Heartbeat

Our First Report card of the Year comes in on Monday, after Christmas Vacation. C-, C-, D, D, C-, B. The Parental Figures are outraged.

They sit me down at the dinner table again to Discuss The Matter. That’s just what Mom says. Dad cares more about Marine Corp discipline than rational talking.

Dad puts on an angry face while Mom simmers. They keep asking me things like “Why didn’t you try to bring these grades up like we told you to?” and “Do you want to go to a good college or not?”

I just sit and shrug. I mash my food together on my plate. I create a volcano of gravy that erupts suddenly from the Mt. St. Helens of my mashed potatoes. The lava gurgles down to the asparagus as the corn runs off to warn the other villagers. Run for the hills.

“Look at me, Francis,” Mom growls, using her deep, dark God Voice.

“Look at your mother when she is speaking to you,” Dad grumbles in the same voice. The contents of my stomach burn down to a watery fallow material.

“This is not acceptable, Frank,” Dad keeps saying. “Not acceptable! I will not have a slacker for a son!”

I push the corn in with the asparagus and sadistically watch them become plowed down by the lava. The asparagus curls into a smiley face smile. I do not smile back.

“Stop playing with your food and look at us!”

Suddenly the plate is wrenched out of my reach and I’m left with nothing but the fork and glass of milk. I chew on my bottom lip and pick at a piece of peeling skin with my teeth. I rip it off with my two front teeth and feel the sting of the exposed flesh. I taste the blood curdling to the surface. Cold and metallic.

They yell at me some more about how they refuse to have a slacker as a son and if I don’t get my grades up by next semester, they will ground me until The Apocalypse comes. I keep nodding my head and don’t say a word. They keep asking me “Do you understand?” and I continue to nod, even when they would prefer I use actual words. I drag myself up to my room afterwards and turn the music up when they start to bicker at each other about me. How my grades are horrible and how I’m not a obnoxiously perfect kid like Hannah is and how I don’t talk that much and a million other things about me that bug them.

I keep having to swallow the lump in my throat, no matter how much it hurts to do so. I blink rapidly and hold my breath. I should have flung myself off the bridge when I had the chance.

They continue to yell downstairs, even after it’s late and I’ve gone to bed. It’s obvious that they’ve consumed their liquors to keep their engines fueled. Dad tries to keep his voice low and keeps telling Mom to stop yelling so loud or they’ll wake us up and scare us, completely oblivious to the fact that I am fully awake because of all their yelling, and Hannah’s not even home. Mom manages to speak articulately enough to spit insults back in his face and talk about how stupid he is and how their children are going to grow up to be complete failures because of him. They go on and on until the argument turns into blunt bickering about nothing. I sit in my closet and plug my ears with my index fingers. It mutes out most of the world, but I can still hear my heartbeat bashing around inside of my body. When I unplug my ears, they’re still going at it. I blink and make my decision. I find a sharp object. A tack to the inside of my left wrist. I dig it into my skin like a bulletin board. It sends twinges of agony throughout my finger tips. I run it across the surface, hoping to make a dramatic quick, slick slice across the skin. But all it does is scrape it a little, making a pitiful little white scratchy line overlapping my veins. I run it across again and again and all it does is scratch me up like fingernail scrapings. Ridiculous. There was a kid who killed himself once in eighth grade and they made us sit through an entire assembly about, telling us that suicide is just a cry for help in the dark. This makes sense. I’m sitting in my closet without the lights on: In the dark. A cry for help? I disagree at that part. If somebody wanted to cry out for help, I don’t believe they would just bring an end to their life, without even waiting for anybody to answer their pleas. I scrape a spider web into my skin until it stings too much to keep going. I throw the tack in the trash. A second attempt. Also failed. How pathetic can I possibly get? I hope this is rock bottom. I’m not in the mood to trudge down even lower. This is like the Nine Circles of Hell. I’ve most definitely hit the ninth, at the very bottom; the Frozen Central Zone with Satan laying around as a frozen red demon popsicle inside of a freezer.

I wear long-sleeves the next morning to hide both the bruises and the scrapings, which works as a twofer because there is no way I’d wear short sleeves with that kind of cold outside. I eat stale cornflakes and watch the snow fall outside. I want it to come up so high it buries our house all the way up to the top of our front door. We’d have to hibernate and wait for Militant Forces to come dig us out. We’d live off of spaghetti and macaroni and cheese.

