Chapter 3 2 страница

He woke back up an hour later with his mother pounding on the door like a bad dream, screeching something about how she’d thought Gerard had left already, hadn’t he heard his alarm? Unfortunately his mother didn’t come with a power cord or a snooze button, and it didn’t sound like she was giving up anytime soon. Gerard staggered out of bed, clutching his head in his one hand, and opened the door about an inch. He glared at his mom and said, “Hnnfhghn.”

She glared back.

“‘m up,” he croaked, and flapped a hand in dismissal.

“You’ll be late,” she warned huffily, at least settling back down to a more acceptable volume of scolding. “You’re late already, Gerard Way. Move. Do not get back in that fucking bed.”

Gerard would have rolled his eyes if his head hadn’t been full of ground glass. Fuck, and his body was so fucking sore, it was like someone had taken a baseball bat and beaten him with it. Or, well, more like someone had taken his body and beaten a truck with it, he guessed.

“’m a take a shower,” he grumbled at his mom. “Go ‘way. Shouldn’t you be workin.”

Gerard’s mom visibly wavered between badgering him out of his room and onto the street and rejoicing that her son was actually going to take a shower of his own volition. She settled for shaking her head and heading downstairs.

“I am working—they sent me home to get some photos from the Jersey salon, asshole,” she called over her shoulder as Gerard shuffled down the hall towards the bathroom. Fuck, it hurt to walk, his stupid brain was going to slosh out of its skull. “I’ll be back here at 5:30, so please fucking be here this time? Christ.”

Gerard grunted and shut the bathroom door. How his mother had even known Gerard was still home was a fucking mystery. She had like Mom Radar or something, like the stork delivered super powers along with babies. Especially ever since Mikey had gotten sick and she and Dad had gotten divorced—she was in total Supermom mode. All, ‘you need to go to class,’ and ‘maybe you should go out more, Gerard,’ and ‘don’t you have any friends besides Mikey.’ And on and on. Whatever. Like it mattered if he was late to class. Missing Mrs. Hall and Ted Sikowski was all to the good, in his book. And he’d definitely rather have a shower than show up to school smelling like puke and garbage.

Anyway, the bathroom here was pretty sweet; Gerard sort of wanted to draw a bath and lounge in the hot water with a comic book or a sketchpad for the rest of the day. There was a skylight and the red-leafed tree branches that arched over it cast these really phantasmagoric shadows on the tiled floor, all jagged and delicate. He’d have to remember to try using that pattern next time he sketched. And the archaic claw-footed bathtub was truly a thing of beauty: it looked like it was going to skitter down the hall or ask Gerard how he liked his bubble bath, like Mrs. fuckin’ Potts or something. Even the faucets looked cool, tarnished and silver and shaped like flowers.

Gerard started the shower running to let the water warm up and sat on the edge of the tub to wait. In the scalloped mirror, a reverse Gerard stared back at him, hair achieving truly impressive heights, mouth bruised and streaks of green tracing down his chin from where Ted had shoved him face-first into his truck that first day. Then Mirror-Gerard had started to steam up around the edges, so he figured the water had probably gotten hot enough. He stepped gingerly into the shower, and sighed blissfully as the hot water pounded down on him. He was sore in muscles he hadn’t even known he had—he blamed Frank for making him trudge around a fucking forest for hours at a time.

A few cursory go-rounds with a washcloth doused in Satsuma Bath Gel from the Body Shop, and he was pretty much clean, he figured. After yesterday’s excitement and adventure, he could probably stand to go ahead and shampoo too, even though he’d already washed his hair like three days ago.

He scrubbed his hands through his hair, dumped in some conditioner until it untangled, mostly, and tried to ignore the morning erection that was fighting for his attention. He couldn’t get Frank out of his head, which was kind of making the situation worse, but jerking off to people he knew was weird, and also tended to make Gerard blush at unfortunate moments. That one time he’d had that wet dream about Pete had been pretty much the worst day of his life.

But even with the hangover, his skin was buzzing with it, and he was horny, goddammit. He finally gave in, closed his eyes and wrapped his hand around his cock, tried to think nice standard thoughts about telekinetic floating sex.

