Seeking Solace

Lunch, as always, is agonizing.

I pick at my food, not really eating, just doing it to have something to do with my hands. I sit awkwardly amongst people I’ve known for at least 8 years, yet I have never felt close to. But I know that I’m lucky they decided to take me in. I could be on the outside, on another table, another target for my group of ‘friends’. I could even be outside right now, but we have to keep up a good appearance for the adults, even though the other kids know better. This is how this gang works.

Luke’s halfway through some epic storytelling of his life, which involves him banging someone’s girlfriend for the third time this week, when he notices some idiot who isn’t hanging on to his every word.

That idiot would be me.

“Iero!” he snaps, glaring at me, while the rest of the group just stare, “I can’t concentrate on what I’m fucking sayin’ if you’re gonna sit there like a fucking emo, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

Luke takes pride his ability to use his favorite expletive at least 3 times in every sentence that dribbles out of his retarded little mouth. I swear he only know about 100 words at the most.

I mutter and apology, and he whacks the back of my head.

“Don’t give me any bullshit apologies, fucking pay attention, faggot!”
I stay silent, keeping my eyes on the disturbingly slimy food on my tray. I’m just too tired to look up and pretend to be fascinated for once.

“Why the fuck don’t you wear t-shirts either, Iero?” he asks next, and my heart suddenly breaks into a sprint, “What the fuck is up with your motherfucking hoodies all the fucking time?”

I grip my fork, snapping the plastic.

“It’s cold,” I murmur, trying desperately to act normal. Except I’ve been quiet and uncooperative all week, which has kept Luke pissed this whole time.

“Fuck you, Iero,” he grumbles, turning back to his crowd of admirers, “Pay attention, faggot.”

I breathe a sigh of relief in my head, and try to tune him out again, but his man-whore story takes a different turn.

“She said her boyfriend is this kid…Carlson I think his name is? Fucking emo faggot he is, she told me he was suicidal and all this shit right?” He grins at the absurdity of it all, the crowd obediently guffaws, “Fucking cuts his wrists and all, probably for the attention, you know what those dumb chicks are like, right? Bullshit, all of it. I cut her up a little and she shut up.”

“You should’ve fucked her too,” one of the sheep in the crowd chuckles.

He laughs and starts to answer, but I decide I’m not going to stick around to hear it.

I stand up suddenly and a hush comes over the table and Luke stops.
“Iero-“ he starts again.

I leave my tray there, sling my bag on my shoulder and walk away.
I’ll got a black eye last time I defied him. This time will be worse. I decide I don’t care.

I soon realize that I have nowhere else to go. There’re still another fifteen minutes left of lunch, and kids that aren’t seniors can’t leave campus. My choices are either to hide in the bathroom like a pussy, or go to the library like a nerd. Neither is in any way desirable.

So I end up wandering the halls, avoiding the eyes of everyone I pass by, heading in the direction of the library in case anyone decides to stop me to ask where I’m going. As I walk, I try to think of somewhere else that I could waste fifteen minutes, because I sure as hell don’t want to end up sitting in a room full of geeks, doing homework I don’t want to do, but should have done.

My miserable drifting soon brings me to the arts hallway. I usually avoid this hallway, because the kids here annoy me. They walk around with this pompous arrogance like Luke and his gang does, only they’re actually geniuses, so can get away with calling the rest of us idiots, without using violence to make a point. The art kids are the ones with the money, the obnoxiously huge houses, the swollen egos, the ones who are hated bitterly yet envied because of everything they have. I never thought I’d understand any of them; I had immediately set it in my mind to hate them all. They’re all the same. Having different faces doesn't’t mean shit.

With that mindset, I would have never wandered here, never seen everything I’d been missing. But walking through here, suddenly I do realize what I’ve been missing, what I’ve been walking blinding past for years.

