Heartbeat

They don’t make us go to school on Columbus Day. I try to sleep in till noon, hoping maybe I’ll fall into a coma and just stay unconscious for a couple of years in a hospital. I can wake up when high school is over and I’m free.

Instead, Hannah barges into my room while I’m laying under the covers so close to falling back asleep, with a phone in her hand. She smashes it up against my ear and says, “For you. Talk.”

I don’t immediately recognize Mikey’s voice on the phone, but after an infinity of rambling on and on about how it’d be cool for me to come over to his house and we could play video games or go to that new CD store up at the mall or just watch horror movies because he’s bored and doesn’t have anything else to do and all of his good friends have abandoned him for the weekend to visit their families or whatever.

I think about it for a minute. How he always smiles when he sees me. How he talks a lot---fast and quick and almost nervous sounding, yet surprisingly articulate all at the same time--especially to me, and how he’s inviting me over to his house to hang out.

I think about how I don’t like being in Gerard’s house when I don’t have to be.

He tells me Gerard has gone to some concert thing in Bayonne. Won’t get back till one in the morning.

I think about this as well. Concerts serve beer and drugs and mosh pits. By the time he gets back home, he’ll be too piss drunk to even coordinate himself through the front door, let alone smack me right on the side of the head for seeing me with Mikey and misinterpreting it for me cheating on him with his own brother.

It reminds of the time that he thought I was having sex with a million different other dudes when he wasn’t around, when he asked me once if I loved him as much as he said he loved me. When I couldn’t open my mouth or say anything good because I knew anything would come out wrong anyway, I got whopped so hard the other side of my head hit the car window and I got marks on both sides.

I wince.

I don’t want to be in Gerard’s house. It makes me sick to my stomach just thinking about it.

I decide not to. I want to sleep in. I apologize and tell him my family is making us visit the grandparents we sent to the nursing home to die. He says it’s fine, and tells me he’ll see me in school tomorrow.

I hang the phone back up and crawl underneath the covers to go back to sleep.

When we get back to school on Monday, they give out report cards. The teachers complain about how “Brilliant” and “Virtuous” I am as a student, but don’t use my “Potential” and need to “Speak up more in class!” because apparently I have good ideas.

Lies. Teachers are good at giving those out. They get the most shittiest people to teach like the ones who are always on drugs or the ones who are loud and obnoxious, and they still write things on their report cards like, "______ is a magnificent aspect of my class. I hope to see more of ______’s ideas!” They get paid to act like they like us, with their deepest, darkest secret being that they actually pick favorites and chances are, you’re never one of them.

I’m forced to take the progress report out and give it to Dad for his critique and commentary. He scans it with his eyes and nods his head when he sees where I’ve done good and then puts on a frown and furrows his brow when he sees parts where I’ve plunged down the cliff.

Mother and Father sit me down at the dinner table while Hannah skips off to a friend’s house to giggle during a sleepover while they watch teen drama television shows and eat yellow popcorn.

“What is with this History grade? I thought you did good in History? What happened? And this art grade. Art is not that hard of a class, Frank, and you’re not even trying in that? What’s happened here? This isn’t acceptable. ”

Dad tries to keep his voice calm and low, when it leaks through so obvious that he wants to yell at me. He only gets like this around the times when we get progress reports and report cards. The things that have to do with our grades because he has to make sure we don’t get any bad grades and that we get into great colleges that aren’t state so we don’t have to be stuck working as toothless Wal-Mart greeters when we’re eighty for minimum wage.

Mom gives me a kind smile and they continue to act like it’s not a big deal so none of us get too riled up and start screaming at each other and then get tangled up into a big, nasty fight that will leave us angry and muddled, followed by the awkward moment in the kitchen the next morning when we’re forced to look at each other over our breakfast cereal.

“We’re not mad at you, sweetie,” Mom assures me. “We just think that maybe you could do a bit better than this. Are there any after-school things there? You should stay after some days, maybe you could get some help from the teachers. Doesn’t that sound like a good idea?”

No.

