Heartbeat

Today is Job Day. The day every student at Carceras High School must spend two hours and miss the first two blocks to take a two-hundred-something-question-long personality quiz that will eventually tell us what we are going to do once we get out of college, if we ever get even there to begin with.

The questions ask me things about the way I like to work in school. What I want to do when I grow up. What kind of person I am. How much patience I have for stupidity. The other kids sitting around fill out the quiz, one question after another, whipping by like it’s nothing. I sit there and stare down at the paper because I’d rather rot inside of a fluorescently-lit tomb than fill out some personality crap that’s gonna give me results that won’t be true anyway.

When I work in school do I like to A.)Work in a large group. B.)Work alone. C.)Work with a partner. D.)None of the above.

I circle None of the Above. I don’t like work at all.

Am I A.)A Dreamer. B.)A Thinker. C.)A Predictor D.)A Creator

The questions go on and on. All multiple choice, ABCD in tiny circles. I lie on a couple but most of them I’m able to tell the truth.

Am I A.)A Loser B.)Invisible C.)Deteriorating D.)Already Dead. F.)All of the Above.

After two-hundred questions we hand them in and get them back at the end of the day.

The test tells me what I should consider doing as a career if I ever get out of high school alive.

I would make a great:
A.) Homeless man.
B.) Serial killer.
C.) Manic depressant.
D.) Coroner

Maybe I can be a dead guy if I grow up.

Mikey gets his results just moments after I do. According to the computer that compiled our results, Mike would make a great A.)Doctor B.)Lawyer C.)Web designer D.)Chemist. He gets excited like a little kid coked up on crack on Christmas morning.

“Dude! This is so cool! A doctor! Maybe I can go to the hospital next weekend and interview some people. Didn’t you say you dad was a doctor? Maybe I could talk to him! I don‘t really know about lawyer, though. Law seems kinda boring. Chemistry? Eh, I hate science. I don‘t really know about web design, it seems kinda weird. But a doctor!”

I barely pay attention. Listening to others hop around about the cool stuff happening in their lives isn’t worth my time anymore.

When I get into Gerard’s car at the end of the day, he leans in and licks my ear.

“Let’s go somewhere else today,” he says to me. I say nothing back. He starts up his car and goes in a different direction towards a place I’ve never been to. His car bumps along though the neighborhoods until it comes onto a highway that leads up into a smaller area with houses spaced farther apart. He drives us up onto a hill and parks at the very top in a gravel turnoff. I don’t see at first why he brought us here. I think for a second it’s because of the scenery, because just over the hill, you can see the whole city, practically.

I feel his lips on my ear again, his hand on my thigh. A whisper.

“What’re you waiting for?”

Inside my headworld there’s nothing but catastrophe. Lightning flashes, crying children, burning trees, boulders crumbling down cliffs to crush people at the bottom. For a while, I’m almost surprised as it doesn’t hurt. I’ve done it so much that it’s anesthetized. Nothingness. And then he starts to go faster and it goes back to hurting. Stinging and pulling at skin so far that it threatens to rip like fabric. I dig my teeth into my tongue instead of biting at my lips, and when I do, it makes my eyes water because I remember then I’ve already bitten practically through it. I go back to my lips. I tear skin with my two front teeth. It starts to bleed again. Too much. It’ll need stitches. The snow pours down outside and starts to collect inside the pockets between the hood of the car and the windshield. I can see my breath in the air, it’s so cold. My fingers are freezing. The only thing he’s using as a blanket is his jacket, which mostly just covers him. I guess his body is supposed to be the blanket for me, but it doesn’t work that well because his skin is cold, especially his fingers, which he has clasped around my head, digging into my ears. I taste the sting of the blood on my lip and it tastes like a bullet on my tongue. It makes me wonder what people are thinking when they see my face. I probably look like I have some disease.

“This is fucking ridiculous,” I hear as the first words out of his mouth once he is done and is putting his clothes back on. I stay laid down in the backseat and watch the snow fall outside. “I am seriously getting fucking sick of this. I swear to God, Frank…”

I’m barely listening, just like Mikey. It’s easy to tell what he’s already talking about. I didn’t even try. I didn’t kiss him back. I’m cheating on him. I never talk. I figure that’s what usually goes on in his head.

