The dark, blue room surrounded Jon as he placed the last of his books into his backpack. A thin layer of blue-dyed plastic covered the one window in the room; other than he and his backpack, the room was completely empty – no toys from ages past, no bed, no computer, no speakers, nothing.

Outside of the room was a dirty, dusty set of rickety stairs that always creaked on the sixth step down from the second floor. On the walls, both small and large spiders made their webs where they would sit and wait for prey. An exceptionally large tiger spider had captured a fleet of flies for his dinner. Paintings of long dead, ancient relatives covered the wall leading down the stairs. Jon's mother always thought that their family was gorgeous; Jon always thought differently. He yearned for something different. And the day that the eviction notice came in, Jon got what he had always wished for.

As he started out of the door, Jon looked back into the steel blue room behind him and noticed the keys to his 2006 Chevy Camaro lying on the end table near the lime green couch. He had missed driving that car all around town. Everyone loved the paint job and great interior of it; he loved the amazing sound system he had installed.

Out the door he made his way. He had always stared at the houses in his neighborhood, confused as to why they all look nearly the same. "I guess that's what you get when you live in a development," he had always told himself to try to make sense of things. When he started to walk, he realized that there was no more reason to be stressed. His entire body loosened to the sensation of being free.

Despite being free, Jon also knew that he had nothing left at all. He had lost his car, his house, his computer, his music – everything besides his books that he dearly loved. He could read for hours. But being free from everything that had limited him before: his mother, his father, his siblings, and that dreaded house that was never kept clean. He never wanted to see them again; he never wanted to fall down that trap door.



Even though he was free, he still had to find some sort of shelter even if it was a makeshift one made of a cardboard box in the middle of a dark alley in the big city. That was his plan: to go to the big city and try to start a new life – to relocate.

The first place he had to leave was his development, a place they called "Electric Mountain" because it was the first place in his area that ever gained the technology of electricity, and he guessed "mountain" just sounded cute for a commune.

White house after white house passed his gaze as it now began to rain. He always hated walking in the rain; the water droplets would always splash into his eyes and cause momentary blindness and a helluva lot of pain. After noticing the end of the road, Jon saw a gate ahead of him. He had never been out of his commune; in fact, he did not even know there was a gate that kept him from the outside.

He shook the gate back and forth, rattling the chain keeping it locked. He punched the caste iron. He felt like an animal now. One foot on the gate, though, and he could climb over. His hands slipped on the first try due to the wetness from the recent rain.

After he climbed the gate, he felt even freer than before. But he started to think where his family went. Would he meet them in the big city, or did they just find another commune?



The big city greeted him coldly. It was still raining, and the tall, tall buildings that nearly touched the sky did not shelter him well. He was kicked out of every building he went to "for being smelly." Everyone around him wore these odd, dark jackets that never closed with these white shirts and a cloth ornament hanging from their neck.

Jon curled himself up in a box fort that he had made from the trash he had found in a dumpster. It at least kept him semi-dry.

Suddenly, a strangely-colored person had knocked over his box fort and exposed him to the rain again. A normally-colored person was chasing after him, Jon had noticed after assessing the situation. Scared of what was happening, Jon pulled out the gun that his father had luckily taught him how to use out of his backpack and aimed it at the person who knocked over his box fort. Jon had never felt so angry at someone in his entire life.

Click, and the strangely-colored person was on the ground with a bullet hole in his head. The normally-colored person stared at Jon, and asked, "Son, put down the gun." Feeling threatened, Jon fired the gun again. A bullet hole was in the head of the cop on the ground. Another strangely-colored person started to run into the alley to see what had happened and when Jon pointed the firearm at him, he put his arms up to show he surrendered. Jon still fired the gun, and another one click headshot.



He started to feel numb in his legs. People had started to form at both ends of the alley that Jon had placed himself into. His head started to spin in anxiety. Looking at the people that had now surrounded the situation, he saw the fear in their faces. It burned like embers of a fire.

He dropped the gun. Police sirens sounded. It sounded like music to Jon. A scary kind of music. A music that he had to flee from. He started running, but tripped over one of the now dead bodies in the alley. After picking himself back up, he ran some more. He ran into the nearest building – a bank with a gigantic lobby. He shed his wet jacket and dropped it on the floor of the elevator after he had rapidly pushed the button for the top-most floor. He tried to act cool.

Jon had never done anything like that before.



He sat in the elevator as it drove upwards to the top floor. The skin on his arms started to itch furiously, and scratching them softly did not help. His nails weren't dull to the point that he couldn't scratch himself, so he wondered why they didn't work to soothe the itchy feeling on his arms. After a few minutes of this, his arms started to become a beet red color. The itchy feeling still did not leave, though. In fact, it started to become worse.

Jon wondered if he could solve the issue by pulling out some hair. His arms had always been hairy. One by one, Jon started to pinch hairs and pull them out of his arms. Surprisingly, it did not hurt. In fact, he thought it felt good. It didn't cure the beet red color on his arms, but it certainly did cure him of the itchy feeling.

It started to become an obsession. He wouldn't stop until his arms were empty of hair. Only then would they stop itching, he thought. His left arm had started to go numb from the repeated pulling on the skin. It was nearly hairless though, while his right arm could use some more work. His right arm started to itch, and he began tugging on hairs on it.

Eventually, his arms were bare and starting to look more white. He liked that he had gotten rid of the itchy feeling in his arms, but he wanted to pull more hair out of his body. As he sat in the elevator, he rolled up a pant leg of his jeans and started to tug on hairs there. Just his arms had not satisfied him. It had become Trichitillomania.



As Jon sat in the elevator, someone with a precious cat had come into the elevator. Jon had never thought they would allow animals into a place so fashionably gorgeous. The cat started to gravitate towards him, and he picked it up. Its owner did not seem to care what Jon was doing to the cat. Maybe it was a stray cat that just looked adorable instead of mangy. He stared at it, studying its shape and form to try to recognize what kind it was.

He pulled a larger book out of his backpack and flipped through pages. He found the kind of cat it was: a black cat. He decided that it was probably born in the time of a Gemini. He stroked the cat's back until he had come up with a name for it: Whiskers. He had always found that to be an ironically clever name for a cat.

He looked up at the man standing in the elevator and asked, "Feed Me, sir?"