Someone out There Loves You

“I agree with Drew.”
“Make that three.”
“See, this is why I’m not in a band, then I don’t have to do this shit!”
I shot Molly a dirty look. I had the worst feeling in my stomach, and not only from the constriction of my life vest. Actually, I liked the constriction-- that way I knew it was there.
Even though I was just as terrified, I couldn’t help but be somewhat amused by Jeph. He was sitting on the floor of the boat, eyes closed, pressed in the small corner by the stern.
“We’re still in the boat, Jeph,” Ray said. “You’re not dead.”
“Yet! I have to pee, man!” Jeph shut his eyes tighter. “And I’m hurting my balls.”
“Then stand up,” Billie said, “And go take a fucking piss!”
Jeph shook his head like a defiant toddler. “If I see that water I’ll end up pissing before I get to the bathroom.”
Quinn groaned and pulled Jeph up by the shoulders. “I’ll guide you. Just keep your eyes closed.”
We all watched for the first six steps of the adventure, until Frank stomped his foot on the right side of the boat. It wobbled a bit. Jeph wimpered like a little girl and grabbed onto Quinn, who was clearly very close to killing Frank.
Matt and his camera crew came up from below deck then. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll talk to My Chem first, then Rush And Ruin, Green Day, and The Used. Sound good? Good.”
Everyone shifted around the boat (Jeph finally made it to the bathroom, with Quinn and Mollers below deck so Jeph could be sure “people were nearby so he didn’t drown.” -- “Because people drown in toilets all the time,” Monster chuckled.) The My Chem guys gathered on the right side of the boat while the rest of us crammed behind the camera crew.
“So how’re you guys feeling about doing this?”
Ray laughed uneasily. “Uh, pretty nervous…”
“Psh, I’m not!” Frank said proudly. “I’m stoked!”
“He’s making is hard on everyone else, though,” Gerard cut in. “Jeph was trying to get the bathroom and he shook the boat.”
“That,” Frank said, pointing at Gerard, “Was frikkin hilarious.”
I couldn’t resist. “Excuse me,” I said to the boom guy. He moved out of my way so I was standing in front of Frank.
His eyes went wide. “Uh, hi Clayah… I don’t like the look on your fa--” He never finished. I put my hand square in the middle of the chest and pushed him over the edge of the boat.
EVERYONE burst out laughing. Even Drew, who hadn’t said a word since we got on the boat. One of the camera guys went to the edge and focused on the bubbling, rippling water where Frank was submerged.
He pulled up to the surface, gasping. “WHAT THE HELL, CLAYAH?”
“Karma,” I grinned. “Don’t be a dick and this won’t happen.” Gerard was next to me and gave me a half hug around the shoulders.
Frank swam the two feet back, putting his hands on the edge and trying to pull himself up. I just stood over him and smiled.
Suddenly, his hand wrapped around my wrist and my ankle smacked into the side of the boat. I screamed and splashed into the water.
(Why were all our MTV interviews so weird?)
The taste of salt hit the back of my throat, water-sloshing-sounds in my ears. I swam back up, flipping my hair back and rubbing my eyes while my lungs grabbed for oxygen.
The boat seemed huge from down here. Frank had turned around, keeping his arms out behind him and holding onto the boat.
“Karma,” he mocked.
“Oh, it’s so ON!” I leaped through the water at him.
“DON’T YOU DARE KILL MY DAD!!” I heard Molly call over the boat. I guess she and the guys had come back for the show.
“NO PROMISES!”

“Uh… why doesn’t Mark go first?” I suggested.
Mark looked at me. “Guppy, don’t go ‘Brave Sir Robin” on me now. Just get on the skis.”

When we got back to the bus I was still happy-dancing. It was the scariest thing I think I’d ever done or ever would do, but it was FUN. My joy even inspired Drew to go.
She hated it, but still.
Everyone else before me had wiped out in under a minute. I stayed on for one minute and twelve seconds-- which I totally dangled over everyone else’s heads. The only person to top me was Mike, who held on for a minutes twenty two. Ten seconds was nothing. Pish.
We had tried to talk Molly into doing it. Even the MTV dudes were on our side (“She’s Frank Iero’s daughter!” Matt had said. “It would be a huge way to get her out to the world!” Frank nearly ate him). Molly refused to do it, but we conned her into doing the next big challenge…type…thing…with us, and she agreed.
Everyone was going to go have fun before the show that night, but as much as I wanted to, I knew it wouldn’t be smart. I couldn’t even bear to hear the plans-- I knew I had to finish my English essay and get it in by the day after tomorrow.
You go all the way across the country and still somehow can’t escape school…
So everyone else went out and did whatever. I threw on sweats (at that point I would’ve thrown on onion skin if it was warm, the cold ocean had sunk bone-level), put on some music, and snuggled down with the old school Mac Dad had gotten me for schoolwork.
Next thing I knew someone was knocking on the bus door. I looked at the clock-- four hours? I’d been working on the same fucking essay for four hours? Damn it to hell…
I got up to answer the door, and suddenly realized I’d been hanging around in a sport’s bra (California was a HELLA lot hotter than Illinois), so I nabbed a pillow in case the someone outside wasn’t Rush And Ruin/Molly. I held it over my body and pushed the bus door open.