“Get dressed, for fuck’s sake,” he mutters, climbing back into the front seat. I find my shirt and boxers and pants and slip then on as I sit on the floor of the car. I climb back into the passenger seat and stare out the window, not making eye contact once. Outside, everything blurs into each other. All white and gray with the snow and the cement slab of a sky draped over the world all day long. It gets darker and darker as we get closer to my house. It’s almost fully dark by the time he gets me home. He pulls up to my house and turns off the car. I look over at him in the dark. He doesn’t usually turn off his car. He just keeps it on and waits for me to get out so he can just pull away once I’m gone.

I’m pretty sure he’s about to shoot off into a lecture about me not loving him back or any other bullshit reason he can think of inside of his head, but he says nothing. There is a silence in the car for a moment, right up until I hear this god-awful sound of blood gushing around inside of my head after I feel the nanosecond numbness of his hand whopping my face like the leather of a belt. My head jerks to the right and the side of my forehead bumps the window just hard enough to create a small bruise. I scrunch up my face and force every single particle of energy inside of me into not crying. I think, for a moment, it’s just a hit, and that’s it. But then there’s a bash on my thigh and it crumbles up every bone in my leg, making my toes twitch and foot jerk up like it would when it’s getting hit with a reflex hammer at the doctor’s. I hear a coughed-out grunt escape my throat with that, and don’t have time to actually finish letting it out before I feel his hand on the side of my head and then the other side of my head on the window as his hand forces it up against the glass. There is another bash to my thigh that makes my knee rattle. And then a backhand smack that comes out of nowhere and I don’t see it until the very last second, when two of his knuckles whack up hard against my eye. I slam my eyes closed and attempt to ignore the throbbing sensation starting up right in between my eyes; a migraine worse than anything. I feel my eyes water up again and even feel a little droplet seep out onto my eyelid and drip down onto my cheek and dribble down. Another bash to my thigh. It makes my knees shake. His hand is on the side of my head again and I don’t even have time to think before I feel my body wrench sideways with my head bashing up against the glass of the window again.

There’s a noise in my head. A ear-piercing whistling noise that sounds like a scream. It rings in my ears and I can even hear it inside of my head, in the center of my brain. I feel my lips move and myself saying something, but I don’t bother to register into my head what I’m even saying or if I’m really even saying it.

I touch my face and it feels like it’s swelling, tender and tingling.

“I know what you’re doing,” I hear him say. He says it again. A scream starts in my gut. Anger and the urge to rip his throat out with my bare hands The words are in my head, clean and clear, and all it takes is to open my mouth and scream them out. I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING!

But then the words are gather below my lower lip and then my lips quivers a bit and nothing comes out. Whispers of silence that are just crushed up into chunks like the words have been through an ice-dispenser and then just melted into thin liquid completely, poured down the drain into nothingness.

“I don’t want to have to tell you again,” he goes on. “You fuck with me again and I swear to God, I’ll fuck you up.”

My house is silent and cold. Something is not right with the heater. The winter frost from outside seeps in through the walls and bites and tears at all the warm temperature until there’s no warmth left and all we have if this chilly atmosphere that forces us to wear sweaters and thermal underwear all the time. I sneak up to my room, one creaky stair step at a time. I crawl until bed without brushing my teeth or changing into pajama pants and when I finally pull the coves over me, it really starts to get to me. My face burns with the smacks and my head pulsates. I want to get up and get an Aleve or something, but I know I’ll just wake up my family somehow if I do so. My eye hurts. It makes my eyelids twitch. It hurts to open that eye specifically. It makes me fear I’ve gone half-blind. I take in a deep breath and try to control my breathing; make it so it doesn’t come out as shaky as I think it is coming out.

It takes me forever to fall asleep; I almost see the sun rising by the time I finally doze off, but the sleep, when it finally comes, is a relief. Not any particular dream that I can remember but I can’t feel my face burning when I sleep.

And then I wake up the next morning and my face feels like it’s completely swelled up. I think, for a moment, I’ve gone blind in one eye, as it hurts to open it up, so it’s clasped closed completely. I trudge into the bathroom and look at myself though my one good eye.

And then I see my other eye and my stomach drops down into my butt.

It’s purple and blue. Completely bruises and slowly starting to swell itself shut.

I could always hide the bruises with long-sleeved shirts and pants, and then I could just make up excuses for the small marks on my face. But never a black eye. And it’s come out of nowhere.

The only thing I can’t cover up.