Heartbeat

I’m sitting on a toilet seat, hunched over in a suffocating bathroom stall in the bathrooms during lunch hour block and the sting on the side of my face is still tingling from this morning. I can’t even remember what I did that time. I don’t even remember opening my mouth, talking at all. Not a single word. He said something about being disrespectful and me ignoring him and not looking at him when he was talking to me and then it just came out of nowhere and I didn’t see it coming, not even centimeters away from my face. All of a sudden there’s a blur and the skin of the back of his hand with the cigarette between his fingertips was connecting with my cheek and there’s an explosion in my skull and I’m biting my tongue again from the force and getting blood in the indents of gums and there’s a burning, tingling sensation encapsulating the whole side of my face from my cheek to the corner of my eye and I think my head is going to cave in on itself, the pounding of my brain against my skull is so strong.

Skipping lunch is the only alternative. Right before slipping into the stalls I peaked a glimpse of my face in the mirror above the sinks on the wall and saw a big, red, mark on the side of my face that stood out against skin so pale it was like I had been locked up in a grungy warehouse my entire life, never seeing the sun or the outside world. There isn’t anyway that I’m going to walk into the cafeteria with an apple-sized mark on my face that looks like somebody heated up their fist with fire and stamped onto my cheek to brand me like a farm animal.

I touch it and I get that tingling feeling that you get when your foot or hand falls asleep; limp and itchy and creepy-crawly. It made the eye on that side of my face water up like last time, but it was easy to get rid of that.

Every guy in this school knows the best times to cry. It’s obvious that everybody cries. Even the big, bulky sports messiahs cry.

The best times are usually during periods and hour blocks where most people are in one room like the cafeteria and the auditorium and they’re all focusing on one thing like their reconstituted lukewarm gunk that the school board liked to refer to as ‘nutritious, healthy meals’, or Principal Somebody blah-blahing up on the stage in the auditorium about discipline and how if we got six or more detentions we wouldn’t be allowed to go on the trip to Cancun at the end of the year; the one that you could only go on if you took Spanish and had eight-hundred spare dollars in your backpack to pay for your admission into to the country. Poor kids won’t be able to go. Kids in Italian and French and German and Latin won‘t be able to go, even when Latin’s a dead and rotting and decomposing language and nobody speaks it anymore, but they teach it to us anyway so the Latin teacher who enjoyed learning Latin during her high school years can keep her job.

I was in Spanish. For a day. The very first day, the gruff-bearded, beer-bellied, Starbucks-drinking, Pop Tart-eating, waddling, funky-smelling average-level Spanish teacher walked in and spoke nothing but Spanish until the very last five minutes of the class when he broke the Absolutely-No-English-To-Be-Spoken-Within-The-Boundaries-Of-This-Classroom Rule to tell us about the eight-hundred dollar Cancun trip at the end of the year that I wasn’t going to anyway because I was heading to the guidance counselor and schedule manager at the office already, handing them over my schedule so they could switch me to kindergarten-level Italian.

My language class is now retard-level Italian. Simple tiny words that are the equivalent of the things they taught us in sixth grade Spanish when we were just starting on foreign language classes and didn’t know much beyond the length of ‘hola’.

Everybody in the whole damn school knows the best times to cry. During lunch block when everybody is trying to digest and stomach the blah-colored grime that’s not even suitable for a convict cooped up in a state penitentiary with two life sentences and no chance of parole; not even good enough for an ugly, balding stray dog to pick out of the gross garbage can out on the street. During speeches or talks from Principal Somebody when everybody’s been marched into the auditorium like cows getting in line to be grated up at the slaughterhouse and turned into burgers to get eaten by sloppy fat people at McDonald’s. Never during class. Never asking a teacher if you can go to the bathroom because you drank too much water during gym when you got dehydrated and now you really have to pee and didn’t get a chance to go during the five-minute period that you get to switch between classes. Never during class. There’s always people in the stalls during class. Guys getting out of the classes they don’t want to bother with to go into the stalls and sniff up some kind of drug that turns their brains into mashed potatoes. Always during a time when everybody is cooped up in one room and can’t leave that room and there’s so many people in that one room that teachers don’t know how to tell that you’re not in that room when you’re supposed to be; that you’re actually in the bathroom and your chest is about to burst from the pressure of holding in sobs and boohoos that you wouldn’t let any of your other dude friends see or hear in a million years.

