Heartbeat

I slide into the Algebra 1 room with fifteen minutes remaining in the class. The Algebra teacher raises an eyebrow at me and hesitantly takes my Late Pass. I stand there at the front of the room like a retard while people stare, and wait for the teacher to remember that I’m still alive. He mouths my name silently as he reads it off the late pass, then arches an eyebrow up at me. “Who are you?”

I open the average-level Algebra 1 class hardcover book up to the right page and stare down at the margins, pretending to read along. I doze off a little bit, but the Algebra teacher’s spastic writing on the board keeps me awake, because he always slams the chalk against the board so hard that his writing comes out loud and unbearable.

I clench and unclench my hands into fists and grit my teeth at the aching pain in my wrists that won’t go away. I still can’t understand how bruises can stay on me for so long. It doesn’t make sense. There are numerous others on me as well; on my legs, ankles, arms, and a couple on my face, and most are masked and hidden by clothes, but they fade quickly and disappear to make room for new ones. But the ones on my wrist won’t leave me alone. They keep coming back whenever he grabs my wrists to hold them up above my head when he does it on a surface where I’m sitting down like a countertop or lab table after school when everybody’s gone and nobody can see us; or when I just accidentally hit them on a hard surface while I’m walking by it like a table or a chair top.

I try to read along after a while but the noise of blood flowing like strong rivers inside of my head makes it hard to concentrate. A whop to the side of the head this morning for a reason I was too tired to even bother to remember. My brain is still pulsating. The noise of my own blood inside my skull pushes out into the vicinity and gets between my eyes and the book and makes it hard to see the page to be able to read it.

Other kids in my class understand all of this completely. I don’t, which may or may not be the reason that I’m getting a D in it. One of the classes that Dad frowned at. I may be getting a D because I don’t understand it and don’t ever get the homework right. Or I might be getting a D in it because whenever the Algebra teacher sees me walk in, he never connects me with the name ‘Iero, Frank’ on the attendance sheet, and always marks me as absent, not knowing I’ve just walked in and I am actually here. Five weeks into the school year, and the teachers still don’t remember who I am. By the time they actually manage to remember who I am and that I go to this school and that my name is Frank Iero, I’ll be graduating.

Halloween comes to me in the form of waking me up early to tell me it’s officially the sixteenth anniversary of the day that I’ve been brought out into this cold, cold world. Mom smiles at me with white teeth showing while Dad tries to smile too, but it’s awkward and twisted because he doesn’t know how to smile. Hannah doesn’t bitch as much, but I can’t tell if that’s because she wants to be considerate on my birthday or because Mom told her to. They make me a big breakfast that I don’t have enough time to eat. In Gerard’s car, he kisses me long and good and nips at me lip that is already scarred up enough. Tells me to have a Happy Birthday and to come over to tonight for my birthday present. I don’t respond and put my head up against the window and close my eyes to fall back asleep. He tells me to stop being so mopey on my birthday, and I flinch thinking I’m going to get a whack on the face but instead get nothing.

School goes by. More teachers forget who I am. Mikey tells me to have a good Birthday. Another teacher forgets me. I turn the knob on the five-hundred dollar microscope the wrong way in Life Sciences and get yelled at for it, the teacher hissing at me that if I broke it like that, I’d have to pay her back all five-hundred dollars just for her to get a new microscope. I stay on the sidelines in gym where I’m safe from getting hit by the ball, and making our team lose. When I go over to Gerard’s house, I’m inside my head before I even step inside of his grungy room.

In my headworld, there’s a casket and black umbrellas and a cemetery out in the cold rain. My tombstone says my full name and there are no flowers on the grave.

He’s hurting me like always, but I say nothing.

In my headworld, Mom is crying, Hannah looks like she’s in shock and Dad is silent. They sit in our living room with other mourners all dressed in black to hide their unusually pale skin and I’m not there with them because I’m in the ground.

I can feel him inside of me and it feels alien and foreign and cold and nothing about it is good.

My casket is cheap and regular-black. A silver trim on the side. Pallbearers have serious expressions on their faces as they carry my casket down the steps of a huge cathedral, towards the hearse at the bottom.

He sits up on the bed with a lighter and a tiny glass pipe. He hands the pipe to me and asks me if I want any. I shake my head turn onto my side to rest my head on the pillow and try to fall asleep. It’s getting harder to get in sleep. I have nightmares of the stars above me and my eyes feeling so heavy and Gerard’s eyes and the bushes pricking into my skin and the dirt on my face and the coldness of the night air. I wake up with a scream starting in my gut that I have to repress with vomit into the toilet.

