Like I hadn't heard that line before.
I looked at the boy, considering him. I usually didn't go for guys who rode kiddie bikes, but he wasn’t terrible looking. Plus he had tattoos, which was something that would drive my mother crazy if she were to find out, earning him some bonus points.
I'd done worse.
“So where do you want to do this?” I asked, sighing. “The bathrooms in there are pretty decent, but we can always go behind the bushes if you're into that sort of thing.”
The boy gave me a funny look. He seemed confused, like he didn't understand what I was offering.
“I'm actually late for an appointment,” he said before leaning his bike against the side of the building.
He smiled at me, and I could see a little chip missing from one of his front teeth. It creeped me out – the smile, not the chipped tooth. It just seemed so... genuine... and if I knew one thing about guys it was that they were never genuine. There was always an ulterior motive for the things they said or did, and it was the ones that seemed genuine that you had to really watch out for. Those guys were like vultures.
“Thanks for the, um, tip about the bathrooms though,” he added. “I drank about a pot of coffee this morning, so nature's calling. See you around.”
The boy waved before walking into my therapist's office, leaving me confused on the sidewalk. He called me beautiful but didn’t jump at the chance to get inside my skin-tight pants. Wasn't sex what he'd been after? Wasn't that what they were all after? Men were men after all, and once you'd met one you'd met them all, that's what I always said. It was all about the prize in the panties. Besides, why else would he have lied and said I was beautiful, if not to try and soften me up?
I wondered for a minute if maybe I was wrong, if maybe the guy wasn’t a complete tool and was somehow different than every other male human being on the planet.
Nah.
That was absolutely ridiculous. He was probably gay.
Chapter 3
Painted Black
Painted black
Like a room with the lights out
Like a splatter of ink on a page
Like the night sky
Painted black
Like the polish on a nail
Like a shadow on the ground
Like a bruised eye
Painted black
Like the bottom of the ocean
Like the mouth of a cave
Like the depths of a forest lie
Painted black
Are my dreams
Are my heart and soul
Are my tears
Painted black
By my memories
By my worries
By my fears
Painted black
Is my past
Is my present
Is my future, it appears
When I walked into the kitchen the next morning, my mom instantly turned into the clothing police. She had a major problem with my wardrobe. I had a major problem with her nagging about my wardrobe.
“All black again?” she asked as I came into view.
“I'm in mourning,” I said.
“Oh? And are you in mourning every day?”
“Mom, could you be any more insensitive? The lead singer of my favorite band just died.”
It wasn’t exactly the reason I was wearing black, but it was true nonetheless.
My mom rolled her eyes. She always thought I was being dramatic. Honestly, the woman gave me too much credit. I was too lazy to put in the effort for dramatics. I was usually just being a sarcastic asshole.
“Carson, don't you ever get tired of wearing nothing but black?” she asked.
“No,” I had on a pair of black skinny jeans with a black tank top and my black combat boots.
I basically wore a variation of the same thing every day. Besides, black was my power color.
“Black is such a depressing color,” my mom said. “You look like you're on your way to a funeral every day.”
“Well, I am slowly dying in this hell hole called life. Might as well be prepared and dressed for the occasion in case I kick the bucket.”
My mom cringed slightly. “Language, Carson,” was all she said. It figured that out of everything I said she would pick out that one word to focus on. My mom hated it when I swore.
“I'm sorry. I'm slowly dying in this heck hole. Better?”
My mom ignored me. “Maybe you would feel a little better if you changed it up and wore something a little brighter.”
Maybe I'd feel a little better if she left me alone.
“I feel fine,” I said. Despite my mom’s optimism, I wasn’t convinced that throwing on a bright yellow shirt was going to turn me into the delightful teen she wanted and I didn't feel like debating with her over it. “If it makes you feel better though, when I die you can throw my corpse in whatever color coffin your heart desires, okay?”
My mom huffed. “You need a major attitude adjustment, Carson. You can't expect to be happy when you walk around sulking every day, dressed in black from head to toe.”
I couldn't take it. That’s how conversations with my mom always went. We always ended up on the subject of my attitude and how it needed adjusting.
“I highly doubt the color of my shirt is going to do anything for my miserable attitude,” I said flatly. “Besides, what makes you think I'm not happy?”
My mom looked at me for a long minute. I stared back at her blankly. Looking away would’ve meant admitting she was making me uncomfortable. It would’ve meant conceding defeat, something I didn't do. Ever.
We continued like that and I could tell that my mom was trying to think of what to say. I wondered how long that process was going to take when she finally opened her mouth and asked, “Are you happy, Carson?”
I could hear the pity in her voice. I could see it in her eyes. She was looking at me like I was a wounded baby bird.
“Of course,” I said. “I'm practically bursting with cheer and fairy dust.”
I was no wounded baby bird.
My mom cleared her throat. “That poem you wrote didn't sound very cheerful.”
