

Which was what Jared had been doing for half an hour or so. Through that period of time, he managed to find himself at the door to the rec room. "Well... I'll just take a break." he said, needing a little sit down. He opened the door and walked inside. It was empty. He noted the couches which were exactly what he needed. First things first though. He took out a wipe, and proceeded to disinfect his hands. He then proceeded to wipe at his chosen seat. About ten minutes later, he could finally sit down. This place seemed clean... but he didn't want to take any chances.

He adjusted his light blue t-shirt and jeans, making sure he was comfortable before kicking off his sneakers and sitting down with his knees up and feet on the couch. He wiped his socks as well to make sure no bacteria was there before taking opening his sketch pad, using his knee as a stabalizing surface. With that, he started to draw, the strokes of his pencil slowly forming the outline of a howling wolf. He was entirely focused in his work. If anyone walked in at this point, he wouldn't even notice.

There was no way that someone wasn't going to notice Penny entering a room. Any adult patient who had been at St. Christina's longer than a week knew what to expect from her, even if they had no idea who she was or why she was talking their ear off. It didn't matter whether or not she knew someone; she liked them anyway, and wanted to talk. She was beginning to become discouraged, however, because no-one here seemed to wanted to talk to her. They mostly wanted her to go away, shup up, sit down, lower her voice, or a combination of the four. However, that didn't stop her from being just as obnoxious as she always was. It was actually getting progressively worse, because it had been far too long since she'd set something on fire. Penny was going a little stir-crazy locked in the asylum all the time with no-one to talk to and nothing to burn. She was anxious and therefore insanely talkative and inquisitive. Her days mostly consisted of walking around finding people to verbally assault and finding paper to do origami with; it was the next best thing to fire, but it didn't really compare. She more bounced down the hallway than walked, and when she got to the door of the rec room, she shoved it open and called,

"Hi everyone! Oh. Well. Hi, one guy." There was only one person in the rec room, which was unusual. But it was better than no-one. She walked over to where he was sitting and leaned over him, saying, "I haven't seen you before...you must be new. I'm Penelope Bridget Kaymann. My friends call me Penny. Hair, brown, eyes, brown, height medium, build medium, blood type AB+. Are you drawing? Cool...are you a good artist? I can't tell what it is yet, but I guess you just started. I can't draw at all, but I can do origami. Also, I can spit fire. That's cool, right? It's not really a marketable talent, though, and they won't let me practice in here. But art is marketable and safe and stuff. You could illustrate children's books or something." She smiled in a way she thought was winning and sat down on the arm of the couch.

"So what's your name?" she asked, and this time managed to wait for a response. Conversations usually didn't move fast enough for her, and it was really hard to be patient, but sometimes she could pull it off. She knew that she could be kind of a blow to the senses, and was willing to give the poor guy time to adjust to the sheer speed and volume at which she was shooting words at him.

Normally, he was dead to the world when he started to draw. But then again, the world usually tried to be quiet when he drew. So when Penelope, in all her loud glory, walked in and announced herself, Jared felt himself being jolted out of his little world. He stared at her as she headed towards him, leaning over him. He cringed slightly, scooting as far as he could. He didn't like it when people came this close before disinfecting themselves. Who knew what diseases they had on their skin and clothes. It didn't seem like she was going to get the message though, as she then proceeded to start babbling on about herself.

Jared continued to simply stare at Penelope, his mind being overloaded by her proximity and the sheer amount of words she was spouting at such a fast pace. He only caught bits and pieces of her speedy spiel such as the fact that her name was Penelope and that she was saying something about art and safety. He flinched when she sat down right next to him on the couch arm. He had spent so long disinfecting that area. He returned her smile, albeit it seemed a bit forced. She then asked for his name, pausing for his response.

"Um, the name's Jared. Jared Melhorn." he said quickly, getting the feeling that she didn't particularly like waiting. He reached down and grabbed a wet wipe, cleaning his pencils and a small space next to him on the couch before setting the pencils down. At that point, he decided to make an effort to socialize a bit. "I'm sorry... but what did you say? I didn't really catch most of that." he flashed her an apologetic smile. Waiting for her to start talking again. This time, he was ready to listen to her hyperspeed style of speaking. "Oh, and wet wipe?" he offered her a fresh one, hoping she'd use it.

