Chapter 7
If this had been a week ago, Frank never could have possibly thought such a thing would happen. But here they were just him and Gerard, laughing in Gerard’s room as Frank helped Gerard hang up some of his pictures. “Seriously though,” Gerard kept saying. “Are you sure you like this one?”
“Are you kidding? It’s amazing.” Frank would say. And they were. The walls were plastered with the drawings, some realistic, some more like a comic book, some sad, some funny, some creepy, some silly. Frank kept his gaze on one the longest, a beautiful, but broken girl, with dead eyes posed like a ballerina, about to make a twirl.
“Who’s this off?” Frank asked.
Gerard shrugged. “It was a dream.” He sorted through another art book. Then he paused and leaned over to look at the picture again.
“That girl was a dancer and I was seeing a show that she was in. She was beautiful at it, and everybody loved her, but she was upset. That’s all I really remember. She told me she hated how she had to be what everybody wanted her to be. She thought that they were destroying her and making her something fake. So when I woke up, I tried to draw her the way I saw her.”
Frank studied it a little longer. “Could I have it?”
“Yeah, sure.” Gerard said. He tried to act casual, but Frank could see how excited Gerard was.
Frank found another picture, of what looked like a funeral. Mourners surrounded a coffin, but the dead girl was up and about, falling down. Across from it, he could see the words sketched around it:
Can you hear me?
Are you near me?
Can we pretend?
To leave again?
We’ll meet again
When both our cars collide
So long, and goodnight
“You write poems?” Frank asked.
“Huh? Oh, yeah, sometimes.” Gerard said. He shook his hair out and took the picture from Frank’s hands. “I mean, it was a song, sort of.”
“Can you sing it?” he asked.
Gerard paused. He took a breath and opened his mouth, and then started laughing. “No, I probably sound terrible.”
“It can’t be that bad.”
“Trust me, it can.” Gerard pressed the back of his hand against his mouth, smothering his laugh, and then took the book from Frank, looking at the words a little longer.
“You want to be a song writer, or an artist?”
Gerard shrugged. “Both, maybe. I really want to start a band. With some friends. And definitely with Mikey.” Frank nodded and Gerard paused, hesitantly. “And you too. I mean, if you wanted too. After all, you’re Mikey’s friend.”
Frank laughed. “I’d like that. To be in a band, I mean.”
“I wonder what I’d call the band.” Gerard got up, slowly walking around, looking at his pictures.
"If you ask me, it should be one of those shitty emo bands." Gerard said.
Frank grinned. "And what would a shitty emo band be called?"
Gerard shrugged. "My shitty bloody love life." He suggested.
Frank laughed. "A Bloody Loving Lie- shit is that even emo?" He asked.
"Emo stuff is always about love." Gerard commented. "Shitty love that ends in those suicide packs or whatever."
"So Romeo and Juliet is emo?" Frank asked innocently. Gerard flung a pillow at him.
"Hey!"
"Now I really want to come up with a name." Gerard said.
"How about "my bloody romance"?
Gerard paused, shaking his head. "My... My Childish Romance."
"My Toxic Romance."
"My Chemical Romance- yeah, that!" Gerard snapped his fingers. "That one! My Chemical Romance- I like that one.”
“It sounds cool.” Frank commented.
Gerard tossed the sketch books aside and got up. “Wanna see my new painting? I started it a few nights ago.”
“Sure.” They got up but Frank paused at crates of comics that were spilling onto the floor. “You have a lot of comic books.”
“I’m practically addicted.” Gerard laughed. “Which ones do you like?”
“I don’t really read them.” Frank said. Gerard pretended to gasp in shock.
“What type of depressing life have you lived?” Gerard asked in horror.
“My mom didn’t let me read them.”
Gerard leaned over and picked one out at random and tossed it to him. “Treat it carefully. But read it.” He added when Frank started to object. “That’s the rule for ‘My Chemical Romance’. You can’t be in it unless you’ve read a comic book.”
Frank laughed. “Okay.”
Gerard smiled, a real smile, not the smirk he always gave to people. It was all cut short though, when they heard a loud thud downstairs, followed by somebody yelling something. Gerard suddenly turned to stone, both of them silent, as they could hear somebody else cry out as something knocked over.
“Mikey!” Gerard exclaimed. He jumped up and ran out of the room, leaving Frank behind. Frank waited, scared of Gerard’s tone, unsure of what to do.
He quickly turned off the radio and was able to hear pieces of a fight downstairs, hearing more of the sounds of someone getting hit than anything else.
Getting hit badly.
Then he could hear Gerard shouting “Leave him alone!”
Frank dug his nails into his palm and waited.
Within a minute, Gerard and Mikey both ran into the room, Gerard slamming the door shut behind them and locking it, Mikey falling down to the ground, gasping for breath. The side of his face was red and swollen, and his nose was bleeding. And then, more shockingly, he started to cry, cradling his head in his arms. Frank never saw Mikey cry before. Gerard quickly got a rag for Mikey, who pressed it against his bloody face, not looking up. Frank looked away from them back at his hands.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, Mikey,” Gerard kept saying, over and over again. Gerard threw his arms around him, hugging him tightly, rocking them back and forth slightly. Mikey pressed his head into Gerard’s shoulder, clinging onto Gerard tightly. “I’m so sorry,” Gerard managed to say again. His voice cracked and he swallowed hard, pressing his forehead against the side of Mikey’s face.
Frank hung back, looking across at the pictures again. He knew it wasn’t safe for him to leave yet, but he knew that he shouldn’t be there, and that he was intruding on them. But for the first time, when Gerard looked back at Frank, his eyes weren’t cold and he wasn’t acting like an asshole. He just looked tired, but he was saying with his eyes “Don’t go, don’t go.”