Heartbeat

The fluorescently-lit tomb of my mother’s bathroom makes me see things on my face that I’ve never noticed before. The bright lights glow onto my skin and turns the pigments of the skin a sick pale color. I have three more pimples on my forehead near my hairline. I bring my fingernails up to one and squeeze until it pops. Gross-colored puss trickles out at first, but then it just bleeds. I clean it up with a ribbon of toilet paper and go back to my eye. It’s two in the morning. I have to go to school at eight. I have six hours to figure out how I’m supposed to hide this.

At first I tried my hair. But all it did was make me look like a drabby trailer trash refuge. And I would not have been able to see straight anyway. I have no idea of how those other kids manage it, those kids who wear the tight pants with the studded belts and overly-expensive digital cameras. I can’t see straight with my hair blocking my vision, I can’t navigate. I’d walk right into a wall or a telephone pole and then I’d just hurt my face even more. I considered makeup, but I figured that wouldn’t work either, and I would look like a woman. My eyes would be welling up by the end of the day and that’d just make my eye hurt even more. My sister tried to put eyeliner on me when I was younger and when she was obsessed with makeup and other cosmetics and flowers and the color pink. I was allergic to every kind she slapped onto me and when my eyes watered up from the ingredients in the makeup, my tears came out a weird purplish red--the color of the makeup mixing in with the saline in my tears.

I look at my eye closely in the reflection. The skin around it is a dark red, with the rest of the eyelids being a dark blue and purple. It hurts to blink, and I can only see out of the other eye.

I almost let out a sigh. There isn’t anything I can do. My mother will see and then she will freak out and start calling the school and wondering who is the bully that beat the crap out of her son and my father will sit me down and talk to me about how if somebody is harassing me, it is important than I report it so it doesn’t continue and Hannah will laugh at me so hard that she’ll go into the mother of all asthma attacks and I will not let her have the inhaler that time, I’ll hide it from her.

The bruises on my wrists are only fading on one. It looks distorted. One wrist is healing, while the other stays beaten up. I shed my winter fur and look at my self in the mirror. Naked and exposed, I can see everything. It hurts my eye even more just to look at it all.

I fill up the tub and use old bubble bath soap from when me and Hannah were little kids. Inside the water, it’s scalding hot, but slips off of my skin, slick like smooth oil. The bubbles on my skin shine in the light and hint out tiny reflective rainbows on the round surfaces. They collect on the surface of my chest, a translucent polar bear fur coat. I take my hands out from underneath the surface and look at them, wet with water and exposed, uncovered. They shine in the light from the water on them, and make the bruises look like forest moss growing out of my veins.

I dry myself off with a towel that I know isn’t clean, and walk back to my room naked. No one in my house is awake, so nobody is going to care. I get on new clothes and put a bag of frozen vegetables up to my wrist. It tingles my skin and makes the bruise twinge with pain. The stinging sensation creates a flash of memory in my head from when I was three, before Hannah was born and everything was going good in the universe. My mother cooking spaghetti on the burner on the stove and I thought the flame looked cool, I wanted to touch it, I reached up for it and it stabbed into my fingers with heat that hurt so bad and made me cry. Mommy ran my hand under cold water in the sink and kissed the bad thing away. I could tell my parents. I could tell them everything. Maybe they’d even believe and then maybe I could go back to being five years old and the only thing that would hurt would be my knee from falling down on the driveway when I’m trying to ride my bike and they would dab it in rubbing alcohol and it would sting so bad, and then they’d put a Band-Aid on it, even though we all know that it’s probably going to bleed for a very long time, but it’s still just the Band-Aid that counts.

I cannot tell them. They might believe me, but that doesn’t mean they’d care. My father would tell me to stand up for myself or talk to the guidance counselor about it and my mother would get mad at him and then tell me to talk to Gerard about it all.

Like it’s nothing.
Like it’s easy to just ask him to stop.
Like he’d listen.