"Jared is a cute name! It reminds me of one of those fun dorks you see working in Office Max," Penny said. "And don't worry about it...I can't even remember what I said. No brain to mouth filter, I guess...whatever's in my head just kind of pours out at super speed. It's kind of an inconvenience sometimes." She took the wipe and looked at it for a moment. She didn't know why he had offered it to her, or why, for that matter, he'd been wiping off his utensils, but she figured that it didn't really matter. She'd been around enough mental illness to know that it didn't have to make sense and it was best to just go with it. So she used the wipe to thoroughly wipe her hands off, and, on second thought, her face, too.

"Gahh! I should not have done that. Stupid thing to do," she said, rubbing at her eyes. "Why do I always go straight for the face?" After looking around for a garbage can to no avail, she stuffed the wipe in the pocket of her jeans and then said,

"So what are you drawing? I know a girl who can draw fruit really well, but that's it. Just fruit. It's a pretty useless talent unless she sells her drawings to a farmer's market or something. You can probably draw more things than fruit, or at least I hope so; I don't know many artists who don't suck. It totally blows to know artists who suck, because they keep showing you their shitty art and you keeping having to pretend like it's not shitty so you don't hurt their feelings. But I'm sure you don't suck." She smiled again, tucking her hair behind her ears. It was a good sign that Jared hadn't told her to shut up or go away yet...it didn't mean that he didn't want her to shut up and go away, but at least he wasn't being rude about it. Penny appreciated that, and she was about to voice her appreciation, but she stopped herself. She had to remember to let other people talk.

Jared smiled slightly as Penelope continued to babble, though he was still a bit on edge. She wasn't that bad really, reminded him a friend he had when he was in middle school. He chuckled slightly at her words, she was an honest one too. He liked that in a person. As she wiped the bacteria and dirt off her hands he relaxed. She then went even further and started to wipe her face. He started to protest when she wiped her face, looking worried when the chemicals got into her eyes. He nodded in agreement with her observation, keeping silent since he knew she was probaby going to continue talking after that little incident.

He was right. She then continued to go on about a girl who could only draw fruit and then on about all the artists she knew and other art related topics. Jared had started drawing again at this point, listening to her babble while he picked up his pencil and started filling in the details of the wolf such as the eyes. He looked up when she stopped to take a breath. It looked like she was going to start again when she seemed to remember the "taking turns" rule of social interaction. He smiled at Penelope, showing her the now more recognizable drawing.

"I'm drawin' a wolf." It was simply line art at this point, with no shading done. He put the sketchbook back down, "Her talent ain't too useless, if you can draw one thing really well, you can learn to draw another with the skills you already have. She just needs to branch out. And 'bout the bad artists and hurting their feelin's. I kinda disagree since it's better to just tell 'em they... well... that they kinda suck. If you don't, someone else who's a lot meaner is gonna do the same." As he spoke, he shaded in the darker areas of the drawing, keeping his strokes light and even.

"So what're ya in 'ere for?" He asked, looking at Penelope curiously. She didn't seem like the usual nutcases you'd see on TV or read about in books. She just seemed... well... normal. Talkative, but normal.

As soon as she heard that Jared was drawing a wolf, Penny threw back her head and howled at the ceiling. It was a poor imitation, but it made her dissolve into giggles for a moment, covering her mouth and snorting. She had a dorky laugh, which she thought was quirky and fun. It was actually more on the annoying side.

"Sorry, sorry," she said when she was done laughing. "It's good. I see wolf for sure. It'll look seriously eat your brains fucking scary when it's done. I'll be sure to tell fruit girl that she's got potential...I'm sure that'll validate her life. Actually, I think she might be going to school to be neurosurgeon, so she's probably got bigger stuff going on. And yeah, I guess I should try to be honest with people about their shitty art, but once I start being honest I have a hard time stopping. Honesty is like a really vicious high. I start criticizing their hair and their clothes and their face and their chromosomes and pretty much everything else. Have you every had someone make fun of your chromosomes? That's mean shit. Anyway, I'm actually too mean to be honest. So I just lie." The next question was easy to answer. It may have bothered some people to have to tell other people what was wrong with them, but not Penny.

