“It’s your lucky day piss ant. I’m in Vegas. I could drive there in like three hours. We can’t this kind of shit becoming a disaster. See you at three, three-thirty.”
Jesse told me to call back and leave a voicemail on his phone that explained everything that he could listen to on the drive over so he knew what to be prepared for. I told him the story and sweated through my clothes all day at school.
Jesse called me at three-o-clock on the dot. We met up at a coffee shop in the middle of town.
I literally laughed out loud when I saw him walk through the door of the coffee shop. He did look a lot like the character from Breaking Bad – short, buzzed, blonde, lost somewhere in his 20s and squirrelly – he shot wild eyes all around the place once he walked in. I waved him over and he sneezed just as he sat down.
“Bless you,” I said.
“Thanks for leaving out God,” Jesse started in. “I gave up on that piece of shit a long time ago.”
Jesse scanned the room of college kids in beanies even though it was 82 degrees outside sipping lattes and gave the kind of disgusted look you might give a computer screen when someone makes you watch a decapitation video.
“Why’d you have me meet you at Chuck E. Cheese for hipsters,” Jesse snorted.
I shook my head.
“Look, I don’t have time to find some kind of steampunk club or something to meet you at. This is serious. My girlfriend might be dead.”
“She’s not dead, yet,” Jesse said flatly.
“How do you know that?”
“Based on what you told me, she’s not. At worst, the guy, killed her in a snorkel and things are a lot more complicated, but she’s not dead.”
“Then what is she?”
Jesse looked around the room nervously.
“She’s in the closet. That’s what we call snorkeling purgatory. When you die snorkeling, something crazy happens. You go into this freaky dreamland where the entire world is created by your mind, like a dream, and it’s almost impossible to get back. Your body, back in the real world goes away. You are close to death, don’t ignore that because when you die in the closet, that’s it. There’s no going back.”
“Crazy,” I muttered to myself.
“Is it at this point?” Jesse asked smugly and checked out a teenage girl in line.
“What the hell do we do?” I asked.
“Well, what I do is guide you through this. What you do is fucking insane.”
Jesse was cut off by an eruption of chatter from a table full of middle schools who sat behind. He turned around to glare at them. I listened closely to what they were discussing.
“He’s dead. He’s dead,” I heard a teenage girl voice announce to her friends. “He hung himself in his cell last night,” she added.
I knew exactly who they were talking about. Jeremy had become the Scott Peterson, Casey Anthony, O.J., of our town and apparently our murdering superstar must have offed himself in his cell last night.
“She talking about our boy?” Jesse asked.
I nodded.
“Then that changes some things.”