Chapter FourTIME PASSED, though never fast enough for Jake.
Jake Roark won every audition and earned every lead in every play in his sophomore year in high school. He inhabited his characters in ways that devoured him, and it estranged him even further from his friends. His best friends, forgivingly, simply looked at him askance. Well, Jake’s in another play, they said.
The things Jake learned from acting he integrated into his life. He knew the effect he had on others, was acutely aware of his difference. For a long time, he thought it was normal, and wondered why nobody else seemed to have it, whatever it was that made him self-contained.
He still attracted the outcasts, the misfits, the rebels. Jake liked a ruffian in high school named Tony Gibbons. He reminded him of d**k Tiger, th
