Some Other Way to Continue

My mom is screaming bloody murder at me. I’ve never seen her have quite this angry. I understand why she’s angry, if I were her I’d be too. Even with my own morals and like mind I’d be pretty fucking pissed off. Like it’s one thing to have a party after she said not to but to find drugs…
I had the house perfectly clean right. I had checked all downstairs. I’d taken the pack of cigarettes out of the downstairs toilet, I’d removed all traces of spilled drinks, I’d even run the tap for half an hour to get the smell of alcohol out of the kitchen sink, all with a hangover worse than anything I thought possible. The literal only place I didn’t check was her en suite.
I opened her room and it was left exactly as she’d left it I’d just assumed no one was in there. But they were. There was ash left on the windowsill that smelt like hash and worse still LSD tablets left, wet and useless, in the sink. To top it all off there was half flushed vomit in the toilet. I could kill whoever was in there just for being disgusting.
My mom had walked into the house pleasantly. Got a glass of water. Brought her bags to her room. Screamed in shock, a blood curdling noise which became my full name.
I look up at my mom from the kitchen chair I’ve been sat in. “Do you have ANYTHING to say for yourself?” she demands.
I shake my head. There’s nothing to say. I have literally no possible excuse to soften this. “Unbelievable,” she spits. “So unbelievable. I thought you were better than this Frank, I really did. I honestly have nothing to say to you,” she pauses her words but not her pacing, “What can I even do? What punishment can I legally inflict on you Frank? You’re already grounded, I can’t triple that. You are not allowed leave this house till you leave for good now. What can I even do!?” She has tears in her eyes. I know she’s taking this personally. Like a blow to her mothering ability. “I’d send you to military school. I’d send you to live with your grandparents, would you throw a drug party there?! How about back to Jersey? Let your father try to discipline you. I’m sure you wouldn’t try defy him! Oh Frank, how could you. Have I not been lenient enough? You keep testing me and it’s got to stop. You were never like this, is it because of that boy you like?”
My eyebrows shoot up, “Gerard? What… Mom, Gerard has nothing to do with this!”
“So you’re telling me he wasn’t here last night? Or at the last druggie party you were at? And the god knows how many before that!” Her voice breaks a little. She puts her hand to her forehead and turns to face the window. Her body shakes a bit as she leans on the draining board.
“Mom?” I say, not sure how I’d even go about finishing that sentence.
“Go to your room while I think up of a good punishment,” she whispers. I stand up slowly and walk upstairs to sit, frightened on my bed. I can hear her sob through the paper thin floors. After a few minutes I hear her dial a number on the house phone and start talking. I can’t make out what she’s saying, like at all. Only that she’s talking to Debby and her voice is high with hysteria.

School is odd Monday. Not in the way that it normally is, people being rude and bitchy and others being super nice while you get your lunch slammed to the ground by an apologising Canadian bully. Instead everyone treats me… oddly.
I’d rung Gerard before my mom took my phone for eternity. He tried to calm me down but acted so vague and disconnected I flew into a heavier still bout of anxiety and then had to hang up and hand my mom my phone.
Doubtless he told the guys. I don’t mind that, it’s just I hadn’t expected them to seem so… uncomfortable.
I pass Gerard’s locker where he’s in a heated argument with Bert which completely falls silent as I pass. I don’t stop to talk, only walk faster toward my own, head down.
I sigh as a bunch of random sheets of school’s official paper falls from my locker. Someone has my code and they use it for truly evil purposes, like stealing my protractors and filling my locker with random buts of special school stationary. I gather all the pages and hold them between my knees as I get out some books. I hobble back, pages still held tightly between my legs, and close my locker. When I turn around I find people staring at me. Maybe it’s all the paper I keep like a lover between my legs or maybe they all know. I could be paranoid but the thing is, what if I’m not. I guess that’s the paranoia of paranoia.
I shrug my bag onto my shoulder and take all the pages up I my hands. Scowling at all the fuckers who are still staring, I storm off to the secretaries to return the papers.
The odd feeling continues with my teacher returning our essays. I’d gotten a B- and a sigh. My head shoots up, “Miss… what?”
“Don’t be rude Frank, put up your hand,” she says calmly as she hands Gabe his. I shoot my hand up, “Yes, Frank?”
“Miss,” I gesture to the paper, “What… why…?”
“Not your usual standard, spelling mistakes throughout. “What” is what I thought to,” she sighs. Mondays aren’t her thing.
I scan the essay. I had spent ages on this one. Like an hour. I guess now I’ll have plenty of more hours of solitude to improve. I sigh audibly.
Dave snaps his head awkwardly backward. “Not get an A++++++” he spits each plus carefully, measuring himself to avoid mispronunciation.”
“Nope,” I try say casually. I never could act casually. He sniggers and says something vaguely sarcastic. I can’t hear him, all I hear is my own blood pumping and my vision fuzzes out. I put up my hand, “Miss, may I go to the bathroom?” My head feels like its filling with cotton wool and my breath is quickening. Some part of me says if I don’t get out of the room I’m going to burst into tears. I can’t hear the teacher but I see her nod and gesture in some way. I jump up and tripping over my own feet, run from the room. I hear people talk but it feels like im hearing it through a cardboard box.
I burst into the bathroom and stand opposite the mirror. I try focus on my own eyes but my breathing is just getting faster and more difficult to catch. “No,” I rasp, “not having a panic attack.” After a while my breath slows and speeds up again. “No,” I say meekly before collapsing to my knees. No one comes in and I end up spending the rest of the class on the damp bathroom floor, knees to my chest, and breathing as if only my body mass in oxygen per second can keep me from passing out or throwing up or something.

