3.I laid in bed that night trying to reconstruct the events that had led to Fabio’s downfall and death. But there really wasn’t anything that set him apart from everyone else. Sure, his parents were a bit more strict and he didn’t do very much outside of school, but to some degree he should have been happy. Not insanely happy, but much happier than the kids who came to school with black eyes and smoked marijuana out behind the boiler room. The kids who ran away, the kids who came to school and ripped themselves up before being suspended. Fabio didn’t fit into any of those groups. He was a bright light among all the dim bulbs, the one teachers loved, coaches embraced, and girls either ignored or fell for completely. He wore all the right clothes, said all the right words, did all the right things. He’d tried weed but he “didn’t like things that messed with his head”. He’d drink, but only if everyone else was. The girls all loved him because he wouldn’t make them put out. Nobody could make fun of him because there was a sheen of perfection that pasted itself over him. Maybe he’d grown tired of being dull and predictable, maybe the persona grew too tight and all he had seen for an escape was the poison, the vomit, the sleeping pills, the bathtub.
I just didn’t feel like reasoning it all out right now. But my mind wouldn’t quiet, it kept on chattering with thousands of remembered events, little signs that said that death was near. And how did Bobby feel knowing that his brother was dead? Knowing it even before Fabio did anything? How did it feel to just know that someone you were presumably that close to was going to be gone forever? He had known and done nothing. I couldn’t blame him for that.
I rolled over and looked at my ceiling. I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t sad that Fabio was dead. Maybe, like Bobby had said, I wasn’t sad because if given the chance I would have done the same. Escape was escape, whether it came in a bottle with a skull on it or a knife with blood on the blade.
Sometime between listening to the last of my CD collection and the CD player’s batteries running out I fell asleep. When I woke up my glasses were digging into my cheek and the headphones had slipped down around my neck. I moved a bit and discovered that I hadn’t changed out of my clothes from last night. There were weird lines all over my arms from where the mesh had rubbed against my skin and my wallet made an unhappy lump on my thigh. I sighed and took off my glasses, rolled over and decided that sleep was much more important than anything else that I had to do today.
Before I drifted off to sleep, my lips, which had remained very silent through the whole thing, started to remember. Brief flashes of Bobby leaning over and kissing me, the feel of his lips against mine, the way that it just felt right. He hadn’t doused himself with cologne like some of the other guys, he smelled faintly of deodorant and soap. I was firmly entrenched in reliving that moment when it shifted to when Ryan had kissed me, the way that he had thrust his tongue into my mouth and made me feel like he was just using me. My hands went up to my face and I curled into a ball. I didn’t want to remember how everyone had stared at me when they opened the door and discovered me on top of Ryan and kissing him as deeply as I knew how. My hands fisted in my hair, I was never very good at just forgetting. Because the kids at school had no problem with homosexuality...or at least they all said they didn’t and there were a few token couples that were tolerated because of their grades and relatively benign attitudes. But me, a stupid little ugly goth poser type who got good grades even though he looked like a freak, I was not. And Ryan knew that that would happen, I think it was a bet that he’d taken. I remembered how I’d been so happy to have just one friend who seemed to want to spend time with me.
Thoughts of Bobby grounded me before I did something stupid like start crying. I kept my mind firmly focused on him as I went back to sleep.
“Jay?! Oh my god, not you too!” my mom was screaming when I woke up. Her nails dug into my back and I jerked awake, glaring at her. She hugged me tighter than she ever had and I was confronted with the reality that she smelled like the most sickening perfume ever marketed. “I...I thought you were dead.” she whispered into my hair.My dad came into the room and hugged me uncomfortably. I sat in the middle of them and wondered what had made them suddenly decide to act all nice.
“You were at the Fernandez’s last night, weren’t you?” I nodded and she hugged me fiercely. “You didn’t see Fabio...did you? You didn’t talk to him at all...”
“Mom...” I began, but I wasn’t sure where to end it. My dad was touching some of my spikes and frowning. “I saw what happened.”
“Honey, you know we love you right?” she said, thrusting her face into mine. I nodded weakly.
My dad was busy pulling on one of my spikes and shaking his head. “This stuff grows out, doesn’t it?” he asked. I put my face in my hands.
“Damn it, he doesn’t need you to start in on him! Don’t listen to him sweetie.” Her hands touched my spikes like they were worms and I never washed my hair. “I think they look beautiful.”
