Suffer the little children (C+C from smart people needed)

[deceitful_hearts]

Suffer the Little Children
Author’s note: This is a work in progress, so any input at all would be crazy awesome, and I’d be more than happy to return the favor with anything that you'd like input on. Also, this is not an emo/vampire story. The pictures may make it look a bit like that, but trust me, it's not. Also, I'll put a more specific warning over the chapters, but some chapters include content that may upset or offend some younger readers. There is not a lot of language, but some of the events may be unsettling, and so if you're looking for something light or have a week stomach, this may not be the story for you. But otherwise, enjoy, and please review/ crit. Even if it's a little harsh, please say it, because I really want to make this story good. Also, please, please feel more than free to point out any spelling errors or typos that I may have missed. I checked it twice and ran it through a few spell checks, but sometimes things still slip through. Again, please enjoy heart biggrin heart
Chapter one: Mackenzie Cooper

A lot of lives ended on September eleventh, 2001. Everybody says that we’ll always remember exactly where we were when we heard about the two towers. But I would have remembered, even without a plane going through a skyscraper, exactly where I was on the morning of September eleventh. I was at home, crying in my room.

On September ninth, 2001, I was in the fifth grade. I had walked home from the elementary school with a kid named Mike Donau, a kid who had been my best friend my entire life. And up until about four o’ clock on September ninth, he had lived two blocks away. We did what we’d been doing for the last two years and split ways by the big oak tree on the corner of Green Street and Birch lane.

And then at five o’ clock, we got the call. Nobody could find Mike. We looked all over, down by the lake, by the park. Cops were crawling all over the place, grownups were going around in cars and teenagers were running wild with flashlights. And the whole neighborhood was in a frenzy.

The next day, no mother on the block let her kid out of the house. We all sat in our beds, behind locked doors as the hunt continued. And suddenly things were looking less hopeful. They looked, but they knew something was wrong. We all did. The night before, a missing kid could have meant that he got mad, or bored, and went out for a walk and maybe got himself lost. But when he still didn’t show up, not even in the next town, hope started to fade.

And then the final nail in the coffin arrived. A kid working up at a Wal-Mart, at about six o’ clock on September tenth said that she’d seen him with a man about ten o’ clock the night before. At nine o’ clock that same night, a group of tenth graders saw a strange shape on the edge on the lake. It was a little boy, the blood from his slashed throat turning the sand under him red. He was pretty beat up, missing a few teeth, with about seven snapped bones. But that didn’t stop Mrs. Donau from recognizing her son.

The cops started the manhunt that night, looking for clues, calling in the CSI like in a daytime TV movie. Only this was real. The cops were going to find out who did it. They were going to make the killer pay. But that all just rotted away when the towers fell. Suddenly, one dead kid wasn’t a big deal. At least not to them.

Fifth grade was the year that I realized that kids died too. But anybody who didn’t really know mike was suddenly swept up in WTC. And once people started getting over that, nobody remembered to look for the b*****d that killed my friend. Nobody talked about mike, his family moved away, the whole thing just sort of went away.

I only tried to talk to my mom about it once, but she shut me up quick.
“it’s not healthy to talk about things like that. What happened happened, and nothing can change that”. And so I just kept it all inside.

I guess that wasn’t healthy either, because by the time I hit grade nine, nobody would talk to me. It was that September, the September of grade nine when I thought things might get a little better.

There were a total of 10 kids in my fifth period history class, not counting me. Five of them were too cool to talk to me, all from a different elementary school, a different neighborhood. A better neighborhood, where nothing bad had happened in forever. Then there was a kid named Kenny who had an aid and rocked back and forth sometimes. We pretty much ignored Kenny.

But the other four were hard to ignore. There was Caleb Wroth, who’s brother Aaron was the talk of the town after he and a kid in our grade named Isaac gunned down three drug dealers and threw two Molotov cocktails into the window of their car.

Then there was Isaac Dehker. The lawyers did a good job of pinning the murders on Aaron, but we all knew what he did. He’d spent the year before in a place called St. Anthony’s home for disturbed boys. There were rumors about what happened there, about what the boys did to each other. And Isaac’s eyes once he got back were a dead giveaway that not one of those rumors was a lie.

Rachelle LeRoy was a foster child; her mom was a whore who popped her out right after she turned thirteen. She’d only moved in a month beforehand, but they labeled her right away.

Danny Lynne wasn’t really classified as a freak or a reject like the rest of us were. People mostly felt bad for him, his mom was a bad drinker, and he came in with bruises and bad excuses at least once a week. A lot of teachers cut him slack and let him get away with stuff that most kids wouldn’t have gotten away with. He had a few friends that came and went, and had a few things going for him. He just didn’t fit in with any set group of kids.

I don’t think I was really a freak either. I hung out with a few girls from my English class, and they were alright. I wasn’t as smart as them though, and they acted too grown up. It just felt like wail their energy was going toward school and guys and bands, mine was going toward mike. Everything led back to mike, wanting to talk about mike, wanting to talk to mike. It was almost an obsession.

I think it was the third of October. That’s when we got the detention. Maybe I should have kept better track of my homework. I did it, I always did it, I just lost it. And Mrs. Kerchner was “fed up with how unorganized I was”. And then she was out for blood. She went up to a kid named Alexia next, who ripped the paper out of a binder that looked like it was held together with staples and prayers. She passed by two more kids who had it, but in no better condition. And then she came to Isaac.

He sunk into his seated pulled it out of his folder. It looked like it had been half done on the way to class.
“Is this your best work” she sort of hissed at her.
“No” he looked her right in the eye
“And why not” she got up in his face, but didn’t yell.
“Because I forgot about it until last period.” He didn’t sound like he was trying to be a wise a**, be he didn’t even try to make up an excuse. She shook her head, growing more pissed with every kid who didn’t have it. Nobody had it in good condition, but the only ones who flat out didn’t have it were that kids that stood out. Us, and Kenny.

She wrote a word on the blackboard, the screech of the chalk making me want to pull my hair out.
O-R-G-I-G-N-I-Z-A-T-I-O-N
“do we know what that means?” her voice was just below a shout “I hope so! Because you’re all going to be writing a two page essay on it. Handwritten, single spaced, due by tomorrow. Cooper, Lynne, Dehker, LeRoy, and Wroth, since I apparently can’t trust you to do the work at home, you’ll be completing it in detention today. It’s up to you to notify your parents during your lunch period. Do I understand? Anybody who doesn’t have this essay in by tomorrow can go have a nice sit in the dean’s office. You’re in high school now, you need to be adult about your work.”

My mom was going to flip. Well, maybe not. She was usually cool about stuff like that, I didn’t get in trouble too often, and when I did, it was only for little things. But I knew it would disappoint her, which was worse than making her get pissed off. At least when she’d yell, you could be mad at her for it. But when she was disappointed, it was like you’d broken her heart, like she couldn’t even look at you or she’d start crying. And that was the worst.

I barely listened the rest of the class. I knew that Mrs. Kerchner wasn’t a bad lady. And I knew that I deserved a detention. But it was easier to hate her and curse her name than it was to tell myself that I’d goofed up. And so I spent the rest of the class thinking every swear under the sun, trying to focus all my hate on her skull and make it explode all over the room. But deep down I didn’t wish her any harm.

The bell rung and life went on. There was almost a certain beauty to the way a class ended. A bell commanded your entire day, a sound that didn’t know what it meant or why it even existed, and you had to do exactly what it tolled you to.

Lunch was seventh period. I sat down with the group of girls who I usually sat with, a kid named Mandy Snell was showing off pictures of her cat and the others were huddled around cooing at it. I hated cats. In fact, I hated most animals. I hated when they curled up on me, or tried to lick me. It was gross. They ate each other’s poo and didn’t clean themselves properly after going to the bathroom, to you never knew if there was dried piss in their fur. What was cute about that?

Then another bell rang, one that you could only hear from the cafeteria. It meant outdoor recreation. I usually went, just to get some fresh air. There was an enormous fence around the yard, so you couldn’t do anything other than walk around in a big circle. It was like in those HBO prison movies where they let all the inmates out and they do exactly what we did, walk around a big half dead field. There were a few kids playing handball on the brick wall, and a few more had organized a sacking.