He drives me home and kisses me again extra long right up until he’s got me pinned up against the window, pushing my head up against it with his lips sealed tight onto mine. He flicks his sandpapery cat tongue into my mouth and scrapes the back of my throat. When he finally pulls away from me, the porch light above the door has been turned on and I can see a silhouette of Mom standing in the door. I meet her at the door with my backpack slung over my shoulders, drooping my posture. She leads me into a darkened home and dots of candle light flicker in the shadowed kitchen. A birthday cake waiting for my wish in the dark. They gather around me and tell me to make a wish. I close my eyes and whip them out inside my head.

I wish I was smarter.
I wish I was cooler.
I wish I had actual friends.
I wish Gerard’s car crashes the next time he gets drunk.
I wish my parents would get a divorce already so we don’t have to keep watching them pretend to love each other.
I wish I had the willpower of somebody brave.
I wish I could step out of this body and live in someone else’s for a day.
I wish for a bus to show up in our driveway to take me all the way to Arizona.

I close my eyes and breathe in the scent of fire and melting cake frosting.

I wish it would all stop.

A pathetic breath of air escapes from deep down inside of me and the kitchen is shrouded in complete darkness as the lights of the candles disappear into nothingness. I smell the smoke and the burnt-out flames.

They cut up the cake as Mom puts small plates on the table with forks. I eat the cake and stuff it down my throat so I don’t have to speak. They give me presents wrapped in old wrapping paper from last Christmas. I get a couple of CDs, a video game, and a Che Guevara poster from some old hippie shop Hannah found. Grandma and Grandpa sends me money, with only Grandma signing the envelope and check because Grandpa refuses to sign checks, thinking they are a political conspiracy or something. I get three gift cards and some more money from an aunt in Florida who I’ve never met.

I watch the trick-or-treaters ascend towards our house in a variety of different masks and lies. Brides, monsters, animals. They don’t sound very happy with my mother when she gives them candy. She must be giving out the little bite-sized candy bars, or the crappy stale little bags of candy corn that nobody likes.

I go back to school on Monday, officially sixteen years of age. I sit through Wellness and the teacher talks about why drugs are bad and how sex will kill you. I doze off but wake up every time a teacher nudges my foot to keep me awake, and it the bruises on my legs and ankles pulsate in pain, waking me up immediately. I stare out the window during History and watch the leaves turn browner and browner. The skies get darker and darker and occasionally let a small wisp of snow trickle down. The weather gets chillier and forces us to had hats to our jackets when we go outside. Sometimes mittens.

We don’t go back to his house after school, and instead experiment in the backseat. It’s worse than in his bed. Uncomfortable, and I think I’m going to fall off every five seconds, onto his dirty car floor, which is littered with crumbs and old milkshake cups from BK. Smells like stale locker room. He uses a emergency blanket from the trunk to cover us up. I hate him on top of me, but our bodies clashing together is the only way I can shield myself against the cold creaking into the car from the freezing autumn season outside slowly disintegrating into Winter. I hug him around the waist and just let it happen, because his skin is warm and soft and warms up my freezing fingers. I even go with it a little because wrapping my arms around him puts me in a weird bodily position where I’m reaching out and if I don’t move along with him, it’ll be like I’m being crushed up against the car door, my neck snapping from bending so weirdly.

It doesn’t change the feel of it at all. Still numb, occasionally hurting. Nothing that makes me smile with a look of ecstasy or sweat and scream his name out and beg for more. Not even remotely close. It bores me. He feels it all. It’s visible and audible. I turn my head when he looks straight at me and stare at the back of the front seat. There’s old candy wrappers tucked into the pocket holder, littered with garbage like the floor.

“Don’t act like you don’t like this,” he grumbles, still going, when he sees my face that I can feel doesn’t even have any expression on it. Emotionless and blank. “Because you know you do. You know you do.”

I turn my head again so I don’t have to look at him look at me.

At home, my house is getting ready for the next late-autumn, pre-winter holiday. The one with the turkeys where we sit at a dinner table and remember the Pilgrims and eat creamed corn. Mom is already getting ready for it. A plush Beanie Baby turkey sits on top of the shelf over the fireplace with all of his Pilgrim buddies. The grocery stores are stocking up with so much Thanksgiving goods that if you put all those turkeys and canned vegetables together, you could feed an impoverished African country for a month. I can easily see my mother barging through the aisles of Shaws with her shopping cart held high, ready to take on the other psychotic holiday-dinner-obsessed moms; racing through the aisles and using tackling moves only seen in football to get the very best of the best of Thanksgiving feast foods. The pillows on the couch are changing from their regular blues and off-whites to golden-brown shades to match the color scheme of the season.