“The front ones are yellow.” I snapped, trying to pull away from them. My parents were not physically demonstrative people, sometimes I was lucky if I got a hug in three months. Not that I wanted hugs, but still. This was just freaking me out.
“Well dear, you have to let it grow out. We didn’t know that you had to leave the bleach in longer. I think it looks so much better than the red you wanted to do.” I had wanted something dramatic, but my mom had convinced me that bleaching my hair would be just as cool. However, she wouldn’t let me keep the stuff on long enough when she was helping me do it, so instead of white blond spikes I had perfect bright yellow ones. I knew she felt guilty about it, but hell, it wasn’t her hair.
I sat in their insane embrace for a few more minutes while they uncomfortably tried to search for the right words to destroy my world. “Jay...if you’re having any problems, we want to know. We love you.” Another strained hug which I just wanted to jump out of, then they were staring at me again.
“I’ll tell you.” I lied. “I trust you guys.” Cheesy group hug that I tried desperately to survive intact.
“Do you want to talk about what you saw or anything?” I rolled my eyes. I could see where this was going. They had never been in Bobby’s house. So I told them that I was feeling a bit overwhelmed and wanted to sleep. Because they were “concerned” about me...they left. I spent the rest of the day lying in a daze on my bed and staring out the window at the flickering lights. Nicotine couldn’t take away the thoughts, and alcohol was too much of a hassle to find.
“Moon
Hides behind veil of
Night peeking out to see sun
Always misses tender glow”The envelope was dark blue and the little haiku was written in silver gel pen. Sometimes I wished that I was able to read significance into the colors that he chose for the letters he wrote. The first few had been on blood red paper with white ink, the next few light blue with dark red, then this. Perhaps he was just using up the last bits of construction paper left over from kindergarten exploits. I imagined that I could see a little blob of lipgloss where he had kissed it closed, then decided to stop projecting.
I sighed and unfolded the paper, still feeling the ink across my fingertips. The rest of the letter was almost normal...the funeral was going to be on Monday, there would be an assembly at the school, a more private showing at the funeral home, then a little drive off to the cemetery. He noted that because the cause of death was in question an autopsy had to be performed. The medical tone continued as he outlined all the steps that the doctors would take, every incision, every...I let my eyes skip that entire paragraph, sensing that he would continue until Fabio was completely dissected and all of his usable organs had been sent off to the car accident victim and the old man who’d used up his liver drinking. The poison would have probably negated that possibility. There was no suicide note, and Fabio wasn’t in the habit of writing down his thoughts. At least that’s what Bobby said. I leaned back against the headboard of my bed and sighed, trying to figure out how best to respond.
I was no good at poetry...or at least there was no reason for me to reveal myself to him like that. My reply should have been couched in sympathy, with some concern as to how he was getting along without his “other half”...of course, I kept all of these worries to myself. I remembered how he had acted that day in the lunch room when I told him I was sorry about the first time Fabio had revealed to the world his desire to leave it.
I ended up quoting songs and poems, rooting through half-remembered books to find that one sentence that seemed to fit...that one expression of utter perfection that would relate to everything that he was going through. When I finished I had a mish-mash of song lyrics and platitudes, poetry and prose, futility and longing. I remembered that my mom had said my dad had written out all the lyrics to some metal song that she didn’t appreciate to court her and she married him anyway. I sighed and looked at what I had. Three college ruled pieces of paper with blue ball-point pen written on both sides. And there were chunks of white out that peeled away where I had revealed my complete inability to spell things correctly all the time, even when I wanted to have something perfect for him.
As I put it in the tree I looked up at his room for a second. No light came through the heavy curtains his mother had put up in a frenzy to keep out all the light. His house looked like it was ready for a bombing raid. I sighed and shoved the paper into the hollow and wondered if he would be in school on Monday.
He wasn’t.
I sat in Physics and tapped my mechanical pencil open and closed idly. I remembered how when we were little we’d pretend that the lead was a needle and close it on our arms and play doctor. It was impossible to pay attention to the teacher outlining the lab we were supposed to do tomorrow. Something about sonic rangers and air and...I scribbled out all of my notes. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t like I liked science anyway.The guy sitting next to me leaned over and whispered, “Hey, were you at the Fernandez’s last Friday?”