If school was a prison, sacking was rape. Usually a few bigger guys would find a small kid walking around the field with his backpack on. They’d hold him down and rip it off him. Then they’d dump all his s**t out, turn the backpack inside out, put the s**t back in, and zipper it up, and toss it back and forth to one another until the bell rung. That way the victim was left with two choices: he could stay and put everything back to gather and be late to class, or he could carry the sacked backpack through the halls to his next class where he’d have to fix everything in full view of his classmates.

A few kids gathered around to watch. I moved in for a closer look. Adam and Eric were standing over a smaller kid whose name I didn’t know. They finished sacking him, picked up his inside out backpack, and tosses it around. A few of their friends joined in, until the next bell rang and we all had to get on with life. They threw it at him like a dodge ball, and ran off into the crowd of kids trying to fight their way through the door.

The kid brushed himself off, picked up his stuff, and started shuffling toward the building. I felt sort of bad for him, but I knew that I was only a few steps above him on the social ladder. And I was low enough that doing anything dumb could get me dragged past the point of no return.

The kid started moving faster, until he was half running into the crowd. He disappeared behind a wall of people, only to be shoved out moments later, minus the glasses. He blindly groped at the concrete, pathetic beyond all logical reason.

When I walked past him, a few kids had made a game of stomping on his outstretched hand. And I know that I wanted to say something, that I should have said something, but I didn’t. It was easier to ignore.

I walked through the halls, feeling low and invisible. I should have at least given the kid his glasses; they were two feet away from me. But it was almost a security to watch him squirm there. I might have been low, but I was above him. I was cool by comparison.

I hurried off to math, a subject that I was sort of good at. I was sort of good at a lot of stuff, and pulled mostly B’s and low A’s from the bulk of my classes. The only thing that I was pulling a C in was science. I liked life science, and was looking forward to Chem. and Bio, but earth science was hell, especially since they made every other day a double period. And it wasn’t like I would even need to use half of the stuff that we learned in earth science. A rock was a rock, to hell with where it came from. I couldn’t give a rat’s left nut. But the damn teacher was psychotic about that sort of stuff. It was his whole life. At least with math, there was an unspoken knowledge that the teacher was just looking for the money to get to wherever his dreams needed him to go. The young teachers were all so full of hope, like this was just a stop on the road to success. It was laughable.

My math class was big, almost thirty kids. And because we lost some sort of lottery type drawing, we had the “inclusion” class, meaning that ten out of the thirty kids came with an aid. Constant surveillance was hell; you couldn’t get away with anything in that class.

After math was double period earth science. I know that I should have been trying to get my average up in that class, but I couldn’t bring myself to do the work, it was maddeningly boring. We were doing a lab on how to identify rocks, and all I could think was who the hell cares about these rocks. And then my mind wandered from that to the kid, scrambling for his glasses, squealing like a girl every time somebody stomped on his hand. In my mind I could see him still scrambling blindly by the door, looking for the glasses that somebody probably kicked onto the grass. All alone, and not even the teachers would help him.

Maybe I was being too hard on myself, but I just kept swearing quietly, calling myself names for not stopping to help the poor kid. I could see god looking over me, shaking his head and calling me a b***h. Between that and the detention, I felt like the worst kid alive  

[deceitful_hearts]

Chapter 2: Danny Lynne
Warning: Mild cussing
Detention sucked. I think that was the point of detention, just to drive you totally bat s**t insane. I knew that I was crucified as soon as I got home. Tommy was probably all worried about me; there would be nobody to get him off the bus. And if there was, god help us both.

It was beyond awkward in that stupid room. I had crap to do, I couldn’t be sitting around looking at the walls. But I was, and I didn’t have much of a choice. We were pretty much unsupervised, and I guess that that’s how it started. Messed up, stupid, unsupervised kids usually always got into some kind of trouble.

It started out innocent enough. Mrs. Kirchner had this stupid, dumb taxidermy beaver on one of her shelves, and so I made a game of flicking spitballs at it and seeing if they stuck. Soon Caleb joined in, and it became a contest of who could make the most stick. Caleb was a cool guy. He was sort of quiet, and everybody knew about his brother, so nobody had much to say to him. But he was cool once a conversation started up.

We started talking about this stupid movie from history class, “the patriot”. It was ok, a little too much talking and not enough blood. And then we started talking about the 9th grade US History teacher, Mr. Hosara. We made a few jokes about the size of his massive a**, and a few more about his accent, which didn’t match up to any nation that we knew of. And then the jokes sort of turned into bad mouthing.

It didn’t take long before the topic of hate turned to Mrs. Kirchner.
“I can’t believe that b***h just out of nowhere started handing out bullshit homework” Rachelle joined in.
“I’m not doing it” Mackenzie took up the invitation to join too.

We all started going on and on in a hate filled whirlwind of
“to hell with the assignment!”. All of us except for Isaac. I really didn’t like him at all, he scarred the s**t out of me. I could just imagine him coming in with a handgun and splattering everybody’s brains, or slitting somebody’s throat in the locker room, or setting off a bomb or something crazy like that. Especially since everybody knew that in the middle of seventh grade he gunned down an armed drug dealer three towns over, drunk out of his mind with a nineteen year old. Normal people just didn’t do stuff like that.

The other thing about him that I didn’t like was the makeup. He wore more eye makeup than some of the girls in our grade, and laid on his mascara thicker than Malcolm McDowell in Clockwork orange. And there was something in his eyes, something that made me plain out not trust him. He was just a creep. He kept eyeballing Rachelle, like he liked her or something, but in a truly freak way, like some sort of crazy rapist.

And then out of nowhere, that creep picked the book up off his desk and hurled it across the room, over our heads, and hit the beaver. So I guess that if it was anybody’s fault, it was Isaac’s. We all looked at him for a second, like we couldn’t believe that he’d chucked a hardcover copy of Oedipus Rex at a stuffed animal. And he just looked at us all wide-eyed like we were gonna jump up and kill him. He sunk back into his seat and fixed his eyes on his desk, mouthing what looked like the word “sorry”.

The force of the book had knocked the beaver from the shelf, and so we all just looked over at it, like we had suddenly gotten a single collective thought that ran through our heads at the same time. Steal it.

“we should chuck it off a bridge” Caleb finally spoke up. The rest of us just nodded.
“who’s gonna take it?” Mackenzie asked “I mean, if only one person touches it, nobody else will get in trouble.”

I looked back at Isaac, who seamed pretty oblivious to the whole thing, like he was off in his own world. And a little twinge of hate made me point back to him.
“Isaac can take it, and then on Saturday, we’ll all meet by Frog Bridge and toss it into the creek”
“Sounds like a plan” Isaac finally spoke. Even his voice was creepy, about an octave too high for his age, but raspy. There was something uneasy in everything he did, from the slightly off way that he walked to the way that he bent at the knees to get the stupid thing from the floor. He was so impossibly easy to hate. It was too simple to despise him.

He zipped the beaver away in his freakishly large backpack. Something caught my eye as he bent over to zip the backpack shut, a few vein-like, stringy blue lines that obviously made some pattern, but not any familiar geometric shape or letter. I only caught a quick glance, but it threw me off balance. Like maybe he was some sort of mutant freak.

But I had my own problems to worry about. I could imagine my little brother coming home to an empty house with absolutely no explanation for why I wasn’t there to get him off the bus. I wasn’t even sure if he’d safely made it off the bus. And that made me feel sick. I could imagine him at the bus station afraid and alone. Or worse, on his way to Mexico to spend the rest of his life picking beans in the hot sun against his will. I practically stood up and ran out of the room at that thought. That’s what mother always tolled us, that if we left her sight we’d be dragged into a van and be on our way to Mexico before we could even scream.

And back in grade five when there actually was an abduction, she had a field day, telling stories about how she saw the little boy in her dreams picking beans and being savagely beaten by men with clubs, and screaming out for water but he couldn’t have any. And she went on and on for the full two days that the kid was missing. And then they found his body.

I never really knew the kid, but my friend Josh did. He was in josh’s third grade class, and the two of them had had a few play dates and gone to the park with another kid named Rocky a few times, but that was my closest connection to the dead kid, Mike Donau. And even after they found the body, my mother still insisted that he’d died in the hot Mexican sun picking beans, and that his kidnappers brought him all the way back just to dump the body. But after the towers fell, she didn’t have anything else to say about the boy who died picking beans in the fields of Mexico. And so it sort of went away.

