Categories > Celebrities > My Chemical Romance > The Poison
'Ello, dears! Currently, I am holed up in my little hotel room in Pennsylvania, crouched oh-so-pathetically over my sister's ittybitty laptop known as Wheatley (anyone who gets that reference gets a granola bar, as that's the best I've got). The reason I'm staying in York for the rest of the week? My dad's on his monthly business trip and since he somehow got 4 free tickets to Hershey Park, he brought me and my two sisters along. So now I'm sentenced to about eight hours of arguing with my younger sister and watching the Olympics, and also studying for my English test out- and yes, possibly working on the next chapter for The Poison, as well as the first chapter for another story I'm working on.
In relation to the Olympics, I'm rooting mainly for the Independent Olympic Athletes, and other countries that no one cares about.
::
The Poison
Chapter Nineteen
We are accidents
Waiting, waiting to happen
For a moment, my mind refused to register that in front of me was standing an acquaintance from my past life. Then my mind snaps into action and I begin to speak.
“What are you doing here, Frank?”
He smiled and gave me a bit of room by stepping back, revealing a young dark-haired woman that looks as though she could be related to him. She waves slightly and answers my question, “Just checking on how you were. Hi, I’m Jamia.”
She holds out her hand for me to shake and I take it hesitantly. So this was Frank’s girlfriend. She was curvy, short, and pale, with dark sunglasses covering her eyes and a side part in her hair- which, on a less related note, looked a great deal cleaner than Gerard’s often-greasy ebony curtain-hair.
“Atropine.” I say unnecessarily, as I’m sure Frank has already told her who I am. “Who sent you?”
“Well, we kind of sent ourselves.” Frank says. “Mikey and Alicia were in on it, too. We just got sent because we look the youngest.”
“And Gerard?” I ask hopefully. It’s only been about a week since I left, but it felt so much longer. William Shakespeare was right- sadness does, indeed, lengthen the hours.
Frank shrugged vaguely. “He’s been... out of sorts, lately. He hasn’t come out of his room in awhile. Been painting a lot, I think.”
I feel a sinking in my stomach, along with a strong stab of guilt. I had done this him, hadn’t I? It worried me a lot to think of what might’ve gone through his head when he read my letter to him- that he could have blamed himself entirely for my disappearance. I could visualize the scene in my head- him waiting a few minutes for my return, which then stretch into half an hour, and hour, two hours, until curiosity gets the better of him and he rolls out of bed and walks into the kitchen. At first, the small scrap of paper that served as my pathetic condolence to him only catches his eye slightly, and he gives it but a passing glance until he sees my name signed at the bottom of it. He picks it up slowly, not knowing what to make of it. And then, reading it, he sucks in a deep breath and scrapes a strand of black hair behind his ear.
Then he crumples the piece of paper into a minuscule ball and throws it on the ground, letting out an angry yell.
I didn’t want to think of what could have happened beyond that.
“So, I take it you’re mostly alright.” Frank said, easing me out of my daydream.
“Uh, yeah.” I say, refraining from mentioning the incidents of that day. “I think I’ll start walking home now- I’ve missed my bus.” It certainly wasn’t a prospect I was looking forward to- nearly six miles home and it was ninety degrees out- but I felt the conversation loping towards something much more awkward than small talk.
“We have a car if you don’t feel like walking, you know.” Jamia puts a hand on my shoulder and guides me towards the guest parking lot, where a beat-up Oldsmobile 98 was parked. I thought for a few seconds- a blisteringly hot three hours spent walking home to only be exhausted even more when I got there, or save myself a bit of suffering in exchange for five possibly awkward moments in an air-condtioned car.
Like any other sane person, I opted for the latter.
Frank held the door open for me as I climbed into the car and slid across the green vinyl seating, and before he closed the door, he handed me a hammer. Humoring him, I took it although I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was supposed to do with it.
“It’s for the seat belt.” Jamia explained helpfully from the passenger seat. “This is kind of an old car, so the seat belts tend to get... stuck, sometimes.”
