5th Period Massacre

It would have been odd to see the two boys walking together, almost too close to be just friends, since they looked so… different.

Or maybe ‘different’ was just the word to describe their appearances. In reality, they had fairly the same personalities. But it was impossible to see personalities through clothing. Still, they walked alongside each other, their arms accidentally bumping together.

It was winter in New Jersey, and the temperature had dropped so dramatically that one day, they were wearing t-shirts and the next, they were wearing thick coats. Well, one of the boys was in a winter coat. The other was in a dirty, black hooded sweatshirt and ratty, ripped jeans. The taller of the boys, the one in the coat, was trying to convince the other to borrow his jacket.

“Because, Frank, I’m in a coat and I’m freezing my ass off! So m-maybe you should borrow it,” the skinny boy tried to persuade his friend, his arm already slipping out one of the sleeves.

“I told you, Mikey, I’m not cold at all,” Frank disagreed, his eyes keeping forward. “I’ll just wear one tomorrow. I’m going to have some coffee when I get home, anyways.”

Mikey, the tall skinny boy, frowned. “Are you allowed to come to my house yet? I mean, are you un-grounded?” He pulled the coat off of himself, offering it to Frank, who shook his head.

“N-Not yet. But by the end of the week, my mom says I’ll be un-grounded,” Frank murmured, his cool voice floating with the wind in a calm manner. “It was so unfair, though. It didn’t need to be a week. Sorry.”

The ‘sorry’ was an apology for being Mikey’s only friend, but Mikey didn’t mind, because he thought that Frank was a pretty cool guy. “B-But… why were you even grounded in the first place?”

Mikey was timid about these questions because Frank didn’t really talk about his home-life a lot. Mikey had rarely ever been over to Frank’s house, and when he did get a chance to go over, he was usually out within two minutes. Frank never let him get in farther than two feet in the house, so Mikey sensed that maybe he wasn’t wanted in there. But he could deal with that.

“My frog. It died.” Frank stated, clearly cutting off the rest of the conversation. But Mikey was too caring to stop prying, and wanted to know why his friend would get grounded because of a dead pet.

“But why?” Mikey questioned in the tiniest voice possible, because sometimes Frank would get hostile about certain things. Mikey could never tell. It was a mean glare from Frank’s green eyes, and then the cold shoulder.

Frank flinched, his hood blowing off of his head. He pushed some greasy brown hair behind his ears and replied, “Because I killed it.” He didn’t go on about how he killed it, though, with the scissors and the... well, that was exactly why he didn’t go on about it. Mikey was too... fragile to hear about those kinds of things.

He said it with a smile, Mikey noted, but managed to shut up for the next few minutes.

Frank’s smile could be friendly sometimes, like if Mikey looked at him during class and made a funny face. He was usually a nice person, and he’d sit with Mikey at lunch and make fun of the other kids who made fun of them.

Mikey was about to say something when someone yelled at them from behind. Frank was the first to turn around, so he got hit in the head with a football before Mikey was knocked to the ground by a larger guy who went to the same school as them.

“What’s up, Frank—or should I say, Faggot? Hanging out with your boyfriend?”

It was the big, deep voice of the superstar athlete of the school, the one who only survived with a mid-fifty average and an only hope to get into a decent college with a sports scholarship.

“No,” Frank exhaled sharply. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mikey try to get up. One of the other big, athletic guys pushed him back down. He heard Mikey’s tiny groan before turning back to James, the biggest athlete of the group that was surrounding them.

“If you have something to say, say it to my face, you fucking faggot,” James grunted, pushing Frank back by the shoulders. The smaller boy fell onto his back, scraping the elbow under his old sweater.

Frank got up and wiped his mouth. “You idiot, I am facing you. So back the fuck off of me and my friend. We’re just walking home from school.”

“Ooh, the little boy got a tough mouth,” James taunted. “Come on boys; let’s leave the faggots so they can fuck.”

The group of heavily-muscled teenagers ran off, laughing so loud that the sound echoed in Frank’s ears.

Frank turned to see Mikey attempting to get up, and groaning. He shuffled over to him, and offered a hand. “Did they hurt you?”

“Kinda, yeah,” Mikey laughed half-heartedly. He still groaned when Frank pulled him up.

