Heartbeat

Because the skies have decided to stop snowing, just when the snow has reached so high that it’s about ready to bury my entire house, we still have school. Even then the banks on the sides of the roads are so thick with white fluff that it threatens to topple over into the road and cause severe car accidents; even when it’s practically twenty below zero.

I decide to walk to school instead of going with Gerard. My hands stay just barely warm with the meager gloves I have over them, alongside the baggy hoodie pulled over me because I refuse to wear my old winter jacket. I trudge through a winter wonderland of slush and dirty car-mud, the puddles soaking through the cheap material of my shoes. My toes freeze up and ache for warmth.

I am almost happy to be at school. It doesn’t make any sense at all, but I am freezing and by the time I reach Carceras, I’m pratically clawing for the heater. I sit in first block English and submerge into the darkness behind my eyelids. The television at the front of the room glaring the movie our for all of us to see keeps me awake; the voices and dialogue screaming at me.

“Hazel, look…the field…it’s covered with blood!”

I place my head down on the desk once the images of rabbits running around talking to each other about Lord Frith and flowers and destruction, makes me dizzy. I close my eyes and watch the horror movie for a bit, inside of my head. My brain pulsates inside of my skull. A thwack to my temple last night, and it still burns. The impact of it made my head bang up against the car door window. I won’t be surprised if a bruise shows up there.

My wrists still twinge. I was too tired to put my hands up over my head for him to pull my shirt off, so he grabbed my arms and wrenched them up and I thought he was going to pull both arms out of their sockets it hurt so bad, and his hands were clenched around my wrists, clasping them up against the bathroom wall. The insides of my legs ache, like my knees are glass cracked so badly that they could just trickle down and shatter to the ground a million tiny little crystal pieces at any one moment. I pull the hood of the hoodie up above my head and rest my head down again. My eye still hurts. The bruise has faded down to a pretty pale pink color, but it still hurts. My ears ring with the constant whistle screaming out after every blow.

I watch the television a bit, before I get dizzy again. My head aches, right on my forehead between my eyes, like the kind of migraines my mother gets whenever she gets too stressed. Dark purple paint splatters splash up in front of my vision, forcing me to put my head back down. I try to breathe in deep and relax, but it’s hard. It feels like I’m having a stroke.

English class finishes itself up once we are halfway through the movie. I swivel into hallway traffic and zip my way through the rest of the day. I almost don’t want to leave, as crazy as that sounds. The heater is at the perfect temperature for the first time in years at this school. And if I leave, I’ll have to see him.

I could tell somebody. A teacher. A lawyer. I could blurt it out. Get it out. It’s like a cancer. Cells multiplying and adding onto each other and eating away at my insides until there’s nothing left.

I find myself in his car at the end of the day, anyway. His tongue is in my mouth, licking away at all the peeled skin and cut flesh. It stings so bad, my eyes water up, but I say nothing. It feels like somebody took a knife and just slashed around my gums. His hand is on my crotch and his other hand is going through my hair. When I feel his teeth drive into my bottom lip, I hear a small sound escape my insides. A whimper. Maybe even a scream. But the blood rushing around inside of my head, I can hear it splashing around so loud like a raging river, that I can’t even hear my own voice. I feel around my bottom lip for a second to see if I’m bleeding. There is no blood, but it still stings.

He brings me into the backseat somehow and I escape into my headworld with homework questions clogging up my head. WH101-Greek Mythology.

Achilles killed Hector because:
A.) Hector murdered Patroclus by accident
B.)Achilles wanted to intimidate Paris
C.)Hector was planning on killing Achilles.

Every thrust, in and out, I feel like it’s going to come up right out my throat. My insides are flipping around inside like I’m in a car rolling down a hill, just second away from death. I almost whimper again, but my voice box is numb.

Paris’s mother sent Paris away at birth because:
A.) A prophecy told her he would be the eventual downfall of Troy.
B.) She did not love him.
C.) The gods told her to.

He feels everything that’s meant to be felt. A moan is released from his lips. I hold my breath. Maybe I can suffocate to death right then and there.

Back in the front seat, I zip the hoodie back on and bury my hands into the interior of the sleeves to keep them warm inside of the soft felt. His car drives forward and vicinity is cold and silent. He pulls up onto the main road and slows down once a line of brake lights sprinkle up in front as bloodred polka dots in the black dark.

I hear him reach over and fiddle with things in the cup holder. He takes a cigarette out of the box with his teeth and stuffs his hand into his pockets for the lighter. He takes it out and it shines in the light of the streetlights and car lights ahead. A flicking sound chirps into the darkness, and tiny flickering flame illuminates his face. It creates dark shadows underneath his eyes and I can see how baggy they are, like he hasn’t slept for five years. I remember when I first met him, that his eyes were this intense, hazel color that you could stare into for hours, just astonished at how green they really were. Now with the flame giving light to his features in the darkness of the car, his eyes don’t look so vivid. Darker and duller, like he’s seen more than he needed to see, and his eyes have dulled down so a smooth, glazed unknown nothing.

The line of cars in front of us inch forward, slower than anything. Gerard drums his fingers on the steering wheel and leers out at the traffic jam. His face is stone-cold and unfriendly. He does not make eye contact with me.

“So what’s his name?” His voice rips through the silence like a burning knife, just slicing through the air, like it’s butchering flesh.

I repeat his question in my head and wonder who he could be talking about. The space between us is silent and void as I struggle to open my mouth and say something.