She demonstrated by taking another small hammer from the glovebox and pounding it down on the buckle of her seat belt until it clicked shut. Frank followed suit, and I looked down at my own buckle. I pulled my seat belt towards it and gingerly tapped it with the hammer.
“You’ll have to hit it a little harder than that, dear.” Frank said from the front seat, already beginning to back out of the parking lot. I hastily slammed the hammer into the buckle a few more times, when it finally locked. I felt a small spark of pride.
As soon as the car cleared the speed bump, Jamia opened the glove box once again and sifted through what sounded like a bunch of jewel cases.
“So, Atropine.” she said, pulling out two cases. “The Pixies or New Mexican Disaster Squad? Or, hey- The Cure sounds good right about now, how’s that?”
“Um,” I thought for a second. “The Cure. Yeah.”
She popped the CD into the stereo and turned the volume knob up, In Between Days blasting almost immediately from the speakers- despite the less-than-top-notch condition of the rest of the car, the speakers were obviously very high quality. My stomach dropped suddenly. After leaving Gerard, this was the last song I wanted to hear. Robert Smith’s voice flooded the car, figuratively punching me in the gut with lonely words.
Go on, go on, just walk away
Go on, go on, your choice is made
My heart clenched and I suddenly felt like bringing the hammer down over my head. The guilt was killing me- I missed Gerard like hell.
I bit my lip and curled into myself, hiding my face from Frank and Jamia. I was definitely going through a fair amount of emotional turmoil at the moment, but that didn’t mean I wanted to talk about it. The Cure continued playing, moving on to the second track, tormenting me in my sadness. I felt relief when we turned onto my street and I pointed Frank towards the house next to mine- there was no reason for me to put either of them in harm’s way, by risking my dad seeing them.
The car sputtered to a stop by the curb and I climbed out, but before I had set foot on the tarmac Frank stopped me with his hand on my shoulder.
“Atropine,” he said quietly, uncharacteristically serious. “I know what your home life is like, and... I know it’s hard. But hold on. You’ll pull through.”
He bit his lip and cast his eyes downward, trying to find something else to say.
“Give ‘em hell, kid.” he said, giving my shoulder a final pat before slamming the door shut and driving off.
Give ‘em hell, kid. That sounded like a song title. From anyone else, it would’ve been the standard false-compliment fare, but from Frank it just sounded so intense and sincere. I hadn’t spent a lot of time around him, but I knew how direct and honest he was. He never said something that wasn’t meant to be poignant. He really wanted me to pull through this, and that actually came as a bit of a shock. The number of people who genuinely cared about me seemed to increase with every passing day.
I readjusted the book bag strap on my shoulder and walked up the dirty gravel drive to my house, hoping to God (or whoever was in charge) that no one would be home. Cautiously, I opened the front door, uttering a soft “Hello?” before walking as quietly as I could into the house when no one answered.
As far as I knew, I was alone, but that didn’t stop from retreating immediately into my room. There, I set out all my schoolwork, despite not having any intention to start it or even give it a second glance. I leaned against my door and closed my eyes, waiting for something to happen.
I heard the front door slam and someone shuffle slowly in, letting out a raucous cough.
Oh God. I said to myself, panicking. Oh God oh God oh God that was not what I meant.
I tried to slow my breathing down to a normal pace and stayed perfectly still, waiting for the telltale footsteps. I did hear them, but they sounded as though they led off to the other side of the house, to my parents’ bedroom. Okay. That was better. That meant that he would most likely collapse on the bed- a loud thump instantly proved that theory- and fall asleep for the next few hours. Cue the loud snoring.
I looked back at my homework, which was still spread carelessly about on the floor and picked up a sheet that had somehow drifted within reach. It was an assignment from English- ‘Describe, using at least 2 pages from your journal, what you want to be when you grow up’ was typed in Times New Roman on the half sheet of paper. It resembled very closely the banal entries that we also had to write out in the class, but for some reason, it got me thinking. Thinking about the future- which, considering that I had barely enough money to scrape by, wasn’t something that I normally put all that much thought into.