They continued walking in silence, until they finally had to part ways for their houses. When Frank got home, he locked himself in his room, and didn’t emerge until morning.

* * *

“Seeya after lunch then, Frank!” Mikey called. Frank nodded, but Mikey probably wasn’t going to see him after lunch.

They had just come out of drama class, the class that Frank didn’t really like. It made him socialize with other students, something that he hated doing. But his friend Mikey was in the class, so he guessed that it wasn’t that bad.

Mikey wasn’t going to be at lunch because he was going to be taken out of school for a doctor’s appointment. Apparently, his arm was hurting in the way that concerned his mother, so now he was leaving the school grounds for a whole hour. Frank wasn’t sure that he’d survive alone.

So he ate lunch in the boy’s washroom when Mikey’s mom came in her car and picked him up. He wiped stray breadcrumbs from his sandwich off of his sweatshirt, the same, old black one he wore each day. It was easy to be the kid that hid in old, tattered clothing and sat in the washroom at lunch when his only friend was away. It was just so easy to hide.

The bell for the end of lunch rang, but Frank stayed unmoving in the stall he was sitting in. The only thing that he could feel then was the outline of his dad’s pistol in his pocket, and the growing smile on his face.

* * *

Period five health class was missing one specific person. There was a substitute teacher, so everyone was goofing around, throwing paper in the air and the typical shit that they did whenever there was a substitute.

“We are missing one student,” the teacher told the class timidly, but nobody was listening to her. “Does... does anyone know where a... Frank Iero would be?”

James piped up, “Yeah, he’s fucking his boyfriend. We don’t need him.”

The teacher sighed and marked a small ‘A’ for ‘absent’ beside the name of ‘Iero, Frank’. She then stood up and put the attendance sheet on the desk, and picked a student to bring it down to the office.

There was a quiet knock on the door, almost an eerie one that made the class quiet down. The teacher breathed in deeply, smiling that the class had finally shut up for more than two seconds. When she got up and opened the door, the smile soon wiped off of her face.

“And who are you?” she asked, and it was Frank who was in front of her in his old sweater and ripped jeans. There was a nasty glow of green in his eyes, but the teacher couldn’t have noticed. She let him slip inside, and take his seat.

“So today, we’re going to learn about how muscles—”

She didn’t get to finish her sentence, because of a sudden screech of metal against the tile of the floor. Frank had stood up in his seat, his hood over his eyes. The teacher frowned, and folded her arms.

“Young man, is there some reason that you—”

Again she was cut off. It was a sudden movement that caught her eye, the movement of black metal slipping into the boy’s hand right out of his pocket, and then a sudden ear-splitting crack that thickened the air for no more than a few seconds.

A few screams escaped when the teacher’s body hit the ground. Frank was already walking up to the front of the room, quiet steps that hardly made any sound. Everyone stared at him, some taking to hiding under chairs or behind bigger people.

Calmly, Frank bent down over the teacher and snatched the keys from her neck, and walked, with silent steps again, to the door. With a small turn of the keys, he had everyone imprisoned in the small classroom.

His eyes surveyed the students, his classmates, his prisoners, to see their reaction to the quiet kid who had suddenly gone from nothing, to the person controlling whether they live or die. It put a smile on his face to see the fear in their eyes, the tears just waiting to pour.

“F-Frank, what are you doing, man?” a boy with short, blonde hair asked. Frank had recognized him; it was his piercing blue eyes that made him tense up. He’d hardly talked to the guy, but he was still pretty okay in Frank’s books, which right now, meant life over death.

“Oh, I don’t know, Bob, what does it look like I’m doing?” Frank asked, flipping back the hood to his sweater. Half of the class flinched, prepared to see some terrifying monster instead of Frank, but it was just him. Just the short, loser that hardly any of them paid attention to. But now, Frank had all eyes on him.

He pulled the gun out of his pocket again, and pretended to examine it with a twisted grin on his face.

“Once you run out of bullets, Iero, you’re so dead—”

“What was that?” Frank snapped, pointing the gun in James’ direction. “Threaten me again. I got a few more boxes of bullets right in my pocket, and I’m not afraid to use them.”

James quivered, but cast his glance somewhere else. Beside him, his girlfriend was silently sobbing, tears running down her cheeks.

“In fact,” Frank continued, starting towards James, “Threaten me like how you always do. Tell me I’m a faggot, right in front of your girl. Say the words, James.”