I felt my stomach tighten up all of a sudden, like somebody was standing over me, about to hit me. But I sort of shrugged it off; it was just a bad feeling. I looked over at Isaac again. I even hated his name, it just sounded wrong in my head. I don’t know why I was suddenly obsessing over my hate for him. And it wasn’t even hate, just annoyance. His presence pissed me off in ways that I couldn’t even begin to understand. He was like a cell phone on a mountaintop, useless and disconnected from the rest of the world. And when you finally got the slightest response, it was like there was a hundred miles of pure chaotic static between him and the rest of the world. Looking hi in the eyes, I could practically hear the “tick-tick-hiss” of cut wires still being pumped full of electricity. It just made me want to hit him.

I sort of fell back at the thought. Hitting him would probably be pretty fun, he looked easy to hit. He didn’t look like he’d fight back. If I wanted to, I was pretty sure that I could have him halfway dead before anybody could run for help. But I knew that, as much fun as it would be to beat his face bloody, I’d feel bad afterward. I shook the idea off. If I hit him, or stepped out of line, I’d get marked as a freak. I’d be no better than him. And I couldn’t have that happen, I couldn’t have people talking about me.

Plus, any violence that I did to him would find it’s way back to me once the school called mother. I tried to direct my attention to another person in the room. But nobody caught my attention in the way he did. He was just so… I don’t know. Just so easy to focus all of my anger on. Worse than anything I just wanted to smash his freak scull in. I guess that makes me a freak too. But we were all freaks, just some were better at hiding it. I guess that’s life.

I sat there and worried and dwelled for the next 40 minutes. I was so beyond screwed, a dead man walking. Or sitting, I guess. I looked over at Caleb and thought of some way to maybe start up a conversation, but my brain was all dried up. All I could do was look over at Isaac, feeling the hate pumping through me, still hearing that same “tick-tick-hiss” as always.

I opened my notebook and started on the essay.
Organization is defined by Webster’s dictionary as…
I scrawled it out with my pen, I didn’t have a dictionary on me, and was too damned lazy to get up and get one.
Organization is an important aspect of a successful life…
I scrawled it out again. It wasn’t my voice making those words; it was the dull sounding British guy from the movie we’d watched in science class about beach erosion.

The others were all scribbling out words too, like the room just completely sucked the words out of our head. I started on a new essay.
Organization is a useless skill, as when we come of working age, everything will be done by computers and E-mail, so the machine will organize things for you. So if you think that I’m gonna sit in this room and hand write you a pointless essay that does nothing to enrich my learning, you’re out of your mind. Furthermore, I did not neglect the homework because I was unorganized, but because knowing the answer to two essay questions from a short story in a ninth grade textbook will not make me a better person, or better prepare me for the real world, so damn you to hell. Die in a hole.

But I scrawled that out too. If I turned that in, I’d get in trouble, and they’d call my house. But I regretted scribbling it out. I started to write it down again, then looked at the words on the paper. It wasn’t worth it. And so I started off from my second idea, and let the dull British guy in my head dictate to me what to scribble down, feeling a little bit sick as I did. They were training us like dogs. Jump at the bell, do your work, take the right notes, believe what they tolled you to believe. It was sickening. But everybody bought it, and so I guess that I had to too.

I just wanted to rebel. Adults owned the whole world, and there was no getting away from them. It drove me crazy to have to sit back and take crap from everybody and never be able to do anything about it. I scribbled out the words, then re-wrote them.

Organization is an important aspect of a successful life. If one is not organized, he or she can not keep track of work, costing both time and, in some cases, money…

And so I wrote down that damn stupid essay, just like everybody else in the room. The teacher strolled back in as I was writing the last sentence. She sort of looked right through me and back at Isaac. And a stupid sort of satisfaction grew in my gut as she towered over him, demanded to see what he’s spent the last hour doing. And he looked her right in the eye and just shrugged.
“Nothing” and there was defiance in his eyes that I was beyond jealous of. The way he spoke to her like he was totally unafraid of any consequences. And the most amazing part was that he wasn’t even trying.
“That essay is due by the end of the period Mr. Dehker, and if you don’t finish it, you’ll be spending tomorrow in the In School Support room”
“I’ll try” he sounded so indifferent, so unafraid. I knew that if somebody waved an ISS in my face, I would have all but killed to do that they wanted me to do.
“Mr. Dehker, it’s September and you’re already on thin ice. That’s not a good place to be for a boy with a criminal record.”
“I’m aware of that” he was even looking past her shoulder, like he was trying to piss her off by not looking at her. She glared at him, then turned away. And all the time I was just praying that she’d hit him good and hard across the mouth to teach him some respect. A good hard hand across the mouth had done me good, I never mouthed off. In fact, a few good hard hands across the mouth and up the side of my head kept me neatly and nicely in line. He looked back at her in that stupid, detached way that he always did and pulled out his notebook.

She ignored me, which almost made me a little bit pissed off. I’d done good and written her essay and used nice big words and double-checked the spelling and grammar and Isaac got all of her attention. It was just plain out unfair. And that made me hate him ten times more. I thought again about hitting him, about teaching him some damn respect, about beating him back into reality, back into humanity. But I didn’t, because I knew that if I did, people would talk bad about me. They’d think bad things. And I didn’t want that. She corrected a misspelled word on Caleb’s paper and walked back out of the room. And as soon as she did, Isaac put down his pen and started looking at Rachelle again.

I started to doodle on the sides of my paper, making little flames and block letters in the margin. Isaac had a good three inches on me, but I thought to myself almost obsessively that I could kick his jailbird a** if I wanted to. I could pretty much kill him if I wanted to. But I didn’t want to. Not that I didn’t think it would be cool to smash his face in and know that I had the power to make him bleed. I just didn’t want to risk my own safety half killing a kid who’d shot a guy in the stomach and torched a car with the guy’s girlfriend in it. A guy he didn’t even know. It scarred me to think of what he’d do to somebody who pissed him off.

Sitting in the room all of a sudden felt like sitting in the same room as Charles Manson. And suddenly I wasn’t so sure that I could beat his scull in. A paranoia rose up in me, and I wondered if he could hear my thoughts. It was a stupid fear, but if aliens could abduct hicks, why couldn’t somebody read my mind. And in a stupid way, it made sense.

I went back to my doodles, drawing a ringing alarm clock that looked more like a head floating in a puddle. Everybody in the room was dead quiet, and tension started sinking into my skin like a bug, crawling around and making me itch.

My thoughts strayed from Isaac to Tommy. He was probably scarred and cold on the front porch on the house, wondering if we’d left him for dead. Mother had threatened to do that a few times, threatened to pick up and leave us behind. When Tommy was just a baby she’d always run around yelling
“Danny I swear to god if I ever hear you say that word again, I’ll take the money and the baby and leave you all alone to rot. You think anybody wants you’re sorry stupid a** but me? You think anybody else will put up with your crap? No, no way in hell. They’ll leave you to starve to death and spit on you’re dead body, that’s what they’ll do if I leave you here.”

But once Tommy turned three, the threat was
“If either one of you thinks that you can trash my house I’ll take everything and leave you to trash it all by yourself. And do you know what they’ll do? They’ll put you up in a military school, any you’ll never see each other again. They wont even try foster care because nobody will ever love either of you, no damn respect. Danny I swear to god that if you don’t come over here and take you’re beating you’ll be in a boot camp scrubbing a toilette with your tooth brush” and then she’d start piling anything that she could get a hold of into a suite case until I finally sucked it up and went over to take my beating for whatever sin I’d committed. And I’d take it damn happily, anything to avoid boot camp.

I started to pick at a scab on my arm. The scaly white edge peeled off easy, it was the yellowish part that I really had to pry off of the skin, and then once that was off, the red part slid right off. I took the edge of my essay and pressed it up against the cut, watching the mixture of blood and scab oil come through the back of my paper. There was my rebellion.

My thoughts started to calm down, moving away from worry and hate and toward entertaining myself for the last 15 minutes. She walked back in to collect the papers. She moved down the rows, ripping things out of people’s hands and jumbling them up in a neat little pile. She started on about Mackenzie’s handwriting and Caleb’s spelling and my doodles in the margins, and then came to Isaac. He handed in his paper, and as he did, I lost the small spark of respect that I had left for him. The defiance in his eyes and tone hadn’t lived up to defiance in his actions. He was all talk. And I guess that that pissed me off. I was sort of looking forward to seeing him reprimanded or humiliated or something else unpleasant.