But now I honestly thought good, long and hard about it, and after a few minutes of careful consideration, opened my pencil bag, picked out a pen and began to write.
Ever since I first learned to pick up a book and read, I wanted to be a writer. I think that the main reason for that was because I was never good at articulating my thoughts, or just being around people in general. With writing, I could express all my feelings, everything I felt, so easily it was almost unnatural. I could let my voice be heard without me saying a word.
It was weird, how much honesty I was using in the writing, and how easily it came out. When I was nearly halfway done, I felt the skin on the inside of my thumb being rubbed raw from the pressure, and I stopped to massage it gently. Even with calluses there and on my ring finger, caused by years of gripping a pencil, I still felt pain when I exceeded the average amount of writing time. As I rubbed the sore spot, I absently wondered where Lindsey could’ve gone off to. I mean- she was a ghost and all, so she might have just rendered herself invisible or something, but the staple of ghostly presences (at least for me) are feeling something- like you can’t really see anything, but you can feel it and you know it’s there.
Maybe she’d figured out some way to make contact with Gerard- which would also explain why he hadn’t tried to make contact with me. At this, I felt something like jealousy churn in my stomach, though I immediately quelled it with the fact that Lindsey had been around for far longer than I had. Before me, there was them. I knew I had probably started out as being his replacement goldfish for Lindsey, and although I was allowed to be mildly perturbed by that, I couldn’t get that angry. He was severely mentally damaged; that was just what happened to be his coping strategy.
After that, I forced myself to finish my homework, in a feeble attempt to derail that particular train of thought- even then, I could tell it would twist into something much darker if I kept encouraging it.
As I came to the last sentence on my English homework, I didn’t pause in picking up my math work sheet, and, although I’m useless with numbers, solved each of the problems to the best of my ability and put the sheet back in my folder.
I still had other assignments I had to do (along with mass quantities of make-up work), but too much school-related work had left me drained- even when there was really nothing else for me to do. I had already read every single book in the house at least ten times, the movies we owned were all scratched beyond repair, and the DVD player didn’t work anyway. Besides counting every crack in the ceiling, I’d thoroughly exhausted every possible source of entertainment in the entire house. Thought that really shouldn’t come as a surprise, because I was dirt poor if you hadn’t already figured that out, and I’d lived in the same house with the same things in it since I was born. I don’t even think many of the lightbulbs have been changed.
I drew my knees up to my chest and began counting cracks.
I was on Crack No. 17 when a random memory of the house came to me. Since I wasn’t there to motivate anyone anymore, what became of the unfinished playground? I hoped that they hadn’t decided to take it down. Not just because we had all worked really hard on it, but because it would give me some sort of security to grasp onto ifit was still there, that maybe Gerard hadn’t tried to erase every single memory of my existence.
For no reason at all, I wondered what time it was and got up from my spot, treading carefully across the worn carpeting to the kitchen, where the house’s only working clock stood.
It was an old grandfather clock- very old, actually. From what I knew, it was an estate-sale born wedding gift from a family friend (who I guess isn’t really a friend anymore). The dark oak wood was scuffed and the pendulum’s brass plating was worn away to show dull silver. The hands were always a bit too slow and the roman numerals set in the clock face were worn down from black into a sort of dark gray. But still, even taking all the wear and tear that it’s been through into consideration, it was a beautiful clock. The elongated panel inlaid below the clock face was the centerpiece, however- the Virgin Mary, holding baby Jesus in her arms. Every stroke of the brush had been deliberate and replicated that of the original painting perfectly- except that Mary was wearing red instead of blue. I’d never really figured out why.
Anyway, the time read 4:36, and I felt a little frustrated that, in all my dawdling, I’d only managed to eat up a little over two hours. Life would generally go smoother for me if I found more things to kill time with in the safety of my room- there was some strange moral threshold that kept my father from attacking me in my room. I didn’t understand it at all, but I was more than grateful for it.
A monstrous yawn from my parents’ room startled me into movement and I quickly retreated, not wanting to have the wrath of a grouchy, hung-over father.
