Categories > Celebrities > My Chemical Romance > 19
[ A/N: Thanks for your kind feedback on the pilot, it gave me a little confidence boost. Because it took me so long to update, a give you...
TWO chapters!!
Howd'ya like them apples? Rate and review please and I promise this'll go somewhere!!]
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Frank couldn’t feel himself.
He lay sprawled on the rug, lost somewhere inside his conscience, floating in his blood and bones and weak muscles amongst the billions of particles that he was made up of. His mind had sifted apart, dissected itself into segments so that his thoughts, the few that they were, were unrelated and battling against each other in his head. The ceiling swirled above him, crashing against the walls which bent and stretched and distorted like when you look at yourself in one of those silly mirrors and Frank had never felt so alive and so dead at the same time. But the dead feeling seeped deeper inside him, turning the bubble of happiness in his chest that was blown by the weed he had smoked last night black like a blotch of ink on paper.
He giggled at what a fucking mess he had made of himself.
He tried to sit up but it was all too fast and suddenly the world was yanked from underneath his feet and all he could see was stars and a yellow haze tinting his vision. He retched onto the rug, a feeling of disappointment stinging his chest when nothing came up and he cursed himself because he was that much of a failure to even puke. He had fished the letter from Montclair out of the bin in the early hours of the morning but it had done nothing but make him feel worse. He couldn’t even gather up the strength to rip it apart.
Aspirin. He needed aspirin. The bile clawed at the walls of his stomach and he crawled to his hands and knees, his face still buried in the rug. He wanted to scream and he wanted to cry but he did nothing but stay there until the yellow haze evaporated and the thoughts of puking and crying and screaming left his mind. Every muscle in his body screamed for him. Then Frank staggered to his feet and checked the time. It was 11:48 pm.
He sighed and stumbled towards the window and pulled the curtains apart. The pale grey midday light burst into his room like a slap in the face and for a moment he thought he had been blinded. Frank grimaced and shut them again, back to the cosy darkness that he knew best. He could hear his mother downstairs and sniffed grimly. She’d left him up there getting high and not even bothered to wake him up.
Just shows how much they really care, he thought to himself bitterly.
Frank sighed again and trudged out of the warm, dope reeking comfort of his room and practically tumbled down the stairs, driven only by the pounding headache tugging at the back of his eyes that reminded him of his need for aspirin. Hasn’t someone had enough drugs already? an ironic tell-tale voice tutted at the back of his mind. He broke the thought in half in a heartbeat and entered the kitchen, greeted by the image of his mother reading a magazine idly at the table. As far as he knew she didn’t acknowledge his presence.
Aspirin. Aspirin. Aspirin.
The medicine draw was full of stuff, but not the stuff he needed at that time. Painkillers, throat medicines, cough sweets, indigestion remedies but no aspirin. As if on cue that sickly yellow haze flooded his vision again and Frank slowly thunked his head on the countertop. The collision with the wood did nothing for his headache so he stopped but now there was a ringing in his ears and it was only until then that he truly felt sick, hung over and utterly helpless.
“We’re out of aspirin if me stating the obvious makes you feel better,” his mom said boredly without looking up from the magazine.
Frank resisted the urge to cry.
Sniffling like a sad puppy he slumped down at the kitchen table and settled for a glass of Sunny Delight instead, wondering whether trying hard enough convincing himself that it was true, it would have the same effect as the aspirin. Finally his mother looked up from Real Life Stories: I Drove the Wrong Way up a Highway and watched him nibble at a piece of burnt toast wearing a limited expression on her face.
“You look terrible,” she said bluntly.
“This is kinda your thing today, isn’t it?” he grumbled.
She pushed a yellow leaflet across the table to him. Frank looked at it blankly for a moment and returned to his toast.
“Hey.” She tapped the leaflet, bringing his attention back to it. “Read.”
Frank sighed heavily and skimmed the headline: Adolescents’ Helpline – Careers talks, therapy and Life Guidance for your mislead youth. And he snorted.
“You’re kidding,” he said. “No way. Uh-uh. Mislead youth; what the fuck is that?”
“I want you to go,” Mom replied.
“Listen to me,” Frank growled. “I don’t need those idiots telling me what a waste of space I am.”