I narrowed my eyes. Stealing a private piece of my writing and giving it to my therapist was one thing, but I couldn’t believe that my mom had the audacity to stand there and (with no remorse I might add) try to strike up a conversation about it.
What pack of wolves raised her and taught her that kind of thing was okay?
“I guess I forgot to sprinkle some of my fairy dust on it,” I said. “Next time you want to steal my writing just let me know, and I'll make sure to remember and do that.”
My mom looked like I just slapped her in the face.
“I didn't steal it,” she started to say, but her voice cracked and I knew I had won the battle.
“I'm going to be late for school,” I said as I turned and walked towards the front door, leaving my mom standing there looking like the wounded baby bird that she had mistaken me for. It wasn't until I had my hand on the knob that she seemed to regain her voice.
“Aren't you going to have breakfast?” she asked timidly.
I opened the door and walked over the threshold, instantly punched in the face with the intense Florida sunshine. I was momentarily blinded, and I could feel my body being deep fried right there on the sidewalk. I hated living there.
“No,” I said over my shoulder. “I think I'll just try starving. Go ahead and call the therapist and let her know I've developed an eating disorder. I might try to score some alcohol off someone on the bus so you might as well inform her that I've become an alcoholic too.”
And then I slammed the door shut behind me.
Chapter 4
Pain
Burns
Punches
Scratches
Physical pain doesn’t hurt
Sometimes I push the pain further
Just to see how much I can take
How close I can get to
Cracking
>
Crying
Falling
Without doing any real damage
Emotional pain is the real villain
That shit
Cuts deeper than any knife
Hits harder than any fist
Burns down more than any flame
It breaks you down
Shatters you into a million pieces
Spits you out
And leaves you in a mangled heap
In the middle of the woods
At the center of the ocean
In a dark hole thousands of feet deep
Too destroyed to be repaired
As the bus drove toward the school, I thought about my argument with my mom. I probably shouldn't have said that last part. It was a low blow and wasn't very nice, but I wasn’t exactly a nice person, so I guess I was just living up to my reputation as a cold-hearted bitch. My mom had never called me that herself, but she didn't have to. I could tell that's what she probably thought when she looked at me. Besides, I'd heard it from enough people to know that it was the general summation of my character. If my mom hadn’t thought that of me before... Of course, that's what she thought. The label was practically stamped on my forehead.
My father was a cold-hearted bitch too. He was also an abusive alcoholic, so I knew my comment probably hit a little too close to home for my mother's comfort, but unfortunately for her I was the product of both her and my father, and apparently I inherited his heart, not to mention his sharp tongue.
It was a lethal combination.
Those weren't the only traits I got from the sorry excuse of a man that the hospital records insisted was my daddy dearest. I liked to think of him as more of a sperm donor. A sperm donor that stuck around, in the physical sense at least, for fifteen years. A few family resemblances doesn't make a person a dad, so although I was born with his light brown hair and facial freckles, I didn't consider the guy that was never there for me and spent his days drowning in a bottle while yelling at the television screen, to have ever been my father. Besides, I'd managed to terminate those similarities for the most part. It was amazing what a box of black hair dye and some powder can do.
I'd been dyeing my hair and hiding the freckles under powder since I was fifteen. There were a few drawbacks. My waist-length hair sometimes had the consistency of straw and I was already fair-skinned, so the powder gave me the complexion of Casper the Ghost’s paler sister. Those were small prices to pay though. Nobody would ever say that I resembled Julian Reynolds in the slightest.
Unfortunately, the last name was something I couldn't conceal, at least not yet. My mom wouldn't let me change it, but soon I would be eighteen, and my life wouldn't be hers to control anymore. I'd be able to do whatever I wanted and be whomever I wanted. In just a few months Juliet Reynolds would be no more.
There was one other part of myself that reminded me of my genetic father that I couldn't cover up, though it wasn't for lack of trying. I had this little scar below my bottom lip, a scar I'd had as long as I could remember. When I was seven I asked my father how I got the scar. It had been in the morning. I remember because there had only been one empty bottle of beer on the coffee table. My father hadn't started on the hard stuff yet and so he had been relatively sober – a little hungover from his routine binge the night before – but he had been mostly coherent, which was a rare occasion.
“Dad, what's this mark on my face?” I remember asking him.
“It's a scar,” he said, his voice more irritated than slurred.
“Where did it come from?” I asked. I hadn't yet learned that my father didn't care much for my questions. Or my existence.
“I don't know. Maybe you stabbed yourself with a fork when you were younger,” he said before stretching across the couch. “Now make yourself useful and get me a beer, would ya, kid?”
So I fetched my father a beer and then did what I always did when something he said made no sense to my seven-year-old brain. I went to my mom and asked her the same thing.