I looked back down at my homework. A little more wouldn’t hurt me, I guessed.
As I wrote, I carefully measured the intervals of time in which my father got up (presumably to mix a new drink) out of the bedroom, went on a small raid of the most likely empty refrigerator, and went back to lay down in the bed. According to my internal clock, each loop took about three minutes, with about twenty reserved for a short nap between them. Three loops went by without me moving an inch- over an hour. After loop number four I returned to my work, waiting out the moment when my father returned to bed for good.
It would be a lie to say that I wasn’t growing impatient, though waiting for something to happen could normally be considered one of my strong points- or at the very least, never taking any action at all. But tonight my mind made a snap decision that was risky, dangerous, idiotic, and completely necessary if I was to survive these next few years.
I scribbled my name down on my history homework and started on science, which would no doubt pose a challenge. The teachers at my school practiced the habit that if the student didn’t get the concept the first time when taught in the vague, standardized way that all textbooks are written, then they probably would never understand it and gave up on trying to teach them altogether. That was the case with me and science.
Even so, I finished it within an hour and a half and was left with heaping mounds of make-up work to contend with- that was something I’d never be prepared to do all at once. So I took each sheet one question at a time, filling up the answers until I was at least half-sure most of them were right, and put it away.
In this sluggish, meandering way, I was able to finish exactly three sheets of work before I heard the heavy shuffling that signaled my father’s departure to the bedroom, followed by loud snoring.
I could visualize the scene now- Wayne sleeping soundly on the bed, with Helena just barely staying on the edge of the mattress, stiffly curled into a ball, not daring to make contact with any part of his body. I’ll admit that I felt a little guilty for a second, but I quelled that emotion as soon as it manifested itself- I wasn’t running away, leaving her to fend for herself.
I hoped that both were in a deep sleep, so that neither could hear the slamming of a door.
::
In other regards to the Olympics, I think that white water kayaking (or whatever it is that they call it) is the most exciting and challenging sport. I was watching it as I edited the chapter and just thought I'd bring that up. I've done some low-par kayaking a couple times, but if you watch what they have to do it's like... o.o insane.
Lyrics from There There by Radiohead, whom I am fast falling in love with.
"Here":http://frownyalpha.tumblr.com/post/27101536251/iron-man-suits-at-comic-con-2012 is a picture set of one of the reasons I cried because I wasn't able to go to Comic Con.
In relation to the Olympics, I'm rooting mainly for the Independent Olympic Athletes, and other countries that no one cares about.
::
The Poison
Chapter Nineteen
We are accidents
Waiting, waiting to happen
For a moment, my mind refused to register that in front of me was standing an acquaintance from my past life. Then my mind snaps into action and I begin to speak.
“What are you doing here, Frank?”
He smiled and gave me a bit of room by stepping back, revealing a young dark-haired woman that looks as though she could be related to him. She waves slightly and answers my question, “Just checking on how you were. Hi, I’m Jamia.”
She holds out her hand for me to shake and I take it hesitantly. So this was Frank’s girlfriend. She was curvy, short, and pale, with dark sunglasses covering her eyes and a side part in her hair- which, on a less related note, looked a great deal cleaner than Gerard’s often-greasy ebony curtain-hair.
“Atropine.” I say unnecessarily, as I’m sure Frank has already told her who I am. “Who sent you?”
“Well, we kind of sent ourselves.” Frank says. “Mikey and Alicia were in on it, too. We just got sent because we look the youngest.”
“And Gerard?” I ask hopefully. It’s only been about a week since I left, but it felt so much longer. William Shakespeare was right- sadness does, indeed, lengthen the hours.
Frank shrugged vaguely. “He’s been... out of sorts, lately. He hasn’t come out of his room in awhile. Been painting a lot, I think.”