Except his nice stock fantasy of Jean Grey sucking him off kept morphing into Frank, looking up at him with wet lashes. Frank’s hand wrapped around his cock, tattooed knuckles moving up and down, and then Frank lowering his head, and there’d be that cold metal lip ring, and Gerard came all over his own fingers at just the thought of it.

He leaned against the cold tile of the shower wall and flung an arm over his eyes, blood still pounding in his ears. God, Frank’s hands. Poor Jean Grey, who had perfectly nice if untattooed hands, and didn’t really deserve to be abandoned mid-masturbation fantasy.

Fuck, he was so screwed. He didn’t even want to think about Frank at all, to remember how much of an ass he’d made of himself last night, or how weird Frank had been acting, or how he’d said that Gerard was cute and how he’d petted Gerard’s filthy, sweaty hair and looked so fucking sweet and concerned, like he cared. It all created a jumble of emotions, elation and horror and hope and despair, and he just didn’t want to deal with it. And now he’d probably get hard the next time he even glanced at Frank’s mouth. Or hands. Or anything.

His headache was coming back with a vengeance, so he grabbed some Tylenol and a couple Aleve from the medicine cabinet, washed them down with a handful of cold water from the sink. He peeked out the door to make sure his mom was actually gone before leaving the bathroom, wrapped in a fluffy pink towel and hair tucked up in a lavender turban. By the time he’d struggled into a reasonably clean Ziggy Stardust hoodie and hiked on some baggy jeans, run a comb through his hair, and smudged on some eyeliner, he was feeling more human and less like the living dead.

He still didn’t have a bookbag, though. He’d left his out in the forest with Frank last night, after all that fucking effort. He wound up sneaking into Mikey’s room and stealing his abandoned army-green satchel. It was sitting forlornly in a box in his room and still had the old school notebooks from last year, from his last day in class, before the stairwell. There were half-finished sheets of chemistry homework and dead pens and a tiny drawing of a unicorn piercing the heart of the Michelin man tucked in the frontmost pocket.

Gerard left everything as it was and just added a few notebooks and a pencil. He closed the door to Mikey’s room carefully and rested his forehead against it for a moment, waiting for his eyes to stop stinging. Fuck, he didn’t want to go to school today. At least he’d definitely missed math.

Sunglasses to cut out the glare, a pot of coffee to keep him alive and upright, and he was marginally ready to face the day.

The town was almost creepier in the bright morning sunshine than it had been last night. Birds were chirping, the trees were cheerfully orange and red against the blue sky, there was absolutely no one on the streets, and, aside from the housewife staring out at him from her window, which had to be seriously clean by now, all the houses looked empty. It was surreal, like a scene from a Tim Burton movie, all bright colors and exaggerated lines. He walked quickly up the street, head down, not looking up until he reached the school.

One good thing, at least, had come out of his drunken spree and vomitfest last night: he managed to enter the building just as Ray was leaving the attendance office. Ray spotted him and beamed.

“Oh, hey!” Ray said, bounding over, just as bubbling and friendly as he had been yesterday. “Awesome hoodie, man. I love me some Bowie.”

Gerard peered down at his hoodie, and Bowie stared back up at him, alien and beautiful. He glanced at Ray, smiling tentatively. “Me too,” he said. “I have a signed record at home. The, uh, Space Oddity album? My brother got it for me for my birthday last spring.”

Ray looked suitably awed. “Dude, you’ve got to show that to me later. That’s fucking sweet. Oh, hey, speaking of music. Do you like Dinosaur Jr? ‘Cause they’re playing in the city this weekend and a bunch of us were gonna go. You should come! I know Ryan’s going because he spent all band practice bugging me about it and asking if you were going.”

“Who’s Ryan?” Gerard asked, bewildered, as they climbed up the stairs, and then he had to clutch Ray’s shoulder to keep from falling to his death, because Ted fucking Sikowski had just shoved him, hard, into the wall, and the shock of it had nearly made Gerard’s feet slip off the narrow stairs. Also, ow. He gritted his teeth and ignored it.

“Dinosaur Jr, right,” he said, determinedly cheerful. “Dinosaur Jr’s good stuff, maybe I’ll go. Hey, will I, uh, get in trouble for missing first period, do you know?”