Gerard looked up at me and smiled. “Hey, Clayah, how’s the-- what’s with the pillow?”
“Uh, nothing. What’s goin’ on?”
“Well…” he rubbed the back of his neck. “We kind raced back to the bus, and… I was the last one, so… yeah, I got locked out.”
I smiled. “C’mon in.”
Gerard climbed up into the bus and to the lounge.
“Uh… can you wait here one sec?” I said.
He looked at me oddly. “Suuure…”
“Thanks.”
I went into the bunk room and sifted around for a tshirt, finally settling for a solid rum-red one that didn’t smell but had a small stain on one of the elbows. Whatever. I went back out to find Gerard skimming through my iPod’s library. He gave a guilty smile. “Sorry, hope you don’t mind.”
“Nah, I’d do the same.” I sat back down next to my laptop, across from Gerard.
“You listen to The Misfits when you do your homework?” he said. “Isn’t that like, super distracting?”
“Surprisingly, no. Three albums I can listen to and still do beauteous things with my homework--” I ticked them off on my fingers. “American Psycho by The Misfits, A Beautiful Lie by 30 Seconds To Mars, and Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge by--” And then I remembered I was talking to Gerard Way, who was now grinning in amusement at my expense.
I swallowed, semi-uncomfortable. “Anyways.”
Gerard was gazing around the bus, and his eyes landed on the old acoustic guitar in the corner. “Wow,” he said, pointing to it. “That thing is gorgeous. Is that Mark’s or Levi’s?”
“Actually, it’s mine.”
“Really? I didn’t know you played.”
“I don’t play anymore.” I laughed. “I sucked at it, anyways.”
Gerard looked at me curiously. “Why don’t you play?”
I shrugged. “I can’t.”
“Well you know what they say, practice makes perfect--”
“No, I mean I physically can’t.”
“Why?”
I held up my bad hand for him to see. I was really getting sick of people seeing it, because it felt just plain embarrassing to me. Gerard reacted the same way as Molly. The same way everyone does, really. It was like having a Hunchback of Notre Dame appendage.
“What… what happened?” Gerard asked in a low voice.
Aw, shit. He had to go and be one of the people who asked? I really hated talking about it, so I hesitated. But at this point I felt that I sort of owed Gerard and explanation. After all he’d done for me thus far, it’d be pretty fucking annoying to leave him hanging. Plus the look on his face was genuine concern,
I sighed. “A little over a year ago, when I was thirteen, I went to a party with one of my friends. Ryan. He was a sophomore in high school at the time. Frankly, I had a severe crush on him. So with that of course I was going to trust everything he said and did, you know?
“So we went to a party some friend of his was having. I figured it was just a bunch of kids hanging out and whatever. But it turned out to be one of those cliché ‘we lied our parents aren’t really home do you want a drink’ kind of parties. I tried to get out and go home, but Ryan was my ride, and I didn’t know for the life of me where my house was compared to that place. I didn’t have a cell phone back then and no one would lend me theirs. ‘Just stay for an hour then I’ll take you home,’ Ryan kept saying. So I waited in his car-- I didn’t want to be anywhere near that shit.
“An hour later Ryan came out. That was when I learned the true definition of ‘wasted.’ I told him we should just use his phone and have someone pick us up, but he wouldn’t have it. He said he was just a little buzzed, he could drive fine. And like I said, I trusted him. Plus I didn’t really have any other option.”
At this point I was starting to get choked up. And I refused to cry in front of , not only Gerard fucking Way, but a guy I now considered a close friend. I hated crying in general. Especially the few times I had to tell this story. Which is why I never did.
“You don’t have to tell me if it’s to hard for you, Clayah,” Gerard said. He reached over and put a hand on my knee, which was cuddled up beneath my chin, trying to hide me and suffocate any tears that were en route to my eyes.
“No, it’s fine,” I said, clearing my throat. “I’ve gotten this far , haven’t I?” He nodded and let me go on.
“So Ryan and I were driving down this old road, all these evergreen trees everywhere… Ryan was going way to fast, and he was swerving. It was dark by then and the road was pretty abandoned, but I was still scared. I tried to tell him to slow down but he wouldn’t listen to me. He said-- well, slurred-- that he knew what he was doing. We drove for a while and then came to a curve in the road.”
Now I realized I was crying. Not hard, but my eyes were streaming. “The other car came out of fucking nowhere, I swear. Ryan tried to swing the car to go in the other direction, but he ended up swinging the car so my side was facing the car coming at us. I grabbed onto the handle on the door to steady myself. Which was really, really stupid, and I‘ll never know why I grabbed onto it with my left hand instead of my right. The other car tried to move too, but it couldn’t because it was too close to us by then.
“It slammed into my side of the car. I didn’t really know what was happening. I just saw headlights and heard breaking glass. The car Ryan and I were in tipped-- the other car was huge compared to ours. Ryan’s side hit the ground and we spun against the road a bit. It all happened so fast.
