The Heartbreak Kid

It was 1 AM, graduation night, and Jacob was kneeling in a public restroom in the park vomiting into the soiled toilet bowl. The park was technically closed, but it hadn’t been that hard to jump the fence, even in his condition. He breathed through his mouth a few times, trying not to smell his own stomach contents, and then vomited again, missing the bowl and splattering yellowy pulp across the seat and the concrete floor.

Jacob hadn’t gone to graduation. Nor had he been invited to any of the parties among his peers that night. He had spent the day with his colonies, testing the strains for potency and uniqueness. Most of them were E. coli, all gram-negative. He had kept them in his closet for the past year or so, fostering their evolution as best he could. His main criterion was diet and, more broadly, survivability in the most diverse array of environments. Of all his strains, group F27.H7 was the jewel of his experiments. That strain had emerged early with a life-force and vitality he hadn’t been expecting, a drive to evolve in order to survive and infect any potential host. His experiments over the past few weeks had all confirmed his muted optimism.

He collapsed in a fetal position, breathing heavily and listening to the disgruntled churning of his insides. Outside, near the park entrance, he heard the front gate open and a car pull into the nearby field. An aggressive bass rhythm appeared as the car approached, and his stomach surged with each vibration until he pulled himself over the toilet and dry heaved a few strands of clear mucus.

The car came to a stop near the restrooms. Interspersed with the bass came drunken laughs from what sounded like young people. A door opened and he heard bodies thump onto the ground and then a female voice slur across the night saying “omigod I’m sooo wastid right now!” And then a male voice saying “Melanie, lemme take your picture!” and then “agin?” and then “show me your tits this time!” Jacob recognized the voices, but he was too unwell and too lacking in fluids to make the mental connections.

The restroom door flew open and a girl appeared, wearing a sparkling but disheveled blue dress, her dark hair meshed into a series of disorganized layers, and a bottle of wine in her hand. She looked around the bathroom with incoherent eyes, not appearing to notice Jacob lying next to the toilet in a puddle of vomit.

Melanie Hastings was in his creative writing class. She had once given high praise to a depressing poem of his, which had, all in all, been the most intimate exchange he had had with a girl during his entire high school tenure. So he obsessed over her, passing her in the hallways and catching side glances of her curvatures, the arc of her buttocks, her breasts, the breezy depth of her hair and her passionate, citrusy smell, imaging the feel of her skin against his and the hum of her pulse in close enough contact to be music. But he remained alone, as always, and all he could do with these imaginings was build for himself a temple to his own putrescence as an isolated capsule flung carelessly and pointlessly into a world to which it was irrelevant. His stomach churned again and he unleashed a loud belch.

Melanie finally looked at him. Through her drunken stupor came a flash of recognition.

“Jezzses. Jacob!”

She remembered his name.

A guy came in wearing a tuxedo and holding a six pack. He grabbed Melanie’s waist and kissed her neck.

“What’choo doing in here girl—whoa, what the fuck?” Jacob lifted himself up to a sitting position. “Who’s this guy?”

“Jacob…something,” Melanie said. “He was in my creative writing class. This guy’s a fuckin’ ammzin poet.”

The guy was a Travis, Jacob recalled.

“I thought this guy was some kinda science geek,” Travis said.

“He diversfies.” Melanie burped.

Jacob flexed his throat to say something, but another wave of vomit surged and he leaned over and retched into the toilet.

“Whoa, dude’s fucked up!” Travis shouted.

Melanie giggled. “Jacob, I didn’t know you partied!”

Jacob collapsed and looked at the ceiling.

The bacteria colonies had been his only salvation by that point. F27 showed enough promise for him to hinge his otherwise shattered hopes upon. The years of loneliness, isolation, fading glances down the halls at the curvature and motion of alien bodies had all led him to the endless nights with a microscope and petri dishes, looking for life forms who would survive, thrive, and with whom he could make an essential connection, if only for a short time. Earlier that day he had neatly packaged the entire colony into a cheap, heart-shaped locket he had found in the basement. Despite its size and rather flimsy aluminum frame, it held his colony in well enough. At least until he had made his way to the park and swallowed the F27 colony whole. He swallowed it to let it poison him, let his useless entrails sustain something that would finally impact the world, and when he crawled through the park, into the endless vectors of the spring air, as his body began to purge itself and the now-empty heart locket jostling around his neck in an ominous foreshadow, he could feel F27 merging with him, and a connection being made in the cool, evening wind that would shatter the lonely temple in his head.

Melanie pulled him out of the bathroom and towards their limousine.

“Hey, let’s take him with us, if he likes to party so much!”

Jacob was flung into the backseat with others. The bass line exploded across his insides. He was handed a drink. He looked at the interior lights, at the faces of the others, as human hands caressed his body as he had dreamed. He tried to speak, but vomited instead, and Melanie, oblivious, began kissing him, deeply, sucking the air out of him, and he felt F27 flying upwards into her, into the cold, noisy air of the limo, through the flying colors and happy shouts of the night, racing towards infections and human contact as he had imagined in the perpetual loneliness of his room.