I close my eyes and just let it happen after school because I’m too tired to keep my eyes open anyway. He runs his tongue along my bottom lip and then sticks it in my mouth. It feels big and wet and slimy underneath my tongue. His body feels heavy on top of mine, but I try my best to ignore it. I look at the scratches on my wrist. I would have done it with a steak knife if I had the courage to sneak down to the kitchen and grab one, but Mom and Dad were arguing with each other too much. I would have been killed. I close my eyes for longer than a blink and feel the sting of the hard open-palm smack that whaps my cheek when he thinks I’m closing my eyes to sleep. I wince and crinkle up my face against the stinging sensation. When he declares he’s finished, he gets dressed faster than he usually does. Most of the time, he just lays in bed and watches me, but now he’s crawling out of bed almost immediately after he’s finished, pulling his underwear and jeans and shirt back on.

I close my eyes and wince up against the pain as I feel his fist slam into my thigh.

“Get off my bed.”

I snake-slide off of his bed, keeping his blanket wrapped around me to keep me warm in their freezing cold house. He fixes the pillows on his bed and wrenches the blanket off of me, exposing me their in the middle of his bedroom, bare naked and cold. He makes up his bed, neat and nice. I observe and wonder why the hell he’s making his bed. But I don’t bother to ask. He grabs my clothes and tosses them over to me like a football. I quickly collect them in my arms and start putting them back on.

“I’m having somebody come over tonight,” he says quickly, lighting up a cigarette and taking a drag so deep and long I think he’s going to suck the whole cigarette right down his throat. “Get out.”

I leave without a word. I gimp home on only one good leg, while the other one aches every time I take a step on it, from the fist to my thigh that dented the bones in my leg like a car door. My parents avoid talking to each other as much as possible and do not make eye contact with each other. Mom asks me how school is and asks me if I’ve failed any tests. I tell her I’m doing fine. She reminds me again to get my grades up. I just keep nodding my head. Programmed robot. Downloaded child.

I go to school and Gerard’s afterward. Same routine. On and on. He smacks me across the face and sometimes I can’t even remember why he smacked me. His hand collides with my face and the all the anger spews out of me and my insides burn with rage and the urge to cry. I go to school. Gerard’s house afterward. A hit every now and then. I can’t tell whether I get more angry than sick or more sick than angry. My parents continue to bicker at each other over nothing. Blah-blahing about who is more boring. I go to school. Gerard’s house afterward. A smack to the face. A fist to my leg. Never a punch, because those are too damaging and will leave too big of a mark. He doesn’t apologize. He used to. But that’s gone forever.

I want to scream until my brain explodes and I’m nothing but a blood heap of guts and bone on the sidewalk.

I go to school. Gerard’s house. Hit. Smack. School. Gerard’s. Hit. Smack. A routine that’s killing me from the inside out. It’s easy to hide the bruises. Wear long-sleeves and nobody will ever see your arms. Jeans, and nobody will see your beaten-up thighs and calves and crackled ankles. When people ask about the red marks on your face, you tell them you play lacrosse and got socked with the ball or you fell down the stairs and smacked your face into a wall or a light switch or somebody opened a door up on your face, bashing your nose in and caving in your skull. I whip out reason after reason inside my head, just in case somebody asks. Nobody asks.

School. Gerard’s house. A hit or a smack or a yell or a growl or a threat. I go back home and sit in my closet and rock. My head bumps up against the wall as I hug my legs to my chest and breathe in and out like I’m having an asthma attack. I bite my lip. I bite my fingernails. I pick off my cuticles and watch the blood seep around my fingernails. I pick at the zits forming on my forehead. They bleed out pus and other dermatological fluids. I scratch at my wrist with a tack because I’m too much of a wuss to pull out the box-cutter.

He smiles at me in the halls and after school it is always the same. On the countertop in the bathroom with my wrists pinned up around my ears and the bruises coming back like always and I have no choice but to take it or die.

I wait until Hannah is at a friend’s house and Mom and Dad are at work, before I trudge out into my backyard and stand there in the frozen winter wonderland and let out the biggest, loudest, eeriest scream I can muster. I scream until my eyes water up and my throat stings and my chest hurts and by the time I’m done screaming when I lose my voice, I realize that I’m still alone. Nobody has come out of their homes or poked their heads out of their front doors to see what that sound was. I am still alone. I’ve screamed so loud people in Iceland should have been able to hear and then I look around and see nobody heard it. I scream into the snow until I literally can’t not open my mouth without a sting of pain wrenching through my esophagus.

Nobody hears it but me.

I go back inside and lay down on the couch, facing the wall until I fall asleep, enjoying the feeling of the tears stinging my scarred lips.