He had pressed the barrel against James’ temple, and beside him, James’ girlfriend screamed.

“Look, man, I had no idea it was like that—”

“Of course! Of course,” Frank hissed, and turned to the class. “Look, for once, James MacDonald admits that he has no ideas. He’s stupid, he just confessed it himself.”

Some of the people forced laughs, but most stayed quiet. Frank turned to James again. “Do you want to die in front of your girlfriend? How about that, true love at your last moment.”

He gestured to James’ hand clamped around the girl’s. Frank grinned.

“Y-Yeah, Frank, man, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean...” James’ eyes were darting around the room, and he was sweating bullets (how appropriate, Frank thought). Frank pushed the gun harder on the other boy’s temple, glaring with all the hatred in the world.

“Of course you didn’t, James, of course,” Frank’s lips twisted into a smile again, but it wasn’t a reassuring one for James. The way that his flaming green eyes glowed with happiness, with pride... it just wasn’t right...

Frank suddenly frowned. “Not so fast, there.”

He whipped around and fired, shooting Melanie Waterson, the head cheerleader, in the back. She had been reaching for the phone, the one that called to the office. His aim was too good, especially out of the corner of his eye.

“If anyone,” Frank boomed, stomping up to the front of the room, “tries to pull a fast one on me, you’re fucking dead.”

Frank didn’t exactly have a plan for this. The hostage idea was a last-minute one, and even now, he didn’t know what to do with them. He could have them all line up, and he could kill them execution-style. But he was more of a rough-planning person. Whoever he killed, great. Whoever got away, well, it didn’t really matter. The scene alone was so traumatizing that some people were now beginning to hyperventilate.

Frank sighed.

“Getting bored, Iero?” a deep voice asked from the back of the room. Another gunshot, and a third person, dead on the ground.

“Shut up, all of you!” Frank screamed, though no one was talking. “None of you know how to follow instructions. So why should this be any different from any other day? I tell you to shut up, nobody does. Stupid circle of life, blah blah blah, you know. But someone’s gotta break it. This bullying thing is old. I’m telling you know.”

He pointed the pistol at one of James’ friends, and fired.

“See? I have a gun now. A long time ago, he told me I was stupid. And he did the typical bully thing.” Frank shrugged, leaping onto the teacher’s desk. He sprawled himself on it until he was on his stomach, facing the class with a cruel look. “Look at him.”

The class stared up front, at the killer who held them in his hands. Frank’s eyes narrowed. “I said look at him!”

The class turned to the still boy’s corpse in a school sports jersey, on the ground with glazed-over brown eyes. A few girls burst into tears.

“Natasha, why don’t you join me up here?” Frank cooed at James’ girlfriend, shattering the silence in the room. James immediately turned his head to her, pleading with his eyes until Frank yelled, “I said, get up here!”

Natasha, a tall, red-headed girl with brown eyes headed up in Frank’s direction. She gulped with every slow step, taking every chance with her eyes to say goodbye to the classroom.

Frank smiled again. Everyone could see that he was genuinely amused with this—taking people’s lives, watching them bleed into their shirts and lie, dead on the ground. And honestly, Frank could say that this was the most fun he’d had in his life.

“Frank,” James warned in a garbled voice. “Not her, not her. Here, what about me instead? Just don’t shoot her, please...”

“See?” Frank cried, infuriated. “He never listens.” He stood on the table, for Natasha was too tall for him to reach up to her head. He yanked her closer to him by the hair, and pushed the weapon against her skull. “Hey, Natasha, do you know that your little boy-toy, James here, held my head in a toilet for so long that I almost drowned, calling me a fucking faggot, over and over?”

James looked horrified.

“He’s a coward,” Frank whispered into her ear. “Just like how he won’t run up here and save you.”

Natasha gulped. “Someone had to have heard the screams... the cops will be here any minute, my dad’s a cop...”

Frank pulled her forehead so close that their noses were touching. “Stupid, just like your boyfriend.” And he pulled the trigger, and she fell to the ground. James was crying in the background.

The smell of blood was thickening in the room, and even though there were already five people dead in the span of fifteen minutes, Frank was still unsatisfied. He hadn’t killed everyone he hated yet.