“No, you listen to me.” She leant forward in her seat and folded her hands on the table. It made him feel like he was five years old again and she was lecturing him that dyeing next door’s daschund Quagmire’s tail green with food colouring would in fact have a consequence.
“I want you to go because I’m a mother. And as a mother I can’t sit here reading about some half-wit’s inability to drive and watching another Iero waste his life away.” She took his hand in hers and for once he didn’t pull away. “I know about Montclair.”
Frank chewed on his lip. “You do?”
“Uh-huh. It’s not your fault, okay? It happens. But, sitting here sulking about it instead of choosing something else is your fault.”
“I don’t know what else to do,” he said stubbornly. “You think I haven’t looked? There’s nothing round here, except dishwashing at Bubba’s Pizza place and joining the Mafia!”
“That’s why we have Adolescents’ Helpline,” she replied calmly, looking for the world like a saleswoman on one of those irritating insurance commercials on the television and infuriating him further. “They can help you with the choices you need help making-”
“I’m not retarded, Mom, I can tie my laces myself. Please, just don’t make me go there. Please.”
Mom pinched the bridge of her nose tiredly. “I’m not arguing with you about this. You’re going. And it starts in half an hour, so go get ready.”
“No.”
“Don’t make me use your full name!”
“Oh, I’m so scared.”
“Frank. Anthony. Iero.”
“…Fine.”
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“What’s your name?”
Frank looked up from his hands at the careers advisor in front of him. “Frank.”
“Frank,” she repeated, rolling the word around in her mouth; accentuating each consonant and the flatness of the ‘a’. “You look like a Frank.”
“It’s my dad’s name. And his dad’s before him.”
She nodded, like she was making it abundantly clear she understood. He didn’t quite know why. “That’s cool,” she smiled. “I’ve never met a ‘the third’ before.”
Frank raised and lowered one shoulder. “I always thought it was kinda obnoxious, but there you go…”
“Well, it depends on how you look at it I think.”
He wasn’t sure what that meant either.
The careers advisor’s smile was evidently fake and that annoyed him. He didn’t like the way it froze at the same place every time it appeared, like she spent hours every day in front of a mirror practising to keep it idem. Her office reflected her smile as well; neat, tidy and completely under her control. The pale cricket white walls curved at the ceiling, giving the impression that you were trapped inside a spherical dome (if you were in the right state of mind to think that way). A lot of things about the room added to Frank’s annoyance as well, like the paintings depicting a twisted dream or the inside of someone’s brain that hung on the walls; as if decorating your office with psychological works of art would indeed help you get into the mind of your patients.
But compared to the whole building, the office was a complete contrast. In the reception, the clientele sat slumped half way in the plush seats, their bodies broken over the furniture like their dreams broken over their lives. It took a lot for Frank to sit in one of the seats as he was instructed, because to sit with them, in his mind, was to be one of them, and that was the one thing that kept him awake at night, laced in his nightmares; the thought that, no matter how hard he tried to stop it, he too would end up broken.
“What’s your name?” Frank asked this time, somewhat unimaginatively.
“My name is Dr Williamson,” said Dr Williamson.
Frank nodded slowly. And because he couldn’t really think of anything else to say, simply replied with, “Cool.”
“Now Frank,” Williamson began suddenly, her voice snapping with authority and Frank didn’t need to be told that it was time to get down to business. “I want to talk to you.”
“Great,” he replied dully. “What do you wanna talk about?”
“I want to talk about you,” she said. “Your future. Have you thought about your future much?”
“Well yeah,” Frank said. “Of course I’ve thought about it.”
“That’s good, that’s good,” Williamson praised. “Now, your mother tells me you got rejected from Montclair State University. Can you tell me about that?”
Frank shrugged and looked at his shoes. “I guess they were looking for more than just character.”
He didn’t expect her to laugh and she didn’t, so he returned his attention from his shoes back to her and met her with the hardest look he could muster.
“Have you considered any other universities?”
“I got a brochure from this other place. But they didn’t have the right stuff for me so…”
“What kind of stuff are you looking for?”
He rolled his eyes, growing more and more agitated. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what you’re looking for in a university,” she repeated.
“Look, is your job just to ask stupid questions or is this interrogation actually gonna go somewhere?” he snapped.
