But I'm a Guitarist!

I stared at the clock 5:59. Ten more seconds to go… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…

I heard a small click as my aging radio started blasting a familiar tune. I didn’t bother pressing snooze or even to turn it off as my head started bumping to the familiar beat. I slowly crawled out of my bed and stretched, admiring all the posters on my walls of various bands. I sauntered over to my closet and both physically and mentally shuffled through my clothing, deciding what to wear.

I tugged on a familiar t-shirt until it let go of the hanger. After sliding the black material over my head I slid on the pair of dark blue washed jeans from the day before--who says you need to wash a pair of jeans every day? If they’re not dirty, I’m not gonna wash them. I finished my outfit with a hoody, a pair of fingerless gloves, and my pink studded belt that faintly peeked out from under my shirt.

In the bathroom, I washed my face, making sure I had no blotchy spots before straightening my hair and putting on black kohl. No, not eyeliner. Guys wear it all the time in magazines. I looked myself over in the mirror one last time and headed down to breakfast.

You are now ready for school, Frank Iero.

I walked into the kitchen where my parents were every morning at that time. The smell of bacon immediately stung my nose and I frowned.

“You couldn’t wait until I left the house to go frying up the hopeless pigs?” I questioned her. She replied with a small "sorry" in the tone of voice that made me sure she wasn’t sorry at all. Not a bit.

I let it go, letting her win that battle. I sighed as I slid into a chair across from my father.

Without even looking up from his newspaper he shot a "Morning, Frank" towards me, but I didn't reply. He never looked for conversation. I poured myself a glass of orange juice and drank it quickly before rinsing it out in the sink.

“I better go pick up Abby,” I told my mom before giving her a peck on the cheek. “She doesn’t like it when I’m late.”

I grunted a "Have a good day" noise to my father, picked up my backpack, and then exited out the door and to my car without anymore exchanged words. I drove to Abbys house with The Bouncing Souls singing to me before Abby had a chance to change it when she got in.

Abby was my girlfriend, just to clear things up. She had asked me out about five months ago and I'd told her, "Sure, why not?" What we had wasn’t exactly amazing. But what relationship is? I looked at my parents and they were never like the stories you read in books as a child. A relationship was just a woman and a man sharing one life, right? And so, with that, her and I were the perfect couple in everyones eyes.

What made us a perfect couple to people who didn't know us was our looks. She had a small nose ring and wore her pants tight and her shirts tighter. As for me, I always took care of the way I looked. Sometimes I'd look at the guys at school and some of them really didn’t know how to take care of themselves, although sometimes the grungy look can be rather hot.

It doesn’t take long until I was parked at the end of Abby's drive way, hoping she’d hurry up so we could meet our friends outside of school. Soon enough, though, she was walking towards me, her hair blowing behind her as her messenger bag moved with her legs. She opened the door quickly and plopped her small frame on my passenger seat.

“Morning,” she gave me a smile. I’m about to put the car into drive when I noticed she was still looking at me. I looked back at her questioning. “Can I please have a kiss?”

She asked as if she were asking for a bag of skittles that I kept in my glove compartment; something she was totally entitled to. She just wanted me to make the first move to give it to her.

I shrugged and leaned in and I let her touch her unnaturally soft lips to mine. Before I even knew they were there, it was over. That's just as well--I don’t know why she liked kissing so much. It’s not like it was that special. We sat in silence all the way to school. That was how we were though. We weren’t fighters, we weren’t talkers. We didn’t tell each other anything--we just sat in the silence.



“Frank!” I heard Todd call out my name as he ran to a stop in front of me as I was putting my books back in my locker. He stood there, taking deep breaths from under his white and red Letterman jacket. “There you are!”

If you hadn’t seen Todd and I conversing, you probably wouldn’t have guess we were friends. Todd was the jock type, and somehow we’d been friends since we met. A lot of other people didn’t like me, a lot of Todd's friends to be more specific, but he always stood up for me. He always made sure I was never left out, and I made sure I gave him my opinion when necessary. He was a good friend, my best friend.

“What’s up?” I asked as I slammed my locker door and started walking to my next class. Todd didn’t say anything as we pass a group of girls, my beautiful girlfriend being one in the many. We waved politely to each other and kept walking.

“Have you fucked her yet?” Not prepared for such an outburst that all, I gave Todd a dirty look.

“No,” I told him truthfully, although he didn’t take it the same way I'd meant it.

“I know what you mean, dude,” he sighed as we walk into the classroom and to two empty seats in the back. “Amber barley lets me past second base.”

Confused. What the hell does that mean?

“Kind of sucks for you,” he said. “I mean, you’ve been going out for almost 5 months and she still hasn’t let you fuck her? Maybe she wants your balls to turn blue, shrivel up, and die.”

I laughed, shaking my head, not because it was funny, but because he had it all wrong. She’d been wanting to have sex with me for the past few months and every time she asked I'd turned her down. I just didn’t want to do it. It was kind of gross, the kind of thing you do if you want to have a baby. You didn’t do it for fun. She tried making me feel her boobs, and they had felt weird under my touch and that’s about as far as we’d gone...as far as I ever intend to go.

I stopped by the bathroom on my way to lunch, figuring I'd touch up my black kohl before meeting with Abby. I noticed someone's watchful gaze on me, coming from the hiding place one of the stalls. It started to sort of freak me out and before I could walk out the door, the stall door flew open. But it was only Todd standing there and I let go a breath of relief.

He walked over to wash his hands, "Why do you wear that stuff?" he asked me as if it were some big secret.

"It's kohl," I told him as nonchalantly as possible, despite his questioning stare. “It’s not like it’s eyeliner or anything.”

He was still looking at me. “It looks like eyeliner to me.”

I just shrugged and answered with, “A lot of guys wear it, mostly rock stars.”

He stared at me and muttered under his breath before turning and walking out of the bathroom.

That was weird.