So maybe I was sick, but we were all sick in our own way. Some of us were just good at hiding it. She sort of looked at him funny. I wanted beyond words just to see him get hit. I don’t know why, but the hate was bubbling up inside of me like lava in a volcano. He’d never done anything bad to me, and yet I hated him more than any adult that I’d ever met. He was just so damn creepy, so untrustworthy. Maybe it was fear and not hate. But looking back on it, I feel sort of bad for thinking all of those things about him.  

[deceitful_hearts]

Chapter 3: Isaac Dehker
Warning: implied sexual abuse, self-mutilation
“hay there Jailbait” he jumped out of the bushes and knocked me to the concrete. Adam Merrech and his little lackeys had been giving me s**t since the second grade. I guess that when I came back to start grade 9, I thought they would have a smaller kid to pick on. But apparently, no matter who was smaller, weaker, more afraid, I was the one bullies singled out. Same thing at St Andrew’s. Somebody sees a tiny guy who’s scarred shitless from all the rumors he’s heard, and suddenly they act like the only thing that makes them get out of bed in the morning is the promise of kicking the crap out of you.

I didn’t try to get up, or say anything to him. They were like wild dogs, if you played dead for long enough, they lost interest in you. I closed my eyes and waited for him to hit me. He laughed.
“same wimpy little f** that you were in grade 7” he studied me like I was a piece of road kill on the sidewalk
“god, you’ve got more makeup then my girlfriend” he elbowed his buddy, who apparently was trained to laugh on cue. Eric Rollen, the scum of the earth, future fry cook, was standing over me mocking me. He and Adam made a pretty good team, one big and stupid, the other just plain evil, like two villains out of a superman comic. Nobody liked them, but they disliked them the same way peasants dislike a dictator. Because they knew that if they ended up on his list, life was hell. He kicked me in the ribs, but not hard enough to do more than make me curl up in a ball. He shook his head.
“what’s wrong” he cooed “ain’t gonna fight back?” he kicked me again in the back, but full force. My whole body jerked backward, and I uncoiled like a pill bug. Eric gave me a few more good kicks as Adam went over to get my backpack, which I dropped when he jumped out at me. He unzipped the main part and spilled the contents out on the concrete, sending loose papers cascading down the street.
“sissy” he snorted, going to unzip the second pocket. And before I could stop myself, I opened my mouth and shouted
“Stop!”
He turned his head, looking almost shocked, then grinned.
“something in here that you don’t want to share with the class?” he dangled it in front of my face. I took my hands out from under me and tried to snatch it away. Before I knew what was happening, he had his sneaker on my hand, and was grinding it into the sidewalk. Apparently he was getting some type of immense joy from causing me pain. I’d been surrounded by sadists like him for the past 18 months, and knew there was no winning. If you broke down and begged them to stop, they’d just laugh and call you names. If you tried to be tough and ignore the pain, they made it their goal to not only disable you to ignore, but make sure you couldn’t forget. And so I chose the lesser of two evils.
“Please stop!” I begged “Please, I’m sorry”
He rolled his eyes and took his foot off my hand. I thought I was safe until I saw his sneaker coming at my face at around the same speed as a bb gun bullet. It hit me right between the nose and the mouth, busting open my lip. I gagged at the taste of the blood, sending the two of them into a laughing fit. Adam kicked my backpack across the street, sending anything still inside spilling across the road. An old lady was a few houses down, watering her lawn. And I was sure she knew what was going on, but she just kept watering the damn grass. I thought if I lay there for a few more minutes, they’d loose interest. But apparently they weren’t about to let me off that easy. Eric grabbed the back of my shirt and yanked me to my feet, I looked at the splatter of blood on the sidewalk, surrounding a piece of a tooth. And I couldn’t help but flash back to St. Anthony’s, the scene was so familiar. Two guys would hunt you down, beat you up, and then make you wish you were dead. But I tolled myself that not even these guys would sink that low.

I looked up, staring Adam straight in the eye. He punched me in the gut a few times, until not even Eric could stop me from crumbling to the cement. They swore at me, called me a few bad names, but they eventually just walked away, leaving me on the pavement. When I felt like I could, I stood up and checked myself over. All my bones seamed intact, and aside from my busted lip, my shirt could cover all the damage that they’d done. I lifted it up; three dark purple bruises had formed on my chest.

I gathered up all the papers that I could find, then shuffled across the street to get my backpack. I opened it up and stuffed everything back in, trying to calm down. They were gonna pay. I opened up the second zipper, the beaver was still inside, creepy as ever, looking at me with it’s big glass eyes, like it couldn’t believe that I just sat there and took it.
“You think you could have fought back?” I mumbled to it
“No, I’m taxidermy road kill, but you could have at least hit them. You never hit anybody, you just let them do whatever they want to you” it silently responded
“I’m still alive, right? So I guess it’s not working that bad”
“But you wish you were dead” it’s non-existant voice was cold and calm
“You didn’t see what happened, ok? Those guys just came out of nowhere”
“I’m not talking about those punks” it laughed, “I’m talking about Chris and Dean”
“Shut up!” I screamed. The old lady put down her hose and stared at me like I was insane. And I guess I was, I was standing in the middle of the street yelling into my backpack at a dead beaver.
“I’m gonna make you wish you never brought that up” I whispered at it, zipping up the backpack.

I finally stumbled all the way home, wiping the blood off my lip. If my mom saw it, she’d flip. I snuck past the kitchen where she was sitting, filling out some paperwork. If she didn’t see me coming up the stairs, she wouldn’t notice that I was late. My ribs and back were killing me, and I could actually feel the blood gathering under my skin, spreading the almost black bruise. I stared at it, feeling the fear again. I promised myself that once I was out, I wouldn’t think about it, I wouldn’t feel it anymore, but I couldn’t fight it off.

It was like a movie flashback, like staring at the bruise on my chest was staring into a magic mirror. And suddenly it all fell over me, like a dark curtain, and I heard the voices.
Hands on the wall b***h
I could practically feel the freezing water numbing my scalp. And like the images, like the fear, I knew that I couldn’t make the water stop.

C’mon princess, you’re only making it worse for yourself
And suddenly I got an all too familiar feeling, a sort of shame that made me want to throw up and die. In the black and white memory, the only color came from the blood that ran down my legs and fell like little red tear drops on the linoleum floor of the shower

Get ready for it pretty boy
And suddenly my head shot up and I snapped out of the memory. The beaver was watching me from my backpack, laughing at me. I practically tore off the zipper, grabbing it by the throat and shaking it. But I couldn’t hurt it. And it knew that I couldn’t.

“f**” it laughed “I bet you liked what those guys did to you”
“No” I shook my head “shut up”
“What would your momma say if she saw your tattoo?”
“She didn’t” tears slithered down my face, making my mascara run “and if she did, she wouldn’t know what it means”
“But you do” it grinned
“Do you want to mess with me, you little furry b***h?” I hissed, but it only shrugged. I grabbed a red marker from my backpack and tore off the back, pulling out that little inky sponge. I squeezed it, letting the red ink drip down the beaver’s leg. It screamed and cried, begging me to please, please stop, but I only laughed until the ink was drained. I took the whimpering creature and shook it again hard, wetting my finger with spit and wiping it on the beaver’s eye to make him sob.
“Now you’re a f** too” I hissed, and then shoved it in my backpack.

I looked at myself in the mirror. Maybe I was a f**. I didn’t do anything to stop what happened. After the first few times, I just let it happen. Maybe that’s why they singled me out, not because I was small but because they knew something that I didn’t. Maybe that’s why I kept my hair long, and put on makeup. Before it’d seamed like a natural thing, I had worn eyeliner and mascara since grade six, and a lot of girls liked it. But it wasn’t something that most guys did. Maybe I wasn’t like most guys.

I shook off the thought. What would Aaron think. My hero. I knew that I wasn’t. At least I think I knew. I guess it’s normal for people who have crap like that happen to them to think it was their fault. That’s what all the talk show hosts tolled the cheerleaders who came on their show bitching about date rape. I tolled myself that as I lay down on my bed, trying to clear my head. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault.