I feel a sinking in my stomach, along with a strong stab of guilt. I had done this him, hadn’t I? It worried me a lot to think of what might’ve gone through his head when he read my letter to him- that he could have blamed himself entirely for my disappearance. I could visualize the scene in my head- him waiting a few minutes for my return, which then stretch into half an hour, and hour, two hours, until curiosity gets the better of him and he rolls out of bed and walks into the kitchen. At first, the small scrap of paper that served as my pathetic condolence to him only catches his eye slightly, and he gives it but a passing glance until he sees my name signed at the bottom of it. He picks it up slowly, not knowing what to make of it. And then, reading it, he sucks in a deep breath and scrapes a strand of black hair behind his ear.
Then he crumples the piece of paper into a minuscule ball and throws it on the ground, letting out an angry yell.
I didn’t want to think of what could have happened beyond that.
“So, I take it you’re mostly alright.” Frank said, easing me out of my daydream.
“Uh, yeah.” I say, refraining from mentioning the incidents of that day. “I think I’ll start walking home now- I’ve missed my bus.” It certainly wasn’t a prospect I was looking forward to- nearly six miles home and it was ninety degrees out- but I felt the conversation loping towards something much more awkward than small talk.
“We have a car if you don’t feel like walking, you know.” Jamia puts a hand on my shoulder and guides me towards the guest parking lot, where a beat-up Oldsmobile 98 was parked. I thought for a few seconds- a blisteringly hot three hours spent walking home to only be exhausted even more when I got there, or save myself a bit of suffering in exchange for five possibly awkward moments in an air-condtioned car.
Like any other sane person, I opted for the latter.
Frank held the door open for me as I climbed into the car and slid across the green vinyl seating, and before he closed the door, he handed me a hammer. Humoring him, I took it although I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was supposed to do with it.
“It’s for the seat belt.” Jamia explained helpfully from the passenger seat. “This is kind of an old car, so the seat belts tend to get... stuck, sometimes.”
She demonstrated by taking another small hammer from the glovebox and pounding it down on the buckle of her seat belt until it clicked shut. Frank followed suit, and I looked down at my own buckle. I pulled my seat belt towards it and gingerly tapped it with the hammer.
“You’ll have to hit it a little harder than that, dear.” Frank said from the front seat, already beginning to back out of the parking lot. I hastily slammed the hammer into the buckle a few more times, when it finally locked. I felt a small spark of pride.
As soon as the car cleared the speed bump, Jamia opened the glove box once again and sifted through what sounded like a bunch of jewel cases.
“So, Atropine.” she said, pulling out two cases. “The Pixies or New Mexican Disaster Squad? Or, hey- The Cure sounds good right about now, how’s that?”
“Um,” I thought for a second. “The Cure. Yeah.”
She popped the CD into the stereo and turned the volume knob up, In Between Days blasting almost immediately from the speakers- despite the less-than-top-notch condition of the rest of the car, the speakers were obviously very high quality. My stomach dropped suddenly. After leaving Gerard, this was the last song I wanted to hear. Robert Smith’s voice flooded the car, figuratively punching me in the gut with lonely words.
Go on, go on, just walk away
Go on, go on, your choice is made
My heart clenched and I suddenly felt like bringing the hammer down over my head. The guilt was killing me- I missed Gerard like hell.
I bit my lip and curled into myself, hiding my face from Frank and Jamia. I was definitely going through a fair amount of emotional turmoil at the moment, but that didn’t mean I wanted to talk about it. The Cure continued playing, moving on to the second track, tormenting me in my sadness. I felt relief when we turned onto my street and I pointed Frank towards the house next to mine- there was no reason for me to put either of them in harm’s way, by risking my dad seeing them.
The car sputtered to a stop by the curb and I climbed out, but before I had set foot on the tarmac Frank stopped me with his hand on my shoulder.
“Atropine,” he said quietly, uncharacteristically serious. “I know what your home life is like, and... I know it’s hard. But hold on. You’ll pull through.”
He bit his lip and cast his eyes downward, trying to find something else to say.
“Give ‘em hell, kid.” he said, giving my shoulder a final pat before slamming the door shut and driving off.
Give ‘em hell, kid. That sounded like a song title. From anyone else, it would’ve been the standard false-compliment fare, but from Frank it just sounded so intense and sincere. I hadn’t spent a lot of time around him, but I knew how direct and honest he was. He never said something that wasn’t meant to be poignant. He really wanted me to pull through this, and that actually came as a bit of a shock. The number of people who genuinely cared about me seemed to increase with every passing day.