The photographs, the drawings , the paintings on the walls; some bright splashes of color that catch my eye and spin me around until I’m dizzy; others with barely any color at all, yet still dance, amaze me, capture me like nothing ever has before. Not much further away, I could hear a piano singing softly and beautifully, but I’m too overwhelmed by what I ‘m seeing to really care at this point. The weird thing is, I’ve never thought much of art. Of course music is huge in Jersey, but all of that seems to have passed me by. I don’t care. I don’t care about ‘passion’ or the effort put into something. I don’t care about some ‘story’ someone’s trying to tell. It doesn’t matter, because in the life I led, nothing fucking matters. Life is hard and you fucking get on with it, until there’s no one left to blame for your own failures, until there’s no one left to beat the shit out of, until you’ve tried to fix so many things with your fists, you’ve forgotten who you were before you even got into this shit.

But for the first time in the few short years I’ve lived, I feel something.

I’m afraid to touch them. I don’t want to ruin something so beautiful- even the ones that weren’t as good as the others, the ones that would be shoved aside by everyone else, they stand out to me- because I feel like I’m not meant to be here. I’m just some dumb tourist wandering around in a world that I don’t belong to, a world that will never accept me, a world I’ll never be allowed to wander through.

And it hurts. It hurts knowing that something that I feel could love for once, something I’ve discovered for myself, I can’t ever have.

This is why there is never any point in my being happy.

I hate to break myself away from these walls – I can’t believe I’d become so attached to something that so many people would call stupid- but I know that sooner or later, Luke will send his minions after me, and I'll get my face ripped off. I sigh heavily, and begin to leave.

“HEY!”

I jump at least a foot in the air, hearing a sudden shout in my direction. I whip my head around, feet already pointed in the opposite direction to run from Luke’s drones and save my face.

But there’s nothing behind me, except an open door.

I don’t relax; instead I watch the corner behind me cautiously, waiting for them to appear. I’m paranoid, so of course I stay alert in case of false alarms. It’s saved my ass more times than I can count.

I hear laughter, and my eyes snap to the open door. Looking further in from where I stand, I can see that it’s a room full of desks with slanted tops, for drawing on. An art room.From the rectangle of room I can see, there’re easels, paint, paintbrushes, blank canvases and half-finished work strewn around the place. And in the midst of all the chaos, are these two people.
The person who had called me grins (almost condescendingly, unless it’s just my imagination) over his polystyrene cup of coffee. Starbucks, I note with disgust.

“You wanna come in?” he says, and the girl beside him looks over at me and giggles. I feel uncomfortable, clearly out of my element here. But the more I stand there watching him, the more I realize that he means well, and isn’t just taking the piss like others like him do.

So I take one last look around, to make sure no one’s seen me, and walk in.
When I’m in there, I’m immediately hit by the strangely comforting, warm smell of paint and sawdust, the smell of clean paper and the caustic sting of spirits that they probably use to clean up paint spills or something. I don’t know. I’m not an art geek.

Who knows how long before I am one though?

The boy – looks like a senior- turns back to the girl perched on a stool next to him, and continues on with his story, making all these elaborate and fascinating movements to explain his story with just his face. I notice how well he’s dressed too. Not obnoxiously. Very well dressed obviously, but…dressed for himself. Not like the other kids who dress up to point out how awesome they are. He dresses this way out of respect for himself. A black waistcoat and a pinstriped white shirt and black skinny jeans. With long brown hair that he pushes out of his face with a carefree toss of his head, it’s obvious that if I was found here with this guy, I will most likely lose my straight nose.

And as I watch him, I look down at myself and feel ashamed for not having that kind of respect for myself. For not being proud of who I am like this guy…but what is there to be proud of? What do I have? I can’t swim – I almost drowned last time I tried – if I tried dancing, I’d kill everyone in the room, and yeah, I can throw a good few punches, but I’m so frustratingly short and light, I’m hardly any use in a fight. I’m usually the decoy.

Decoy.Easily disposed of.Useless.

Yeah, they would never miss me.

I don’t realize that there’s someone else in the room until I hear a quiet sniff behind me. Paranoia flares again and I spin around, only to find this guy hunched over a sketchbook, pitch black hair spilling over his face and his work. I can’t help but think how I’d love to grow my hair out like that. But Luke would hit me and call me a faggot like he always does, and I try to stay out of his way as much as possible.

