Heartbeat

I like to be still awake at two in the morning. There is no noise. The whole world is asleep and the sun is still dozing. Crickets chirp outside the walls of my house and morning dew collects on the blades of grass. The color of the sky is a dark purple color slowly fading into a light blue. Stars are fading away and the day is eating up the night.

Everyone in my house is asleep but me. I know that. I can hear Mom and Dad snoring in their bedroom three rooms down, and Hannah is either sleeping as well or underneath her covers, silently text-messaging to her male preoccupant.

I hear Hannah giggle on the other side of the wall. Still awake. Texting away.

I get up once I hear her giggle again but cough out a little bit and wheeze in the process. She sounds like a dying one-hundred-year-old man.

I find her inhaler in the dark of the kitchen and feel around for her bedroom door. The inside of her room smells like air freshener and stale food and girl.

She jerks up from underneath the covers and glares at me once I step in.

“Get out!” she screeches, in a whispering form of screaming at me. I hear her breathing; her lungs are compressing and it’s hard for her to take full, deep breaths.

“Take your inhaler.” I fling it at her. It hit’s the wall behind her with a thunk that was louder than I would have wanted it to be.

“I don’t need to,” she says all nasally-sounding. She takes it and throws it back. I think about flinging it right at her face, but I put it on her dresser instead.

She rolls her eyes at me.

“God, you’re lame,” she spits at me. She hunches back underneath her covers and the light of the screen on her cell phone becomes visible.

I take the inhaler and walk right up to her. I slam it right down onto her. It whacks her in the head.

“Ow!” She rubs her head in pain.

“Shut up and take it. You’re wheezing. It’s annoying.”

She growls something under her breath and reaches a hand out from underneath the covers. She snatches up the inhaler and I listen to her take it twice. Breath in deep, count off one two three, breathe in deep, count off one two three.

“I didn’t need it,” she mutters again, throwing it at me. I catch it before it can hit me in the face. I put it back on her dresser for later use.

Back in my room I find attire for school. Clothing: wrinkly jeans, dirty shirt, stale-smelling boxer shorts, and a beanie hat to cover my head and keep my thoughts warm inside.

I dig a Pop Tart out of the box in the snack cupboard and eat it while I channel-surf on early-morning television. This is the best time of the day to watch TV. All the good shows I used to love were cancelled years ago and can only be re-aired at early-morning intervals.

My arm twitches with a black and blue that splotch over the bones of my wrist. A frozen bag of broccoli from the freezer works as an icepack for it. I try to remember where that bruise came from, and I can recall slightly what happened. Something in the school bathroom. After school. The whole building was empty, except for the janitors. He sat me down on top of the sinks’ countertop and held my hands above my head against the wall. It crippled my wrists, he held them so tight. I couldn’t feel my fingers. When I tried to pull my hands out of his grip, he banged them up against the mirrors and I decided to stop fighting it. The back of my head hurts as well, from when it banged up against the side of the mirror continuously as he did his business. I can’t remember if I wanted it or not, if I liked it. He told me I did.

Once I hear Hannah step out of her bedroom, I toss the frozen vegetable servings back into the freezer. I dig Dad’s huge Jets hoodie out of a laundry basket and pull it over my head. It feel like a little kid inside of it. It reminds me when I was five and really liked to dress up in Dad’s clothes. Some infatuation with walking around in his economy-sized clown shoes and button-down shirts that he wore to work, that reached down all the way to my ankles. Mom thought it was cute. She took a lot of pictures and made a lot of Christmas cards.

I only wear the Jets hoodie so I can cover my wrists. It’s the only long-sleeved piece of clothing in this house with sleeves that won’t ride up and reveal my wrists and numbing fingers. Since Dad comes straight from the core of the Bronx in New York, he’s a huge Jets fan. It’s a fandom he can never mention in the state of New Jersey, or he’ll get clobbered underneath obsessive New Jersey sports fans. It’s like saying ‘I love the Yankees’ in Boston: you won’t come out alive.

I sit at the table and chew on a soft banana and watch Dad slowly ascend out of their bedroom. He says good morning and makes his coffee and bangs on Hannah’s door to start getting up and getting ready for school, all the while, only wearing boxer shorts and a wrinkly button-down shirt from yesterday and , long, black Dad-socks that go all the way up to nearly his knees.

“Why are you wearing…” His voice trails off as he looks at me wearing his gigantic Jets hoodie. “You like them?”

I shrug.