“When all the motion had stopped, I noticed I was still clutching on the door. There was glass all over me and digging into my skin, so since I couldn’t really do much about that I just tried to get my hand off the handle. But the metal of the door had sort of… wrapped around it. Ryan was unconscious so he couldn’t help me. I looked through the sort of metal tunnel that was wrapped around my wrist. And… there was a huge piece of metal going right through my hand.” I lifted my hand up and pointed to the long white scar. “I was pretty… stunned looking at it, so I was shell-shocked for a few seconds.
“The fire department said the next part was a freak thing. Somehow the gas tank had popped, and their was so much pressure that it sprayed in all directions. So some got on the door. But they never figured out how the door caught on fire.
“The car had had a fabric lining, so with the window shattered, the inside of the door caught on fire pretty fast. At first the metal wrapped around my hand just got hot, but then the fire got to my skin. And--” I heaved for a second-- “And my hand caught on fire.
“It was the most painful thing I ever felt. I was screaming but I didn’t know how to get my hand out. So… I finally just had to tug at it. The metal that was through my hand tore it.” I pointed to the white scar again, tracing from the bottom up to the part between my fingers. “Like that-- they said I ripped through a souple tendons and I was extremely lucky the doctors could fix it.
“My hand was still on fire, though. The driver from the other car turned up then. He had a pretty brutal head injury. But when he saw my hand on fire he froze. Maybe if he had taken off his jacket and smothered my hand sooner, I wouldn’t have marks from the burn and the skin might have grown back.
“The driver finally helped me out and called 911. The fire department said I was lucky to be alive. But the doctors said my hand wouldn’t ever really be the same again. I was at the hospital for three days. I had lost a lot of blood, which was especially dangerous for me because I of my heart condition-- which you witnessed the severity of the other day. I was in and out of consciousness for those three days. My dad worked at that hospital (he’s a surgeon) but they wouldn’t let him work on me, because they said something about it being too stressful or whatever.
“Ryan lived, too. He was in the hospital for a month before they put him in jail. They didn’t keep him very long, I don‘t know why. His family moved to Seattle once he was out. His social life in Chicago was pretty much fucked anyways.
“I was in physical therapy for a year. My parents wanted to send me to a psychologist but I refused. I didn’t want to talk about it to anyone, ever. I explained it to Rush And Ruin and my parents and the police, but other than that, I try not to revisit the accident.
“But I think that’s what really converted me to music. I mean I loved music before, but it really became my life after that. The kind of songs that make you forget and the kind of songs that comfort you. I dove into it. Then Rush And Ruin came along… and now that we’re here, it’s like… ‘I survived and I’m beyond lucky.’”
Gerard’s face was indescribable. It wasn’t that kind of sympathy face I normally got. It was more horror. And honestly, he looked furious.
“Why do you look so mad?” I asked, unsteady.
He shook his head. “I just… I just can’t believe that happened. That some boy was stupid enough to do that. And hurt you.”
I shrugged. “It’s just memories and a fucked up hand. I’m angry with Ryan because he drove drunk, but I haven’t spoken to him since the accident, so it’s hard to be mad at someone you never even see.”
I was definitely crying by then. I always tried to be tough when I talked about this, because I never liked showing that I felt pain over it. Blocking it out, not dwelling on it, was the only thing that had worked for me all this time. For the first month after the accident it had been non-stop crying and nightmares and weight loss because I hardly slept and had no appetite. But after that I promised myself to never react like that again.
Gerard came over to my side and hugged me, rocking me back and forth gently, hushing me and trying to calm me down. I hated that so much. Not that he was trying to help but that I needed help. It killed me. And I was humiliating myself to someone who I had idolized for years! But here he was, hugging me, caring, not thinking I was completely off the wall.
“I’m sorry,” I said, sniffing. “This is really embarrassing--”
“Don’t you dare feel embarrassed, Clayah Shier,” Gerard said firmly. “If you didn’t cry over this I would think you were insane.” He hugged me tighter. “I’m just sorry that that happened to someone like you.”

While I hugged Clayah, and her tears drenched the shoulder of my shirt, I swore I would track down this Ryan kid.
And strangle him to death.
What hurt more was I never fucking knew! Why had Todd and Claire never told us? I mean, true, we tried to know as little as possible about Clayah’s life, but still. We deserved to know this. Isolated from her life or not, Mikey and I were still her big brothers.
But as much as we both deserved to know, I wasn’t going to tell Mikey yet. Not until I had wrapped my head around it. It hurt me down to the bone. The core of my bones, even. I couldn’t even imagine how it could hurt Mikey. I knew they had a special bond I would never know, but in my soul I knew Clayah and I had one too. And not just now.
“Gerard?” Clayah said, pulling her face up from my shoulder. She had stopped crying, but I was fine with her burrowing into me.
“Yeah?”
“Could you not tell anyone? Please? I hate people knowing. Even Mollers, and I already love her to bits.”
I grinned at that. “I promise I won’t if you don’t want me to.” She smiled and leaned on my shoulder again. I just kept my arm around her, letting her know without words that I was there.
‘And you’re family, Clayah. You’re my little sister and I love you. I always have. You just don’t know it yet.’