But they were all girls. That kind of stuff didn’t happen to boys. I lifted my shirt again to look at the tattoo. I didn’t know what it meant when they were giving it to me, all I knew was that it was 4 in the morning and two guys were sticking a needle in my side over and over again. At first it looked like an upside down five-pointed star, but one of the lines was missing. I dug my nails into the tainted skin, dragging it along the lines of the tattoo to turn them white, to erase them even if only for a second. I dug my nail in deeper, dragged it along harder, until I felt the skin break. Until I felt the warm blood turn my fingers sticky. I rubbed it across the skin, masking the blue lines. You were supposed to bleed from your side, your leg, your face. Skin was supposed to bleed. It was the only thing that was supposed to bleed.

The air stung the cut as I squeezed along the sides of it, trying to make enough blood to cover the whole star. But the screen of red only masked it, and I knew that underneath the micrometer of red was the truth. I wiped it all away and put my shirt down.

Detention had been brutal. They all knew, I could feel it. Everybody in that room, in that school knew what I did to wind up in St. Anthony’s, and what Caleb’s brother did to get life in prison. They never found out what bullet killed whom, so as far as my lawyer was concerned, I missed every shot, and Aaron was the one who killed the men. But everybody in the room knew who hit the target.

The only good thing about detention was Rachelle, when we whispered about our little plan for revenge; to take that god damned creepy beaver off the old bat’s desk. I think she sort of liked me, and I liked her too. She wasn’t pretty like a model, but there was something cool about her. You could tell she’d make a good mom just by looking at her. She wasn’t into brand names, didn’t do anything crazy with her hair, dressed like she was trying to avoid attention, in mom-like clothes. Jeans, sweaters, t-shirts, all in colors and styles that most girls in our school didn’t wear, styles that you saw at PTA meetings.

I was about to take the beaver out and torture it some more when the phone wrung.
“Is Isaac there?”
“Speaking”
“It’s Rachelle” I could hear her smiling on the other end of the phone.
“Hay” I tried to sound cool, but with my voice, it was pretty impossible. My voice never really broke, so it came out sounding like a mix between a duck and a bike horn, not good for talking over the phone to girls.
“Did you get it home?”
“Yah” I looked over at my backpack “you know, I’ve got a better idea then just tossing it off a bridge”
“What’s that?”
“let’s wreck it up, and then return it” I had to do something so that I wouldn’t look like a toy-torturing psycho the next time I showed it to her
“yah” she was a little over-enthusiastic, but she seemed like the kind of girl who’d never even lost recess before. And maybe I’d have been feeling the thrill of it too if I feared in school suspension. But I didn’t.
“hay, meet me up at the lake by millstone bridge, I’ll give it to you there, that way I wont need to take it to school” the real thrill was talking to a girl for two whole minutes without making an a** out of myself, which was a new personal record.
“Cool” she gave a little nervous giggle “see you there” and then hung up.

I put the phone back on the receiver, a little wave of accomplishment running over me. I could still taste blood coming out of my lip, and there was a good bruise on my nose from being kicked. I crept into the bathroom and rummaged through the cabnet for the foundation, knowing that if I wanted to go downstairs, I had to make sure mom didn’t see the bruises. She’d call the school up, and then I’d be twice as screwed. If I’d learned anything during my eighteen-month stay at St. Anthony’s, it was that telling only made things worse. It was a mistake that I only made once.

I unscrewed the peach colored bottle and poured some of the skin colored liquid onto a cotton ball, dabbing it over the bruises. I lifted my shirt and covered the ones on my chest, and then moved down to the tattoo, always back at that damned tattoo, and blotted it out with the makeup.

I took a wet towel and wiped the black, inked tear lines from under my eyes. That was the bad part about mascara. If you cried, it showed. I scrubbed until the tear mark was almost completely gone, and took the rest off with baby oil before heading downstairs.

“hay mom” I crept up behind her
“hay baby” she turned around “did you just get home?”
“no, been home for almost two hours now” it hurt to stand, those guys worked me over pretty good, and I guess the pain showed in my voice.
“Are you ok baby?” she cooed, suddenly worried, her mom senses kicking in
“yah” I nodded and flashed a smile
“no” she shook her head “no you’re not. What happened?”
“nothing mom” I tried to assure her, but she wouldn’t hear it
“Are those boys giving you trouble?” she looked me in the eye “that Adam kid, is he still picking on you?”
“Nah” I shook my head “just some kids at school been talking”
“about what?” and I knew she was about to go psycho mom on me “Because what happened that night wasn’t you’re fault baby, you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you gotta let people know that”

I wished that I could believe that, and I guess part of it was true. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But when I saw those drug dealers going at Aaron, I couldn’t help it. I picked the gun up off the seat of the car and fired ten shots out a window, watching two distinctly rip through the neck and stomach of one of the men. So I was guilty of murder. I deserved to be like Aaron, locked up for the rest of my life. My bullets killed. But my lawyer had a better story. And to nod and agree that I was innocent felt like a lie. But I’d been lying about plenty to her. No ma, nobody hurt me.
“I know” I nodded “I… I’m sure things will get better”

She smiled “that’s my strong little boy” but her smile faded “why do your clothes smell like smoke”
“I’m trying to stop” I assured
“That Aaron boy took away a whole year of your life, and his filthy habit ain’t gonna take another minute, you know smoking kills”
“I’m trying ma” I rolled my eyes “You smoke”
“I smoke because I can’t stop” she raised her voice “you can”
“I’ve been doing it for two years, you think I can just stop”
“Isaac” She stood up, a crazy look in her eyes “If I ever catch you smoking, I swear I’ll send you right back to St. Anthony’s.”

And as she said that, I could tell by the look on her face that she took it back. I felt my eyes fill up with tears.
“oh baby, I didn’t mean to…” she wrapped her arms around me “I’d never want you to leave me, I’d never send you away, you know that”
I tried to stop the tears, but they fell like tap water from a leaking sink.

I wondered if she knew. I think she knew that something bad happened, but she never asked what, and even if she did, I never would have tolled her. That’s just the kind of stuff that you don’t tell a mom. My hands were shaking. They always did that when I was realy upset, they’d done it since I was a toddler.

I was almost a little bit mad that she didn’t know. I mean, it’s safe to assume that a kid can grow out of sleep walking, but when somebody leaves just like any other kid and comes back unable to ride a bike, you have to know that something was wrong. Part of me wanted to break down and tell her, and scream at her for never visiting me. Maybe if she’d visited I could have tolled her. Maybe at the start of it I could have begged her to do something to get me out.

“I’m trying to stop mom” my hands finally stopped “I am”
“You try harder” her voice was angry, but not as mad as before
“I will” the tears stopped
“Good boy” she nodded

I hated those words. They always said that right before they made you bleed. I wanted to think that it would all go away when I was free, but I guess I was damaged goods. And maybe deep down, I wanted to be damaged. Maybe I didn’t want to get better. There was something almost cool about being broken, a sort of attention that followed you wherever you went, that was almost nice. People noticed me; they picked me out in a class. Maybe not for the right reasons, but I’d gone from a quiet, pissed off little nobody to somebody that people talked about. Somebody that people spent even a small part of their time thinking about.
I guess I was no better than the whores on the cheerleading team who dressed like skanks simply for the attention of the principal, who’d stop them in the hall and demand that they changed their clothes. It was like a badge, something to identify yourself with. We all carried it. Rachelle was stamped with foster child, somebody who nobody got close to, because there was no telling when she’d be gone. Mackenzie was semi-famous for being the best friend of a kid who got murdered. Danny was famous for his psycho, crack whore mom. Caleb was known as the little brother of the guy who shot those other guys down in the street. And I was the kid who watched him do it and spent 18 months in prison for it. It was just a title, but nobody can ever see past titles.

My title offered a little more freedom though. It could go either way, depending on how I acted. I could either be “Isaac, the scary kid fresh out of St. Anthony’s” or “Isaac, the kid who spent the last 18 months as somebody’s b***h”. So far, I was pretty sure that it was going to come out that I was the second, not the first.

“you’re just not you anymore” My mom’s voice brought me back
“what do you mean” I looked away. She hugged me tighter.
“I mean ever since you came home, you walk around here like the undead. You won’t eat, you won’t talk, you won’t sleep” she stressed the last part. And maybe I hadn’t been sleeping like I did before I went away. I was just afraid that when I opened my eyes, there would be somebody in the bed next to me.
“I’m just trying to get back to normal” my voice was barely a squeak “things have been… weird”
“you know you can always talk to me, right?”
“I know mom” she let go of me
“and there’s nothing you want to talk about?”
I shook my head
“if there ever is, I’ll always be ready to hear it. It’s not good to keep stuff bottled up inside”

I almost wanted to tell her. I almost wanted her to know. But I didn’t want her to think about it. I didn’t want her to be upset. Plus, there was nothing that she could do.
“love you” I smiled before shuffling back upstairs.  