Once Hannah is out of bed and Mom is out of bed and we’re all awake beginning our morning routine, I brush my hair and my teeth and take the hoodie off and grab my backpack and wait out on the front porch for Gerard’s car.

Once his rickety used car pulls up to the house, Mom steps out and gives him a wave. I lower my head in shame. She’s always done this. She likes to be buds with all of Hannah’s and my friends. It’s weird. When she waves, she doesn’t go side-to-side like normal, she moves her fingers up and down like she’s trying to shoo something away.

Gerard waves back. He smiles at her. Shows his teeth like a good little boy. I don’t say goodbye to Mom.

Inside Gerard’s car, there is clutter trashing up everything. Old candy wrappers littering the dashboard. Crushed cigarettes rotting away in the ashtray. In the backseat he has a fragile messenger bag instead of a bulky backpack. It’s so torn up and weary-looking that I fear all his school stuff might just break through the bottom of it while he’s walking to class and he’ll be forced to clean up all of it and carry it around due to the lack of an adequate schoolwork-carrying receptacle. There are necklaces made of pins and paper clips dangling from the rearview mirror, alongside a Shaws grocery store employee ID card hanging off of what looks like a shoelace. His job. Bag boy and shelf-stocker.

He watches to make sure my mother has gone back into the house before be leans in and his lips are mine. They feel sloppy and wet. I press my lips forward in a poor attempt to kiss back. I wish I knew how to kiss better. Or at all.

He drives us off and we get stuck in traffic when we’re about fifty feet away from the school.

I feel his fingers spidercrawl up my arm and rest around the collar of my shirt. He tugs a little at the collar but I don’t respond. Traffic doesn’t move a single inch, so he has nothing else to do. I feel his lips on my ear and his tongue lapping around the inside of my ear, tickling my skin. I don’t move or speak. I don’t groan or moan. I don’t kiss him back.

“Come over to my house tonight,” he says. I can feel a smile being created up against my ear. “My Mom’s going to some book club. And Mikey’s going over to a friend’s house or whatever. Come over.”

I nod my head like the mechanical human being I am. If I slit my throat open, a whole rainbow of colored wires and sparks will pop out.

School passes by in a blur. I’ve failed another Spanish test, even when I’m in retard-level Spanish. In Math, they try to teach me how to divide fractions and create graphs on the one-hundred and fifty-dollar calculators they made us buy over the summer that are the size of sub sandwiches. My World History teacher goes on a sugar-high rant about the archeologist that desecrated King Tut’s Tomb. Debate: Should he have used sticks of dynamite to get to the tomb, or just left the poor King guy’s dead body alone? I stay real quiet in Homeroom and write one sentence in my journal in English: I am drowning. The English teacher told us she wouldn’t ever read our journals, which I’m finding hard to believe, but I write it anyway. If she finds it, she won’t know what I’m talking about either way.

I see Gerard is already at his car at the end of the day. I feel Hannah shove past me and swear as she runs to go get a ride home with her friends.

Gerard kisses me again once we’re back in his car. At his house, everything is clean and calm. A decorative rooms and furniture spawned right out of a Martha Stewart interior design magazine. Vanilla-colored carpets and nice-smelling tiny candles going well with nice kitchen floors and cabinets with glass doors. Expensive counter tops. Nice couches in the living room. And then I step into his room and it’s like stepping into a completely different universe. I go through his door and it’s like I’ve stumbled upon a parallel fabric of time and space, unknown and foreign to my usual world. His walls are lathered in posters and his own sketches. Even the ceiling as coverage. His dresser is cluttered with old fast food and wrappers and homework sheets and sketches torn out of drawing books and broken colored pencils and pens. A dead fake bat frozen inside of a rectangular prism of gold-colored whatever sits on his nightstand; a ghoulish paperweight. A black and white dog sits on top of his bed and dozes.

He dumps his bag on the floor and slides my backpack off of me himself. He steps in close and his eyes stare right into mine. He’s taller than me. I can feel his hands tangle into mine and his fingers caress the tops of my hands. I watch his face get closer and closer until his lips are touching mine. He keeps his eyes open and stares at me.

He breaks away faster than I thought he would.

“Why don’t you kiss back?” he inquires. I don’t respond. He leans in again and it stops being a kiss. He makes it rough and his teeth click up against mine. It can’t be considered a kiss once it becomes like that.

His lips rough up against mine and sting the parts where I’ve bitten into them out of nervousness; where the skin has peeled off and made my lips openly bleed into my mouth. I can feel his tongue like sandpaper in my mouth, scratching up against my own tongue the inside of my cheeks. I almost gag, but I don’t know if he notices.