I stand there like a creeper, just watching him draw, and eventually I work up the guts to walk over and see what he’s doing. With another paranoid glance at the door, I head over to his desk, trying to be all quiet for some reason. That’s not creepy. That’s not creepy at all.

So I’m there just peering over his shoulder, managing to catch a glimpse of this figure of a girl or something, when he suddenly freezes. I freeze too, cursing at myself for getting caught. I should have just said something. Now I just look like this weird stalker breathing down his neck. He probably hadn’t even heard me come in….some great first impression this was turning out to be…

He straightens up a little and looks at me through his hair in shock for a minute, before pushing it behind his ears and clearing his throat. “Can-“ his voice is raspy and whispered, so he clears his throat again, “Can I help you?”
His voice is so quiet, meek, I feel uncomfortable again. For what? All I did was look over his shoulder but…I feel like I was intruding and that I should apologize.

God, Luke was going rip my balls off and feed them to me as soup if he found out about this.

“Sorry,” I mumble, stupidly not able to meet his eyes, “I, um…I just wanted to…to see.” I clear my throat awkwardly.

He blinks at me a few times and frowns. “See?” He looks down at his drawings as if he’s trying to figure out what the hell was so special about them. “See…this?”

I shove my hands into the pockets of my hoodie and nod, still avoiding his eyes. “I didn’t mean to like, disturb you or anything. I mean. Sorry.” I glance up at his confused face and felt so incredibly awkward, I just drop my head again, “Sorry I’ll just-“

As I’m turning away, I hear the only other conversation in the room suddenly stop and I freeze again, cursing my awkwardness. Fuck it, I need to get out and talk to people for fuck’s sake…

“Hey, Gee,” the well-dressed boy calls from across the room, “Show the kid the vampire one.” I can hear the smug smile in his voice when he speaks, and somehow, that gets me all excited for what I apparently might see.

Gee (wonder what his actual name is) bites his lip and looks down at his sketch book again, but can’t quite hide the smile that pulls up the corners of lips. He sighs, pushing himself away from the desk, and slides off his stool. Getting up, he turns around to the shelves behind him, and finding one with his name on it, digs through the massive piles of art to find what he’s looking for. I watch him curiously, and notice he isn’t dressed much better than me, which makes me feel better (in a cruel way, but still). The ends of his jeans are torn and ragged, and shirt he wears under his sweater is at least a size too big. I feel like maybe I could fit somewhere in this world if he can. But I know that I don’t have the talent to survive, so again I feel like I’m intruding.

He eventually finds the picture he’s looking for – a small A4 piece of card- and turns around to hand it to me. I’m hesitant to touch it- I still feel like if I move too fast, I could smash this whole world to pieces – but after a second, I reach out and take it.

I look over the colors- only three; black, white and red- and at first, the picture doesn’t make any sense to me. I see shapes and curves of lines, and red strokes drawn in arcs across the page…I just can’t understand it all.

Seeing the confusion on my face, he smiles softly and outlines the image with a one pale finger. As he traces the lines for me, I start to see it, the curve of a woman, a claw, the blood….

“Wow,” I say, stunned, and the guy across the room chuckles and goes back to his conversation. I just keep staring at the picture in amazement, wondering how someone could take all these lines and…

And then I notice the finger that he uses to show me his picture is ragged around the edges. Torn with dried blood around the bed of the nail, the skin red and painful. It’s obvious he tears at his fingers. Regularly.

I think of my own fingers, and then my arms and the rest of the body that I keep hidden under long-sleeves and pants, and for a minute, I forget about the picture. I look up at his face- a few inches above mine- and see…I see a pale face with sad brown eyes, framed with black hair that hangs down to his shoulders, a beautiful person hiding pain that I think I know.

I see someone who I want so badly to connect with, more than I ever have before. I don’t know why.

And I see another broken boy, so close to making the choice I have promised I will make just next week.