Heartbeat

The sign on the wall in the stall is telling the girls who enter into this lavatory to please not flush their girl-things down the toilet. Put them in the plastic garbage bin attached to the stall wall like a good girl.

The girl’s bathroom shocks me. So much cleaner than the boy’s bathrooms. Not nearly as cruel. There are barely any profanities on the walls, except for one girl scratching into the metal that Becky Somebody is a slut-rat, and then Sarah Whoever defending Becky by telling the original girl to go fuck herself. And then some phone numbers and suggested ski resorts up north. Guys girls should stay away from. A lone message in the corner informing us “I pooped!”

The boy’s bathroom is being taken over by janitors and custodians cleaning up the bathroom gunk and profane messages on the wall of the stalls. The sounds of loud, yelling vacuum cleaners and other electronic cleaning tools drown out Gerard’s groans.

I stand in some half-way stance, crouching down and standing up at the same time; arching my butt up in the air with my boxers at my ankles near my shoes. I’m gripping onto edges of the toilet lid so I don’t topple over and crack my head open on something.

My neck hurts. I fear instead of ending my own life, I’ve damaged the vertebrae in my neck forever. I can put a hand up to my throat and still feel the places where the scarf wrapped around my flesh and choked me.

It hurts. Sex isn’t supposed to be like this. It’s supposed to be good. Warm. Nice, like hot chocolate and graham crackers. In romantic movies, they always have an overhead view of the couple laying in bed next to each other, the blanket just barely covering up over their chests, as they smile like idiots, happy at what they’ve done together.

I don’t feel any of that. When his body connects with mine, it rips and tears at the skin and flesh inside of me and makes my eyes water. He moves too fast and his body is like a boulder crushing me. I’m too small. When he’s inside of me and I can feel him inside of me, I gag like it’s going to come up right out of my throat. His sweaty body up against mine is not romantic or hot. It’s just disgusting.

Disgusting. That’s what it is. But he won’t stop. I want to whimper or cry and put on puppy-dog eyes to make him feel the sympathy I’m flinging at him, so maybe he’ll get a clue and leave my body alone for a little while. But I know that’s not going to happen. Jumpy dogs don’t know how to stop hopping up into your lap.

He has his hands around my hips and his fingernails digging into my flesh. The cold of the metal of his watch up against my skin. His hot breath on my back as he buries his face in my spine to taste my body. His feet inching more towards mine, and our ankles entwining.

I want to scream.

Snow is churning down from the skies outside. It is only four-thirty. School let out at two-thirty. I’ve been in this building two hours longer than I need to be. And I’m in pain.

He won’t stop. He never gets tired. This never hurts him. He can never know what this feels like. I can’t go into my headworld because my body is too focused on my face crinkling up and flinching and wincing with every thrust and twists and pulls and scrapes at my skin. My eyes are watering up with tears, like how you get teary-eyed when you’re running real fast in cold weather. I start reciting things in my head to aid me in thinking about something other than this world they’ve shoved me out into it against my will.

Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, was allergic to carrots.
When licking a stamp, you are consuming on tenth of a calorie.
When Donald Duck cartoons first came out, they were not allowed to be aired in Russia because Donald was not wearing any pants.
A dog can smell 10,000 things more than a human can.

His tongue is on my skin and he’s tasting my flesh as he gets closer and closer. I don’t feel shit. I feel like I’m going to vomit. My stomach curdles with contents screaming to be emptied out.

If you yell for eight years, seven months, and six days, you will have created enough sound energy to heat up one cup of coffee.
Human hair and fingernails continue to grow after death.
In milk commercials, it is white paint and thinner that is used as the display milk, instead of real milk.

His groans are getting louder. He’s starting to move faster. Breathe faster, but lower and more less, as he’s concentrated on reaching the peak of this and can’t focus on unimportant things like breathing.

If coloring weren’t added to Coca-Cola, it would be green.
There are two-hundred and ninety ways to make change for a dollar.
It’s physically impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
More fake Monopoly money is printed in a year, than real money printed throughout the entire world.

I’m destroyed. He’s finally defeated me.

I feel the tear slip out of my eyes and dribble down my cheek, resting on my lip and stinging my flesh right where I bit in and peeled chapped skin.

I silence a sniffle and a hiccupping breath, as I quickly swipe one hand up onto my face to wipe it away and breathe in deep. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Don’t think about anything. Just breath. Forget everything else.

I can feel his teeth sink into my shoulder as he bites down to suppress one final, loud moan as he succumbs to a climax. I close my eyes and listen to the blood ringing in my ears.

When I open my eyes again, his face is on mine and we’re in the front seat of his car. He’s got his tongue do deep into my mouth, that I’m sure it must look like he’s eating my mouth off. He moans into my mouth and sits down onto my lap. When he don’t immediately kiss back or even try to kiss back, his face is off of mine and his hands replaces it. A cold, hard, whop.

