Nuclear Family
In Which Helena's Life Begins to Follow the Plot of a Typical Fanfiction
“Uh,” I said.
“Uh,” Mom said.
“Uh,” Gerard Way said.
I looked at my mom. My mom looked back at me, and shrugged, as if to say “What can I do?” Well Mom, first thing you could do was to explain why one of my favourite band members was reclining on the couch, eating the raspberry jelly that I had mixed up three hours ago, and drinking coffee out of the cracked mug that Tory left at my house one day and never had taken back.
“I’m, I’m sorry; did I miss a memo or something?” I asked, gesturing wildly with my hands in a moment of panic and forgetting that I was still holding a didgeridoo. Gerard Way ducked as the instrument whistled past his head, sending a nervous glance at Mom, who sighed.
“Helena, put that down.”
I dutifully placed the didgeridoo on the coffee table. It promptly rolled off onto a pile of newspapers and Mom gave yet another world weary sigh, exchanging yet another world weary look with Gerard. Great. Now they were doing that weirdass eye communication thing that adults did with each other when they wanted to talk shit about their kids without the kids noticing.
The silent exchange went on for a few seconds while I pondered a) Why did we even have a didgeridoo? b) The fuck was Gerard Way doing in our house? c) Why was she selling sea shells by the seashore in the first place? and d) The fuck was Gerard Way doing in our house?
Eventually, they both broke off eye contact and leaned forwards. Mom said, “Take a seat please, Helena.”
I plonked down on Fluffy’s cardboard box, as it was the only available surface next to the coffee table. However, I had overestimated the box’s reliability and ended up on my ass anyway. Mom’s mouth twitched slightly. Gerard looked slightly taken aback and I wondered how much longer until he couldn’t take my accident prone-ness anymore and got the fuck out of our dingy one-story house, situated two hundred metres from the shops and three streets away from the local high school, a wonderful place in a wonderful location!
[At least, that’s what the overly cheerful real estate agent had told us.]
“Look, Helena, I really should have told you this earlier.” Mom looked me in the eye, and leaned forwards even more intensely. Uh oh. She only did this when shit got real; like that time I had set the science lab bin on fire.
She took a deep breath. I prepared myself for the worst.
“Helena, Gerard’s your father.”
A few awkward moments of silence passed.
Mom looked at me expectantly,waiting for a reaction. This time, I was the one to take a deep breath.
“Well, I can’t say I wasn’t totally expecting that. I mean, that sounds like something out of a bad fanfiction. Huh.” I narrowed my eyes. “This better not be a prank.”
Gerard smiled nervously, and tucked a piece of loose hair behind his ear. No one laughed or burst out of the pantry while waving a camcorder and yelling “YOU'VE BEEN PUNKED!” Scooting forwards, I prodded Gerard in the arm. “Oh no. this really isn’t a joke, is it?”
Then the reality of it all hit me in the face with the force of someone bitch-slapping you with a preserved tuna [Grade 4, it was how I met Tory] and I gulped.
“Waitwaitwait. Does this mean that I’m not fully Asian?”
There was a another awkward moment of silence in which Fluffy walked in and began to meow mournfully at the loss of his cardboard box. “That’s your first thought?” Gerard [No, uh, Dad] asked, dubious. Mom looked as if she was about to facepalm.
I cringed slightly, another thought barging, unwelcome, into my mind.
“Mom, oh my god, you did the nasty with Gerard Way!”
My mother recoiled, slightly stunned and a whole lot embarrassed. I didn’t know how she did it, but somehow she had deluded herself into thinking that for the whole of my worldly 15 years, I still believed that a stork came and delivered the baby. No such possibility: the internet and Tory had corrupted me. [Flashback to the tail-end of Year 6: ‘Woah, did the man just spill craft glue?’ ‘Oh honey, that’s not craft glue.’]
I waved my second accusing finger of the day. “Mom, you told me he wasn’t pretty!”
