Heartbeat

I dived in and swam upstream through knifing, cold river water to get through my first three classes right up until lunch hour block when I swam right into a boulder on the riverbank and smashed my head and needed to crawl up to the shore in the safe, quiet bathroom stalls to heal myself.

I walked to school to avoid Gerard’s offers for a ride. Got up early. Got dressed quickly. Was out of the house and walking towards the building that I didn’t want to go to anyway before Gerard even got he chance to get up out of bed yet and drive over to give me a ride. I hibernate in the same exact bathroom stall as last time. Message my legs that hurt from so much walking and are sore from six or seven bruises that won’t go away and keep coming back.

It’s getting close to when the end-of-lunch-time bell is supposed to ring, and I hide in here and listen to the muffled voices coming from the outside halls.

I can hear kids running back and forth, their sneakers squeaking on the new, shiny tiled floors. Yells from one end of the hall to the other. Teachers stopping kids and demanding hall passes.

If I can stay real quiet, nobody will even notice I’m gone.

That’s the thing. They told us at the beginning of the year that they made a new rule where nobody could leave the cafeteria during lunch block, like being found wandering the halls with a cookie and a water bottle, just eating as they walk back to their lockers, or going outside the building to get in a smoke. They told us in big, mean, nasty voices that if we did this we would get a month-long detention and if they found us outside the lunch room during lunch more than five times then we’d get suspended.

I don’t go into the cafeteria anyway, so there’s no way to tell that I’m not in there when I’m supposed to be. I was never in their to begin with.

Inside the bathrooms it’s silently serene. Smells like crap, but is still quiet. I peak through the hole where the door’s old lock used to be and can see pink and yellow papers taped up to the tops of the urinals, talking about field trips and extracurricular after-school things and clubs I’m not ever going to join. The Activities Committee thought it would be a good idea to stick their fliers in all the places people were most likely to be forced into looking at them. And it’s considerate, I suppose. They wanted us to have something to look at while we take a leak .Why not brightly colored papers telling us about Kool! things we could do after school?

On the white tiled floor I can see burnt-out cigarettes smashed deep into the corners of the walls. Dust covering everything. Bathroom gunk. The scents in the air are a mixture of toilet-related substances and cleaning products. Bitter smells of Windex and moppy soap. The place smells faintly of smoke, either from cigarettes or the barbecue that’s going on across the street.

Nobody is in here but me because everyone else is still trapped inside the cafeteria, forced to suffocate of stale air. That is the worst part about the cafeteria. There isn’t ever enough room to breathe.

It is always stuffy. The lines are so long that I feel I’m waiting in some ridiculously long line to get on a popular roller coaster at an amusement park. Everyone is taller than me, even when I’m a sophomore now and no longer the tiniest of the bunch like the freshmen are. Seniors stomp on everybody like they’re the chancellors of the whole damn school, with authority over every single one of us, even when they are one of us. The cafeteria ladies have run out of excuses for why the food sucks so badly. The milk is never cold. The vending machines don’t work. The cafeteria ladies keep telling me they’re going to fix my lunch money account on their computers, so that whenever I punch my account number in, some foreign exchange student’s name like Greta Hughenkaimensloffenkoff or whatever’s name will stop popping up. They never do. There is never anywhere to sit. And when after you’ve finished letting the drones dump poor excuses for edible sustenance onto your red, plastic tray that also has profanities scribbled into it just like the bathroom stalls, you turn and see that there’s nowhere to sit. That Gerard has a different lunch block than you do. That you have no other friends.

My food ends up in the grungy trash bin near the door almost every single day. The room is filled to the max with repellant, pathetic excuses for human species who resemble the Animal Kingdom a bit too much, so nobody sees me when I walk right out, which is against the rules on all levels. But nobody sees when I leave. Nobody notices, cares.

Invisible Boy, that is me. Sounds like a superhero name. Hobbit-sized, subtle, unnoticed pimple on the forehead of society by day. Handsome, beefy medium-rare man-flesh dude with the powers to turn back and forth between invisible and visible whenever he wants, by night. Sounds like it would make a good plot for a comic book. But I doubt anybody would ever want to read it.

I move my ankles around and toes inside of my shoes to crack my bones. The sounds of bones clicking as they unhitch is identical to the sound of cracking knuckles. I love the feel of it. Releasing.

I watch through the tiny hole in the bathroom door as a freshmen-sized kid stalks in, does is business at one of the urinals and reads one of the fliers as he does, then zips his pants back up and walks out without washing his hands. Disgraceful.