I readjusted the book bag strap on my shoulder and walked up the dirty gravel drive to my house, hoping to God (or whoever was in charge) that no one would be home. Cautiously, I opened the front door, uttering a soft “Hello?” before walking as quietly as I could into the house when no one answered.
As far as I knew, I was alone, but that didn’t stop from retreating immediately into my room. There, I set out all my schoolwork, despite not having any intention to start it or even give it a second glance. I leaned against my door and closed my eyes, waiting for something to happen.
I heard the front door slam and someone shuffle slowly in, letting out a raucous cough.
Oh God. I said to myself, panicking. Oh God oh God oh God that was not what I meant.
I tried to slow my breathing down to a normal pace and stayed perfectly still, waiting for the telltale footsteps. I did hear them, but they sounded as though they led off to the other side of the house, to my parents’ bedroom. Okay. That was better. That meant that he would most likely collapse on the bed- a loud thump instantly proved that theory- and fall asleep for the next few hours. Cue the loud snoring.
I looked back at my homework, which was still spread carelessly about on the floor and picked up a sheet that had somehow drifted within reach. It was an assignment from English- ‘Describe, using at least 2 pages from your journal, what you want to be when you grow up’ was typed in Times New Roman on the half sheet of paper. It resembled very closely the banal entries that we also had to write out in the class, but for some reason, it got me thinking. Thinking about the future- which, considering that I had barely enough money to scrape by, wasn’t something that I normally put all that much thought into.
But now I honestly thought good, long and hard about it, and after a few minutes of careful consideration, opened my pencil bag, picked out a pen and began to write.
Ever since I first learned to pick up a book and read, I wanted to be a writer. I think that the main reason for that was because I was never good at articulating my thoughts, or just being around people in general. With writing, I could express all my feelings, everything I felt, so easily it was almost unnatural. I could let my voice be heard without me saying a word.
It was weird, how much honesty I was using in the writing, and how easily it came out. When I was nearly halfway done, I felt the skin on the inside of my thumb being rubbed raw from the pressure, and I stopped to massage it gently. Even with calluses there and on my ring finger, caused by years of gripping a pencil, I still felt pain when I exceeded the average amount of writing time. As I rubbed the sore spot, I absently wondered where Lindsey could’ve gone off to. I mean- she was a ghost and all, so she might have just rendered herself invisible or something, but the staple of ghostly presences (at least for me) are feeling something- like you can’t really see anything, but you can feel it and you know it’s there.
Maybe she’d figured out some way to make contact with Gerard- which would also explain why he hadn’t tried to make contact with me. At this, I felt something like jealousy churn in my stomach, though I immediately quelled it with the fact that Lindsey had been around for far longer than I had. Before me, there was them. I knew I had probably started out as being his replacement goldfish for Lindsey, and although I was allowed to be mildly perturbed by that, I couldn’t get that angry. He was severely mentally damaged; that was just what happened to be his coping strategy.
After that, I forced myself to finish my homework, in a feeble attempt to derail that particular train of thought- even then, I could tell it would twist into something much darker if I kept encouraging it.
As I came to the last sentence on my English homework, I didn’t pause in picking up my math work sheet, and, although I’m useless with numbers, solved each of the problems to the best of my ability and put the sheet back in my folder.
I still had other assignments I had to do (along with mass quantities of make-up work), but too much school-related work had left me drained- even when there was really nothing else for me to do. I had already read every single book in the house at least ten times, the movies we owned were all scratched beyond repair, and the DVD player didn’t work anyway. Besides counting every crack in the ceiling, I’d thoroughly exhausted every possible source of entertainment in the entire house. Thought that really shouldn’t come as a surprise, because I was dirt poor if you hadn’t already figured that out, and I’d lived in the same house with the same things in it since I was born. I don’t even think many of the lightbulbs have been changed.
I drew my knees up to my chest and began counting cracks.