“Nahh,” Ray said, waving a hand. He was still looking furiously over at Ted, who was slouched against the wall outside Mr. Carew’s room and smirking, but he perked back up when Gerard brought up the front office. “Got you covered this once. Mrs. Hawthorne seriously doesn’t pay any attention to attendance, it’s a disgrace.”

Gerard eyed him. He sort of was getting what Bob meant now about Ray taking his job a little too seriously. At least Ray was covering for Gerard, though, even if he got the feeling Ray would start lecturing if he skipped again.

English passed without much trouble, although Ted and his posse of fucking thugs were really starting to freak him out with their staring and whispering. Plus, he kept getting the feeling between classes that someone was following him—he kept seeing movement out of the corner of his eye, but it was always just some anonymous student, bored, blank-faced. Then he’d get distracted by Ray again, who kept popping up and bugging Gerard about playing video games that afternoon.

“Seriously, it’ll be fucking epic. We’re having a Resident Evil marathon!” Ray jogged Gerard’s shoulder pleadingly. “You should really come this time. It’s Bob, Patrick, Worm and some other guys from band. Mike, and oh man, apparently Greta plays, so she’s coming. Patrick’s gonna flip. And my mom’s making snacks, it’ll be great. C’monnnn.”

Gerard hummed noncommittally, because fuck, that was a lot of people he didn’t really know. He liked Bob and Ray a lot, and Patrick and Worm were okay, but he didn’t really do well with crowds. Ray spent the rest of the day pestering Gerard about it, though, and enlisted Bob to help, and by the time Gerard left Biology he’d semi-grudgingly agreed to at least think about it. Mainly just because he was fucking amazed Ray actually cared enough to wage a campaign to convince Gerard to come, complete with a Dead Frog Skit during Bio. It was kind of hard to resist a dancing dead frog.

He spent most of art class debating his options, because it wasn’t like the class demanded a lot of his attention. This time they were doing a still life of a mirror, a milk jug, and a stack of blank CDs. Mr. Felts had a total hard-on for still life. According to the syllabus, the class hadn’t been doing anything else since August, and weren’t due to start on Cubism until late October. Gerard foresaw a lot of boredom in his future. He sketched a quick, shabby outline of the tableau, and then spent the rest of the class pondering what to do.

He didn’t really want to go to Ray’s, not for a big epic party or anything. Maybe if it’d been just Ray and Bob. Besides, he still needed to get his bag from Frank, with all his comics and his favorite lighter and his sketchpad. His math homework, too, now that he thought of it. Maybe Frank would want to go to the party. Maybe he was already going. Gerard thought he might not mind so much, if Frank was there too.

He was going to have to just admit it. He had a giant, world-ending hopeless crush on Frank. Admitting it was the first step to overcoming it, he hoped. The trick was not to get his hopes up.

Frank was just so fucking cool. Just being his friend would be awesome, honestly. Gerard had remembered, at the last minute, to pack the next Doom Patrol volume, since Frank hadn’t read it yet, and his good Derwent pencils, so he could sketch the graveyard, if Frank asked, and he’d maybe been doodling Frank’s tattoos all over everything all day. Mikey had already sent ten thousand texts bugging him about Frank and their date, and it was annoying as fuck and kept making Gerard feel nervous. It wasn’t a date; it wasn’t like that. Thinking like that was bound to end in disappointment.

It was odd that Gerard still hadn’t seen Frank in school. Maybe Frank was in a different class or something—maybe he was a sophomore or a junior instead of a senior. But that didn’t make sense. Frank definitely looked older, and he had to be at least sixteen to have gotten all those tattoos.

Maybe he was homeschooled. Or… maybe Frank had run away from home and was waiting to turn eighteen and a legal adult before he showed back up in society again? That might explain why he was so reluctant to leave the woods all the time, if he was afraid of being caught and dragged back home. Maybe his parents were assholes. Gerard’s own dad had been kind of a dick during the divorce, but Gerard had never felt so trapped that he’d ever considered fucking running away and living in the woods.

He hoped that wasn’t the reason. He hated to think of Frank that unhappy, that miserable. Maybe there was another explanation.

Shit, he was totally spacing out, and Mr. Felts was circling the room, eyeing him suspiciously. Gerard hastily shuffled around the papers so that his original, boring-ass drawing was on top and began diligently re-shading the dimpling of the milk jug.

