FicWad

More often than not, it was difficult for me to write. It hurt to hold the pen in my hands because of the fresh wounds that I had brought about on the tips and sides of my fingers. The skin there was pink and painful. Swollen from the years of picking and biting. It was always when there was a piece of loose skin or a scabbed, calloused part of my finger that I would feel the need to pick it. If the skin was un-cut and as it should be, I would normally be able to leave it alone.
That was the problem.
I had begun to pick the cuts and I never let them heal. The wounds were constantly fresh as I would never let the scab rest there for more than a couple of hours. I had had a number of infections in the past when bacteria had managed to get past the barrier that I broke down and my white blood cells had not been able to fight them off. I had lost nails, too; bitten them so badly that I had just ended up pulling them right off. Or the infection had caused the loss. They grew back weaker than they were to begin with and it made it easier to bite them. When they got too long, they were too flimsy and they’d snap. I’d bite them even more, making sure that they never got to the point where they would bend back if I typed on my computer keyboard or rapped them against my desk. I hated long nails. They made me cringe.

I was at school, sitting in a lesson and not really paying any attention to what the teacher was saying. I was daydreaming again, getting lost in my thoughts of that guy at the record store. It was utterly ridiculous how he was all I thought about – especially when I didn’t even know his name. But he was all that could think about. He seemed so perfect compared to me. He was everything that I could ever want. I wanted to get to know him. I needed to find a way that would allow me to talk to him. I needed a situation that would permit me to ask for his name and then hopefully he would ask for mine and it would all blow up from there. He would like me just as much as I liked him. He would throw himself at me, kiss me full-on and hard on the mouth. His fingers would be tangled in my hair and mine would be on his waist, pulling him as close to me as possible as we made out in the record store.

What a joke. Obviously, that would never happen. It wasn’t even what happened in the movies so no way would it ever happen to me, lonely-old Frank Iero. I wasn’t special enough.

But I wanted to try. If I was this obsessed with him, it was worth a shot. What was the worst that could happen? He turned me down? Big deal – I would just stop going to the record store and I would never see him again. It wouldn’t be the end of the world. I had the rest of my life left and just because, at that moment in time, I wanted him didn’t mean that there weren’t /plenty of other fish in the sea/.
Even though he was the fish I wanted.

I turned my hand on its side and pulled the edge of my pointer finger into my mouth, biting off the skin. My face was pulling a funny expression as my teeth gnawed at the hardened skin. I probably looked like a monkey with my teeth on full display and my eyes squinty. I just really needed to get that piece of skin off. It would bug me for the rest of the day if I didn’t get it off of my finger and into my mouth. Whenever I saw a piece of loose skin I would get obsessive about it. It was all that would consume me until I got rid of it by pulling it off and swallowing it. It didn’t need to be pulled away by my teeth – my other fingers would do – but it had to end up in my mouth. I didn’t understand that bit. I just knew that I had to eat it afterwards.

I managed to get the piece of skin off and the patch that I had ripped it from started to bleed. It stung and I brought my finger into my mouth, sucking on the bleeding area to try and get it to stop. My tongue flicked over the lesion and pushed down in my efforts to stop the gush. It wasn’t a big cut but they usually bled for a long time and it could be a little annoying when my paper had random splodges of red-brown on it.

“God, I’m so bored,” my best friend, Harvey, mumbled. He had his head down on the desk, resting in his arms, and his eyes were closed. It was painfully obvious that he wasn’t paying any attention to the teacher – no one in the class was – and I just chuckled and nodded my head, forgetting for a second that he wasn’t looking at me.

I didn’t say anything in return. My laugh had been enough for him to know that I had heard him, and so I went back to picking my fingernails.

The colouring of my school never ceased to amaze me. They painted the walls and ceiling as if it were a prison. They weren’t bright and colourful, warm and inviting. They were dark and bleak, cold and hostile. The walls were all an off-grey colour that was peeling and chapped, the white of the plaster showing through. The white underneath wasn’t pristine. It was a greying white with dirt and grime. The ceilings, too, where a dirty white and the floor was a weird shiny-brown concrete. They had covered the concrete in some kind of laminate, making the stone appear too try-hard.

It didn’t make the school day feel any less unpleasant. School was a drag, a total bore. I couldn’t wait to graduate and never have to go back.

I had no idea what I was going to do after school – whether I’d go to college or just get a job. I didn’t have the motivation to throw myself into even more schooling, so I guessed that college was out of the question. But then there was a problem with jobs. What job would I get? I had no real interests other than music and there wasn’t a lot that I could do with that. I could always get a job at the record store – that would force me to be close to the man that I fantasized about. But I would feel too awkward and it would mean that I wouldn’t ‘work to the best of my ability’. I would be too nervous around him.

“Do you wanna go to the record store after school?” I whispered to Harvey, keeping my voice on the down-low so that the teacher didn’t hear us and start bitching. It was a wonder how he hadn’t already mentioned that no one was paying attention to whatever he was droning on about. He was probably too wrapped up in the boring topic to even look at the class of 30 students; each one of us half asleep.

“Sure,” Harvey replied and opened his eyes to look at me. He caught me as I was picking at a hanging bit of skin off the side of my nail and he scolded me with his eyes. “Your fingers are so disgusting, Frank,” he commented before adding. “We need to let Cass know we’re going, though.”

I nodded my head and carried on picking my nail. Cassie, /Cass/, was Harvey’s girl friend and my other best friend. The three of us had always been inseparable, ever since we were young and met in 1st grade. We had been put in the same class and had instantly become friends – playing in the sand box together and building sand castles. We’d suffer together when a bully of a 3rd grader would knock down our hard work, trampling over our kingdom of sand, and we would build it back up together.

I had drifted from them a little bit as I got older. I became a bit of a recluse and that was why my mum had started to believe that I no longer had friends. I hadn’t formed a depression, but I had started to hide myself at home in my bedroom. I didn’t want to go out at the weekends and I would only see Harvey and Cassie at school. They would invite me out at the weekends or after school and I would politely refuse with the classic excuse of ‘no, sorry, I have so much homework’. It was in my absence that the two of them formed a closer relationship. I had been told that it was completely out of the blue. The two of them had been lying in Harvey’s bed, watching the television, and he had kissed her – straight on the mouth. Their relationship had formed from there and now the two of them were overly smitten with each other.

I was jealous, to say the least. I wanted the guy at the record store to just kiss me on the mouth. I would kiss back in less than a heartbeat. It would be perfect.

It made me feel like the third wheel. Going out with the two of them was awkward for me. Whenever they would kiss I wouldn’t know what to do or where to look. They were my best friends and they were a couple.

But they were always there for me when I needed them. I never felt left out when I was with them. If I wanted them to stop kissing all I had to do was hit one of them and it would be fine. They would apologise with a sheepish grin and talk to me more, trying their hardest not to ravish each other. I was glad that I had such understanding friends. We were so close and able to tell each other everything. Though, I never did. I left the talking up to the two of them. I kept my sick fascination deep within myself, not wanting to appear as a love-sick teenager in front of them. Even though that was what the both of them were. But they had each other. I had no one.

“God,” Harvey groaned into the wooden desk. “I just want school to be over al-fucking-ready.”

I silently agreed with him for reasons unknown to him. I wanted school to be over so that we could go to the record store and I could spy on the man of my dreams. He probably only wanted school to be over so that he could get out of the boring hell hole and hold his girlfriend’s hand.

A/N!!
I'm going to be away until roughly the 28th of February as I won't be in the UK
But I will be back with more :D

&Thank you so much to everyone who's reviewed!!