Dr Williamson sighed and rubbed her temples and the silence that fell upon them caused him to fidget. She changed her position in her chair; uncrossing her legs and then crossing them the other way. He was annoying her by being intentionally cryptic and it was satisfying – satisfying to know he was still the difficult one who didn’t need advice, always was always would be. But then he thought of the broken kids just outside the door, the kids he supposedly wasn’t one of. He needed help and no matter how much he denied it in front of the people who wanted to help him, it would stay that way for longer than it needed to be.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, keeping his eyes on the floor.
“It’s alright,” Williamson replied calmly. “You’re feeling confused and it’s perfectly understandable for you to feel agitated.”
The patronising smoothness of her voice just succeeded to agitate him further, but he resorted to clenching and unclenching his toes in his shoes instead of lashing out again.
“So,” Williamson began again, with that same authority, “I’m going to give you this pamphlet which might provide some direction,” she handed a pamphlet to him, “and I want you to keep looking. Think about what things you want to do and next week we’ll do some more work.”
Frank stuffed the pamphlet into his pocket and made no hesitation to leave. Once he left the office, he slammed the door behind him, as if that one gesture won him the argument. But then suddenly that yellow haze began to cloud round his eyes again, the wave of nausea washing over him so strong it was a wonder it didn’t knock him off his feet. The bile was working his way up his throat again and suddenly he felt so very, very hot, like the reception had suddenly turned into an oven. With one hand on the wall and under the surveillance of prying eyes he staggered past the other kids and just made it towards the door.
It was when he met the harsh cold air of outside that his knees suddenly gave in and the next thing he knew his face was pressed to the sidewalk, inches away from the gutter that his vomit was gushing into. He wanted it to stop and he wanted to crawl into the alley and curl up and cry but the vomit just kept coming and coming so that all he could do was lie there and watch the world slip and slide in and out of darkness. There was a ringing in his ears.
A hand on his shoulder, but he barely felt it. The soft voice of someone he could only wish would just leave him alone in his ear, but fuzzy and barely comprehensible like it was being said a hundred miles away. Hands cupping his chin away from the concrete and then lips forming words he couldn’t hear.
“Mommy said not to talk to strangers,” he grumbled drunkenly, his throat gurgling like a frog’s.
“I’m not a stranger,” the voice replied and suddenly he was being hauled off the ground and staggering somewhere else, somewhere safe, barely standing against the lean figure of his liberator.
TWO chapters!!
Howd'ya like them apples? Rate and review please and I promise this'll go somewhere!!]
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Frank couldn’t feel himself.
He lay sprawled on the rug, lost somewhere inside his conscience, floating in his blood and bones and weak muscles amongst the billions of particles that he was made up of. His mind had sifted apart, dissected itself into segments so that his thoughts, the few that they were, were unrelated and battling against each other in his head. The ceiling swirled above him, crashing against the walls which bent and stretched and distorted like when you look at yourself in one of those silly mirrors and Frank had never felt so alive and so dead at the same time. But the dead feeling seeped deeper inside him, turning the bubble of happiness in his chest that was blown by the weed he had smoked last night black like a blotch of ink on paper.
He giggled at what a fucking mess he had made of himself.
He tried to sit up but it was all too fast and suddenly the world was yanked from underneath his feet and all he could see was stars and a yellow haze tinting his vision. He retched onto the rug, a feeling of disappointment stinging his chest when nothing came up and he cursed himself because he was that much of a failure to even puke. He had fished the letter from Montclair out of the bin in the early hours of the morning but it had done nothing but make him feel worse. He couldn’t even gather up the strength to rip it apart.
Aspirin. He needed aspirin. The bile clawed at the walls of his stomach and he crawled to his hands and knees, his face still buried in the rug. He wanted to scream and he wanted to cry but he did nothing but stay there until the yellow haze evaporated and the thoughts of puking and crying and screaming left his mind. Every muscle in his body screamed for him. Then Frank staggered to his feet and checked the time. It was 11:48 pm.
He sighed and stumbled towards the window and pulled the curtains apart. The pale grey midday light burst into his room like a slap in the face and for a moment he thought he had been blinded. Frank grimaced and shut them again, back to the cosy darkness that he knew best. He could hear his mother downstairs and sniffed grimly. She’d left him up there getting high and not even bothered to wake him up.
Just shows how much they really care, he thought to himself bitterly.
