X-Kid

I woke to hushed voices in the hallway at noon, having slept through the entire night undisturbed.

“I don’t wanna go.”

“You have to go. It’s your band, honey.”

“I’m tired of the shit storm it’s become. It’s exhausting. Gerard hardly ever shows up anyway and when he does, he doesn’t come with anything particularly useful. He doesn’t come with lyrics anymore. He doesn’t even wanna talk about it. He’s a train wreck.”

“He’s your friend, Frank. Maybe you can take Alice along with you for some support, yeah?” There was a long silence where all I could hear was just how loud my heart was beating. I couldn’t do that. I never wanted to see him again.

“They have a history. I mean… together. And you know what he’s like…” Jamia sighed and Frank walked off, presumably to go to his band practice, in the end.

---

I found the rest of my things still in my suitcases as I eventually made my way out of the spare room and tripped over them in the doorway. Jamia must have heard me, because she came down the hall to see what all the noise was.

“Oh, I thought you were Frank,” she said, giggling as she saw I’d tripped. We ended up watching TV together for a while until tea time, where Frank never came home.

“He’s not usually late. Gerard must have turned up,” she commented. “Sorry. I mean… I’m sorry.”

“What for?” She was quiet for a moment.

“Frank told me all about it. He’s such a… a…” She couldn’t find the words for it, either. She continued to eat and I tried not to think about what Frank had told her. He couldn’t have known the whole story. Not from my point of view. There wasn’t a lot to say anyway, I guess. There was nothing. That was sort of the point, though.

Gerard Way had stopped contacting me a few years ago now. Suddenly. But I’d heard the stories; I’d seen the pictures in the magazines and heard the rumours spreading. I might have stopped looking for him in the magazines had he not made that impossible by dying his hair bright blue. It was like he did it on purpose, just to hurt me. Just to make it harder for me. He didn’t have to try.

I heard he slept around. That hurt, especially seeing as we were still talking at that point. I still wore the necklace he’d bought me and I was sure at that point that he still wore his, too. I never brought it up over the phone. He never did, either. I heard the rest after he stopped calling, but by then I’d already guessed most of it. His last call had been at 3am, despite him knowing the difference in our time zones. He was upset, and he was drunk, but we hadn’t ended our conversation in a bad way. He chose to never call again after that. He chose.

Jamia and I went back to watching TV once she’d put the kids to bed, and conversation was small but comfortable. She seemed tired, and was probably still wondering where Frank had gone to. It was at that moment that I heard knocking and watched as Jamia sprung up from the couch to answer the door with a sudden burst of energy.

“Oh.” I wanted to turn around and find what had Jamia baffled, but I didn’t. What had Frank done this time was ringing through my head.

“I couldn’t just leave him there,” Frank whispered, but I’d heard. I knew what he’d done. I turned around in my seat just in time to see Gerard walking up the drive with a bag over one shoulder, pushing his hair out of his face to reveal deep purple bruises and heavy bags beneath his eyes. Frank and Jamia stood worried in the doorway as their glances switched between Gerard and I before finally, I got up and left the room. I couldn’t deal with that. It felt too soon. I rushed off to the spare bedroom and closed the door, hearing only a muffled conversation as I turned out the light and made my way into bed early. It hurt to see him looking like such a stranger.