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Jake Riley simple, but definitely not stupid; rather, he’s bright and very dependable. He is also taciturn; he uses three words where someone else (Finegan) would use a paragraph—and still manages to convey more impact. He wears his heart on his sleeve; his face is an open book. Whatever emotions he experiences show up on his face like a neon sign. Everything he turns his hand to he does well: Jake Riley is all ability with no motivation, which Finegan Marsh is all too eager to supply. Jake is too smart and has too many fringe interests for the most Garterville locals to want to associate with him. And then there’s the matter of his association with Finegan Marsh, which has since outstripped either of the previous factors in the matter of his ostracism. Jake’s reaction to his poor treatment took a different form than Finegan’s. Rather than the becoming arrogant, Jake has become brooding and comfort-seeking. He finds solace in hard work and routine. In a word, Jake is phlegmatic. He has a difficult time with chaos, either of his surroundings or of himself—which is odd, because his best friend is the biggest source of chaos in his life. His relationship with Finegan Marsh is an odd one. It began innocently enough: Jake saved Finegan from a thrashing during their freshman year in high school, driven by pity and justice in equal measures. Finegan stuck to Jake like a remora and they discovered a shared interest in weird books and music. Jake turned him on to roleplaying games—and the guy who ran them: local gaming nut Bob Howard, perhaps the only person more poorly regarded by Garterville than either of them. It is a mingled sense of pity and familiarity by which Jake feels obligated to Finegan, whom he has always seen as fragile. One of Jake’s more difficult moments was when he served as the pillar that kept Finegan more or less erect during the Marsh family implosion shortly after graduation. Finegan’s father drowned his mother and then committed suicide, which resulted in Finegan’s nervous breakdown and subsequent committal to a psychiatric hospital. His feelings became further complicated when Finegan left town to go to college. This hurt Jake deeply: Finegan not only left Jake to face Garterville alone, but he neither wrote nor called until he returned home during the following year’s summer vacation. When he did return, Finegan struck back up with Jake as if he’d never left, and this time with plans far grander and more dangerous than the pranks they’d begun pulling back in high school. Jake’s other close relationship is with Michelle Oneto, or “Shelley” as he and everyone else calls her. He met Shelley during his senior year of high school and they began a clandestine relationship. Their relationship has been on-again/off-again for the past five years or so, with breaks sometimes as long as several months. They had an intense period of relationship around year three, where Jake and Shelley were inseparable for eighteen months, but this eventually fragmented into the relationship’s current state. Jake has never met any of Shelley’s family or friends, and though he likes her, he suspects Shelley is embarrassed being in a relationship with a "loser", and hence believes she would rather have him as a “back door man” instead of as a legitimate boyfriend. Although dissatisfied with this state of being, he has since come to accept it and has grown accustomed to it. Despite poor standing among the locals, Jake is more socially developed than Finegan or Bob. People will actually talk to him when he's not in company of either of his two friends. Jake ’s a committed Garterville “lifer” and has achieved a level of comfort in his routine. For him to leave town would be to leave his comfortable space and have to learn to adapt to another possibly hostile town somewhere else. In his opinion, it’s “better the devil you know…” Appearance |
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