Yesterday Mr. Felts had mentioned maybe contacting the guidance counselor after he’d seen Gerard’s ‘still life’ of a vampire-bat-child gnawing on an arm, and Gerard was not fucking around with that shit. He was gonna put that disaster off for as long as humanly possible.

“Well done, Mr. Way,” Mr. Felts said approvingly, looking over Gerard’s shoulder. “You have an instinctive knack for perspective. Perhaps you might enter some of your work with mine in the local county fair next weekend.”

Gerard stared at the man, horrified. Local county fair, holy shit. He bet there would be prize-winning produce. And hens.

Luckily Mr. Felts was too distracted by class ending to notice Gerard’s stricken expression. The bell rang and the girls, who had spent the period covertly discussing the relative merits of the Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus— gag Gerard with a spoon, seriously— promptly fled, leaving a detritus of broken pencils and crumpled paper in their wake. Gerard slouched slowly from the room after gathering his extra papers and stuffing them into Mikey’s bag.

He peered out a window at the rapidly emptying parking lot, the steady stream of cars dispersing outwards into town. He waited a few minutes in the hallway, watching the dregs of students trickling by, then slipped through the cafeteria and found the back door leading to the band room. Looking uneasily behind him, he set off towards the woods, clutching the strap of Mikey’s bag tightly and squinting against the afternoon sun.

The wind had picked up again, tugging at Gerard’s hoodie strings and playing fitfully in the tall grass, chilly despite the sun. Winter here was going to be brutal, Gerard could tell. More leaves had fallen today; grey-brown tree branches showed here and there among the red and orange foliage. Gerard stood at the forest edge and peered down the path. Nothing was there—it was just dappled shadows, the far-off cry of birds. There was a strange echoing quality to the sound, like being in a vast empty cave full of trees. Maybe there was just the one bird, talking to itself. He wondered if he should walk a little further, see if Frank was waiting by the ruined house.

He took a step off the path in what he thought was the right direction, stood ankle deep in leaf litter and looked around. The trees stretched tall and dizzyingly similar around him. He vaguely remembered something about how moss grew on the north side of trees, but he’d never really understood how that was supposed to help if he didn’t know which way north was pointing to begin with. Moss didn’t grow in the direction of Frank, or of the path, for that matter. Gerard retreated the few steps back onto the path, shaking the leaves out of his socks, and scowled at the woods. Hopefully Frank would think to meet him on the path, instead of further out.

He settled down to sit on an old stone wall to wait. Occasionally the wind shifted and he could hear faint music, from the band room, he guessed, but it was too far off to tell what song was playing. Every now and then he thought he heard someone walking, the crackle of footsteps filled with dead leaves, but when he looked, there was only ever empty forest. It was kind of creepy, not the good kind, either—more like an asshole-jock-lying-in-wait creepy. And now the wind was picking up, whistling mournfully through the skeletal canopy and scattering down drifts of red and orange.

After an hour of waiting, Gerard had to face the truth. Frank wasn’t coming. Gerard felt disproportionately awful; his chest ached, like his ribcage was collapsing inward, like he’d suddenly gained a super-dense lump in his chest where his heart should be. Which was stupid, he’d just met Frank a few days ago. It wasn’t like he was getting fucking stood up for prom.

It just sucked that he couldn’t get his bag and his shit back, that was all. It wasn’t a big deal. There were other people in town that liked him. He could just go hang out with Ray and Bob and all their friends, inside four solid walls, where there was heating and lights and video games. Probably Mrs. Toro was one of those moms that made homemade hot cocoa and cookies or whatever, unlike Gerard’s mom, who made mainly coffee, and sometimes Black Russians.

But he stayed sitting on the cold stone wall, staring at his feet, every now and then craning his neck to look down the path. He felt like he could stay here forever, just disappear like that kid Ray had talked about at lunch. Or, instead of him disappearing, it’d be the other way around. The world outside the forest would vanish, and he’d wander the autumn woods forever, lost in dead leaves and distant blue sky. It was sort of eerie how easy it was after a while to convince himself that there was nothing outside the forest, how clearly he could imagine it. But it had been like an hour and a half with no sign of Frank, so Gerard eventually made himself get up and leave the forest.

The world was still there. The school parking lot was empty.