“Pretty?!”
“Well-”
“You lied!”
“I did not!” Mom squealed, and I wondered where she had hidden that pubescent school girl tone all these years.
“You so did!”
Mom had had enough. “Helena, go to your room!”
I moaned melodramatically and stomped off to my room, chased by Gerard’s quiet laughter [if you could call it quiet] and my mother complaining about how disrespectful and annoying teenagers were. I briefly wondered if I could be bothered to yell that I could still hear her [the answer was no] before entering my room and instantly tripping over my school bag.
Too lazy to get up from the messy floor, I watched myself in the mirror across from me, lyrics from various songs written across the surface in cheap fluorescent liquid chalk [$2.80 from Daiso]. I guess we do look pretty similar. Me and Gerard had the same cheekbones and jawline [heck yeah, I had hella bone structure], and the same nose [long, slightly upturned at the end]. Pulling my knees up to my chest, I silently blamed Mikey Way [holy shitake mushrooms, he was my uncle] for the awkward knees that had caused me grief in PE, and my near-sightedness.
Oh. This was really weird. I was related to Gerard Way. Gerard Way was my dad. I ran a blog dedicated to him and his now defunct band.
Thoroughly weirded out, I pulled a face, not noticing the footsteps that had just stopped outside my door.
“Helena?” Gerard walked in and found me lying on the floor, face schooled into an extraordinarily unattractive double chin.
“I have a unicorn pillow pet named after your brother.”
Gerard’s mouth quirked into a smile. He made his way over to my bed, which dipped slightly under his weight. I scrambled upright, wincing at the burn in my knees as the movement pulled on the newly scabbed marks, and rested against the mirrored wall.
“Are you okay?” he asked, motioning at my legs. I hastily nodded, explaining my accident prone-ness and the incident with the half pipe; complete with hand gestures and a sloppily drawn diagram on the mirror [interrupted only by the discovery of ten dollars under my bed].
We sat for roughly ten seconds before my father dropped the question like he had dropped the news of the ‘I’m Not Okay’ single. In other words, it was sudden and unexpected and during a completely unrelated discussion, this time of the pros and cons of liquid eyeliner. [It glides on like a river made from the tears of angels, but it smudges and occasionally smells like Satan’s morning breath.]
“Helena, how would you like to come live with me?”
I couldn’t say that I wasn’t completely expecting that, either. However, it made everything so much more real, and although I thought I was mentally prepared, if I hadn’t been sitting down, I most certainly would have hit the floor anyway.
Gerard had asked me to go live with him. I didn’t even know him, he didn’t even know me, and I had threatened him with an indigenous Australian instrument, to boot, and I told him just that.
His answer surprised me.
“Exactly,” Gerard sighed, interlacing his fingers. “I don’t know you. I want to get to know you. You’re my daughter, Helena, even though I hardly knew you existed.”
“Yay,” I said.
Gerard rolled his eyes, a tiny smile playing on his lips. “If it hasn’t occurred to you yet, we’re almost exactly the same. And you grew up for the first fifteen years of your life without a father figure. I wasn’t there for you.” He leaned forwards, eyes wide and serious, the same eyes that I had seen countless times in photos, in videos, and in my mirror. [That is so weird. I had Gerard Way’s eyes.] “I wanted to be, believe me. I want to be there for you.”
“You’re asking me to leave this place.”
My newfound father was asking me to leave Australia. He was asking me to leave the dark alleyways of my neighbourhood, where the air was filled with smoke from fires during the summer. To leave the traffic choked streets during rush hour, with the ancient buildings that rose on shaky knees, trembling with the passing roar of trains.
To leave the pathways where racist assholes screamed abuse at those who looked different, where street artists and even myself had painted and drawn and written over the walls that encompassed us all, hoping somehow to make this city built on the pain of the indigenous people somewhat more beautiful, and less ugly.
But it was so much more than that.