“Tutoring never does anything good, Linda,” Dad argues back. His voice is starting to grow dark and Dad-angry. “He just needs to learn to listen up more in class.”

“He does listen,” Mom hisses.

“How do you know? Frank, do you listen? The comments on this report are saying that you’re not, that you’re just staring out the window during the lesson. Is that true? Don’t you realize how important it is to listen in class? If you don’t listen, you’ll never learn. Understand?”

“Don’t talk to him like that!” Mom bites out, like a snake. She turns back to me. Smiles again. Weakly. “Look, Frank, we’re not trying to push you into doing anything that’s too much for you. But do you listen in class? Look, I know the classes may be boring, but I’m sure you’ll get better classes next semester.”

“This isn’t about next semester, this is about this semester,” Dad grumbles. I sink down into my chair and scalp the skin off of another KFC leg. I watch the crispy brown bodily casing peel off , revealing the veal-white dead meat underneath. My wrists ache with bruises that won’t leave as my own skin peels off, just like the leg, exposing the vulnerable dead body under the surface that nobody, not even myself, sees. I’m lathered in skin and it’s trapping me. A prison that encases my entire body and there’s no key to the lock or a way to escape.

“Frank, are you listening to me?” I hear Mom’s voice. “Frank? Are you listening to us?”

“This isn’t acceptable, Frank,” I hear Dad say again. “Do you hear me? Unacceptable. Get these grades up.” He taps the progress report paper with his scaly index finger.

“Frank, look at us when we’re talking to you.”

I close my eyes and stare into the blackness behind my eyelids; the horror movie scripted and based on my life; directed and produced by me, starring me.

I can feel my heart clanging inside of my ears and the blood rushing through foresting vines inside my brain. Gerard’s words in my head with a smack to my face like a gunshot.

Look at me, you asshole. You look at people when they’re talking to you.

“Look at me, Frank.” Mom’s voice is turning darker as well. I feel like I’m being interrogated after being wrongly accused of a sickening murder.

“Francis Anthony, you look at me, right now.”

Look at me, you asshole.

I lift the five-pound useless appendage sitting atop my shoulders that I’m supposed to call a head and a face, to look at Mom. Not looking at her even after she used my full name would just be stupid. Stupider than trying to shave a tarantula or keeping a velociraptor as a pet on a leash in your backyard.

She looks at me with Death Eyes that glare into my brain and scrape and cut at my thoughts. This kind of incredibly serious look is the exact same kind of look every mom gives their kid when they’re little and did something bad like knock over something glass or make a mess in the kitchen. The kind of Mom-look that scares you so much you think you’re going to pee your pants.

But I’m a big boy now. This doesn’t threaten me anymore. Big boys aren’t scared…of most things.

I look right back at her. Narrow my eyes. Give her the same look back. It weakens her shell and Dad goes back to being real quiet. I get up out of chair and hold my head proud and high. It’s a lie. A cover-up. But it works. I dump the skinless, vulnerable dead chicken corpses into the trash and rinse the plate in the sink and stalk up to my room and lock the door and turn up the music loud when I hear them start to bicker at each other when they can’t wrangle at me.

When I get into Gerard’s car the next morning, I rest my head up against the window and close my eyes to get in some sleep that will never come, and so if he hits me, my head will already be up against the window, so it won’t hit it from the impact of the smack. He looks over at me weirdly more than once. I take the risk and close my eyes to pull curtains down over the rest of the world so there’s nothing left but paint splotches dotting up in front of my retinas slowly fading away.

I stare out the window through my first two classes and do everything that the progress report was bitching at me not to do. I do not raise my hand and offer my knowledge. I do not even open my mouth. Not once.

The leaves continue to turn away from the bright green colors. They’re getting darker and darker. Slowly withering away until they’re completely dead and crinkled and have nothing left to do but rustle when the wind blows and fall to the earth without a sound. Wait until the snow comes and blankets over them with ten feet of packed arctic white snow. This is the time of the year that is most silent. When the snow is just beginning to fall in small wisps. Snow doesn’t make any noise, no matter how hard it pounds down. It comes down in soft impenetrable hails and pats down onto the earth, obscuring the world in a thick, white quiet.

