Heartbeat

Our Life Science class is missing a teacher. So they bring in a substitute who doesn’t know how to do his job. He makes us watch a movie instead of teaching us directly. Alice In Wonderland, because the things we work with Life Science give him a rash, and because he’s actually an English teacher.

Some people pass notes while must just chat with each other. Nobody’s watching the movie but me and a couple of lone dweebs in the front. First scene comes in with Alice bitching to her sister about how boring History is and how she wants more books with pictures. Cue the anthropomorphic, glasses-wearing, white rabbit having a psychologically unhealthy anxiety attack because he’s late, late, late for a very important date. Alice wandering off because she has the attention span of a squirrel and can’t stay around her sister for too long or she’ll lose it. She follows the rabbit and there she is in Wonderland; a universe of grotesque creatures coming in all shapes and sizes.

Gerard once told me this was a druggie movie. The whole damn story is. A fantastical world of hallucinogens, and lack of abstinence. A talking doorknob telling a little girl to drink and eat things that will advance her father into the world. When she drinks the bottle and eats the cookie, she suddenly shrinks to a level that is small enough for her to fit through the door. Mind-altering drugs. Hallucinogens. Sedatives. Lewis Carroll had a sick sense of humor. Enter in, Stage Left, the Cheshire cat with no sense of logic. Which way did the White Rabbit go? He went that way. He did? Who did? The White rabbit. What rabbit? A striped purple feline with a thought disorder. Lack of necessary adequate communication. All serious symptoms of schizophrenia. A homicidal card queen. A midget top hat-wearing elderly man with a bad case of dementia. A hookah-smoking caterpillar.

I put my head on my desk and close my eyes to sleep. The fluid movements of the animation give me a headache; all those colorful characters blaring out against all black backgrounds and dark backdrops. My head is pulsating. He told me to talk more again and before I could get even a single word out, a cold, hard whop across my temple that made my eyes wrench around so much, I saw my brain inside my head. My wrists are killing me. My head is killing me. My eyes are heavy and I want to sleep so bad, but I can’t because every time I do I see that night inside of my head and even after I wake up sweating, and close to screaming, I can still hear the blood rushing in my ears and his voice in my head telling me to be quiet and the stars and the bushes and my eyes so heavy with sleep and how I can’t figure out why I’m sleepy and my tongue is thick inside my mouth and I can’t get a word out.

Alice wakes up eventually, realizing it was all a dream and that there is a point that the world has Logic in it. Without it, you get Wonderland, which is just a fucked-up setting that’s confusing and senseless.

I take the bus home at the last minute. I’m too tired for sex or whatever else he has in mind. I just want to sleep. I come home to an empty house. Hannah is sleeping over at a friend’s. Mom is too busy at the design place, readying for Christmas, to be home. Dad is hibernating in the hospital, waiting for the season to be over. I pop a frozen pizza into the oven and turn on the television to Christmas specials playing on every channel. Rudolph prances around on ice declaring his independence and individuality. I change the channel to the Sci-Fi Channel; a dramatic feature film following a grey alien cornered in a corn field somewhere in Nebraska. The scientists and SWAT team have guns pointed at her. She’s trapped. She can’t speak. She can’t feel. She wants to tell them to stop, but no words come out because she has no mouth.

I take the pizza out of the oven and inhale two slices, not even waiting for it to cool down. On the television, the little alien baby is being forced against her will, into a van to be sent to a underground Area 51 to be experimented and studied. I go back to the kitchen and put a frozen bag of vegetables on my face to heal the bruise on my temple above my eyebrow. They’ve got the little alien baby in the lab now. They tie her to a table as take notes as she squirms and whimpers for help. Her legs and arms are spread. She screams out, helpless. Nobody’s willing to help her. They’re all very oblivious to her pain.

I get Hannah’s inhaler out and set it on her dresser, so it’s easy for her to grab when she gets home and starts wheezing. I go back to the television afterwards. The alien baby is unconscious now, as they prick her grey skin with tubes and wires that search for a heartbeat or any sign of life that is similar to that of human anatomy. She wakes up in the middle of the procedure and starts screaming again. Crying for help. A scientist mentions that this may be a cry for help from a parental figure. She wants her mommy.

I snarf the rest of the pizza and go up to my room, turning off the television just as the alien baby reveals her secret: the scientists should have treated her better, because their mother ship is idling over New York.

I pull my reflection back out of the closet and sit on the nothing-colored floor. I look closely at this person’s eyes. They have no color, like underwear washed so many times they’re just raw and stale. They are nothing more than dark and baggy raccoon eyes. His hair is greasy. He needs to wash it more; he spends too much time trying to find good ways to get some sleep in without having nightmares, instead of following through with proper hygiene etiquette. He smiles, just to see what it looks like. Pitiful. A counterfeit smile. And it looks horrible. The kind of forced grin your mother tells you to put on for school pictures.

I shake the image of this kid’s face out of my head. I take the mirror downstairs into the kitchen, and toss it into the trash.

The next day in gym, I crawl into the shower stall and pull the curtain closed so I don’t have to get dressed in front of all those twenty sets of eyes sneaking peaks in at other body parts, trying to decide who is a Loser and who is Pretty Cool in the Locker Room Hierarchy of Adolescent Societies. I shed my winter fur and recover up my skin with a T-shirt that is too big and basketball shorts that reach down to my knees. It makes me wonder why I still bother. I figure I could just hang out in this shower stall until the end of gym. The gym teacher won’t notice my absence. He’d have to notice my existence first.