He couldn’t bring himself to go to Ray’s, not now. He headed home to make a care package for Mikey instead, and if he got maybe a little trashed on cheap Miller Lite as he did, well, he figured his mom wouldn’t buy it if she didn’t want him to drink it. Just—it was almost like heartburn, this tight feeling in his chest that he kept trying to shake by playing Black Flag really loud and singing his throat hoarse. He was probably annoying the hell out of his neighbors, but who gave a fuck. It wasn’t that big a deal.

Maybe Frank was sick. But no, the fact was he’d probably just thought better of it after last night, after seeing what a drunk loser Gerard could be. Fuck. Well, what the fuck, ever, Frank. Who needed him, and his tattoos, and his fucking abandoned graveyard, and his scratchy voice singing the Misfits. Gerard fucking didn’t need him, that was for fucking sure. He drank another beer.

He filled Mikey’s bag with blueberry Poptarts and some of those snack-sized bags of Cheetos. A search through the cabinet turned up a couple cans of Diet Coke and those weird packets of instant cappuccino. Mikey claimed they were like caffeinated Pixie Stix, which even Gerard thought was maybe taking the caffeine addiction a little too far, but Mikey was sick and if he wanted to a caffeine buzz, who was Gerard to judge?

Gathering everything up, he went to sit out on the porch to wait for his mom. It was only the first week of October and there were already jack-o’-lanterns on some of the porches. There was one at the house across the street with a sphinx-like smirk, the edges of its mouth thin and curled. Gerard stared into its unlit eyes and listened to the distant sound of the traffic on Main Street. It sounded like the wind in the trees.

His mom pulled into the driveway half an hour later, and didn’t ask any questions, just turned up the music on the radio. He guessed they’d both had a shitty day. They drove like that, in silence, with Gerard staring out the window at the blur of passing fields, of stands of forest. When they got to the Trumbull Center, Mikey seemed like he’d had a better day, at least. He was typing furiously on his cell phone when they arrived. Gerard immediately went to go sit on the edge of his bed and dumped the bag of contraband on Mikey’s pillow. He leaned against Mikey’s shoulder. Mikey was warm, and smiling. It was nice.

“Fucking A,” Mikey whispered happily when he found the packets of cappuccino mix. “You’re my fuckin’ hero, Gee.”

Gerard felt a little drunk, still, not bad, just enough to be warm and maybe flushed—he hoped the nurse didn’t notice, but Mikey totally did. As soon as their mom left, he cocked his head at Gerard and frowned.

“I’m fine,” Gerard said and fuck, he could try to be a little more convincing, couldn’t he? He didn’t want to talk about Frank right now, or about Ted and his fucking asshole friends, but if he didn’t say something Mikey would probably guess in a minute or two.

“Hey, I got a text from Pete earlier,” he said brightly, forcing up a smile from somewhere. “Did he tell you he and Gabe want to come caravan up and visit sometime?”

And Mikey fucking beamed, which, okay, actually did make Gerard feel a little better. A lot better.

They spent the rest of the evening curled up on Mikey’s bed, debating the havoc Pete and Gabe would wreak on a small town, then re-reading the old issues of Kerrang Gerard’d brought. Before he knew it, visiting hours were over, and Gerard had never thought he’d be reluctant to leave the flickering fluorescence and eerie sterility of a hospital. But he was, and it sucked.

See you tomorrow, Gee, Mikey mouthed and Nurse Ratched glared from the doorway, the picture of malevolence in white buckled shoes. She probably had needles secreted away somewhere on her person. Gerard shuddered. He hoped Mikey had hidden the black market goods away, because he totally knew who would get the blame for that one.

“I’m going, I’m going,” he muttered, glaring at her, and hugged Mikey goodbye. “Have awesome dreams, Mikey,” he said, feeling miserable. “You know you can text me whenever, right?”

Mikey rolled his eyes and made a shooing motion with his hand. Gerard hated it, hated leaving him. If it wasn’t for Gerard and his stupid fucking high school, maybe his mom could have stayed camped out in the hospital all night. She wouldn’t have to leave to take Gerard home so that he could go to class first thing in the damned morning, and Mikey wouldn’t have to be here alone. It wasn’t fair. Life wasn’t fair.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23