“This is ridiculous,” he growls. “I’m getting tired of this bullshit.”

I zip my lips up, listening to the aching sound of metal grinding against metal. No words come out.

He narrows his eyes and his expressions turns dark and corroded.

“We’re in a relationship,” he snaps at me. “People in relationships are supposed to be intimate with each other. Don’t you know what that means? It means you actually kiss back and show how much you love the person instead of just sitting there like a fucking dickhead, doing nothing. How stupid are you?”

His words are cold, hard metal nails falling to the floor. Crashing and hitting deep.

I curl my lips in and try to swallow myself again, but it doesn’t work. And in one second, his hand goes from by his side to the back of my head, taking a clump of my hair and wrenching it back so hard I think he’s going to scalp me. His face comes close and his eyes stab into mine, angry and terrifying.

“From now on…” he says so low, right into my face. I can feel his breath on my lips and his eyes knifing into my skull. “No more of this. I’m sick of it. You hear me? Sick of it.”

The contents of my stomach condenses into bitter, hydrochloric waste chemicals. My skin shivers with Goosebumps and I get that horrible feeling in my chest like when you are so nervous, your whole body feels like it’s about to cave in on itself.

“Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about,” he snarls. “Because you know exactly what I’m talking about. Oh, and the talking part, too. I don’t wanna hear anymore of this deaf-mute shit. You have a voice--use it.”

The winter cold outside crystallizes my throat in a thin coat of glittering ice. My voice freezes and I can’t say anything. I swallow and it hurts. It’s dry. I need a drink of water. I feel like I’m going to throw up.

I lift a head that feels like five tons on my shoulders, and lower it to give him a single, lonely nod. He sees it in the dark of his car and his retinas flare up with Satan’s flames.

“I will,” I squeak out. It’s pathetic. Not even a whimper. Not even a whisper. Not even anything.

My house is dark and silent and cold. Father snores upstairs. Mother has fallen asleep on the couch with the laptop still turned on atop the coffee table; the monitor creates a blue glow that illuminates her face in the black dark. Hannah wheezes in her sleep. She needs to take her inhaler again. She needs to go to the doctor. I’m not in the mood to make her take the inhaler again. And I’m not in the mood to use hand signals to tell my mother that she needs another check-up on her asthma, because my voice is too faded to tell her this directly. The dinner table has a lone single plate filled with now cold food on it. My dinner. I sit in the dark and scoop forkfuls of tasteless, cold broccoli into my mouth. The milk has been left out for too long--the only thing about the meal that’s warm. Sickening. I leave the plate on the table and don’t bother to rinse it. The sound of clinking dishes will wake up my family. I trudge upstairs and fumble through the dark until I feel the crystal of the doorknob of the door to the bathroom around my fingers and I stumble inside and lift up the lid and open my mouth and spew my cold dinner right into blue toilet water. I flush the toilet and rinse my mouth. Brush my teeth to get the God-awful taste off of my tongue. Snow continues to fall outside. Mom is going to go extra-insane around these days, because Christmas nears faster and faster, as soon as Thanksgiving is finished. I check my face in the mirror. A red mark on my cheek. The bruises are still on my wrists. It’s like whenever I think they’re finally going away, they run back when I’m not looking.

Under my covers, I can listen to the tick of my watch, pushing time by one second at a time. Every second that passes makes me closer to tomorrow and tomorrow I will just see him again and it never ends. He wants me to speak. I can’t because every time I see his face angry in mine and the slap of the back of his hands, no words come out. He wants me to love him back. I can’t because I don’t know how to love him when he’s tossing me around like that. I feel like a beaten dog in the rain, trudging from gutter to gutter, desperately finding a place to rest where I can get out of the cold. But there’s no rests. Just gutters after gutters and the streets go on forever and it never stops raining.

I stare at the digital green numbers on my alarm clock. I’m better at not speaking than anything. It’s so easy. Zip up your lips. Push the words back down inside of you and close your throat so they can’t come back up. Stop breathing. Replace talking with body gestures like head nods and shakes and shrugs and eyebrow-raises. Hand gestures. I would make a great mime.

It’s so easy not to speak. And then it’s not. When his hand is hard on my face, I fear I’m going to vomit if I don’t speak, because I get feared into it. I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to talk. The wrong words might come out and then people might find out. I don’t want people to know. They won’t believe me anyway. This kind of crap happens in prisons all the time. The prisoners don’t get any sympathy, what makes me any different? If they ever find out, I can just imagine what they’d say. I’m a big kid now. Not four years old. I don’t need a grown-up’s protection. They’d tell me to be a big boy because I’m only growing older, not younger.

And then that’s the problem with everything.

They all tell you to suck it up. Act like it’s nothing. Get over it. Deal with it.

They all tell me to be a man.

But they don’t ever tell me how. And then I’m stuck at the beginning again. And I’m not going anywhere.

There is no way I’m going to still be alive by the time high school is over.