My ribs are cracking. I hear the bones snapping and the edges of them are sharp as they plummet into my lungs, puncturing my breathing and making me bleed all inside of my chest.

That’s how much this hurts right now. And that’s how much you try to keep it all in so nobody else hears you. And then you pray to god that even when you can’t help but let out little coughy sobs and hiccups filled with tiny dribbles of tears, they still don’t hear you.

Sometimes it’s actually good to cry in the bathrooms when you hear somebody getting a hot cup of ass-kicking out in the halls and they’re crying and screaming for help and the teachers are too busy sipping expensive coffees in the teacher’s lounge and having fun during the times that they don’t have to work, to really care. That way when the kid--usually small, the size of a Keebler Elf, roughly, so his voice box will be small as well, making his voice high-pitched and squeaky and just as high as you need it to be--is screaming and crying for somebody, anybody, who hears him to come out and save his life, even when you sniffle in just slightly, they don’t hear you. Your sobs get drowned out by the kid’s cries and screams for mercy.

I tug and rip and tear at the roll of toilet paper on the holder until I have enough pathetic ribbons of TP to wipe the inside of my mouth with when it starts to sting and bleed again when I bite it accidentally when I get nervous that somebody will hear me breathing shaky and blinking rapidly so the tears disintegrate.

It’s only three weeks into the school year. I’ve skipped almost nearly all the lunches to hang out in the bathroom stalls, no matter how grimy they are.

I look around. Messages and phone numbers scratched into the red-painted metal of the stall doors and walls. Phone numbers; best places to wrench the virginities right out of innocent little girl’s souls; swear words and numerous lists of a universe of different pointless topics. Entire conversations forever engraved into the school’s furnishing, until they decide to renovate again and switching everything around.

It used to be a lot worse, which was typical. A lot of things were dirty. Our floors were nothing but skanky-looking carpets stained by coffee or other substances that looked too much like certain unmentionable bodily fluids. Your locker was either a dark blue or a brown shade of dog crap. There was only one foreign language class. Teachers usually didn’t care if you were getting maimed out in the grossly-carpeted halls. There wasn’t any dress code. One teacher was raped underneath the bleachers during a football game; the cheers and roars of our sports-loving students hushed and quieted her screams for help. Kids lit up in the bathrooms. Some hid in the stalls to cut; brought their own razors, too, didn’t use any tools from the science lab like others did. Janitors hid pipes and bongs in their closets and stoned up at the end of the day after we’d all left and the Principal had gone home.

And then we got a newspaper. Some kid wrote an editorial about how much our school sucked donkey balls and it ‘inspired’ the principal to get off her butt and do something about it.

They ripped up our ugly shitbrown carpets and replaced them with nice, shiny, tiled floors; the kind you get really tempted to slide around on in socks. They painted all the lockers and now they are all rainbow-y to promote the Arts Foundation Club and the Gay Pride Club that they stuck in at the last minute. They added in a whole hall that was devoted to foreign language classes and put in French and Italian and German and Latin, even though nobody spoke it anymore and colleges didn’t care about it because nobody spoke it. Any teacher that was careless or just plain shitty got canned. They got a whole new staff like you’d buy a new kitchen table and chairs to go along with it: better and comfier. They gave us newer, younger teachers who tried their best to understand us and wanted to be our ‘friends’ so we didn’t treat them like assholes. They dumped a dress code on us that said girls couldn’t wear anything so high up that it showed their belly buttons, or that guys couldn’t wear pants that rode so low we could see their butt cracks. High-heeled shoes were banned when too many girls tripped in them and went flopping down the stairs face first and were in the hospital by the end of the day, banged up beyond repair. Teachers encouraged girls to wear those legging things underneath their skirts so their bare legs didn’t show, and to make it so their skirts weren’t so small they might as well just be used as a belt. The teacher that got raped got a psychiatrist for post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. The kids who cut got their own individual guidance counselors and got to miss first block classes every morning to go to meetings with them about their ‘issues’, which they were lucky for because, according to the teachers, they were getting the ‘psychological help they need’ and they also get to miss first block, which is usually where they put all the most boring classes. Kids who got caught with crack cocaine, frying their brains, were expelled. Janitors caught with grass got fired. A whole new staff of janitors were brought in just like the teachers. They mostly keep to themselves, chill in their respective closets and don’t do drugs.