He was asking me to leave the other places that I once had, and still cared about, where bushland rolled off in every which direction.
He was asking me to leave the mountains which I had climbed and conquered, the land that I had slept upon through night, trusting my surroundings to keep me safe. [Even so, I had woken up with frost on my sleeping bag and a layer of ice in my shoes. Don’t trust weather reports. They’re never accurate.]
He was asking me to leave the creek whose bed I had sat in during summer, building pyramids of river stones in, the bed that had housed rushing waters that I watched during the bitterly cold winter of Australia’s high country, broken only by the tops of the rock formations made by my hand. To leave the patch of land that had been felled for a fire break, which I had spent three days by my own in, lugging the logs of the butchered trees to the one lone survivor, arranging them in a circle around its trunk, before scribbling a short poem on one of them.
[To protect
the young
We must kill
our old.]
He was asking me to leave my home.
“You don’t have to,” Gerard interjected quickly, as if hearing my thoughts. “You can stay here with your mother, but if you come, you can still spend time with her. I just want to give you this choice. Trial it for a year or something, and, uh, if you like it, I’ll see if we can somehow relocate your mother to America. If you want.”
I mulled over his words. I had never had a father figure in my life before, unless you counted Jerry, who had been with my mother for five years before he ended it with a brisk text. I had always wanted to find out who my dad was, but now that I had…I didn’t know what to think, or, really, if I even wanted it.
But this was Gerard Way. He had always been one of my idols, ever since I stumbled across Helena on the internet. I mean, a song with a name exactly like mine? Pronounced the same way? Ten year old me was rapt. [Mom wasn’t too happy, though. She said that I never knew what I could have come across on the web after googling myself while trying to do a project on beluga whales.] And now he was offering me the chance to live with him.
How could I turn it down?
“Yeah,” I said, raising my head. “Yeah. I do.”
“Uh,” Mom said.
“Uh,” Gerard Way said.
I looked at my mom. My mom looked back at me, and shrugged, as if to say “What can I do?” Well Mom, first thing you could do was to explain why one of my favourite band members was reclining on the couch, eating the raspberry jelly that I had mixed up three hours ago, and drinking coffee out of the cracked mug that Tory left at my house one day and never had taken back.
“I’m, I’m sorry; did I miss a memo or something?” I asked, gesturing wildly with my hands in a moment of panic and forgetting that I was still holding a didgeridoo. Gerard Way ducked as the instrument whistled past his head, sending a nervous glance at Mom, who sighed.
“Helena, put that down.”
I dutifully placed the didgeridoo on the coffee table. It promptly rolled off onto a pile of newspapers and Mom gave yet another world weary sigh, exchanging yet another world weary look with Gerard. Great. Now they were doing that weirdass eye communication thing that adults did with each other when they wanted to talk shit about their kids without the kids noticing.
The silent exchange went on for a few seconds while I pondered a) Why did we even have a didgeridoo? b) The fuck was Gerard Way doing in our house? c) Why was she selling sea shells by the seashore in the first place? and d) The fuck was Gerard Way doing in our house?
Eventually, they both broke off eye contact and leaned forwards. Mom said, “Take a seat please, Helena.”
I plonked down on Fluffy’s cardboard box, as it was the only available surface next to the coffee table. However, I had overestimated the box’s reliability and ended up on my ass anyway. Mom’s mouth twitched slightly. Gerard looked slightly taken aback and I wondered how much longer until he couldn’t take my accident prone-ness anymore and got the fuck out of our dingy one-story house, situated two hundred metres from the shops and three streets away from the local high school, a wonderful place in a wonderful location!
[At least, that’s what the overly cheerful real estate agent had told us.]
“Look, Helena, I really should have told you this earlier.” Mom looked me in the eye, and leaned forwards even more intensely. Uh oh. She only did this when shit got real; like that time I had set the science lab bin on fire.
She took a deep breath. I prepared myself for the worst.