I swim down the stairs to the auditorium where Gym takes place, along with the other schools of greasy, fish with brains the size of peas. I stand on the sidelines and don’t raise my hand when the Gym Teacher asks us who wants to demonstrate a move for the rest of the class. Badminton. I get a yellow light-weight racket and thwack the birdie as hard as I can. It still doesn’t go far. It makes me wonder again why I still bother.

Mikey calls me once again and bullies me into coming over after school. Gerard wasn’t at school today, so I figure he won’t be at his house either. I sit on Mikey’s bed and examine. His room is the exact polar opposite of Gerard’s. Clean. Nice. Spiffy, like the photos that appear in my mother’s interior design magazine. Clean carpets and walls. An organized desk with a computer that has two monitors. A bookshelf of novels and DVDs and weird little figurine things. It is obvious what kind of kid Mikey is. He is the same kind of kid who spends too much time playing video games. The kind of kid who spends all of his long-saved money on comic book memorabilia. The kind of kid who thinks of political theories and intelligent discussions on Star Wars. A dweeb. Yet, he still manages to be Popular. It’s his face. Girls like it. They think it’s cute; cute in the same way they say “Awwwww!” whenever they see puppies or toddlers or baby lions. They say hi to him in the halls. Ask him how life is going. He responds in an equally sweet voice and they grin. They want to date him, secretly, but are already taken by the jock messiahs who spend their time beating the crap out of each other on football fields. It makes me jealous, but I say nothing about it. Why can’t I be like him? Liked by everyone without even trying? It’s impossible for me. I didn’t do enough at the beginning of high school to be noticed. I didn’t go to our school’s game or root for our team or have School Spirit during Homecoming Week. I thought it was stupid. It still is. But I should have gritted my teeth and gotten through it. Done something to show that I’m not a complete hermit.

I want to be liked.

Mikey tells me about how good of a posture I have and how I would be a great addition to our school’s lacrosse team. He asks me if I’ve ever played sports before. Have I ever thrown a football? I look like the kind of kid that would be great on the field with a stick in hand, flinging a ball around and bashing the stick into my opposing players, he tells me. It would be a great way to vent out stress. He tells me the Winter Sports sign-ups are coming up soon. He says I should join something.

I do everything in my power to not pay attention to him. Count the dots on his ceiling tiles. Follow the lines of the stripes on his wallpaper. Pick the cotton out of his comforter. Try to remember if I finished my homework. Think about what show are on tonight. Recite how many presidents I know the names of. Nixon, Clinton, Bush #1, Bush #2, Coolidge, Lincoln, Washington, Kennedy…

He goes on and on. He’s one of those kids who are too enthusiastic about things. So enthusiastic and so spirited that it’s annoying. Yet, he still manages to be liked by everyone. I’m not liked by anyone. I try, occasionally, but get nowhere. Where is the justice?

When he finally stops to take a breath, he looks over at me and gives me a look, waiting for me to answer him back and say Yes, that’s totally awesome! You’re such a great friend! Thanks for telling me!

I say nothing. I can’t play sports. Doesn’t he see me in gym? I can’t play sports to save my life. Why does he even bother? He’s just like the teachers, yelling at me for not speaking, even when not speaking at all is better than speaking too much.

His mother pokes his head in eventually and asks me if I need a ride home whenever I decide I’m ready to go. I shake my head No, grab my bag, say a quick “bye” to Mikey and leave as fast as I can.

I watch the snow fall down through the darkness as I lay in bed hours later, trying hard not to fall asleep and trying hard to fall asleep, all at the same time. My house is freezing. I get out the extra comforter from the top of the closet and drape it over the blanket I already have. I crawl underneath the blanket cave and listen to the snow fall outside. Two days before Christmas vacation. Mom will probably not be coming home early for a couple of days. I remember back during these times, when I was a lot younger. I’d get up every night, late, just to check is Santa Claus had decided to come early that year. He never did. He was always right on schedule. I wondered how he always managed to have the same wrapping paper as us. We tried to cut our own tree one year, which didn’t work out well because Dad is not a lumberjack, wise in the ways of the forest. We bought our trees after that. Five years of that and it got too much of a pain in the ass to water it and sweep up all of the fallen pine needles on the floor. We got a fake one after that. It didn’t need to be watered and it’s pine needles never fell off. It was immortal. We’ve had it ever since. It’s the kind with the whiskers on it that light up in different colors. A plug-in tree. It came in a box.

The cold kicks in even more an hour later--still wide awake. My wrists hurt. I sit up and punch my pillow. Bad idea. It crumbles the bones in my fingers and hurts my wrists even more. I want to smack something. Hit something. Punch a mirror and make it shatter in a dramatic way. Kick a wall. I can’t sleep whenever I want to and whenever I do get to sleep it’s just nightmares that scare me so much I think I’m going to wake up with shorts wet with pee. Mikey roaches all over me like a yippy little dog. Gerard--self-explanatory.

My mother knows of a million different ways to get to sleep good. Drink warm milk. Recite the presidents, in order. Think of Zen questions. Meditate. Existentialism.

I eventually figure out that reciting 'Never Wake Up, Never Wake Up, Never Wake Up' inside of my head works out pretty good.