I was on Crack No. 17 when a random memory of the house came to me. Since I wasn’t there to motivate anyone anymore, what became of the unfinished playground? I hoped that they hadn’t decided to take it down. Not just because we had all worked really hard on it, but because it would give me some sort of security to grasp onto ifit was still there, that maybe Gerard hadn’t tried to erase every single memory of my existence.
For no reason at all, I wondered what time it was and got up from my spot, treading carefully across the worn carpeting to the kitchen, where the house’s only working clock stood.
It was an old grandfather clock- very old, actually. From what I knew, it was an estate-sale born wedding gift from a family friend (who I guess isn’t really a friend anymore). The dark oak wood was scuffed and the pendulum’s brass plating was worn away to show dull silver. The hands were always a bit too slow and the roman numerals set in the clock face were worn down from black into a sort of dark gray. But still, even taking all the wear and tear that it’s been through into consideration, it was a beautiful clock. The elongated panel inlaid below the clock face was the centerpiece, however- the Virgin Mary, holding baby Jesus in her arms. Every stroke of the brush had been deliberate and replicated that of the original painting perfectly- except that Mary was wearing red instead of blue. I’d never really figured out why.
Anyway, the time read 4:36, and I felt a little frustrated that, in all my dawdling, I’d only managed to eat up a little over two hours. Life would generally go smoother for me if I found more things to kill time with in the safety of my room- there was some strange moral threshold that kept my father from attacking me in my room. I didn’t understand it at all, but I was more than grateful for it.
A monstrous yawn from my parents’ room startled me into movement and I quickly retreated, not wanting to have the wrath of a grouchy, hung-over father.
I looked back down at my homework. A little more wouldn’t hurt me, I guessed.
As I wrote, I carefully measured the intervals of time in which my father got up (presumably to mix a new drink) out of the bedroom, went on a small raid of the most likely empty refrigerator, and went back to lay down in the bed. According to my internal clock, each loop took about three minutes, with about twenty reserved for a short nap between them. Three loops went by without me moving an inch- over an hour. After loop number four I returned to my work, waiting out the moment when my father returned to bed for good.
It would be a lie to say that I wasn’t growing impatient, though waiting for something to happen could normally be considered one of my strong points- or at the very least, never taking any action at all. But tonight my mind made a snap decision that was risky, dangerous, idiotic, and completely necessary if I was to survive these next few years.
I scribbled my name down on my history homework and started on science, which would no doubt pose a challenge. The teachers at my school practiced the habit that if the student didn’t get the concept the first time when taught in the vague, standardized way that all textbooks are written, then they probably would never understand it and gave up on trying to teach them altogether. That was the case with me and science.
Even so, I finished it within an hour and a half and was left with heaping mounds of make-up work to contend with- that was something I’d never be prepared to do all at once. So I took each sheet one question at a time, filling up the answers until I was at least half-sure most of them were right, and put it away.
In this sluggish, meandering way, I was able to finish exactly three sheets of work before I heard the heavy shuffling that signaled my father’s departure to the bedroom, followed by loud snoring.
I could visualize the scene now- Wayne sleeping soundly on the bed, with Helena just barely staying on the edge of the mattress, stiffly curled into a ball, not daring to make contact with any part of his body. I’ll admit that I felt a little guilty for a second, but I quelled that emotion as soon as it manifested itself- I wasn’t running away, leaving her to fend for herself.
I hoped that both were in a deep sleep, so that neither could hear the slamming of a door.
::
In other regards to the Olympics, I think that white water kayaking (or whatever it is that they call it) is the most exciting and challenging sport. I was watching it as I edited the chapter and just thought I'd bring that up. I've done some low-par kayaking a couple times, but if you watch what they have to do it's like... o.o insane.
Lyrics from There There by Radiohead, whom I am fast falling in love with.
"Here":http://frownyalpha.tumblr.com/post/27101536251/iron-man-suits-at-comic-con-2012 is a picture set of one of the reasons I cried because I wasn't able to go to Comic Con.
Sign up to rate and review this story