Mom obsesses over to-do lists and shopping lists and a million other lists all crammed into one yellow notepad with her lucky purple pen with the fluff ball on top. Her eyes are wiry and she talks to herself like a delirious drunk. Dad goes back out to the hospital even when he doesn’t need to. Hannah goes back to the school to help out the Activities Committee on making nice turkey dinners at the homeless shelter. It’s typical. Hannah can be a real snob, but when it comes to community service that she can do on her own free will and not required by a school assignment, she gets involved so she can look more like a grown-up and seem more mature and smarter than everybody else. Irritates the hell out of me and Mom and Dad, but we deal. She helps make sandwiches for homeless people living out on the street and reads books to kids at the Ronald McDonald House. They organize dances and make up the ideas for new school clubs. They care about global warming and remind us to recycle our water bottles and spare papers. They encourage us to join in with them, oblivious to the fact that it’s their cheeriness that’s driving us away from them. It creeps us out. Nobody should ever be that happy about saving our planet from vanity and corruption. It’s too weird.

While my entire family finds constructive things to do with their time as Thanksgiving nears, I take the bus to avoid going to Gerard’s house after school, and stay in my room to catch up on sleep that never, ever comes. My eyes are getting heavier everyday. It’s hard to stay awake. And then it’s hard to sleep. I’m trapped in between and the prolonged fatigue is giving me headaches.

The day before Thanksgiving on school vacation, Mikey calls me and asks me how life is going.

I tell him, “Fine.”

He asks me if we’re doing anything special for Thanksgiving.

I tell him, “No, not really…”

He tells me he and Gerard and the rest of their family are going all the way up to Manhattan to visit their aunt and uncle. They’ll have their Thanksgiving with them. It makes me feel like crap. Everybody I know has a million different relatives that they go see on holidays, where they have huge, nice dinners and great dessert and come back home happy and stuffed with good food. I have no relatives that I know of that are that inviting. My entire family has separated into splinters of isolated families, trying to get as far away from each other as possible. My father has not talked to his sister in two years. My mother has no siblings. My only living grandfather gets too grumpy and political around holidays, so it’s impossible to have fun with him. My cousins are all spoiled or mean or snobby, and none of them like me, if they even know or remember who I am. I still don’t understand why we continue to acknowledge each other. At this point, the only thing left to do is get together in one big family reunion, where we all disown each other all at once and get on with our lives as free, happier people. My parents are too caught up their jobs and fake hobbies to admit that they hate each other. Too guilt-ridden to tell me to my face that I’ll never be the perfect spelling bee-winning son they wished upon a shooting star for. I’m not good-looking or constantly happy or have a good sense or humor or get all A grades. I’m all of that twisted and contorted so I come out the exact opposite: a nobody who can’t ever say it when he doesn’t want to have sex, and needs to wash his hair more often.

I take a frozen bag of green beans out of the freezer and alternate between wrists to hurry the process of healing the bruises so they’ll just go away for once. It aches underneath my skin and tingles my bones. I wince, but it isn’t that bad of pain.

Mikey tells me over the phone that he thinks it would be cool if I could come over and hang out after Thanksgiving. I tell him I’ll probably be in New York visiting relatives for the holiday and can’t. I apologize and he says it’s fine, like last time. I stick my Che Guevara poster on the wall and wonder why I can’t be like Che. Strong and brave and overthrowing evil Cuban dictators and their grimy regimes. The look on his face makes him look brave and blatantly better than everybody else. Why can’t I be like that? Maybe not better than everybody else, but at least strong enough to stand up for myself and have a voice. Even a whisper of me would be nice, but I don’t even have that.

Mikey hangs up after we say bye after a long while of awkward silence where neither of us can figure what to say next. I think more about how he’s always smiling around me and calling me and wanting to hang out. It brings a certain possible conclusion into my head, but once I dwell on it I push it out of my mind in a split-second.

I lay on my bed and count the dots in the ceiling tiles while I debate in my head if I should do anything.

For a while, I imagine the Devil Me and the Angel Me sitting on my shoulders, whispering debatable advice into my ears.

The Devil Me says that I should get back at him for everything he’s done to me. Come to his house at night with a baseball bat and give him something to remember. Something I can tell him he likes and can’t deny that he likes it.

And then the Angel Me argues and says that doing something like that would get me killed. It’s better just to stay where I am. Where I’m safe and unsafe at the same time.

The Devil Me continues to argue that acting like a pansy and taking it is getting me nowhere. And if I just stand there and let it happen, I’ll be killed anyway. Doing something would end it all. The Angel Me continues to argue this point, noting my safety and his temper and how the two don’t go together very well. They start to argue until they get into a full-blown fight, punching and dropkicking.

I shake them both out of my head and fall asleep to the silence of nobody left.