They say the school is better now. Nicer. Now we don’t have to feel like dirty city trash whenever fancy school official people come in and Principal Somebody gives them a tour of nice new floors and lockers and staff and everything else.

Too bad they couldn’t change the stalls. They’re still as cruel and rude as ever. The toilets work more often now but still smell the same. Kids still get their faces pounded in, but get detentions more often for it.

The toilet paper inside of my mouth tastes stale like I’m licking a dusty wooden floor. My throat aches with a lump in it and my lower lip quivers. My eyes puddle up. I blink rapidly and cover my mouth and nose with my hand to muffle a sniffle and hiccupping half-silent sob.

I feel like my school. The old version of it, at least. Creaky and grimy. I feel like I need to be renovated. My soul needs to be cleaned out and replaced with a new one. My insides need to be scrubbed down. Everything hurts. My skin isn’t clean and fresh anymore. It’s covered in discolored black and blue splotches. The Southern Hemisphere area between my legs looks like somebody took a black Magic Marker and splotched around my skin with it; there are so many marks down there. And then there’s my wrists, with the bruises fading but still clearly visible. My face, my head. One side of my face always stinging and burning with the essence of his hand smashing up against it, making my ears ring and pale yellow paint splatters dot up in front of my vision. When he hits there is sounds like the crack of a baseball bat whacking a homerun at Fenway Park. An explosion in my skull and it hurts so bad. My legs hurt, my ankles. My back always being held too tight and being pushed and shoved around. My spine always feeling like it’s going crack when he’s on top of me, a boulder crushing me, telling me I’m liking it and I know it and can’t deny it.

The bell rings. It is the end of lunch hour block. I grab my bag and pull my sleeves down and toss the toilet paper in the garbage outside in the hall and make sure to walk straight and not limp, no matter how much my legs hurt from when he sometimes hits my thighs and kicks at my shins and ankles when I’m too tired to get off his bed after he declares he’s finished with what he feels like doing every night.

I manage to daze out through the two last classes and when I see Gerard’s car waiting for me outside the school at the end of the day, I make sure to walk normal then, too.

When I get into the passenger side seat his kiss is tender and not so raw. It lasts longer than usual. He tastes like toothpaste and cigarettes and Taco Bell. I like how it feels tender and not rough at all and for a moment I can almost feel myself kiss back. But by the time I get around to doing that, he decides we’re done.

He always decides when we’re done. That’s how it usually is. There is no whining. No ‘come on, let’s stay five more minutes, just five more, please?’. No begging. Decisions are made in split seconds and are either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. There are no ‘Maybe’s or ‘I’ll Think About’. There is no shade of grade squished in between. Just black and white. That’s how he is. The kind of guy that split’s the Earth’s population into two different categories: Assholes and Cool Dudes. Most people areassholes. His brother is apparently an asshole. He said sometimes I’m even an asshole, which made me shiver and sink down in my seat, but he reassured me and told me most of the time I was cool. Sports-are assholes. Girls that gave him dirty looks are assholes. Teachers are assholes. If you’re lucky, maybe you got thrown into the Cool range. But being Cool to Gerard is about as rare as an English teacher encouraging Chatspeak. Most are assholes. If not all.

I want to tell him to just drop me off at my own house so I can crawl back into bed and sleep for a couple of hours. I’m still tired. I can’t sleep at night. Images if terrifying scenarios wake me up and I’m stuck in a room where it’s pitch black and everything is silhouetted. Scary, especially you’ve just woken up from a night terror and you’re still disoriented.

I want to open my mouth. But I fear I can’t even part my lips without a blow like the crack of a baseball bat and my brain spinning and twisting around inside of my skull.