Frank sighed again and trudged out of the warm, dope reeking comfort of his room and practically tumbled down the stairs, driven only by the pounding headache tugging at the back of his eyes that reminded him of his need for aspirin. Hasn’t someone had enough drugs already? an ironic tell-tale voice tutted at the back of his mind. He broke the thought in half in a heartbeat and entered the kitchen, greeted by the image of his mother reading a magazine idly at the table. As far as he knew she didn’t acknowledge his presence.
Aspirin. Aspirin. Aspirin.
The medicine draw was full of stuff, but not the stuff he needed at that time. Painkillers, throat medicines, cough sweets, indigestion remedies but no aspirin. As if on cue that sickly yellow haze flooded his vision again and Frank slowly thunked his head on the countertop. The collision with the wood did nothing for his headache so he stopped but now there was a ringing in his ears and it was only until then that he truly felt sick, hung over and utterly helpless.
“We’re out of aspirin if me stating the obvious makes you feel better,” his mom said boredly without looking up from the magazine.
Frank resisted the urge to cry.
Sniffling like a sad puppy he slumped down at the kitchen table and settled for a glass of Sunny Delight instead, wondering whether trying hard enough convincing himself that it was true, it would have the same effect as the aspirin. Finally his mother looked up from Real Life Stories: I Drove the Wrong Way up a Highway and watched him nibble at a piece of burnt toast wearing a limited expression on her face.
“You look terrible,” she said bluntly.
“This is kinda your thing today, isn’t it?” he grumbled.
She pushed a yellow leaflet across the table to him. Frank looked at it blankly for a moment and returned to his toast.
“Hey.” She tapped the leaflet, bringing his attention back to it. “Read.”
Frank sighed heavily and skimmed the headline: Adolescents’ Helpline – Careers talks, therapy and Life Guidance for your mislead youth. And he snorted.
“You’re kidding,” he said. “No way. Uh-uh. Mislead youth; what the fuck is that?”
“I want you to go,” Mom replied.
“Listen to me,” Frank growled. “I don’t need those idiots telling me what a waste of space I am.”
“No, you listen to me.” She leant forward in her seat and folded her hands on the table. It made him feel like he was five years old again and she was lecturing him that dyeing next door’s daschund Quagmire’s tail green with food colouring would in fact have a consequence.
“I want you to go because I’m a mother. And as a mother I can’t sit here reading about some half-wit’s inability to drive and watching another Iero waste his life away.” She took his hand in hers and for once he didn’t pull away. “I know about Montclair.”
Frank chewed on his lip. “You do?”
“Uh-huh. It’s not your fault, okay? It happens. But, sitting here sulking about it instead of choosing something else is your fault.”
“I don’t know what else to do,” he said stubbornly. “You think I haven’t looked? There’s nothing round here, except dishwashing at Bubba’s Pizza place and joining the Mafia!”
“That’s why we have Adolescents’ Helpline,” she replied calmly, looking for the world like a saleswoman on one of those irritating insurance commercials on the television and infuriating him further. “They can help you with the choices you need help making-”
“I’m not retarded, Mom, I can tie my laces myself. Please, just don’t make me go there. Please.”
Mom pinched the bridge of her nose tiredly. “I’m not arguing with you about this. You’re going. And it starts in half an hour, so go get ready.”
“No.”
“Don’t make me use your full name!”
“Oh, I’m so scared.”
“Frank. Anthony. Iero.”
“…Fine.”
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“What’s your name?”
Frank looked up from his hands at the careers advisor in front of him. “Frank.”
“Frank,” she repeated, rolling the word around in her mouth; accentuating each consonant and the flatness of the ‘a’. “You look like a Frank.”
“It’s my dad’s name. And his dad’s before him.”
She nodded, like she was making it abundantly clear she understood. He didn’t quite know why. “That’s cool,” she smiled. “I’ve never met a ‘the third’ before.”
Frank raised and lowered one shoulder. “I always thought it was kinda obnoxious, but there you go…”
“Well, it depends on how you look at it I think.”
He wasn’t sure what that meant either.
The careers advisor’s smile was evidently fake and that annoyed him. He didn’t like the way it froze at the same place every time it appeared, like she spent hours every day in front of a mirror practising to keep it idem. Her office reflected her smile as well; neat, tidy and completely under her control. The pale cricket white walls curved at the ceiling, giving the impression that you were trapped inside a spherical dome (if you were in the right state of mind to think that way). A lot of things about the room added to Frank’s annoyance as well, like the paintings depicting a twisted dream or the inside of someone’s brain that hung on the walls; as if decorating your office with psychological works of art would indeed help you get into the mind of your patients.