“Helena, Gerard’s your father.”
A few awkward moments of silence passed.
Mom looked at me expectantly,waiting for a reaction. This time, I was the one to take a deep breath.
“Well, I can’t say I wasn’t totally expecting that. I mean, that sounds like something out of a bad fanfiction. Huh.” I narrowed my eyes. “This better not be a prank.”
Gerard smiled nervously, and tucked a piece of loose hair behind his ear. No one laughed or burst out of the pantry while waving a camcorder and yelling “YOU'VE BEEN PUNKED!” Scooting forwards, I prodded Gerard in the arm. “Oh no. this really isn’t a joke, is it?”
Then the reality of it all hit me in the face with the force of someone bitch-slapping you with a preserved tuna [Grade 4, it was how I met Tory] and I gulped.
“Waitwaitwait. Does this mean that I’m not fully Asian?”
There was a another awkward moment of silence in which Fluffy walked in and began to meow mournfully at the loss of his cardboard box. “That’s your first thought?” Gerard [No, uh, Dad] asked, dubious. Mom looked as if she was about to facepalm.
I cringed slightly, another thought barging, unwelcome, into my mind.
“Mom, oh my god, you did the nasty with Gerard Way!”
My mother recoiled, slightly stunned and a whole lot embarrassed. I didn’t know how she did it, but somehow she had deluded herself into thinking that for the whole of my worldly 15 years, I still believed that a stork came and delivered the baby. No such possibility: the internet and Tory had corrupted me. [Flashback to the tail-end of Year 6: ‘Woah, did the man just spill craft glue?’ ‘Oh honey, that’s not craft glue.’]
I waved my second accusing finger of the day. “Mom, you told me he wasn’t pretty!”
“Pretty?!”
“Well-”
“You lied!”
“I did not!” Mom squealed, and I wondered where she had hidden that pubescent school girl tone all these years.
“You so did!”
Mom had had enough. “Helena, go to your room!”
I moaned melodramatically and stomped off to my room, chased by Gerard’s quiet laughter [if you could call it quiet] and my mother complaining about how disrespectful and annoying teenagers were. I briefly wondered if I could be bothered to yell that I could still hear her [the answer was no] before entering my room and instantly tripping over my school bag.
Too lazy to get up from the messy floor, I watched myself in the mirror across from me, lyrics from various songs written across the surface in cheap fluorescent liquid chalk [$2.80 from Daiso]. I guess we do look pretty similar. Me and Gerard had the same cheekbones and jawline [heck yeah, I had hella bone structure], and the same nose [long, slightly upturned at the end]. Pulling my knees up to my chest, I silently blamed Mikey Way [holy shitake mushrooms, he was my uncle] for the awkward knees that had caused me grief in PE, and my near-sightedness.
Oh. This was really weird. I was related to Gerard Way. Gerard Way was my dad. I ran a blog dedicated to him and his now defunct band.
Thoroughly weirded out, I pulled a face, not noticing the footsteps that had just stopped outside my door.
“Helena?” Gerard walked in and found me lying on the floor, face schooled into an extraordinarily unattractive double chin.
“I have a unicorn pillow pet named after your brother.”
Gerard’s mouth quirked into a smile. He made his way over to my bed, which dipped slightly under his weight. I scrambled upright, wincing at the burn in my knees as the movement pulled on the newly scabbed marks, and rested against the mirrored wall.
“Are you okay?” he asked, motioning at my legs. I hastily nodded, explaining my accident prone-ness and the incident with the half pipe; complete with hand gestures and a sloppily drawn diagram on the mirror [interrupted only by the discovery of ten dollars under my bed].
We sat for roughly ten seconds before my father dropped the question like he had dropped the news of the ‘I’m Not Okay’ single. In other words, it was sudden and unexpected and during a completely unrelated discussion, this time of the pros and cons of liquid eyeliner. [It glides on like a river made from the tears of angels, but it smudges and occasionally smells like Satan’s morning breath.]