“Who….?” My voice is small and jumps around, back and forth between high pitches and low pitches, like I have a tuning fork lodged down my throat and every noise I make bounces off of it and vibrates.

“The guy you’re fucking.”

His words come down like the crumbling bits and pieces of a house collapsing during an earthquake or hurricane; heavy and hard.

I don’t even open my mouth. I know I have nothing to say. I can’t think of any response to this. Nothing good, at least. There are a million things inside of my head that I want to scream at him. I want to grab him by his neck and shake him around and scream at him to stop treating me like crap. I want to run away or scream or cry. But I say nothing. I do nothing. He drives forward and we reach my neighborhood.

“I’m only saying, because I read this thing once where you can tell when you’re partner is cheating on you, because they lose interest in everything you do for them.”

He pulls up to my house and stops his car.

“I mean, what other reason is there for you not talking to me, like I’m a piece of shit?”

He blows out smoke. It fogs into the space between us and makes me cough.

“So, what’s his name?” he asks again. “I’m just curious.”

I can’t look at him. I know if I turn my head, he’ll grab the chance to get in a whack or two. Or three. I say nothing. I can’t even open my mouth. My throat hurts.

And then I see out of the corner of my eye, his hand just coming coming towards my head and I flinch before I even feel anything and my eyes slam shut and I try to prepare for the hit, except when I finally feel his hand on my skin, it burns worse than anything and I can feel the stench of the cigarette and the smell of the smoke and the charred ash and fire and the scent of the hairs on my neck burning and dying and his knuckles push into the side of my neck as my head bashes up against the window with the rest of my body just wrenches around and my hands are flailing around him, trying to get him to get it off but he won’t and hurts so bad and my eyes water up and the flesh underneath my skins screams in agony.

He finally pulls his hand away and the cigarette butt bounces into my lap. I can smell my own flesh, wreaking of cigarette essence with the smoke and the ash and the burning smell of the fire. I feel one hot tear escape from my eye out of the corner near my nose.

“Get out of my car.”

I can’t move. My fingers are numb, but they find a way up to the burn and touch it. I wrench my hand away in an instant. The touch sends twinges of stinging torture through my veins. My fingers tremble.

And then his hand is on the side of my head again and before I can even think of a way to prepare the other side of my head explodes when it collides with the glass of the window. My brain bounce around inside of my head and my skull cracks a little bit. I grit my teeth and bite my tongue and gnaw on my lip to keep the whimper inside of my throat, so it doesn’t escape. My neck continues to burn and sting. My temple pulsates. My wrists ache and my legs throb with new bruises. I take it tall in for a single second and all the anger whistles out of me in a single shaky exhaling breath. The words to scream at him are clean and clear inside of my head, but I still can’t say them.

I get out like I am told. My mother is making dinner, but go straight upstairs and do not even make eye contact. I inspect the burn in the mirror. A pale, faint color that sticks out more than anything slightly turning darker into a shade of bruising red. It stings even when I move my neck. I try to look like nothing has happened when I go downstairs for dinner. My parents are bickering at each other, but they turn it down to annoyed mumbles when I come into the kitchen. My mother asks me if I’ve asked to do any extra credit work, because they’ve seen the progress report. I shake my head, no. She narrows her eyes at me and wills for me to be hit by a bolt of lightning. My parents continue to bicker at each other while I eat. I go back up to my room without a word. I feel around the burn again, no matter how much it hurts to do so; I want to figure out if it will turn into a bigger more noticeable mark. I go into the bathroom and examine it again, and when I touch it too roughly, at one point, it burns worse than anything; so bad I have tears in my eyes.

And then it hits me all over again with every bruise and mark and the burn. I almost think about punching the mirror. My blood sizzles with rage and anger. I do nothing. I get whopped for nothing. A relationship affair that never happened; not showing any love. Outside the snow is starting to drizzle down again. The heater will never kick in. I will have to use the extra blanket again. I’ll be freezing. My bruises hurt. My everything hurts. Tomorrow will be the same. Another whop, a whack. Mikey clinging onto me like a leech. Bad grades. Bad progress reports. Ignored. Nonexistent.

I crawl into bed. My dream is aviated . I’m running through some forest in the middle of the night. I have no shoes or sneakers, so my feet crunch up against everything on the ground, but it doesn’t hurt. I have wings, like angel wings or dove wings and I can look over my shoulder and see them start to fold out, and they are all different colors and textures like autumn leaves and there‘s blue or silver on the edges. I run and run, thinking there will be no end until I see the blue glow of an opening. I get to the opening and it’s a wide cliff jutting out to the ocean and I step over the edge and I’m just flying away with the wind on my face.

When I wake up at two in the morning with the sun still hiding beneath the horizon, I duck deep under the covers with the tears raging down my face and I cry for so long that it feels like I lost weight doing it. Crying really is that tiring. It’s like grieving while you’re getting ready for a funeral; when everybody says how nice and slim you look in the black dress or the black tux, it’s because you’ve cried so much you’ve lost enough weight to fit into the outfit, so when they say that, they actually mean it.

By the time my alarm clock goes off, my face is wet and cold and stained with the paths of the tears, like zigzagging rivers on maps. The sun has been eaten by the gray clouds, so there is no hope of having any light or warmth today. My neck still burns. I don’t touch that time.

It takes me five minutes to even just sit up in bed and squint around the darkness of my room, wondering whether or not I should walk to school or get a ride with Gerard. I could walk, but it’s freezing out, or I could get a ride with Gerard…

And then it pops up, a light bulb idea in my head.

Don’t go to school.