His hands are on my hips and they skate up my back and my neck, until they’re on the back of my head, pulling me forward so he can make it deeper.

I can feel his tongue eel around inside my mouth and no words come out to tell him that it feels disgusting and I don’t want to do this and I just want to go home and take a nap. I’m tired. I’m hurting. My wrists ache with internal bleeding frozen underneath my skin.

His fingers snake all around my back and his tongue deep inside my throat makes me think I’m going to throw up.

And then it stops. He breaks apart again with a slick, wet, disconnecting sound and looks at me coldly.

“You’re still not kissing back,” he says.

My lips stay still and I am silent.

“You don’t want to do this, do you?”

I can feel my stomach do one last flutter before it plops right down into my ass. He’s trapped me. I’m stuck in the middle of an intersection with cars coming at me in all different directions.

Maybe it’s possible that he can understand. Maybe.

I take the risk and shake my head.

“I’m kinda tired…” I don’t know what to do with my facial expression. Give a little smirk or a pleading smile, begging him to understand and feel bad and let me go home and crawl back into bed and snooze for a little while longer. I let out some weak smile and shrug a little.

He does not smile back.

“That’s bullshit,” he spits at me. “And you know it is.”

My wrists are murdering me. My fingers are aching. My hands feel like they’re cramping up. I’m tensing everywhere. My bruises hurt.

“Sorry…” It comes out low and muddled. But my voice is gone and it was all I could manage.

He steps in towards me. Stares right at me. Into my brain and my mind and I hope to God he can’t see my thoughts; the inside of my head playing a horror movie on a never-ending loop.

And then he smiles. It’s small but unkind.

“Don’t worry.” I hear his hot breath in my ear, prickling my skin, making my hairs raise like Goosebumps. He moves his head again and looks right at me. And his face gets closer and closer until our foreheads are touching and his nose is clashing up against mine. “You won’t be so tired once we get started.” And then his lips are mine and I am gone.

It’s easy to go into your headworld. It can be like however you want it to be. Anything your imagination cooks up, it exists in there.

Inside my headworld I’m back at home playing video games and I can smell lasagna in the oven downstairs and Hannah is giggling on her cell phone with one of her friends. Dad is in his office, typing up something on his laptop with a serious expression plastered on his face. This is Home and it feels warm and good.

He’s hugging his arms around my middle and using it to continue thrusting better and faster. His skin is rubbing on mine and underneath his covers it is cold and clammy and it stings. His dog is watching us.

In my headworld, I’m in school and getting good grades and teachers remember my name.

I can’t stop wincing. He pushes himself into me and it stings. It hurts. It feels like my skin is being peeled and cored like an apple. It isn’t my first time. Although my first time was the worst. But now every time I do it, it feels like the first time; inexperienced with bodies clashing with each other and territories that are foreign. I think I’m bleeding.

He goes on and on and one and it gets harder and harder to go into my head. And then I’m stuck in reality.

Reality: He lays on top of me now, collapsed and tired and sweaty and gasping for air. He clothes his eyes longer than a blink and now knows how I feel. I feel like taking a nap. Sleeping for a couple of years. Dreaming forever and skipping all of this.

I look over at the clock and it’s six. Mom is making dinner around this time. I forgot to call her. I am in for shit when I get home. If I go out without telling her where I’m going, she worries that I’ve been mugged or I’m laying down in a ditch somewhere unconscious or I’ve been abducted by aliens and I’m now getting experienced on by higher intellectual creatures.

In his car, he’s dressed again and I wait back outside my house. Just like last night. Just like every night.

“You didn’t even try.” He voices shatters the sudden, nauseating silence. I don’t move my eyes away from the dashboard, like always.

I can his eyes looking at me. Watching me. Glaring. They’re like nails being hammered into my skull.

“You’re fucking somebody else.”

I jerk my head at him. I want to say something defensive like ‘No, I’m Not! How could even think that?1’ or ‘Yeah?! What if I am?! What’re you gonna do about it?!’

And if what he said were true, I know exactly what he’d do. It makes me shiver.

And I want to say something so bad, but when I open my mouth, I can’t even get a word out before my mouth is snapped back closed by a sudden force.

I feel my head snap to the side and my temple slam against the window a little bit. I clamp my tongue with my teeth from the impact and my tongue screams in agony inside my mouth. Red liquid on my taste buds and a pin prick sting that won’t go away.