The bathroom becomes silent again and I put my face in my hands and breathe in scents. My hands smell like Gerard’s room. Skin. Sweat. I look at the bruises on my wrists up close and it looks like somebody sliced the skin off my wrists so they flapped open like paperback book covers, painted the inside of them with dark reds and blues, then stuck the skins back on and the paint dried like that.

I wish I could go back to the ancient times in kindergarten when the biggest thing you ever had to deal with was when somebody stole your snack or knocked your blocks over. Everybody looked the same with their bowl-shaped haircuts and tiny pigtails. Nobody made fun of anybody because nobody knew how. I remember Mommy holding my hand and toddling out to a giant yellow school bus and getting mad when I couldn’t get the window seat. Hannah wasn’t born yet. Dad was still finishing up his last bits and pieces of medical school. Mom smoked less. Things were good.

The door the bathroom opens up again and I hear squeaky footsteps on the brand new floors; the kind that always looks and sound like they were just waxed.

I hear a backpack get dumped on the floor and when I look down I freeze. The backpack is right in front of my stall. I see expensive-looking basketball shoes on the white tiles with long gym shorts just barely visible below his knees. The door wiggles as he raps on it with his hand.

“Um…is anyone in there?”

I grab my backpack and sling it around my shoulder and slam the door open so fast I think I broke his nose. I step out of the stall and look at him. Just a tiny bit taller than me. Pale-skinned. Real dorky face Glasses sliding off of his nose. Brown hair that’s flatter than the Texas.

He raises an eyebrow.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in the lunch room?” he inquires. “Like…it’s lunch time.”

I want to shove him or something. Right up against these sticky, graffiti-covered walls. Get my point across that I don’t need some gangly little single-minded enthusiastic retard to tell me where I should and shouldn’t be.

I readjust the slings of my backpack on my shoulders so the weight of the bag doesn’t drag me down.

“Hey…” He points a slow finger up to me. “Aren’t you…Gerard’s boyfriend?”

I stop moving. My eyes connect with his. Angry and irritated. Leave me alone.

“Yeah? So?”

He tries to smile, but it comes out weak because he’s not sure if smiling around me is safe, if I might beat him up or not.

He points to his chest plate and gives me the weak smile again.

“He’s my brother.”

I stop moving again. I look over at him.

This is Mikey. This is the brother Gerard told me was an asshole. The one who I never see because he’s either at a friend’s house or in his room whenever I’m at their house. The one Gerard said was easy to convince to leave their house so I could come over and we could mate in peace with no interruptions.

He doesn’t look like an asshole. He looks like a dweeb. The kind of kid who always gets picked last in sports. The kind of kid who sucks in gym and breaks his bones easily. The kind of kid who enjoys talking to teachers or raising his hand or doing his homework for fun. The kind of kid science and math teachers say have Nice Potential.

He apologizes to me for him not being around long enough ever for us to meet each other. Like I care about meeting him.

“Are you coming over tonight?” he asks me. He must know I always come over, even when we never see each other. He doesn't stop smiling at me. It's creeping me out.

I shrug. The bell for second-to-last block class rings through the whole school. The doors to the cafeteria open up and thousands of students file out back to their rainbow-colored lockers to get things for the last two classes of the day. The halls become crammed in mere moments. Damn. I missed getting out of the bathroom early. My punishment is getting stuck in rush hour traffic.

I don’t say goodbye to Gerard’s brother. I leave him there in the bathroom, letting him asphyxiate in a horrible awkwardness.

I manage to sprint out of the schools at an Olympic runner speed to beat Gerard and his car. I don’t feel like tripping back into my brain while being used as a masturbation toy and having to sit around and watch Gerard suck psychotropic fumes out of miniature glass pipes, saying dopy things like ‘makes things burn brighter’.

Mom has gone to a conference thing somewhere in New York. Isn’t coming home. Because our entire family depends on Mom to makes us nutritious, savory meals that help us grow strong bones and poop good, we’re pathetically hopeless when she’s not around. Dad can’t cook or even make grilled cheese. The cheese becomes burned because he forgot to butter the bread first or he forgets the bread’s even on the pan and the smoke alarm gets set off from the burning sandwiches and it takes forever to get the muggy smoke out of the kitchen through the window.

When I get home, he’s still at the hospital. A note scribbled in God-awful handwriting on a note card that he must have stolen from my backpack sits on the kitchen table next to the phone with a twenty, tells me I can either order pizza or go out and get Chinese or just eat cereal. Nobody’s in the mood to smoke up the kitchen and sit through a dinner, digesting food that nobody wants to be eating anyway. Depresses the hell out of us. But at least we get to watch television. Usually when Mom is home, she’ll say things like how Dinner Time is an significant facet of family growth and relationships. If we don’t eat at least one decent dinner together, we’ll grow apart and hate each other. She ignores the fact that we don’t even talk to each other anyway.