Life is lonely. When you get used to being around people as often as I was, this solitary confinement is really quite difficult to take. I mean, I like being alone but there is a canyon between being alone and being lonely. And what I am now, with detention every lunch and a lift home after school, is lonely.
The detention I got for not returning to English when I asked to go to the bathroom. Apparently the teacher is going through a tough divorce or something. I should cut her some slack but two weeks of no lunch times free is a bit unfair.
I’m sitting in my bedroom, leaning back against my bed with the misfits blaring. My mom told me to turn it down but she’s in the shower now so I’ll play it as loud as I please. I refuse to look at the window, it feels wrong to be staring at civilisation and society from behind glass like some crazy old dude. My mom comes in to check on me often to make sure I haven’t escaped. Despite her freak outs I love

Thursday. Not even a week into my hellish, friendless days. It’s worse than Jersey where I just followed people I called my friends around the whole time. Doing homework at lunch times and listening to music. Here I spend lunch time in a room with incredibly tattooed twin girls and this guy who shoves as many pencils into his mouth as he can. I didn’t realise this is what he was planning on when I leant him my pencil.
Thursday though and I enter room twelve just before pencil dude. The twin girls are sitting side by side drawing designs on fools cap paper. “Hey, what’re you drawing?” I say sitting beside them, desperate to make conversation.
One of them looks up through thick lashes, “Mine’s an excersism symbol I want tattooed on my chest.”
“Mine’s the zodiac sign for Cancer,” the other one says not looking up, “though it looks like people 69ing. We want to get it on our wrists here,” she touches her wrist, “If only it didn’t look so inappropriate. Even target wouldn’t employ us with sexual positions visible.” She sighs and starts again.
I’m about to reply when the teacher walks in. He’s eating a cold tuna sandwich and drinking an extra-large coffee. “Quiet, put away the doodles, forty minutes will begin momentarily. No talking. No laughing. No phones. If I need to go into more detail, I will.” He bites his sandwich.
Just as I sit back in my chair, prepared to stare at a clock until I go crazy, the door flies open. Gerard walks in with a sketch book tucked under his arm. He’s scowling till his eyes find me. He winks, “Am I late?”
“Mr. Way, no you are not. Not yet. What did you do?” the teacher takes his slip.
“Am I required to say out loud?”
“I guess not.”
“Then I will leave it up to your imagination,” he grins and walks down to the desk next to mine.
“The time will begin-” the teacher, whom I believe Gerard has for art, is cut short by his phone ringing. He answers it and without a second’s hesitation is running from the room saying, “I’ll send someone else, I’m about to be a dad,” with more tones than I’ve ever heard from him.
Gerard raises his eyebrows at the empty space where his art teacher had sat. The girls take out their drawings again and pencil dude begins his plight to fill his mouth with pencils. Gerard just begins sketching and I’m left with nothing to pass the time.
After five minutes a teacher hasn’t appeared yet and Gerard passes me an elaborate drawing of a comic book character with the words do you wanna skip school tomorrow? in a thought bubble.
“That’s really good!” the girl who was trying to draw the Cancer sign exclaims, “Gerard, is it? Could you draw the uh star sign for Cancer for me?” She smiles sweetly at him.
“Sure,” he smiles, leaning on and across me to get her paper. This is not the time I tell myself and try to think of old women and cows in lingerie to keep my pants under control.
Gerard sketches the thing perfectly first time, of course and then triple underlines the thought bubble. “Sure” I say and smile at him. A few minutes later a flustered Mr. Jordon. “Quite now delinquents, you’ve all done something naughty so now you get to sit quietly because that will somehow teach you a lesson.”

I meet Gerard at the front gates of the school the next day. I’m about to walk in when he appears out of nowhere and grabs my arm, pulling me back out of school. “I don’t know about you,” he grins, holding my elbow and dragging me across the road, “but I have this terrible flu, and I cant possibly face school.”
“What a terrible flu, it’s highly contagious and I think I might have come down with it,” I grin as we break into a run, heading for the park.
We sit and shiver on the hidden park benches. It’s only hidden because you can’t see it from the main path, it’s surrounded by trees which provides hours of shade. Gerard talks most of the time. We see each other in school but we can never have a proper conversation. Finally the topic falls to loneliness. I say a lot about living in my bedroom and he says that he hates it too. How sometimes he couldn’t even bring himself to leave his room and go skating. “I hate it but I, like, depend on relationships to motivate myself. I mean I don’t study or anything really. I only do when Mikey gives out to me about it. I had a therapist for like a month after I got really depressed and he says I need to find something else to depend on, but I don’t do music, like I can’t play an instrument and I don’t think I can sing, I don’t write or do shit like that. All I ever do is draw and hang out and if I can’t do one of those…”
“Yea,” I mumble, “I get it.” We sit in silence and then make out, quite unexpectedly. I can here dog walkers pass as I lie on top of him and I hear disgusted grunts and coughs but fuck them, if I do one rebellious thing, why not do the lot.
After a while Gerard’s phone rings and he jumps up, knocking me, dazed, to the ground. “Yea, yea, I forgot okay? Oh fuck off, I’ll be there in five minutes.” He shoved his phone in his back pocket. “Uh Frank, I’m sorry man but I’ve got to run, shit to do that I forgot about.”
My heart sinks, “I have another two hours to be back at the school! Could I come?”
He shakes his head and throws his bag up on his back, “no sorry.”
“Could you tell me what it is?”
“Too long to explain and I’m already running late. See you…” and with that he runs off toward the main path. My weekend of solitude begins early.

Notes

Two more chapters left :3 then i may start on my other ideas, i can't wait. I wish there was a way i could write way faster. Oh well. I'll update as soon as I can because I have naught else to do with my life. Even in his confinement, i write frank with more of a social life than i have xD