[deceitful_hearts]

Chapter four: Rachelle LeRoy

I didn’t choose my first name, but I got to pick my last one. At first I’d just take the name of any family that I was part of, but I realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t part of a family. And I never would be. When I was little I had a few good families. I stayed with the Lenards for a while, about two years. I took to calling the lady of the house “mommy”, and learned to walk and talk and use the bathroom under that roof. But one day a lady in a blue suit took me from the house in a powder blue van, and I never saw the Lenards again. I was only a little baby, not even three years old, so I don’t remember much about them.

Everybody wanted a pretty little baby girl, so I usually stayed in a house for about a year. And then once I turned eight, the year became six months, than four, than one, than none at all. I was in a group home that year, which was just a pretty name for an orphanage. It was the lost and found for kids that nobody would ever come looking for. I was my own mommy, and mommy to the babies that came in and out with fancy adoption papers; people were just dieing to take them in.

The orphanage wasn’t run down like in Annie, and nobody hit us or starved us or anything like that. But nobody loved us either. I needed to talk to somebody, so I went to see Serenity. Serenity was a year older than me, and pretty. She was smart too. On the inside, she was perfect.

But her parents heard the word “cerebral palsy” and couldn’t get rid of her fast enough. Nobody knew her real name, but she’d been there longer than anybody else, and we’d never heard her be called anything other than “St. Serenity”. How she got that name was a great mystery that turned into a mythical legend. My older “brother” Jacob tolled me that her body didn’t work because god needed her to stay in one place, that if you asked Serenity for advice, or tolled her of your problems, god would send you the answer.

I didn’t fully believe him though. Jacob wasn’t right in the head, and we all knew that he’d wind up in a home for the mentally ill. He preached hellfire and brimstone about god and his miracles until his face turned red and he was screaming out the horrors of hell, and the nurses would have to calm him down.

But that afternoon I paid my dues to St. Serenity, sitting on the stool next to her wheelchair, which was placed in front on the TV. The TV had been off since the end of her videotape, an old worn out VHS copy of West side story that had been watched and re-watched so often that it was just a blurry mess of static with an audio track that sounded like it was being played under water. We had a DVD player, but no DVD’s except for 3 volumes of Barney and two volumes of “once upon a potty”, one for boys and one for girls.

I placed my shoes to the left of her wheelchair and picked up the worn out bible from the floor and started to read from where the last kid left off. According to the rules, or the superstitions of whatever they were, you needed to read her 77 words or St. Serenity wouldn’t deliver your message to god. I started to read from the book of Job, feeling pretty bad for the poor guy as I read. I left off after the devil smote Job with boils and killed his family and took away everything that he had, feeling bad that she would have to wait for the happy ending. But I knew that she probably knew the entire bible cover to cover by that point, so I didn’t feel too horrible.

“I’ve come to ask you to deliver a message to god for me” I half mumbled “Could you tell him that I want a mother and father. I honestly tried to pray myself, I really have, but he wont hear me. Could you put in a good word for me? Could you ask god to send me a mom and dad who’ll take good care of me for the next four years? If you do, I swear I’ll go to church every Sunday and take all of my children to Sunday school and bible class, and I’ll make sure that they do it with their babies too.” I knew it was a big promise, but I was desperate. St. Serenity drooled a little, and sort of jerked her self in a full body nod. I smiled and kissed her on the cheek, then re-wound and re-started west side story for her and went on my way.

I shared my room with three other girls. One was Tania, who I really didn’t like at all. She was sort of prissy and looked down at us like we were trash, as if she forgot that she was in no higher a position. Nikki was nice enough. She was nine and slept with a stuffed rabbit that smelled like a port-o-potty, but was quiet and kept out of my way. Demitra was in my grade, and a few of my classes. She was really off in the head though, she hadn’t had quite as loving a series of fosters as I had, and on top of that had all of these weird illnesses. She was a lot like Jacob, only she had nothing to preach about. She hated god, and day after day screamed that if he existed, he sure as hell didn’t love us.

I didn’t fully believe either sometimes. If god really loved me, I would have had parents by then. I would have had a boyfriend, and been popular, and lived a perfect life. I’d never done anything bad enough to be thrown out and unloved, and I wasn’t even sure what sort of crime could condemn a kid to a childhood of being lost. I’d never even had a best friend. And sitting in my room that day, I felt cheated by god.

I sort of ran over my talk with Isaac in my head. He was a little creepy, and I guess that I was a little bit afraid of him, but there was something about him that I loved. He wasn’t bad looking at all. Maybe a little bit feminine looking, but certainly cute to some extent. Nikki was on the other side of the room with her headphones, and Tina was at work. She babysat for this family who went to our church, and loved to wave the cash in all of our faces. My “job” was passing grade nine, which I was doing just barely, pulling a 72 as my highest grade. I was repeating grade 8 math, which I guess didn’t do wonders for my social status. I just didn’t see the point in doing good in school. When I failed I got lectured, and in the rare occasion that I pulled an 80 on a quiz it was just totally ignored, there were no pats on the back or congratulations. So I just sort of gave up.

I wasn’t a bad kid though. There were a few bad kids in the home, a few girls with babies, a few pothead boys, and some other assorted trash that was caught somewhere in between. I just wasn’t smart, that didn’t mean that I didn’t try my best. I was more of an invisible kid.

I could hear somebody crying from the boy’s room next to us, probably the new boy that they’d thrown in that morning. It was no big deal though; new ones always came and went. But like I was saying before I started talking about St. Serenity, I got to pick my last name. My birth mother’s last name was Jamie Elroy, which is where the “Roy” came from. And then I took the “Le” from “Lenard”, the name of the people who raised me. And whenever anybody asked who my mother was I tolled them that her name was Jamison LeRoy, the first name of my birth mom combined with the first name of the woman who raised me, Madison Lenard.

I sort of imagined Jamison LeRoy as a Virgin Mary type lady, perfect and holy in every way. I imagined that one day she’d walk in the door and adopt me and take me away to live in a happy little house by the sea, with no brothers or sisters to take her attention away from me. And I started into my little daydream world, with every intention of staying there for at least ten minutes, but the sobbing child in the next room was invading my head, and I felt too bad to spend my time in fantasy land.

I went into the room and the little blonde boy who they’d dropped off that morning was sobbing his pretty green eyes out, crying out words that no longer sounded like words, just a jumble of grunts and shrieks. He was only about four years old, and would probably be in the arms of a loving mommy before the month was out. But he was still sobbing. I sat on the bed next to him and sighed, trying to make my presence known. It worked, and he removed his head from the pillow and looked up at me with big, puffy, red eyes, mouth still half open so that his quivering lips formed a tilted square.

“hay” I said, half smiling and half serious “what’s wrong? Why are you crying?”
“I wanna go home to my momma” he blubbered, collapsing into the pillow once again. I picked him up and put him on my lap, which usually made the sobbing. Once again, it worked.
“Crying isn’t going to bring her back” I told him, trying to sound adult “besides, why would you cry over something as silly as a mommy. A mommy is just one person, and no person is worth crying over”
“mamma!” he screamed, and started sobbing again. I picked him up and spun him around so that he was looking me in the face.
“You know, you’re lucky than most kids. Most kids only get one momma, you know that? And they live their whole lives trying to make that momma happy, and skipping out on all the fun in life trying to keep momma from getting mad. You’re better than that” he wiped his eye with his fist, snot rushing out of his nose, over his lip, and halfway down his neck.
“You get to love lots of different mommas, and you’ll never have to worry about them getting mad or sad at you because you’ll never need any of them. You’ve gotta learn to be your own momma, you cant depend on anybody else”
But I could tell that I was talking way too far over his head.
“You ain’t gonna cry, you hear?” I started to get frustrated “because if you cry, nobody is gonna want to be your momma. Maybe that’s why your momma left you, because you cry so damned much!”
He stopped sobbing and looked up at me with wide, shocked eyes
“That’s a bad word”
“You bet your a** it is. I’m sick and tired of you damn spoiled brats pissing and moaning about ‘mommies’. You can’t trust ‘mommies’! If you could, you think that any of us would be here? You ain’t above any of us here, you don’t deserve a mommy any more than we do, but shut your trap because you’re gonna get one because all the mommies want is a pretty little blonde boy and the rest of us can go to hell. So if anybody should be in here bitching, I should!” and then I felt bad for exploding on him. He started hyperventilating and whimpering and making little baby noises, and then for some reason that I couldn’t understand, he threw his little arms around me and started sobbing into my chest.

