Eat My Heart Out

“Gerard?”

I open my eyes, but quickly shut them again. My head is pounding and the light seeping through the window isn’t doing me any good.

“Gerard,” mom says from behind me, and I lazily roll onto my other side. I crack my eyes open and the pounding in my head fades a bit when they’re met by a soft darkness.
“Gerard, there’s a letter for you,” she says sweetly and sits down on the edge of my bed.
“It’s from the school. It’s probably your grades,” she says happily. I can tell she’s excited. All I am is in pain, and I think I’ll only get worse once I’ve opened this letter.

Since mom stays seated on my bed, not moving an inch, I can tell she wants me to open the letter now and show it to her.

I clumsily and slowly sit up, my head throbbing and my body feeling a thousand pounds heavier than it did last night.

I take the letter out of her hands and open it up. At least she hasn’t opened it herself yet.

She reads over my shoulder, which is a good thing, 'cause then I don’t have to look her in the eye as she finds out about my sucky grades. I snarl at the piece of paper. All of those hours of studying; all for fucking nothing.

My stomach gurgles and before I can comprehend it, bile is rising up my throat. Without caring about the letter, my mom or myself and my head, I fling myself out of bed and run towards the bathroom. I fall onto my knees and let my stomach empty itself into the toilet.

In between coughing, I hear my mom come in after me. When my stomach and throat cramps and puke splutters out of my mouth, she grabs my hair and holds it away from my face, gathering it up in a ponytail.

My knees hurt from falling onto the floor and slamming against the toilet. My head hurts from dehydration and the brutal motions my body is doing as I hurl. The rest of me is just numb.

“Oh, honey. You must’ve caught the same thing as Frank,” she coos, before I empty my stomach again.

She’s wrong, though.

Frank is anorexic, not bulimic.

And I’m hungover.

The only thing we’ve both caught is a sick obsession with masochism and sadism. We hurt ourselves and each other.

It’s all we ever seem to do.