In his car, Gerard does something he has not done in a very long, long time. His hand is on my thigh. Not caressing or rubbing or grabbing or punching, it’s just there. Soft and awkward. The car is silent, no radio. He says nothing about my eye. No apology or commentary at all. I didn’t expect one, but I’d appreciate it. He says nothing.

He hasn’t had his hand on my leg since the first time he ever took me out what supposed to be defined as a ‘date’. He brought me to the movies and he had his hand on my leg and it felt good because he was cool and funny and nice and now he was touching me and nobody’s ever done that before, so it feels good. He smiled at me and bought me food and didn’t make me spend any money at all because it was all on him. We watched the movie, Open Water, we sat in the second-to-first row and he kept kissing my ear. He whispered things into it that almost made me laugh, but I had to remember we were in a movie theater and people really hate it when couples in and touch each other instead of actually watching the movie. He called me cute and told me he would love to see what it all looks like underneath my clothes, and at first it sounded awkward and a little bit uncomfortable, but it felt good and nice and my face went red with flattery. After the movie, he didn’t immediately drive me home. Instead, he went to somebody’s house, where there was a party and he told me to stay in the car while he went inside and did stuff I didn’t see and when he came out, his eyes looked weird, glazed over a little, reddish, and when he drove me home he kissed me hard and I tried to tell him to stop being so rough and then it came at me like a bullet, just a smack to my cheek and it happened so fast, it was just a blur, but then it was an explosion inside of my head and I held my face in my hand, just sitting there, gawking and not quite believing that just happened. He told me to never talk to him like that ever again and then there was silence and then he kissed me again like nothing happened.

My first block teacher just stares at me when I come into her class.

“Oh, dear, what happened here?” she asks, moving her hand towards my face but not quite touching the bruise.

I could tell them. I could tell them all. I could scream it out for everybody to hear.

But that doesn’t mean they’d listen.

I whip out the first thing that comes into my head.

“Tripped on the sidewalk.”

She keeps looking at me. She raises an eyebrow.

“Frank, is everything going okay at home?”

I nod my head. It’s so easy to lie to teachers. They don’t get paid to pry into your personal life. They get paid to pretend to care about whether or not you’re getting a good education. If you don’t get into why you have a bruise on your eye or why you’re always late for class or why you sometimes get headaches for no reason at all, then they won’t get into it either.

My gym teacher sees the bruise, but says nothing. Inside of his head, this isn’t a bad thing. Maybe I got into a fight because I’m building up my courage and upper-body strength. Bruises show strength--pain draining out of the body, weakness leaving me and being replaced with strong physical abilities.

I hate gym teachers.

My art teacher sees the bruise, as well. He comes to me about it like my English teacher did.

“Hey, where’d that come from?” He points at my eye. “You get into a fight with a washing machine?”

He laughs like that was supposed to be funny.

“Where’d it come from?” he asks me again.

I shrug.

“I tripped.”

“Tripped?” he echoes.

I nod my head.

“That doesn’t look like you tripped,” he says. He crosses his arms over his chest and starts to get serious.

“And everything’s going on okay at home?”

I nod my head again.

“You wanna go to the nurse?” he asks. “She could put ice on it, if it hurts.”

“I’m fine.”

I listen to my voice. Wretched and desolate. I feel like crying. But there is no lump in my throat and my eyes are not watery. I just want to cry, I’m in the mood for it. I want to go back to being five years old again. Riding my tricycle and watching Sesame Street.

By now, at least half of the class is staring at me. I want to scream at the art teacher to get out of my face. He’s making people look at us weird. Go away. Leave me alone. I tripped and smashed my face on a rock and the bruise is definitely not from my boyfriend’s fist. Go away.

When he finally leaves me alone, two people are still looking at me. Their mouths move and I know they’re whispering about me, but I can’t read lips and I don’t think I really want to know what they’re saying.

Twenty sets of eyes cling onto me when I walk into the science room at the end of the day, last block. I’m late five minutes because I took a quick stop after lunch to go look at myself in the bathroom to check and see if the bruise is really as bad as all the teachers are making it out to be. It looks the same as it did this morning. They stare at me as I find my lab table and one big thought bubble appears over all of their heads: ‘Who, when, where, and how did he get beat up?’