But compared to the whole building, the office was a complete contrast. In the reception, the clientele sat slumped half way in the plush seats, their bodies broken over the furniture like their dreams broken over their lives. It took a lot for Frank to sit in one of the seats as he was instructed, because to sit with them, in his mind, was to be one of them, and that was the one thing that kept him awake at night, laced in his nightmares; the thought that, no matter how hard he tried to stop it, he too would end up broken.
“What’s your name?” Frank asked this time, somewhat unimaginatively.
“My name is Dr Williamson,” said Dr Williamson.
Frank nodded slowly. And because he couldn’t really think of anything else to say, simply replied with, “Cool.”
“Now Frank,” Williamson began suddenly, her voice snapping with authority and Frank didn’t need to be told that it was time to get down to business. “I want to talk to you.”
“Great,” he replied dully. “What do you wanna talk about?”
“I want to talk about you,” she said. “Your future. Have you thought about your future much?”
“Well yeah,” Frank said. “Of course I’ve thought about it.”
“That’s good, that’s good,” Williamson praised. “Now, your mother tells me you got rejected from Montclair State University. Can you tell me about that?”
Frank shrugged and looked at his shoes. “I guess they were looking for more than just character.”
He didn’t expect her to laugh and she didn’t, so he returned his attention from his shoes back to her and met her with the hardest look he could muster.
“Have you considered any other universities?”
“I got a brochure from this other place. But they didn’t have the right stuff for me so…”
“What kind of stuff are you looking for?”
He rolled his eyes, growing more and more agitated. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what you’re looking for in a university,” she repeated.
“Look, is your job just to ask stupid questions or is this interrogation actually gonna go somewhere?” he snapped.
Dr Williamson sighed and rubbed her temples and the silence that fell upon them caused him to fidget. She changed her position in her chair; uncrossing her legs and then crossing them the other way. He was annoying her by being intentionally cryptic and it was satisfying – satisfying to know he was still the difficult one who didn’t need advice, always was always would be. But then he thought of the broken kids just outside the door, the kids he supposedly wasn’t one of. He needed help and no matter how much he denied it in front of the people who wanted to help him, it would stay that way for longer than it needed to be.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, keeping his eyes on the floor.
“It’s alright,” Williamson replied calmly. “You’re feeling confused and it’s perfectly understandable for you to feel agitated.”
The patronising smoothness of her voice just succeeded to agitate him further, but he resorted to clenching and unclenching his toes in his shoes instead of lashing out again.
“So,” Williamson began again, with that same authority, “I’m going to give you this pamphlet which might provide some direction,” she handed a pamphlet to him, “and I want you to keep looking. Think about what things you want to do and next week we’ll do some more work.”
Frank stuffed the pamphlet into his pocket and made no hesitation to leave. Once he left the office, he slammed the door behind him, as if that one gesture won him the argument. But then suddenly that yellow haze began to cloud round his eyes again, the wave of nausea washing over him so strong it was a wonder it didn’t knock him off his feet. The bile was working his way up his throat again and suddenly he felt so very, very hot, like the reception had suddenly turned into an oven. With one hand on the wall and under the surveillance of prying eyes he staggered past the other kids and just made it towards the door.
It was when he met the harsh cold air of outside that his knees suddenly gave in and the next thing he knew his face was pressed to the sidewalk, inches away from the gutter that his vomit was gushing into. He wanted it to stop and he wanted to crawl into the alley and curl up and cry but the vomit just kept coming and coming so that all he could do was lie there and watch the world slip and slide in and out of darkness. There was a ringing in his ears.
A hand on his shoulder, but he barely felt it. The soft voice of someone he could only wish would just leave him alone in his ear, but fuzzy and barely comprehensible like it was being said a hundred miles away. Hands cupping his chin away from the concrete and then lips forming words he couldn’t hear.
“Mommy said not to talk to strangers,” he grumbled drunkenly, his throat gurgling like a frog’s.
“I’m not a stranger,” the voice replied and suddenly he was being hauled off the ground and staggering somewhere else, somewhere safe, barely standing against the lean figure of his liberator.
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