He touches my leg occasionally. I flinch every time he reaches over. I think he’s going to slam a fist down on my thigh, but all he ever ends up doing is placing a soft open palm on my leg and using spidery fingers to caress my jeans a little. I enjoy the softness of it. The serenity. Safety. As long as his hand is petting and caressing and being nice and warm and touchy, then it’s not hitting. Punching. Smacking. Hurting. Making me bleed.

I close my eyes for longer than a blink. The darkness behind my eyelids that is usually working as the projector screen for a sick and twisted horror film playing on a continuous loop inside of my head, has toned down so a nice tone of black. Nothing too dark. It makes me feel relaxed. As long as his fingers are caressing, they are not hurting.

My heart that usually thumps like a jackrabbit scampering away from a monster mountain lion, tunes down to a steady beat that makes my muscles stop tensing.

At his house, I’m relaxed so it’s easy to duck into my headworld.

In my brain, the dinner Mom is cooking smells professional like something out of a fancy restaurant and Hannah’s at a friend’s house and I’m all alone in my room and my room is warm and it only hurts a little but when it hurts it’s easy to ignore it and slip back into my headworld where it doesn’t ever really hurt that much.

In my brain, we’re eating dinner and tastes really good and Hannah isn’t being a bitch for once and the dinner is calm and his tongue is in my mouth, scraping around like sandpaper and it keep hurting and I’m drifting farther and farther away from the kitchen table and family’s voices are becoming more distorted right up until I can’t be with them anymore when I can’t go back into my head and it just plain hurts.

When I feel down between my legs to itch a little, there is red on my fingertips. He’s really cut me open on the inside.

I stare at the bright red smudge on my fingertip and smear it around a bit. I can see Gerard’s hand touch mine and him looking at the blood a little bit, as well.

“God, you’re sensitive,” he spits, dropping my hand. "...Can't even fuck you without you fuckin' bleeding..." He stands up there on the bed without getting redressed and stumbles around me to jump off the bed and walk over to his dresser where he rummages around in the top drawer until he produces a tiny plastic-looking pipe and tiny Ziploc baggie of something that obviously isn’t salt. I watch him do the works, and with a lighter in his hand, he’s lightning the bottom of the pipe and waiting for the fumes to rise right up until he puts it up to his lips and sucks it all up and gets whatever effects it’s supposed to give him.

His goes wiry for a second, and he blinks rapidly and his face looks half-scrunched up, half-glowing. And then he relaxes.

“S’posed to make everything burn brighter or something,” he mutters our, tossing the pipe and baggie onto the dresser top.

This is my chance. I don’t know how long it takes for the euphoria and increased adrenalin and hyperactive compulsivity to set in, but as long as he’s doped out and too dazed to figure out what’s going on, I can get going.

“See you tomorrow,” I say real quick, grabbing my backpack and getting my shit ready to leave. Right as I’m slipping my shoes back on, still sitting on the bed, he leans over and rests his whole side on my back.

“Don’t leave,” he whines, too dizzied up on pharmaceutical fairy dust to make sense of what he’s saying.

“Gotta go,” I tell him, still moving quickly, racing to beat the drug’s effects. I don’t want him to get hyper. Or I at least don’t want to be here when his heart starts racing and his blood is pumping and he gets so pumped up or paranoid about something or nothing that he needs to punch something and I don’t want that something to be me.

I can’t remember any punches, because those mostly left huge marks. But he could always get pretty close to a punch.

I was out of his room just as he sat up in his bed--still bare-butt naked--, with his eyes going wide and his face freezing up in a hesitant look, waiting to see what was going to happen next, like a patient rabbit waiting to see if the noise he heard was an enemy or not.

“Whoa…” he said. “Whoa…”

I’m out of his house just as I’m sure his body has readied the whatever drug to kick in all the way. I walk home. It’s not a very far distance. And I’m thankful. Nothing good ever happens when he drives me home. The night always ending with us still sitting in the darkness of the car just outside my house and I’m waiting for him to give me his permission to let me go back to my house.

By the time I get back to my house, Mom is still making dinner and not just finished making it like she usually is by the time I get done. She smiles. Like always. Asks me how school was. Like always. I tell her it’s ‘school-ish’. Like always. Go up to my room and lock the door. Like always.

Crawl into bed. Hope to God I can sleep at least one night, maybe even never have to wake up.