A miracle doesn’t happen until fifth block. A test is about to be given out and I can’t even remember what the unit was that it was based on, because I didn’t listen to a single word the teacher was blah-blahing to us at all this year, so far. We have the papers on our desks and our pencils ready to get failing grades when we nearly jump out of our skin when a the fire alarm screams out at us out of every single alarm set up in every single classroom. A fire drill.

They march us out into the parking lot, herding us like sheep. We stand in lines between cars in the faculty parking lot and wait. The wind kicks up and makes us shiver. I zip up my hoodie all the way and pull the hood over my head, covering my ears from the nipping cold. Other kids surround me and talk about nothing important. Things they did over their long Columbus Day weekend. What new makeup was at the mall.

Standing around, surrounded by other one-thousands kids with zitty, smug faces, there is only one thing there is to do. It’s easy to look around and make predictions about who you think is going to die first.

I see a jock messiah standing in the line next to me. He’s tall and gangly and most likely on the basketball team. Another telephone pole. I try to delve into his head. Five years from now, he could have heart problems from so much aerobic exercise. He’ll be playing a game and he’ll pass out right on the court, gripping onto his chest as his heart pulsates. He’ll be dead of a premature heart attack by the time they get him the hospital.

I see a cheerleader, tall and red-headed. I predict drugs. Addictions. Depression. Snorting whatever drugs of choice in a grungy bathroom stall. Overdosing right then and there as her nose starts to bleed spastically and her whole body convulses in a violent seizure, right before she gargles up blood out of her mouth and drops onto the floor, brain-dead.

I predict car crashes. Heart attacks. Suicide. Gulf war syndrome. Yellow fever. Ebola. Alien abductions.

“Yo, that the fire department?” I hear a voice venture out from a line not too far away from mine.

I look around and there they are. This isn’t a drill. Real bloodred fire engines screaming down the road into the front parking lot of our school.

They voices ascend again. Somebody pulled the alarm. A teacher pulled it because he was sick of us already. A crazed Nazi kid pulled the alarm because he was psychotic. Somebody tried to set the school on fire so they took a thing of papers and set them on fire with the burners in the Senior Chem. Lab. A kid didn’t want to take a test so he took a wad of toilet paper in the boys bathroom and lit it up in the stalls and the held it up to the carbon monoxide alarm.

The fire department is still screaming and blaring their red and yellow lights while fire fighters, brave and friendly, barge into our school with hatchets and hoses and face masks.

There isn’t any flames. No smoke that anyone can smell.

Principal Somebody huddles together with some Science teachers and they discuss what could have possible happened.

I look around some more. I see death. Death and carnage. Nobody on the football team is going to live past the age of thirty.

I see Gerard. He stands in another line and chats with a girl who looks even shorter than me. He smiles at her sweetly like he’s flirting with her. I look away and close my eyes and watch the horror movie a bit.

The fire fighters walk out of our beloved school some five minutes later, disappointed that they didn’t get to see real, burning fire action. They pack up their hoses and put everything else back and talk to the teachers a bit while police officers skip inside and do a last-minute check.

The teachers stand tall and high and tell us what happened. A kid in the boy’s locker room spraying AXE deodorant spray. The chemicals inside seeping into the carbon monoxide alarms and setting off the whole damn school in an oddly organized frenzy to get out to the parking lot to get a good view of the school supposedly burning down.

They march us back inside with a new rule added to the list: No more sprays.

When I get to Gerard’s house, I almost fall asleep right in the middle of it. A smack across my face like a real romantic-movie face-slap. Hard with a real juicy smack sound. It opens up my eyes and wakes me up enough to force my eyes to stay open. He drives me home and tells me I know I like it. I can’t deny that. I’ve always liked it. Always wanted it.

I get up to my room and lock the door without a word to Mom or Dad and I sit on my bed and wonder how long it would take for me to die if I slit my throat.