I keep my eyes low and don’t make contact. I pretend to be finishing up my homework and fiddle around with my graphing calculator. I press random buttons and numbers in no particular order and a little sign comes up on the screen. ‘Syntax Equation Error’ The calculator clears the numbers I’ve punched in and gives me a blank screen. The science teacher looks at me eye, and says nothing until the end of class. He asks me if everything’s going on alright at home. My alibi is weak, so he heads for the phone.

He’s calling up my parents at their work. Guidance counselor time.

I sit in my guidance counselor’s office and look at all the posters she has on her wall. A poster is taped to the front part of her desk: an illustrated picture of a little dweeby kid getting his butt thrown around by a fat hunk of muscle in dirty clothing, with a bunch of other slightly taller kids coming over to defend him. Brightly-colored, bold lettering at the bottom reads out ‘Prevent Bullying Now!’ It looks so unrealistic, all those creepy-looking dummy faces against a water color-painted background.

“Mr. Iero, let me note that this isn’t the second time that we’ve seen Frank come into school with…not-so-good-looking bruises.”

My fathers sits mannequin-still in his chair and stares stone-cold at the guidance counselor.

“You think I’ve done this?” he finally speaks. He looks over at me, at my eye. “You think I did that to him?”

“Well, Mr. Iero, it isn’t just school policy to report it if we see a student come in with a mark like that that could be suspicious, it’s the law,” the guidance counselor keeps going.

“But he’s our son!” Mom sputters. “We’d never do such a thing!”

“This isn’t what you told me over the phone, why I had to come here,” Dad says sternly to the guidance counselor. “You told me this was about his grades.”

“Those, too,” the guidance counselor tells him, nodding her head. Principal Somebody sits behind her and pretends to take notes down on a yellow notepad. I can see he’s really just doodling.

“We’ve checked Frank’s report card records and we can see that Frank’s grades were quite exceptional. All As and Bs, but mostly As; it was great. But now…well, what can we say?…Mostly Ds and Cs here.”

“It’s the AP classes,” Dad nods his head. “Linda, I told you not to stick him in so many of those AP class, it’s too much work!”

“He’s not in any AP classes, you idiot!” Mom hisses lowly at Dad. I sink a little in my chair. A lady working in the office in the next room over comes in and hands me a paper cup of water from water-cooler. I sip, hoping maybe it’ll clean out a little of my soul, but it does nothing. I chew on the edge of the cup and the paper of it becomes soggy and mushy.

“Well, we were thinking that maybe these grades were connected to something…going on at home?”

A silence grows in the room like a big, creaky tree and its millions of roots just tangling up around us, wrapping around our throats and choking us.

“Are you two having marital issues at all?” the lady who gave me the water squeaks in quietly behind my parents.

My mothers lets out a petite little sigh of annoyance. She narrows her eyes and glares daggers at the guidance counselor. My father asks how old she is, if she even went to college. They start bickering to the counselor while she attempts to use small talk and rational conversation to get them to shut up and get back on track. I tune out for a little while and stare out the window. I could be home right now, playing Coldblood D. I’m almost on the very last level, but I’m stuck on this one part where I have to kill fifty zombies in just under fifteen seconds before they bite my head off and use my blood for sustenance. I could be watching TV or sleeping or writing practice notes, so when I finally get around to actually offing myself, my note will not look like a immature little fifth grade essay on American History.

In my headworld, I’m not in the guidance counselor’s office because I’m in trouble. I’m in here because all the teacher’s have finally realized my hidden genius, and are waiting for just the right moment to hand me my Trophy of Awesomeness. I almost smile. This is cool. They smile back and they’re so proud of me.

“You’re the man, Frank,” the guidance counselor grins.

“Well?”

I blink. Back to reality. I’m in the guidance counselor’s office because I am a loser.

