Bleeding out The House

The worst part is all the kids, all of Porci's friends. I had no idea he even KNEW this many people, let alone had such a pack of friends, but every day like clockwork there are new ones. They ask me if I know where he is, and I always tell them I don't, that they probably know more than me. Their faces fall and they just trot away. Half of them don't even live in Cool Greens. It's like he had this...child army of goody-goody townie kids.

>Do you think he planned this?

Well...terrible as this is for a parent to say, I've never truly known where Porci is at mentally, but now he's just gone, slipped into the early morning sun and left us feeling very cold. Some of the kids are alleging that he took a posse of his "Bestest and Bright" with him, but I haven't heard anything about more kids missing.

>How do you feel about his...departure?

It's been a month. A goddamn month, and I don't really miss him. It's hard to, after he changed so much. If he thought he needed to leave and do whatever he's doing, fine, but I can't shake the feeling that he isn't reserved enough for the outside world. He put on a show for the last few years, but he didn't entirely clean up his act. I think he just got better at releasing his disgust with things quietly.

>How do you mean?

Porci wasn't a good kid before what happened to Midge happened. Again, that's a terrible thing for a parent to say, but it's the truth. He was a nasty little boy who stole and fought and lied, but that was just what we expected from shitty kids around here. So when he...changed after it, I could never really accept that this little thug was out of him. Just buried, along with the Disgust.

>'Disgust'?

Anger. Disappointment. Irritation. Hate. Porci would get unreasonably angry at things for no reason, but he couldn't direct it at any of those things because he still knew they were petty and in turn dumb as hell to be mad about. Cars with a stupid colour, commercials that repeated something too much, the presence of gardens at some of the houses, he'd see things like that, innocuous elements of what daily life is for everyone else, and call them disgusting. Just right there, blurt it out. "Ugh, that's disgusting."
It took us awhile to realize that it wasn't expressions of anger, he was just angry. And that made him more angry, he hated to hate. But he stopped with it within a month of Midge.

>Was he always like that?

No. He was just a kid until the incident with Midge, albeit a stupid thug of a kid. Something about that poisoned him to the world, but he accepted it. I think it validated all of his negative feelings. He used this motto 'shit happens, now you can too'. He went all quiet after everything hushed down with the cops and papers about Midge, but that was something we'd hear often enough.

>Did you think he had something like Post-Traumatic stress or Mental Atomic Pneumatosis?

That's the weird thing, for every psychiatrist we sent him to, they always told us that 'according to our records' he'd improved.
Despite that, he never gave complete responses in the first years or so afterwards. Just these quiet, short sentences that tied together the silence he carried with him.
Trust me, when you have a kid who lies and cheats the way he did, and have that all drain up over night because of...whatever happened to him, it's frightening. He stopped being "Porci the detractor" and "Porci the ignorer". He stopped talking back and ignoring his chores. He became...adequate. His silence was concerning, but what could we do? Nobody knows what exactly happened to Midge and Del except for him.

>So he just became complacent?

No. He hated to be still. We'd come home once in awhile and find him pacing through the house with his headphones on, looking angry. Well, not angry, just...concentrating. It became obvious that he was thinking about things more and more. Processing information in a different way, I guess. He loved to be in motion, to work and walk. Maybe it took his mind off things.

>Was the change welcome?

In a word, yes. He turned into a comparative model kid in such a short time that we were baffled. Still, with that flourish in intelligence he turned into something cold. Smart as hell, but he had extreme difficulty warming to anyone, seemingly out of pride. He became quietly smug about a lot of the people he knew, occasionally passing off these remarks at dinner or what have you. Little snide jabs. He seemed to lose interest in some of his friends from Cool Greens overnight, like a switch just clicked in his head and he abandoned them. We tried to coerce him into retaining some of them, but the only person he seemed to legitimately care about was James. He was always doing stuff for him, picking things up and trying to be helpful. James didn't seem to notice or care, but Porci never sighed or huffed when he had to help. It was different before; James was like Porci's lackey, his minion. Porci didn't seem to care about him at all.

>What happened to James after Porci left?

It took him three days to find a job. Three. Days. Within two weeks he was living in one of the new townhouses. Old Dale left shortly after that, he probably took it pretty bad. Might be dead. Might be with Porci.

>What makes you say that? Do you believe that James and Old Dale were ' in on it'?

Who knows? Point is, he's out there, now. Porci is. He's going to spread the poison. He's going to be Big Time.