I put my arms around him and started patting his little back.
“I’m sorry” I kept saying “shhhh, don’t cry baby, I’m sorry” His whole body shook violently with each sob
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry baby, please don’t cry. Please don’t cry baby, shhhh, I’m sorry. Shhhh, don’t cry baby, I’m sorry”

He sobbed for what felt like hours, and then finally stopped, face still buried in my shirt, fast asleep. I laid him out on the bad and tucked him in, then went back into my room and put on my headphones and took a nap of my own.  

[deceitful_hearts]

Chapter 5: Danny Lynne
Warning: child abuse
She was on the couch when I came home, and I could tell that she was out for blood by the look in her eye. There were two empty beer cans next to her, which wasn’t enough to get her wasted but was more than enough to get her violent.

“I got a call from your teacher” she said casually “you wanna tell me what it was about?”
“I lost my homework” I looked at the carpet where there was a fresh red nail polish stain. And then my stomach jumped into my throat. She always painted her nails when she had to think up some sick, new punishment.
“Apparently you haven’t been keeping on top of your school work” she was tapping her freshly painted nails of the coffee table, trying to make me loose my nerve. I bit my lip, knowing that I’d only get it worse if I cried.
“do you know what happens to boys who don’t do their school work?” she took a long drag from her cigarette, blowing out a cloud of thick black smoke. I almost wondered if that was just another act of violence at me, trying to poison me with her second hand smoke. But I knew that she only did what she did because she loved me. She only wanted to keep me in line and out of prison and boot camp and foster care, she was just being a good mom.

Tommy was sitting in the kitchen drinking a Pepsi, which was half spilled on his stained wife beater. He hadn’t changed that damn shirt in three days, and so it was covered in food stains and nosebleed spots. I knew that his kindergarten teacher was worried about him, she’d asked some pretty weird questions when I had to pick him up from school the last time. But I had a few excuses stored away that shut her up good and fast.

“C’mere” she jerked her head, motioning for me to go over to her. I looked over at Tommy, who’s eyes were locked on the table. I hated when she tried to make an example out of me. Slowly, I shuffled over to her, until I was standing over her. She took another drag from her cigarette.

Looking me in the eye the whole time, she slowly rolled up the short sleeve of my shirt so that my shoulder was exposed. I looked in her eyes, trying to figure out what she had planned. She grabbed my ear and yanked my whole body down, cigarette bobbing in her mouth, sprinkling little ashes over her jeans.

I screamed as she twisted my ear, feeling more degraded than hurt, knowing that Tommy was probably looking at me squirming. She took a last drag of the cigarette before plucking it out of her mouth and putting it out on my bare shoulder, grinding the ashes into my skin where my clothes would cover up the marks.

“you’re gonna do better now, ain’t you?” she screamed “ain’t you”
I nodded, blinded by tears
“Answer me you damned piece of s**t! You’re gonna do better, right”
I tried to answer, but all that came out was a high-pitched whimper
“God damn it Danny! Answer me when I’m talking to you!” she screamed, grinding the ashes in harder and pulling my ear until I was sure that it would come off in her hand.

And then I heard a crash, like breaking glass. She let go of my ear and dropped the cigarette butt on the carpet. Her face was bright red as she located Tommy, who was standing almost defiantly, surrounded by a pile of broken glass. I tried to stand up, and got as far as my knees before she smacked the back of my head, making my fall down again. She stepped over me and walked over to Tommy. I felt like I was about to be sick all over the floor. And I knew that not only was I a bad son, but I was a bad brother too. I was weak, that’s why Tommy smashed the plate. Because I couldn’t man up and stop crying.

She raised her hand like she was about to hit him, but then lowered it and turned to me.
“It’s your fault” her voice was still so calm “You punish him. Just because my first son is a piece of s**t hell bent on throwing his life again doesn’t mean that I can watch my baby go down the same path. And he’s gonna wind up a worthless dumbass like you if he runs around protecting you. So make him not want to protect you”
“No” I shouted across the room at her.
“Danny, I think you must have stuttered, because it sounded like you were disobeying me, and I know that you know better than that.”
“No” but I didn’t sound quite so sure that time.
“So you want to damn your baby brother to a life of being nothing like you? You want to drag him to hell with you? Fine, then what’s the point of raising either of you? I’m gonna be in California, call me from boot camp every once and a while” She pulled the half-packed suite case from the closet and started to fold the clothes.

Tommy was still surrounded by the glass, tears running down his face. I forced myself to walk over to him, feeling the tears in my own eyes well up. I didn’t want to hurt him, but we needed her, regardless of how she disciplined us. If I didn’t hit him, the cops would throw us in boot camp and we’d never see each other again. I was totally at her mercy, and I knew that she got off on the power.

I stiffened my hand up, raising it to his face, and using every ounce of willpower that I had I gave him a good hard smack in the mouth. The look that he gave me killed me inside, his big brown eyes filling up with tears of betrayal, looking at me like I’d just shot him.
“I don’t need you to protect me” I said nice and loud so that she could hear “you need to learn when to mind your own damn business” my voice caught and I could feel my throat tightening. He whimpered and nodded, pressing his chin to his chest.

I looked over at my mother, watching her slowly nod in approval. And then I just froze up and broke down. I threw my arms around Tommy and started sobbing too, half screaming about how sorry I was, falling to my knees so that I could put my arms around him, feeling the little shards of glass rip into my skin. He didn’t say anything, just kept sobbing. I swore that I’d never hurt him again, feeling a sharp yank on my hair. She dragged me to my feet, and then lifted me up onto the tips of my toes, as if she was trying to scalp me.
“You’re pathetic” it wasn’t an insult, just a fact to her “you disgust me, you know that? You’re too damn soft to save your brother, too damn self centered.”
“I’m sorry mommy” my eyes were only half open, and my head was killing me.
“Don’t call me that!” she shrieked, letting go of my hair and putting both hands on my shoulders, shacking my so violently that I was sore that my neck would snap. I’d been punished before, but never to this extreme. And then I realized that the punishment had ended when she had let go of my ear. Now she was just frustrated and disappointed that I’d let her down so badly.
“Never call me that you piece of s**t!” Her breath was saturated with alcohol, and I could tell that there was more in her system than the two cans of beer that I’d seen earlier “I’m ashamed that you came out of me! I’m ashamed that a spineless piece of s**t like you spent nine months brewing in my womb”
“I’m sorry” I threw my hands up in the air “I’m week, I’m s**t, I know!” the words flew out of my mouth without me even wrapping my mind around the meaning “I’m going to hell, I know. I’m a bad son and a bad brother and I don’t deserve to be part of your family!” I gasped for air, out of breath from screaming the empty words “I should be damn glad that you put up with me, but I’m an ungrateful a*****e like my father and shouldn’t be breathing!” I felt numb, almost invincible, knowing that I hadn’t said anything that I could be punished for saying “And I’m going to sit in my room and reflect quietly on my sins until you can bare to look at me, and I’m going to complete my homework once I’m allowed out and will have it handed in tomorrow in pristine condition so that I don’t further disgrace the family name”

She bit her bottom lip, looking away from me, and then nodded. The numb buzz wore off and I felt low. I was so willing to do anything and everything to get away from the situation and into my room, locked behind my door, that the words came out so disgustingly easy. Deep down, I sort of believed that it was all true. Why else would I need to be controlled so violently? I was born badly, just like my father.

My father was a dirt bag who heard “we’re having a baby” and disappeared faster than a box of candy bars at a fat camp. Not like Tommy’s dad, who loved my mom with all his heart, knocked her up, shot a guy in the face, and got put away for life. At least it was love with Tommy’s dad, not just two drunk collage kids in the back room of a club like it was when I was conceived.