“Fuck this.” Frank muttered, and he put the gun down. Some people sighed with relief, but he was only adjusting something on it. “Okay, I’m going to count to ten, and when I get to ten, you’re all going to scream.”

“... What if we don’t?” a girl asked, and Frank looked up at her. The last thing she saw was Frank’s infamous glare as her body thudded onto the ground, bleeding with the others.

“I’m going to kill you all anyways,” Frank laughed. “It just spices everything up when people are screaming. So yeah, feel free to scream your guts out and run anywhere before I blow out your brains.”

“This is stupid, Iero,” James spoke up, finally turning his head away from his dead girlfriend. “You’re nothing but a fucking coward, killing us all because you hate us.”

Frank’s cheeks flooded with red. “You shut the fuck up, James, you don’t have the gun. You ever notice that ‘gun’ rhymes with ‘fun’? It’s a simple rhyme, so it can get through your thick head. So shut the fuck up, unless you’re trying to be brave so you can die a fake and be with your girl. You’re the fucking coward.”

James gulped, standing up. “Yeah, w-whatever, you fucking f-faggot.”

“Oh, getting brave because your girlfriend can’t hear you anymore.” Frank purred before he fired the gun. He turned to everyone else. “That’s six. We’ll start from six then.”

Everyone stayed still. All of the more outspoken people had gotten shot, and now left the others cowering in fear. Frank only had to murmur the word, “Seven,” before they all started chatting to one another, saying last goodbyes and last words.

“I’m sorry I talked shit behind your back.”

“I actually did fuck your girlfriend once.”

“The outfit that you wore the other day burned my eyes out, but I still love you!”

Frank listened to the shallow words from everyone. He couldn’t even believe his ears. All of this, and they’re not saying their true feelings? Stealing lipstick, sharing and telling secrets, all of it was too lame. So Frank cut them all off and yelled, “Eight, nine, ten! Ready or not!”

They didn’t start screaming at first, to Frank’s disappointment, but when the doors of the class burst open, they all started screaming their heads off. It hurt to hear it, and suddenly, Frank’s plan wasn’t following up. He started to fire in all directions. And then he turned his head to see who had just entered the classroom.

Mikey stood in the doorway with two police officers.

“Frank! Put the gun down!” Mikey cried, and what was Frank to do? He wanted to keep his best friend, and had tried hiding this secret from him. He loved to watch people die. That wasn’t exactly a quality that someone would want in a friend.

“Shit, shit,” Frank breathed to himself, wondering what he should do. The cops were shouting at him: “Put the gun down, son, and come here with your friend!” But Frank was just wondering, How the hell did Mikey find me here?

Frank was beginning to feel nervous, for the crowds of people in the class were rushing to the door to get away from his presence. All the while, Mikey was standing there, staring at his friend with wide hazel eyes, asking with looks, “Why would you do this?”

It took Frank some time to remember that the sling over Mikey’s arm was why he did this.

“Frank,” the cop called in a loud voice, even though they were feet away. “Frank, just throw it down on the floor, nobody else needs to get hurt.”

Those were the key words that flickered more thought into Frank’s head. Now Mikey knew that he was a menace to the school, and now he’d have to be expelled and never see his friend again. Trouble, Frank was in big, big trouble.

He thought to his mom, probably sipping some of her favourite green tea at home, wondering if her only son was okay at school and not getting beat up again. And his dad, at work and not knowing that his gun had been taken from the ‘perfect hiding spot’ on the middle shelf his closet, where Frank could just reach.

“Breathe, Frank! Come on!” Mikey urged, but Frank couldn’t even take in another whiff of the horrible smell of blood and vomit. His eyes, now cold and dead, focused on Mikey’s arm in a sling. “Frank! Are you listening to the policeman, Frank? Come on, it’s okay now, it’s...”

Frank couldn’t help but laugh hysterically when he heard the word ‘okay’. It seemed to have an opposite effect on him. With bodies and blood surrounding him, how could everything be okay? Frank suddenly realized what he had just done. He’d taken twelve lives now, he noted while quickly scanning the room. He was a monster. And Mikey was telling him that it was all okay.

He raised the gun to point it at himself, and then went into a full-panic mode when the policemen both lunged at him. His finger seemed to just slip on the trigger. Maybe they slipped on the sweat of his palms, or the blood decorating his fingertips.

But now the death count was at thirteen.