• Help

    I always wear a sweatshirt, even if I’m hot. No one asks about it, and I am sure that everyone for miles knows. Once my sister had a friend sleep over, when we were all a few years younger. Her friends always had little crushes on me. I was making m&m pancakes in my black t shirt with stars on it. I still wear that shirt. I wear it whenever it’s clean, even sometimes when it’s not. So my pale arms were nakedly exposed, and my sister’s friend asked me what happened to my arms? I fell on my skateboard, I said. A dirty lie. My skateboard was rotting in the garage, next to my sister’s rollerblades. They were pink and had rainbow sparkles and shiny purple streamers coming out where her toes went. She told her friends that they were a hand-me-down. But I thought you only had a brother. They’d say. Exactly. And they laughed. Another time I walked to James’ house and had to ask for a band-aid. My sweatshirt had started to smell stale and copper. He insisted on watching me put it on. This made me more uncomfortable than he should have been. But he wasn’t, or didn’t seem it. Why? He asked. I told him I didn’t know. And I made him vow secrecy. He doesn’t go to my school anyway. There’s really no one he could tell. Just in case. Also James is my best friend, and secrets, I hear, are what bond best friendships. In return, I didn’t tell anyone that he wanted my mom. I actually am in mostly a state of denial on this subject, as would you be, had it been your mom. The house phone rang. “Hello?”
    “Hey, Sweeny.” It was Natalie. She loves animals.
    “hello,” I said.
    “So I was looking up some snake stuff. The cheapest one I saw was like $75, not even including the cost to maintain them- more feeder rats, a cage,”
    “Silly Natalie, I am a determined little boy. I cannot be discouraged.”
    She laughs “You’re doing this to spite me.”
    “Am not, I’ve been planning this forever. Before I even met you. I got the rats for cheap when they were little so I could get them to be big enough to feed my snake. I will get a snake. Not merely to eat the rats, but to fulfill their destiny.”
    “You’re awful, you heartless murderer.”
    “Me? You’re not much better, an aspiring-food chain destroyer.”
    “Sweeny! What would you even do with a snake? Watch it? I don’t think you can walk them or anything.”
    “I can wear it.”
    “I’ll buy you a necklace.”
    “I’m getting a snake.”
    “Your rats deserve to live. I’m going to save them”
    “What if they’re suicidal. I hear feeder rats get vicious when their lives are in steak of being saved.”
    “I don’t know why I try.”
    “I don’t know. Well, I need to feed the rats. I’ll see you Monday.”
    “If you come to school a murderer ,I’ll kill.”
    “That’s a bit hypocritical.”
    She sighs, but I can tell she’s amused. “See ya, Sweeny.” That’s how it is with the girls at my school. They give me lots of hugs, too, which is possibly why the male population of the high school doesn’t associate with me. I don’t think I would like them if they did, though. I have low tolerance for worthless company, as most of it is. After years of this life, my standards for humanity dropped. That was when I started getting friends. Mom should wake up soon. I want to go to the pet store. Now. Mom lets me borrow her car sometimes to pick up Lane from school. That I can’t legally drive is no concern of hers. Maybe I could take the car out now.
    Guys at school think I’m gay. Even some mean girls. But really, I don’t like guys or girls. I dated a girl the summer before I was a freshman. It ended and I gave up. Without expectations, everything is a pleasant surprise. The night I went to the E.R., I was watching “A Shot of Love with Tila Tequila,” who is okay with both genders, and apparently goes as far as beyond the boundaries of humanity; she kissed a dolphin. One of her concubines was filmed telling me how envious she was of the dolphin. This made me laugh a lot, and feeling giddy with the humor of interspecies affairs, I made that fateful incision. It was never supposed to be that deep; the TV had me distracted. I hated how nurse after nurse after doctor after secretary after nurse had to ask “How did this happen?” Didn’t these people talk among themselves? No, I picture the hospital staff at their cultic round table. Candles hang from the ceiling and on the walls making shadows deepen their faces and move them even when they are, in fact, still. Archaic grand chairs and velvet lining and intricate designs on the table’s legs.
    “Let’s make him say it over and over till the scar never heals.”
    “Don’t let him forget it,” I imagine them saying, “keep asking him how.”
    “Emotional scars, explained a doctor with an accent, leave the emotional realm for the physical,” he said. “Let us remember our purpose is not to beat down the sick, but to stick them in alcohol that burns and burns till they are clean.”
    I don’t understand my brain at all. I have a vivid imagination, strange and precise, and I’m not sure when I’m hallucinating and when I’m thinking. I don’t remember when, but sometime between my birth and now, I gave up on sanity. But still I haven’t given up on… I’m not sure what.
    I don’t really want a snake. But you see, I don’t know where that conversation would have gone had that verbally been the case. I love my rats. And that is a secret. I don’t know why, but it is. Maybe humans need secrets to keep with themselves, too. I wish James would have exercised that with the whole my mom thing.