I chipped the blue paint off the walls. There wasn’t much in the room, just a few soda cans, a desk, a lamp, a mattress with a blanket, and a whole lot of trash. I wasn’t allowed to watch the TV; mom said that it makes all of the bad parts of the brain a hundred times worse. She said that it’d make me crazy and evil and stupid. She tolled all of the teachers that I had a rare condition, and could only learn from text and lectures, that the lights from videos and TVs and computers would make me sick. And so wail the others got to type their homework, mine was always hand written. I knew that none of the teachers bought it, but they went along with it. But sometimes I wondered if there really was something wrong with me, if I did have some condition that I didn’t know the name of, and she was just trying to save my life. I didn’t want to take a chance and find out the hard way.

If I weren’t dependant on her for food and shelter, I probably would have killed her. I hated her, and hated the way that she treated me. I wanted her to go away and never come back. But I knew that without her I’d be at the mercy of strangers, a thought that terrified me. If she wasn’t there to keep me in line, I was sure that I’d either end my life at St. Anthony’s or in a field in Mexico, picking beans and suffering under the whips of men on horses and sweating under the boiling sun.

I held onto the lies and insanity to keep myself sane. Home back then was all the insanity that I thought I’d ever have to live with. And it would have been done with by the time that I was eighteen if that stupid little f** had just been able to sit quietly through detention without dragging up his dumb plan. So Dehker I guess was the reason for everything that happened to me after grade nine. His plan, his beaver. If we’d just tossed it off a bridge and been done, life would have went on. But we didn’t.

I could hear Tommy crying in the other room. That was Dehker’s fault too. If he hadn’t put the teacher in a bad mood with his dumb, untouchable, high-and-mighty attitude, she wouldn’t have thrown out detentions. And mother wouldn’t have punished me. And Tommy wouldn’t have defended me. I’m sure that if I tried hard enough, all of my problems could, in some twisted way, be traced back to Dehker.

He was so, so fun to hate. He had this prissy, femboy thing about him that made me think that he was probably gay, but the way that he looked at Rachelle made me think that he might have been Bi. Whatever he was, he wasn’t straight, or at least not fully. I know that it sounds judgmental, but there was something about him that made me feel like he’d once been a girl.

So I killed the remainder of the hour hating him, which started to become almost a hobby. I imagined just full on beating the piss out of him for everything that he’d done, for everything he had that I didn’t. He was bigger than me, but not big enough or strong enough to put up any sort of good fight. In fact, if he’d grown his hair out a little bit more, he could pass for a girl. I started on my sex change theory again, there was no other guy that I knew of with that sort of a frame, with that high a voice, or even who wore that much makeup.

As I thought about it more and more, he had a lot of features that most boys didn’t have. It almost immediately planted in my brain as I dwelled more and more. Dehker was a transvestite. The idea actually made me laugh out loud. Prettyboy Dehker was once a chick. All I needed was some hard cold evidence. He…she…it wasn’t in my gym class, so I couldn’t do any investigator works in the locker room. I don’t think it went to beach or the local pool, or anywhere where I could see if he/she swam with a shirt on.

Maybe she took male hormones for the voice and the hair, although on the one occasion where I’d seen Dehker in pants that didn’t reach his/her ankles, it’s legs were as hairless as a naked mole rat. And every inch of my mind was wrapped around the infinitely amusing fact that he had once been a she.

And so I amused myself with that fact for another two hours until I was called out of my room. And there was my mother, standing over Tommy, who was bleeding pretty badly from the nose, with a big red handprint on the side of his face from where I slapped him.

“I think you owe him an apology” she crossed her arms and looked me in the eyes.
“I’m sorry that I’m a bad brother trying to drag you down to hell with me. Unlike me you have the chance of becoming something other than a bum on the side of the road, and by refusing to properly discipline you for defending my weakness, I’ve failed you as a half brother, and don’t even deserve to share half of my blood with you. Unlike me, you have genes from a good, loving man who didn’t take advantage of a young girl, and my actions were purely out of bitterness and jealousy”. They were words that I’d said a hundred times, a usual chant that satisfied my mother, feeding her hate with my empty words.

I could tell that it was only hurting Tommy more, but at that point there was no winning against her. The words didn’t hurt me like they should have. It was just empty bullshit to make her shut her mouth and leave me alone. Tommy thought that I was serious about it though. He looked at me with wide eyes, half shocked and half sickened, as if those words didn’t come out of my mouth every other week. I had both of them fooled, and there was almost a sense of power that went along with the deception. I could make them think things that weren’t true. I could make her believe that she’d won.

She kept her eye trained on me. I took a step backward, trying to snap the force that had me hypnotized like a mouse looking into the eyes of a snake. She took her hand off of Tommy’s shoulder and stepped toward me. I took another step back, and she took another step forward. And that little dance continued all the way to the kitchen, until she had danced me down by the cabinets. She opened one and took out a little bottle full of pills. She took two, swallowing them dry, then looked at me as if I might have been something other than a bug smashed on the bottom of her shoe.
“put your hand up there” she pointed to the edge f the open cabinet. I looked at her for a second, but felt compelled to please her. Unsurely, I placed my hand on the edge of the cabinet.

I caught a quick motion out of the corner of my eye, and heard a snap before the pain set in. The cabinet door smashed into my unsuspecting fingers like a comet wiping out a small village. I opened my mouth and screamed, but there wasn’t any real pain, just a numbness that traveled from my arm to my head, like the nerves had sent out a message of confusion instead of pain. I opened the cabinet and removed my swollen hand, seeing the little black and blue lines starting to form. My eyes welled up with tears, but there was a feeling deep inside of me that I couldn’t connect to pain or sadness. It felt like I’d been stabbed in the soul, like my body was rotting away and all of the little bits and pieces of me were pouring out through the cracks and scars and cuts. They all rolled down my skin like melted wax, gathering and hardening on the floor. Warmth spread over my face as I scrambled to recognize the feeling. And then the last little bits and pieces of my soul came up as vomit all over the tile floor, my body’s last resort to get the strange sickness out of my system.

She swore and screamed, and the taste of stomach acid hung in my mouth like a body from the gallows, dead and lifeless and spreading a rainbow of unpleasant smells. I looked through the archway at Tommy, dribbles of the regurgitated food fresh on my chin and dripping onto the neckline of my shirt in a sloppy greenish orange dribbles, dotted with pink chunks of hot dog and swirls of white that I supposed were the remnants of the milk that I’d had with my lunch.
“Clean it up!” she was screaming, pinching her nose and carrying on like a child. She was stomping her feet and shrieking bloody murder and throwing rags at me, but all I could see was Tommy, huddled on the sofa with his knees pulled up against his chest and his head in his hands. I looked blankly at the rag, and then at the pile of vomit surrounding my socks, which had absorbed some of the discolored fluids and were becoming wet and uncomfortable.

I scooped up most of the chunks with the rag and tossed them in the trash pail, feeling her eyes on me and hearing her angry words. Once most of the chunks were off, I wet the towel in the sink and started to wash up the fluids, still dotted with chunks and half digested hot dogs. I could feel the stinging acid eating away at the soft tissue under my fingernails, and the smell and taste and feel of it all was about to make me get sick again.

When the mess was cleaned up, she went on me about my clothes.
“I’m not throwing your puke soaked shirt in the family’s washing machine, do it in the sink!”

I nodded, the vomit still on my face.
“do it!” she screamed “wash the damn clothes, I’m not gonna have you tracking puke all over my house!”

I pulled my shirt over my head, careful not to smear the puke in my hair, although a few strands caught chunks of something that I couldn’t recognize as food, and looked more like reddish mud. Taking the inside out shirt on my hands, I wiped the puke from my mouth and chin, using the sleeves to catch the dribble that had run down my neck. I turned on the tap water, wishing that she would juts go away, and started to rinse off the shirt. Little solid pieces gathered in the drain as the liquid was swept out by the force of the sink.

Once it was as clean as it was going to get, I folded it on the edge of the sink and started on my socks. Barefoot and shirtless, I started back to my room.
“You ain’t done yet!” she snapped at me, and pointed to the stain on my pants. Once she’d gotten what she wanted, which was to completely humiliate me in front of my brother by reducing me to my boxers and forcing me to scrub puke from the knee of my pants, she dismissed me back to my room.

As I lay on my bed that night, I quietly admitted to myself that I’d lost that round, still tasting the stale vomit in my mouth and breathing out the acid smell of failure.