"I'm a pyromaniac. I know, it's totally weird, even for a mental illness. I'm actually going kind of crazy right now because I can't set anything on fire. Well, more crazy than usual. People think that I just really, really like fire, but it's more like an addiction than anything else. I can't stop setting things on fire; just striking matches makes me ten times happier. They keep having to lock me up so I stop torching things...I mean, the biggest I ever went was a house, and there weren't any people in it or anything. I don't want to kill anyone; I'm not a psycho, I'm just addicted to fire. Your turn! I'm guessing you're some kind of clean freak, just judging from the taste of sterile wipe in my mouth." She made a face and stuck her tongue out. "Sorry, is clean freak not the correct term? Is that like a psychological slur? Dude, I'm sorry if I dissed your psyche."

Penny was a very accepting person. She could accept most anything, and almost nothing that anyone said was going to strike her as weird. She knew that other people did not think like that, and that some of the things she said were bizarre; that being said, she was genuinely afraid that 'clean freak' was an offensive term, and that Jared was going to freak out on her. It had happened before, and every time she made a resolution to close her mouth at the appropriate time, it had completely fallen through. It was near impossible.

Jared shook his head slightly at her badly imitated wolf howl. Not that he was going to say anything about. He wasn't going to comment on her laugh either... definently wasn't going to comment on that. He shuddered slightly, remembering why his first girlfriend broke up with him. Said he was too insensitive after he commented on her particular hobby of collecting stuffed animals. After that, he would reserve his honesty for art critiques and for those who truly deserved it. He sighed, pushing that memory out of his head before tuning back into his conversation with Penelope, who had started babbling again. He had missed the first part during his small flashback, but managed to catch the bit on honesty, causing him to smile again. Well, they were certiainly on the same boat.

Then she started answering his question. At first, he wasn't too sure what she was saying, something about fire. Then, it clicked. "A pyro? That's a new one." he thought, studying her slightly. "Well, you definently can't judge a book by it's cover." Having grown up reading comics, mainly batman, he was used to pyro's being guys... "Now that's just sexist." he thought, scolding himself. "Either way, she's nice enough. She can't help bein' a pyro as much as I can help bein'---" That's when he heard her call him a clean freak before apologizing right after. He winced at the term, though remained calm.

Sighing, Jared took another wipe out, cleaning his hands absentmindedly. "Yeah... I suppose you could call me a clean freak... I prefer germaphobe though... it's more accurate, since I'm not really OCD. I'm just scared of bein' dirty." He crumpled up the wipe, tossing it to the side as if illustrating his point. "And don't worry about it. You didn't 'Diss my psyche'." He smiled as he said the phrase, making air quotes around it. He fiddled with his pencil, twirling it through his fingers. Suddenly, something she said earlier came back to him in full clarity.

"Wait... You set fire to a house?"

"Yeah, guilty. I thought that it was abandoned, but it turned out that the people who lived there were just out of town. Not my proudest moment, incidentally." There was an honest-to-God pause in Penny's speech then; she was embarassed. She wished that she hadn't brought up that house, because it made her want to cringe. However, in the next moment she picked back up again with her endless wall of words, trying to forget about that one awkward moment. "But, you know, I don't always burn houses. Sometimes just paper. Sometimes I light matches just to look at them. Well, I used to...they think they can cure me here or something. Control my unnatural impulses." She wiggled her fingers on either side of her face and rolled her eyes. In truth, Penny wasn't sure whether or not she wanted to stop setting things on fire. She thought that she had when she had started taking medication the first time, but she'd missed the fire, even though it was scary and unpredicable and ruled every inch of her life. You can't just get rid of something that intrusive overnight. Laughing again, she continued,

"Enough about me, though...I always talk too much about me. You're probably interesting. I mean, you're clean and you can draw, and those are two fucking respectable characteristics already. You should see my apartment, man...well, the apartment I used to have. It's like a breeding grounds for every type of bacteria ever. I probably shouldn't have told you that. They probably cleaned it now, though, and sold it to someone else. Damn, I'm talking about myself again. Feel free to just stop me next time, okay? Tell me more about you."