I imagine my family like a sitcom thrown into the hands of an ugly, green monster. It is twisted around and contorted and chewed on until our family is spit out and all we are is a group of people trying to pretend that we’re not actually related to each other. Dad stays at the hospital most of the time; does surgeries and E.R work. Wears scrubs and face masks and takes piss samples and scoops around inside of people’s inners with scalpels. Mom is a manager at some interior design place. She obsesses over matching furniture, cute patterns that go along with the seasons of the year, scented candles, and a fake, wooden, 50s family lifestyle that consists of everybody smiling with sparkly white teeth showing and nobody’s ever sad and the furniture is really tacky. Hannah bitches at me when I make her take her inhaler when she’s wheezing so much from her asthma that I think I’m going to have to call the hospitals and have EMTs come over and stick a breathing mask on her face to get air into her constricted lungs. She uses her cell phone too much and doesn’t visit any website on the Internet other than MySpace, where she has or six-hundred best friends she’ll never meet. I sit in my room and play video games. Go on the Internet to play more games. I sleep. I continue to keep living. I stay real quiet. Dad locks himself in his office most of the time. Pretends to be doing work. Stays real quiet. Hannah stays in her room. Text-messages a lot of her friends on her phone. Most of the time, she stays real quiet. Mom talks when she wants to know how school is going or if I’ve finished my homework or if I’ve done my chores and other things. When we have nothing to do, she stays real quiet. We wake up. We live out our days. We come home. We eat dinner. We stay real quiet. I’m still waiting for them to get a divorce. For Hannah to disown herself from the rest of the family. For me to not come home one night when he hits me so hard I just lay down in a gutter unconscious and get eaten by stray dogs mistaking me for venison.

I use Dad’s old rickety car in the garage to get to the Chinese Place. I get crab Rangoon, white rice, teriyaki something-or-other, and fortune cookies. I don’t tell Hannah’s it’s dinner time when I get back with food because I don’t feel like using my voice box. By the time she comes down and sees I’ve got food and started eating without her, she gives me a dirty looks and grabs as much food as she thinks she’ll want to eat, and then pouts all the way back up the stairs and slams her door closed again and doesn’t come out.

Gerard calls me later on, wanting me to come over because Mikey is too busy working on a book report or some huge school assignment to be bothered by us, and his parents are out for dinner because it’s their anniversary or something. I go because there’s nothing good on television anyway.

I actually try to stay in reality this time. See what’s it like; what I skip out on every time I trip back into my head.

It doesn’t feel any different than any other time, except for the fact that he spends more time with foreplay like kissing and touching certain spots on each other. The sex part isn’t any different. Still stings. Burns. Stretches out my skin like an Indian sunburn. He lays in his bed next to me afterwards and lays real close. His nose touches my ear and he repeatedly pushes a piece of hair out of my face that keeps flipping back over my eye.

“You know your lips are real pouty,” he tells me. “Kinda like…girl lips.”

I say nothing back.

“And you always kinda look like your eyes are just sort of sideways…like always looking down at the ground or off to the side or something…”

I still don’t respond.

“You’re too quiet,” he pouts. “You need to talk more.”

There is a silence in the room for a moment as I quickly think of something good to say.

“What do you want me to say?” I say slowly. I feel him shrug.

“I dunno. You just don’t ever talk. It’s weird,” he informs me. He then leans in and plants a kiss on my earlobe and keeps his lips up to my ear as he nudges even closer to me.

“Not even when we fuck,” he goes on, close to my ear. “You just lay there…what, are you a robot or something? You act like you’re dead.”

I am. Almost.

I shrug.

“You’re like a frigging corpse,” he mutters, sounding irritated. I don’t move.

I hear a door close upstairs. Footsteps coming down the stairs towards Gerard’s basement room. A knock on his door.

“Fuck off,” Gerard says to the door.

“Mom want you to do your laundry,” I hear that kid Mikey’s voice on the other side of the door.

“Fuck off!” Gerard yells again.

There are mutters behind the door, followed by the eventual footsteps of Mikey going back up the stairs. Gerard scoffs and dumps his head back down on the pillow.

“Hate this fuckin family…” he growls into my neck.

I don’t say a word. I don’t know if he wants me to agree with him or not, or say something against it. I stay silent and don’t respond. My jaw clenches up to keep my lips closed. I feel his hand inch up to my chest and his fingers trace circles on my skin.

It becomes a very good thing after a while, once you train yourself to not speak in the situations you know you shouldn’t even open my mouth once.

Good thing I know not to even part my lips, or I’d pass out and throw up.