“Well?” Principal Somebody’s voice is aimed towards me. He’s looking right at me, glaring into my head. “What do you have to say about this?”

Say about what? I’ve missed something. I’ve tuned out and they’ve been talking all this time and now I don’t know what they were talking about.

I open my mouth to say something and nothing comes up.

“He’s not even paying attention!” Mom barks.

“We need to discuss Frank’s physical state right now,” the guidance counselor tells them. My parents look at her weird. “If there is somebody bullying Frank, or targeting him specifically, then we need to partake in this, and prevent it from continuing.”

“How do you know he’s being bullied?” my father inquires. “He’s just hurting himself for attention.”

“Don’t say that!” Mom hisses at Dad. She turns to me. No smile, not kind at all. “Frank, if somebody is bullying you, then why don’t you just tell us! We need to know about this!”

“We’re not trying to gang up on you, sweetie,” the guidance counselor smiles sweetly at me, her eyes showing fake, plastic concern. “We’re just trying to help. Now, it’s very important for us to know if somebody is bullying you, or has physically hurt you.”

“It’s physical harassment,” Principal Somebody adds in. “And it’s against the law. Did you know this, Frank? It’s against the law.”

They all look at me now. Every bout of anger they’ve had for each other, they’ve now turned on me. I chew on the paper cup and say nothing.

“Frank, really, this is a safe place,” the guidance counselor keeps going. “Anything you say in here, it never leaves this room, okay? If you tell us who is doing this to you, we can report it and it’ll end, just like that….Frank? Are you listening to me?”

I could run away. My father has a stash of hundreds somewhere in his closet and I could use that and run away. I’ll hitchhike to New York City and rent out a little apartment. I’ll get a simple little job and buy a pet. I can live off of Ramen noodles and hot dogs. Anything. As long as I’m not here.

My mother sits stone-cold silent in the passenger side and my father grumbles on while he drives.

“Fucking great,” he keeps going. “Now the school thinks we’re beating him, just because he can’t stand up for himself!”

“You be quiet!” Mom hisses at him. “I know the superintendent personally, and she knows we’d never do that.”

“Frank, this is not funny.”

I meet my father’s eyes in the rearview mirror. I look away after a second. I can’t look at him.

They sit me down in the living room when we get home and yell at me about everything they planned for me to be, at birth, but I’m not. My father uses his deep, dark God Voice. The kind of voice that used to make me think I was going to get nightmares because of him. My mother stands behind him and argues with him, and then yells at me, too, all at the same time. Hannah peaks her head down from upstairs and observes the wreckage through the wooden railings of the stairs. It gets boring after a while, so she goes back upstairs and turns her music up higher. My father flaps his scaled green wings and spews fire in every direction. When he opens his mouth, he bares sharp blood-drenched teeth. My mother stands behind him, green skin and a cobweb-infested witch hat decorating her head. She points a black-painted fingernail in my face and cackles.

They could go on for hours just yelling about the same thing over and over again. They could argue with each other for a whole month and not even realize once that they’ve repeated the argument subject about eighty-million times already. I stare at the wall behind them. Framed pictures of Hannah and I dressed in stupid little outfits, smiling wide for the professional photographer. Family pictures and vacations. The only reason we go anywhere is so we can take pictures of us all together, happy, like a plastic sitcom family, so to convince everybody else that we haven’t completely failed at life.

The charade finally ends once my father has burnt down nearly all of the living room with his breathed fire. He finally lets out the one last puff of smoke, clearing out his charred lungs.

“Go to your room!”

I sit at the top of the stairs and listen to the sounds of ice cracking out of the ice tray and then clinking down into a glass cup. My mother pours liquor into the cup and consumes while my father retreats down to the basement and doesn’t come back out. I go back into my room and play Coldblood D until it starts to hurt the bruises on my wrist. Tomorrow is going to be the same. There is no way that I can still be alive. This must be hell. Some kind of twisted, contorted, haunting depiction of my life, that is my hell. And I say nothing. I do nothing.

I am nothing.