Penny liked to hear about other people almost as much as she liked to talk about herself...almost. She found people interesting; she'd even wanted to be an anthropologist when she was thirteen, until she realized that that was less fun than it sounded and had settled on being an elephant trainer for the circus. She wasn't an anthropologist or an elephant trainer now...she was a pyromaniac, and she was rapidly realizing that that was all she was ever going to be.

He sighed in relief when she said no one was killed. Well, at least she tried to pick an empty house... failed, but tried none the less. Which shows that she isn't exactly evil... not like the fanaticism of Firefly. He chuckled slightly at that thought, nodding along as she described her particular "illness". Surprisingly though, she then transfered the speaking stick to him. Jared thought she'd just continue babbling, apparently not this time. Though it did take a while to actually get to the point where he could speak. He didn't mind though, he wasn't the most talkative person and usually ran out of things to say sooner or later.

"Yeah... I'm not even going to try and imagine your apartment." he said with a small laugh, making it clear he was simply teasing a bit. "I'd probably faint." He paused after that, trying to decide on what to tell her. Then, looking back at the mini biography he got, Jared decided to simply start at the basics and beginning. "Well... I was born in Dallas. My parents were average though a bit... clean freaky..." He laughed slightly before continuing. "Didn't really grow up in the best side of town. Tons of gangs with tattoos which is where I got my interest for them. I'm a tattoo artist by the way. Got a liscence and everything. Even got featured in Ink magazing for my designs." As he said the last part, pride swelled in his voice. That truly was his greatest achievement in life yet.

His expression then fell though as he continued with his story. "Then, the phobia really popped up. I had to quit my job and everything... And now I'm here, hoping to be cured." He forced himself to smile slightly. "So yeah... that's my life in a nutshell." He took out a wetwipe, nervously cleaning his hands again. His phobia always seemed to act up when he's stressed. As he did so, he continued to speak, though very quietly. "That's my sad pathetic life in a shitty nutshell." He punctuated each word with a tear in the now used wetwipe, throwing it to the side afterwards. His face showed naked turmoil and anger about his situation. He wanted to be cured. He really wanted to be cured of this madness.

"Tattoos are cool," Penny said brightly. Even she couldn't fail to notice his anger, presumably at being stuck here. It made her frustrated too, so she understood the feeling; she just dealt with it in a different way. She decided to address this the way she addressed everything; with a long, unintelligible rant about nothing. "Maybe you can give me one when we both get out of here, after we're all cured and shit. I want, like...a ring of fire around my belly button. But, damn...when I get old and fat, it will totally stretch...okay, I want a flaming tiger on my back. Like, giant. Pouncing at the viewer. Dude, I'd definitely get naked in public more often if there were a flaming tiger on my back. Wear my bathing suit everywhere I went. After you give me a flaming tiger tattoo, I'll totally stand outside your tatto parlor shirtless and hold a sign. That's good publicity."

And that interesting monologue, or something akin to it, was how Penny comforted someone. By offering to get naked outside of their place of business. It wasn't exactly a touching offer, but it was what she had to give. Without the fire, she didn't know what she'd be, besides topless outside a tattoo parlor.

"If that didn't weird you out, nothing will," she continued, giving him a friendly nudge which was probably more weird than friendly. "But seriously. Whatever happens after this hospital will be good. That's what I focus on. Well, sometimes, because my attention span is limited. I think about all the things I like to do besides set things on fire; there aren't very many, but there are some, and I think that maybe if and when they manage to tap me on the head with their magic wands and cure me, I'll be able to do them more often. New things, too. Maybe I'll go be an Olympic bob sledder. Who the fuck does that? Or maybe I'll be a dog groomer slash boxer. I don't know...I guess I'm an optimist."

She smiled and tucked her hair behind her ears again; that was a habit of hers. The truth was that Penny was really scared of leaving this place. She doubted that her mother would help her get back on her feet, and her best friend had a hard enough time staying on her own feet, so she'd be pretty much on her own, alone with herself. Being alone with herself was something she never wanted to do, because then she might have to examine her own conscious; that was the scariest thing.