"ROACH"

Roderick Hayes





Imagine if the roach of a joint and a wet

garbage bag had a baby. Well -- that's Roach.



A joint kind of roach — not a cockroach. Some people think that, but those are the A students! Maybe he'll say that as an excuse to police or principals, but everyone knows it's bullshit.



But that's not his real name, everybody knows that! It's Roderick: Roderick Franklin Hayes, but don't call him that. The last person who did had their nose broke. The only person who doesn't call him Roach is Nico, but Nico calls him "Roddy". Nobody else has tried to call him that and nobody thinks it would end well.



He's an 18-year-old alternative school senior at Jefferson Academy, a Jefferson High School extension. Or, as he likes to call it, Junkie Academy.



Roach is 6'1" which only makes him scarier. He uses it as a weapon; he makes sure he's unavoidable. He's about 178 lbs and lean, the type of lean you get from pure life experience instead of the gym. He's adapted for sprinting from cops, fighting dirty in alleyways, and vaulting fences. He's wiry and taunt with ropey muscle strung across his long limbs. His chest is narrow, but his shoulders are wide and always hunched like he’s ready to throw a punch. His waist is lean, bordering on underfed, and his legs are lanky and restless. He’s a visibly rough fella with elbows and knees marked with old injuries and his knuckles permanently scabbed and cracked open.



His eyes are dark blue—so dark they almost read black in poor lighting. They're are sharp and flat and the kind of stare that makes people look away first. He's always tracking and/or calculating. Nobody really knows.

There’s nothing warm in his gaze.

Just judgment or challenge,

or aggression, or the flicker

of someone about to lose their shit.

They're deep-set and stained red

with heavy, sunken

eyelids that make him look

sleep deprived. Roach has always

got red-veined sclera,

especially when he’s agitated or high. His eyebrows are thick, low, and perpetually pulled into a slight scowl. He glares by default and blinks slowly when he's agitated, or not at all when he’s on edge.



He's blond but his hair is buzzed down to a couple weeks of regrowth. The buzz is uneven—jagged and messy in places like it was done with a pair of dull clippers in a bathroom mirror. It’s starting to grow out at the top—messy, bristled, unwashed, with spiky, short “bangs”. The blond is an ashy shade, almost white under harsh light. It gives him an eerie, near-feral look when he’s pale. He often has shadows of old bruises in green and yellow fading along his ribs or jaw. The skin around his eyes are perpetually red or purple, appearing ashy or almost black, from lack of sleep, rage, or both. He has warm, pale skin with grey undertones, but with a coldness to him. When he’s high, he looks zombie-like, when he’s sober, he looks worse.



Roach's got a sharp jawline he doesn't deserve and high cheekbones that give him a gaunt, wolfish appearance. His nose is crooked from being broken at least once, or three, or five times. He has thin lips that are always chapped and often cracked or bleeding. He picks at them without noticing. His chin is marked by small, permanent scarring like someone tried to carve it with a key or a knife. Patchy, sparse, pale hairs started growing as facial hair when he was in 9th grade and never fully spread out. There's a scar across his right cheekbone, diagonal, faded white-pink. From a bottle, maybe. Nobody’s dared to ask. He also has a few burn marks—some deliberate, some not. Lighter burns on his knuckles and a melted spot near his collar from a cigarette. Tattering his body are several amateur tattoos, inked in jagged black. They're not aesthetic, just an outward identity struggle. A few of these tattoos are: a razor blade on the inside of his forearm, tally marks behind his right ear, a jagged X on the back of his right hand, and a smiley face just under his collarbone that's more creepy than cute. His hands are always dirty and always twitching. Roach's fingers are long but cracked at the knuckles with nails chewed to the cuticles. They're usually bleeding; he picks at his fingers when he’s bored, angry, or overstimulated. When he clenches his fists, his whole body tenses with it.



He's always tense with hunched shoulders like he’s used to flinching but learned to warp it into a fight stance. He walks fast like he’s either chasing or escaping something. His gait is wide and confrontational with his elbows facing outward. He leans when he talks—forward, aggressive, like he’s daring you to say something stupid. When bored or hyped, he bounces one knee or taps his fingers in rapid, frantic rhythms. He never sits still, doesn't want to.



Everything he wears looks stolen, secondhand, or scavenged from a closet he wasn’t supposed to open. He usually wears the same black hoodie with cigarette burns in the cuffs, faded denim or black jeans with fraying seams, steel-toe boots or torn-up Vans with graffiti all over them, or an oversized military surplus jacket in winter. All of his clothes have rips, bloodstains, dirt—he doesn’t care. Roach sometimes wears chains, safety pins, or metal trinkets like armor. He keeps a boxcutter or blade hidden at all times, not usually for threats, but for use. He smells sharp and acrid. The smell of cigarettes, gasoline, dried sweat, and rusted metal clings to everything he owns. Sometimes there's the ghost of cheap soap or chemical cleaner—the kind used in locker rooms or juvenile detention centers.



Roach's voice is deeper than most people would expect from your typical blond, blue-eyed boy. It's thick and rasped like it’s clawing its way up his throat. He clearly smokes too much, yells too much, and coughs too much. His voice carries even when he’s speaking low: rough and gravely, with a hoarse edge that makes everything sound like a threat or a dare. When he laughs it’s sharp, loud, and unhinged.



He's got a bunch of weird mannerisms. He speaks loud even when he doesn’t need to, cuts people off mid-sentence, doesn't ask questions, he only makes accusations, he never says “please” or “sorry” unless mocking, will laugh in the middle of a tense silence just to make it worse, and he uses threats like punctuation. Roach grabs hard—arms, shoulders, collars, and uses physical contact as a tool of control. He never touches softly, probably doesn't know how. Touch from him means either: “Don’t move”, “Back off”, or “Pay attention.”



He's unironically that one stereotypical genre of white blond kid, especially when he was younger.