It was then that my mom told me the tragic tale of the time when I was a toddler and fell out of my stroller. According to the tale, my father had been pushing me in my stroller as we all took a nice walk through the park as a family. Even at seven this shocked me because I couldn't picture my father ever agreeing to go anywhere with sunlight and without booze. Apparently my father hadn't always been a drunken waste of skin, at least that's what my mom always said (though she wasn't quite so colorful with her language). Anyways, my parents had stopped walking for a minute and that's when it all went down. I guess my father saw and unleashed dog across the park and moved my stroller, forgetting that he had just unbuckled the straps around me, causing my innocent and helpless body to tumble out of the stroller. My front tooth went into the skin below my lip and, well, the rest was history. I hadn't stabbed myself with a fork after all.
So I was left with the quarter-inch long scar on my face and despite the fact that a quarter-inch probably didn't seem like very much, whenever I looked in the mirror it was the first thing that jumped out at me. I’d spent years trying to cover it up with every cream and powder the cosmetics aisles had to offer, but nothing did the trick. The scar always rose to the top, creating a crack in the crust of my skin like a quake creates fissures in the earth.
Every time I saw it I was reminded of the deadbeat whose DNA ran through my veins.
For the most part I had more of my mom's features. I had a small nose, full lips, and bright blue eyes the size of saucers. I also shared my mom's tiny figure and wavy hair. When I was younger I didn't mind the resemblance or the constant comments from people about how I was practically the spitting image of my mom, except brunette. When I was about fifteen though (right around the time I started dyeing my hair and covering my facial freckles) I decided I was tired of being the spitting image of anyone. I grew my hair out so it didn't match my mom's blonde, shoulder-length locks and began straightening it every day. I started ringing my big blues with black eyeliner and shadow. I painted my nails black. I got a nose piercing (fortunately I also inherited my mom's loopy handwriting and was able to easily forge a parental consent form).
I couldn't do much about the tiny frame unless I wanted to eat myself into obesity, but I learned that being tiny had its advantages. Maneuvering yourself on a guy's lap while sitting in the front seat of an itty bitty car caused minimal discomfort when you yourself were an itty bitty being. I didn't try to hide the full lips either. Nah, I played those up big time.
From that point on I looked like a completely different person and I liked it that way. I didn't want to look like either of my parents. By that time, despite our outer similarities, my mom and I were night and day as far as our personalities were concerned. I was the eternal cynic while she was the eternal optimist. I was sarcastic, hard, a stone wall. She was kind, soft, a spring breeze.
And my father? Well, my father was dead so...
“Move it, whore.”
I felt a shove at my right shoulder, which pushed me back to the present. I looked at the girl sitting next to me. She was glaring at me and as I glanced past her enormous head I saw through the bus window that we had arrived at Bishop High School. I gave the girl a nasty look before making a big production out of picking up my bag and zipping it shut. I slid out of the seat as slowly as I possibly could, letting my foot linger behind slightly. The girl was too busy shooting invisible darts into the back of my head to notice this and she tripped over my ankle, landing flat on her face.
“Bitch,” she muttered from the ground.
How original.
I smirked and made my way off the bus, heading towards a different Hell.
Chapter 5
Swirls
I carve swirls into my notebook
To keep myself from carving lines into my skin
It doesn't take the urge away
But it distracts me long enough
For the urge to fade
Or at least I pretend it does
The truth is I think I'm kidding myself
The urge doesn't fade within the swirls
It just simmers there
For a while
Sometimes a while is a few minutes
Sometimes a while lasts a little longer
Eventually the simmer turns into a boil though
And my brain swirls in chaos
And once again all I can think about
Is carving the pain away
I hated geometry. It made absolutely no sense to me, and I didn't care enough to spend time trying to make it make sense. I figured if my brain didn't automatically understand how to find the area of a triangle then I shouldn't irritate it by trying to force the issue.
It hadn’t always been this way. The first time I took the class people had said that if you understood algebra then you might struggle with geometry, but what about people that struggled with math in general? Where did they fit in? I really had given it a solid effort in the beginning, but it was just so confusing. And then my dad and Bree left and I lost what little motivation I had to make sense of the mathematics of shapes. I mean, how many times in my life was I going to come across a big triangle that demanded I tell it how much room was inside it?
Exactly.
Unfortunately, my teacher didn't share my philosophy and insisted on asking me questions she knew I didn't have answers to. You'd think after failing someone's class two years in a row that they'd get the hint and leave you to sit in the back of the room and rot the third time around. Mrs. Aito didn't operate that way, though. Either she was extremely optimistic (delusional) and thought my light bulb moment was bound to come, or she just took great pleasure in humiliating me in front of a class full of sophomores. I’d always had a feeling the latter was more likely.
I was drawing swirls on the back cover of my notebook when I heard Mrs. Aito's voice. “Carson? Carson, did you hear me?”
No.
“Yes,” I said, still giving my notebook my full and undivided attention.
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