I feel my head shake quickly.

“I’m not.”

I look back at these last two seconds and wonder how I managed to do that.

I hear him scoff. The sound of his voice drips with feelings of disgust and disrespect. I hear him shuffle around in his rickety messenger bag until he finds his box of cigarettes. I turn my head just slightly enough to find one between his teeth and his hands fiddling around with his pants pockets.

“Where the fuck’s my lighter?” I hear him mumble distortedly, with the cigarette in his mouth crippling his speech.

I see it shining in the light of the streetlight above us, as it sits in the cup holder that separates us, cradled in old tissues.

I take it out and hold it out to him. He snatches it up so fast that his fingernails scrape up against the palm of my hand, making my hand sting for a fraction of a second. I see his silhouette in the dark and the small click of the lighter as the tiny flame ejects from the top. It glistens in his face and creates ghoulish shadows underneath his eyes. I can see the smoke of his cigarette in the light for a moment, before he closes the lighter and the car is dark again. I hear him take a deep drag.

“Whatever,” he mutters. He taps the cigarette out on the edge of the opened car door window. “Go home.”

The inside of my house smells like boiling spaghetti and scented candles and cigarettes.

Mom is smoking again. She’s turned off the smoke alarm so her cigarette doesn’t set it off, and neither does the oven.

Hannah sits in front of the television, flipping back and forth between MTV and some crime scene investigation series on Showtime.

Dad is unseen. Either at the hospital or downstairs in the basement doing whatever to avoid Mom.

Mom grins at me. Asks me how school was. I tell her like it is: “School-ish”.

My feet thump on the new carpet laid out on the stairs as I trudge up them. I pass by framed pictures of Hannah and I as babies and toddlers. School pictures. Family vacations. Our smiles are fake and plastic, like squeaking dog toys. I can’t remember a single vacation we’ve gone on were Mom had to bribe us into smiling when she felt like taking a good family picture. Or she’d yell at us, which usually wasn’t threatening unless she added cut-off internet connection of cell phones taken away into the message, which was usually only threatening to Hannah. I smiled anyway.

The upstairs hall is quiet and empty. In my room, the temperature has dropped dramatically, because I kept my window open and didn’t keep my door open when the heater was one and the warmness was moving throughout every single room. I pull a hoodie on and clamp my arms across my chest and enclose my hands under my armpits and warm my fingers.

I wiggle the mouse and my computer wakes up. The black screen fades back onto the two windows I had pulled up this morning. One Word Processor with a half-typed English essay on some book I didn’t read, and another on eBay.

I sit and stare. Eventually the computer dozes off again and as it closes its eyelids, and words move around the screen as the screensaver. ‘Frank sucks! Haha!’

Hannah has hacked into my computer again while I was gone.

I hear Hannah laugh at something on the television downstairs. Mom chops up some vegetable on a wooden board with a horror movie-appropriate knife. Dad’s car pulls into the driveway and the whole house shakes as the garage door slides open. He pulls into the garage and is in the kitchen helping Mom finish making dinner in a matter of a couple of minutes.

I hear Mom’s voice calling up to me. Dinner time.

I don’t even blink. The words move across the screen over and over again as my computer sleeps soundly.

I can feel the part of my tongue where my teeth grinded into it when he hit me. It stings in agony when I feel around with it with my teeth.

I don’t go downstairs to eat because I’m not even remotely close to feeling hungry. I feel more like vomiting. Instead I crawl into bed and pull the covers up like I wanted to since I was at Gerard’s. Mom calls up to me again to come down and eat dinner. I don’t respond. I close my eyes and stare into the blackness behind my nightmares until I drift back off into my headworld again.

As I sleep, it feels like I’m in a coma. Inside my head so deep and tight and warm and that’s why I never want to wake up.

And my dream about nice things fades into terror and I see his face in my mind and he won’t go away and when I wake up in the middle of the night, I’m sweating and my jaws are clamped so tightly together that I’m getting a headache.

I want to go back to sleep, but I know I can’t. I stare up at the ceiling instead and listen to the hum of the computer I forgot to turn off.

I think about how maybe I could be in a coma. Maybe I could fall asleep again but fall asleep so deeply that I fall into a severe unconsciousness. And then I don’t ever have to get up in the morning and drag myself over to him again. But then I realize that it probably won’t be different than how I sleep now.

It would be nothing more than a continuous nightmare, and I wouldn’t be able to wake up from it that time.