“Yeah.” I said without thinking about it. He had red hair, like, REAL red, crayon red, the red that I wanted but could never have. That had been the only reason I decided to sit next to him, that and the little band stickers all over his notebook, bands that I liked. I never talked to him though, there was a wall between us with all the similarities. I don’t think I would have talked to him first even if there had been no stigma surrounding me.
“Then you saw Fabio? I heard he shot up in the bathroom and was raving all over the place, there was puke everywhere!” he exclaimed, almost giggling in his fervor.
I shrank down and tried to resist the urge to get up and leave. “It was clean. There was only a bit of whatever he drank on the floor. It was...almost antiseptic.”
“Yeah, well, I heard that his mom’s making the whole house into a kind of shrine, leaving everything exactly where it was when he croaked.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me.”
“And that freak show brother of his...I wonder if they’ll tighten the reins on him.”
I said nothing and let him ramble on for a few more minutes about how much freakier Bobby could get, turning him into a leper...turning him into....me. “I doubt he’ll change all that much. Fabio told him before he went.”
“Man, that is messed up! I wonder...” I tuned him out easily and let the blobs on the board coalesce into that remembered kiss, the feeling of Bobby’s shirt against my arm, the look on Fabio’s face as he puked up the rest of the food he hadn’t eaten, the way that his mother grabbed onto his arm and shook the his life away.
My parents dragged me to the viewing that night. I didn’t know what exactly I was supposed to do, but it seemed like staring at Fabio’s wax corpse in the coffin was inappropriate. Perhaps I should have admired the embalmers for performing their job adequately, even though Fabio’s skin still had a distinct yellow tinge and you could almost smell the sickly sweet poison wafting off of him in waves. There was only so much that science could do for him, the rest was the color of the fake velvet interior of the coffin, a deep red to bring out the healthy glow that wasn’t there anymore. Bobby’s mom stood vigil there, wailing and beating her breasts. Every so often she would bend over and kiss Fabio, screaming all the while about how he shouldn’t have been taken away so soon.I watched from a corner. Pretty much everyone from school had seen fit to attend, if only to say goodbye to his popular corpse. My parents tried to wheedle information out of all of the others, I could hear whispers where a whole group of adults tried to reconstruct the nights events from all of theirs children’s stories. I was glad that I hadn’t told my parents what I had done...I had avoided the subject completely. It wouldn’t have surprised them, but they would have tried to use me to get to Bobby and eventually learn all of his secrets, leaving him as a decaying husk.
“Jay?” a tap on my shoulder. I turned and almost thought it was Fabio out from his coffin. Slammed my eyes shut and inhaled deeply. “I’m sorry...did I startle you?” Why was he so fucking calm? His brother was dead, his mother was going insane... His skin looked ashen in the rose- tinted lights. I resisted the urge to touch him and see if he was cold.
“Y...just a bit.” I muttered, straightening the suit I had only worn a few times.
“Can we go outside? I’ve had to be here all day.” he ventured. I stared at him for a few seconds then nodded.
The twilight air was full of the scent of barbecues and charcoal. The sun was setting in the distance, burning trees with its glow. Everyone was either grilling or finishing grilling. I closed my eyes and inhaled...wishing it was nicotine. The pack of cigarettes slid out from my pocket and into my hand before I could truly process what I was doing. I passed him one first then lit it gently. His face lit up a bit in the glow...he didn’t look as much like a corpse out here, in the dim. My fingers shook as I lit my own and took a deep drag.“Are you gonna be in school tomorrow?” he asked me.
“Yeah...there’s a lab in physics and...are you?”
“I think so.” The smoke spiraled across his eyes and obscured them for a moment. I wondered if when it cleared they would still be there at all.
“Do you think that’s a good idea?”
He looked at me head on and sighed. “You skipped school a full week after what happened to you. That just let it all ferment and grow. Maybe...even though it’s distasteful, I should just go back as soon as I can. They’ll be more sympathetic.”
We smoked in silence. I sat down on one of the concrete railings and let the world flow. “Can I ask you a question?”
He laughed a bit. It felt so profane, especially since his brother was lying dead in a casket in the building. “Go ahead.”
“D..do you think you’ll do the same thing eventually?”
“You mean kill myself?” There was a pause. “It’s a definite possibility.” The moon was slowly reaching up to find the sun, but it missed as the sun slipped beneath the horizon.