“Helena, how would you like to come live with me?”
I couldn’t say that I wasn’t completely expecting that, either. However, it made everything so much more real, and although I thought I was mentally prepared, if I hadn’t been sitting down, I most certainly would have hit the floor anyway.
Gerard had asked me to go live with him. I didn’t even know him, he didn’t even know me, and I had threatened him with an indigenous Australian instrument, to boot, and I told him just that.
His answer surprised me.
“Exactly,” Gerard sighed, interlacing his fingers. “I don’t know you. I want to get to know you. You’re my daughter, Helena, even though I hardly knew you existed.”
“Yay,” I said.
Gerard rolled his eyes, a tiny smile playing on his lips. “If it hasn’t occurred to you yet, we’re almost exactly the same. And you grew up for the first fifteen years of your life without a father figure. I wasn’t there for you.” He leaned forwards, eyes wide and serious, the same eyes that I had seen countless times in photos, in videos, and in my mirror. [That is so weird. I had Gerard Way’s eyes.] “I wanted to be, believe me. I want to be there for you.”
“You’re asking me to leave this place.”
My newfound father was asking me to leave Australia. He was asking me to leave the dark alleyways of my neighbourhood, where the air was filled with smoke from fires during the summer. To leave the traffic choked streets during rush hour, with the ancient buildings that rose on shaky knees, trembling with the passing roar of trains.
To leave the pathways where racist assholes screamed abuse at those who looked different, where street artists and even myself had painted and drawn and written over the walls that encompassed us all, hoping somehow to make this city built on the pain of the indigenous people somewhat more beautiful, and less ugly.
But it was so much more than that.
He was asking me to leave the other places that I once had, and still cared about, where bushland rolled off in every which direction.
He was asking me to leave the mountains which I had climbed and conquered, the land that I had slept upon through night, trusting my surroundings to keep me safe. [Even so, I had woken up with frost on my sleeping bag and a layer of ice in my shoes. Don’t trust weather reports. They’re never accurate.]
He was asking me to leave the creek whose bed I had sat in during summer, building pyramids of river stones in, the bed that had housed rushing waters that I watched during the bitterly cold winter of Australia’s high country, broken only by the tops of the rock formations made by my hand. To leave the patch of land that had been felled for a fire break, which I had spent three days by my own in, lugging the logs of the butchered trees to the one lone survivor, arranging them in a circle around its trunk, before scribbling a short poem on one of them.
[To protect
the young
We must kill
our old.]
He was asking me to leave my home.
“You don’t have to,” Gerard interjected quickly, as if hearing my thoughts. “You can stay here with your mother, but if you come, you can still spend time with her. I just want to give you this choice. Trial it for a year or something, and, uh, if you like it, I’ll see if we can somehow relocate your mother to America. If you want.”
I mulled over his words. I had never had a father figure in my life before, unless you counted Jerry, who had been with my mother for five years before he ended it with a brisk text. I had always wanted to find out who my dad was, but now that I had…I didn’t know what to think, or, really, if I even wanted it.
But this was Gerard Way. He had always been one of my idols, ever since I stumbled across Helena on the internet. I mean, a song with a name exactly like mine? Pronounced the same way? Ten year old me was rapt. [Mom wasn’t too happy, though. She said that I never knew what I could have come across on the web after googling myself while trying to do a project on beluga whales.] And now he was offering me the chance to live with him.
How could I turn it down?
“Yeah,” I said, raising my head. “Yeah. I do.”
Notes
Here's the next chapter! I hope it wasn't too bad and you enjoyed it. Please comment and rate, if you liked it.
You can find more of my stuff under the pen name Mikey_The_Unicorn on AO3.
EDIT: A character page has been added. Being the narcissistic shit that I am, you guys may gaze upon my face as Helena.
Signing out,
Coke/Mikey
happy easter now update
4/21/14