    The engine dies, I realize I’m the one who killed it, and I am brought out from the mental realm back into the physical. I’m in my mom’s car at a busy intersection across town. I go to the strip mall where the pet store is. Instead, I park near the video store. I could never afford a snake, anyway. A guy I know works here. I open the door, and bells alert the workers. “Vicky!” I sing. I call him Vicky because even though his name is Victor, he’s far too feminine for such a name. “Hey! Sweeny.” He more identifies me than greets me after he emerges from behind a row of videos. I don’t feel like talking; I take his hands and mold them into mind, pulling our stiff bodies closer. It revolts me, as the teller of the tale. I pity the receiver of this information. So I’ll stop here. But that’s what happens when I’m bored. Whatever’s closest. I keep my eyes close, opening them only every now and then to be sure I’m still alive. But when I get a glimpse of what I’m engaging in, I close my eyes harder and burry myself deeper into this pit of physical-ness, far from anything emotional.
    I am disgusting. I leave Vicky there with his insecurities and his tongue twisting around, still tasting my saliva. I drive to the lake. Slice, slice, slice and a little stab. My heart jumps when blood splatters. I’m pretty I’m out of view of the playground and hear a little baby concentrating all its young energy into a uncomfortable screech. What could be its anguish? What has it done in its few months of pampered existence to earn right to this horrid self-condemning cry.
    I consider diverting the knife to my crotch. No, I decide, that’d hurt far too much. And I’m sure to regret it. But that’s not even it. I’m not a sex addict. Strangely, this disappoints me, still not knowing what seed my sorrow grew from. I go on till all the skin of my arm becomes raw and I begin rolling up the leg of my jeans and study my little white ankle. I then look at the blade; abnormally bloody.
    Then I invite Mir in. She is beautiful and a genius in algebra. She says I’m the funniest little thing ever. “Hey Mir, do you want to go downtown with me?”
    Yes, she said. No, she didn’t need a ride. “Love you!” she said.
    We took the ferry across the river from downtown to some neighborhood I’d never been to. She used to live there, she said. She moved after her dog ran away.
    “Maybe we’ll find him,” I said, smiling.
    We walked along the river until we realized our hunger. Shallow words and lots of laughing. As always. But it was fun. We found a restaurant where locals sat at a bar watching a sports event. Football or something. I told her she was beautiful and she said something in weary protest. I watched her eat her grilled cheese, and decided to order her a sundae or pecan pie or something. I don’t like the taste of cheese, especially not secondhand. She would have to taste sweet for me. Then I catch myself. Why didn’t I slice this evil off! Would have been one less problem. Then I think, like really consider her, right there in the restaurant. The words of a song come into my head, “Everything looks perfect from far away.” I look at Mir sitting across me. She has acne on her chin that’d I’d never before noticed. I didn’t want to love her anymore.
    That night when I got home, I didn’t care that I was wearing my sister’s jeans. I jumped in the dark pool that my little neighborhood shares, felt the dark liquid covering me so opaquely. It was comfortable, like a coffin. Life’s natural pattern was killing me indiscriminately. It left me no time to figure out what was rolling over me. I slip, not knowing up from down, not trusting the oxygen bubbles trying to humor my face. If I remain after my lungs are empty, I never have to touch air again. I could sleep here in this pool forever, with no regard for who I am. Just a meaningless existence. To be meaningless is a beautiful liberation. But a depressing one, just the same. I realize that I’m scared to death. Then I realized that I’m scared to death of myself, because tonight deals with myself. The pool is a mirror tonight. And I want to shatter the glass till I’ve bled all infections out. I want to sleep cold and painless. I want rest. still submerged, my head becomes light but a thousand times its natural weight with each throb. My lungs are being squeezed. Surely not the will to live, but something pulls me to the surface. I let the air resume its dominion with a sharp, deep breath. I release all muscles and let them saturate in the black water. Too breathless to care what this gravity-less atmosphere does with my form. And I dwell on the cycle- that mocking feeling, hope, followed by bitter disappointment -that my life’s become. Then I think of everything I’ve ever done wrong, when I was the disappointment. Starting with the first time I lied, telling my mom I ate that awful ham sandwich when it was sitting in the trash can. I remember when I first cut myself. It was before I was even fully corrupt- no media influences or anything had touched me. The idea came as natural as eating. I remember when the line dividing friendship and romance was destroyed. My first girl, my first boy. After some time, I notice all my sins were essentially the same. I get out of the pool and lay on my back, my heart beat audible. I can see it through my shirt-now sticking to my skin. My mom was wrong not to send me to the mental. I hated it when it was first mentioned in the E.R. I even considered crying, it upset me so much. But a psych hospital would do much better with me than I could on my own. My solitude magnifies everything I hate. I have kids to high five, but no one looking out for my mental health. I go inside and put on dry clothes. I look in the mirror for a few seconds, then pull on a sweat shirt and coax my rats in the front pocket. I grab the keys and drive. I know this one really good person. Just one. Her name’s Mary. Everyone thinks either that we’re both gay or that we’re dating. Neither. She’s just the best person ever, so I call Mary.
    “Hey” she answers.
    “Hey. It’s Sweeny.”
    “Hey buddy! What are you up to?”
    “I was headed to the lake; can you meet me there?”
    “Hmm what time is it?”
    “Like nine-ish.” She thinks a little more then says okay and that she’ll see me soon. I sit in the grass that lies in front of the lake and stroke my rats and watch them play and watch the water go on and on into darkness. It doesn’t know when or if the horizon will give it a break, still it perseveres with predator and prey in its depths.