A hiding to nothing chapter two

A hiding to nothing chapter two

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Chapter two
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"Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." Douglas Adams.



Things with Harold and the whole bodyguard business hadn’t really gone anywhere. I almost wished it had. A fight or two could have helped pass the time and keep me in shape as well instead of hour long jogs and some dumb shadow boxing in the living room that may or may not have ended with a whole in the cheep drywall. I hadn’t had a real fight in weeks. A few people had tried to start some petty arguments and tossed around some accusations at Harold, but then I popped out and they usually just backed off.

Something almost got out of hand just once. It was a Wednesday … or maybe a Thursday. I don’t know, it doesn’t really matter. But a group of guys came up to him in the parking lot and started some good old fashioned gay bashing. Really, I thought our society was getting past this issue. They were knocking poor Harold around and calling him a queer, fag, fudge pusher, the whole inappropriate-and-oh-so-mature works. When I rounded the red bricked corner, tired and sporting a pounding headache from the endless hours of torturous school, Harold’s back was to me and he was slowly backing away as the others poked at him (Metaphorically and physically). If I had just waited and let him keep shuffling backwards with his hands flitting about his frame and going from his throat to the hem of his shirt, tugging the light blue fabric over his dark jeans, he would have backed right up into me. One weasel of a teen had Harold’s bag and was digging through it. Don’t know what he could have been hoping to find. I watched for a moment, hanging behind and waiting for them to notice me or maybe get a little more violent. Maybe Harold would get angry and show an interesting side to his personality. I mean, he was pretty brave when it came to me. A thug with a heavy New York accent was no problem, but a few valley ken dolls with bleached teeth were the new terror of the block.

“You fucking fag,” the front man hissed and took a step forward, and that was when I jumped in and clocked the guy in the mouth. It wasn’t for Harold, really, I was just pissed off. I was really getting sick of the derogatives and if I heard so much as one more person referring to an inanimate object as being ‘gay’ I was going to flip.

“That wasn’t a fight,” I told Harold when he suggested paying me, going for his wallet with a thread of adrenaline quivering his fingers. I was smoking about then, so I blew smoke in his face and told him with quite a bit of amusement that he was sheltered. He got a little mad and tried to defend himself, I guess, and said that all violence was fighting. He sounded pretentiously righteous—and yes, I do know those words—so I shoved him against the wall and told him to fuck off.

Anyway, the following Tuesday, I was exhausted. Beyond exhausted, really, I was about ready to drop off to sleep for a few weeks at least, then maybe nap for a few more days before checking back into reality. I convinced Harold to give me a ride home before Second started. He wasn’t happy about it and protested, but I bullied him into it. Almost literally. I nearly pushed him flush against a wall during break. It probably fuelled the rumours going around. The poor kid looked like he was going to faint.

For once he didn’t try to talk to me at all during the ride. He remained tight lipped. Smart, but boring, and I nearly fell asleep again, even achieving to embarrass myself by making a week grunting noise when he pulled to a slightly abrupt stop. My eyes jerked open and I may or may not have blushed; I refuse to remember.

My mom’s car was parked on the side of the road. It shouldn’t have been, but I was too tired to care. I lugged myself from the car, almost forgetting to unhook my seatbelt first, and slouched over to my door. Turning the partly broken knob and pushing open the unoiled door I looked through the dim lighting to find my mother drugged out on Crank.

I froze in the doorway when I saw her sitting there on the couch with her head lolled backwards and a bottle of alcohol in hand. All her old paraphernalia was spread out in front of her on our water and coffee stained table. I could never understand why someone felt the need to nail green tweed fabric to the original plywood of the table. She had promised me she had thrown all her paraphernalia out the last time she had gone through rehab, but there it all was, cluttering up our new home. The only thing I could find myself thinking was that I hoped the syringe was at least clean.

She didn’t even see me, she was so out of it. I backed back out the front door and shut it softly my shock quickly turning to misplaced anger. I was so pissed that I didn’t even wonder why Harold was still out front or care what he might have thought when I made him give me a lift. Yet another silent ride brought us back to the school, both of us agitated. I didn’t bother to go to any of my classes, I just needed a place to be.

I smoked nearly half a pack of smokes that day and finished it off the next day.

After school I told Harold to fuck off when he offered me a ride home and ended up punching him when he tried to follow me to ‘see what was up’. I was tempted to tell him what he could shove up where, but refrained. I had walked away and headed for the bus, but Harold ran up behind me and tugged on my sleeve. It should have been obvious by now, but I didn’t take kindly to being grabbed, and I could react pretty violently. I spun around and got him in the gut off guard. I didn’t even hit him that hard and he still folded like a lawn chair, his blond hair falling over his shocked eyes. He gasped and held his stomach. He looked kind of queasy, so I guess it must have hurt him more that I had thought, but I was too pissed to care.

“I swear to fucking god, if you try something like that again, I’ll put you in the fucking hospital!” I got really close to him when I said this, whispering most of it roughly in his face as I forced him to back up. He flushed, flinching as I gripped his shoulders to stop his retreat.

For someone so wimpy, he sure had strong shoulders. It was probably the first thing I noticed about him besides his impressive height and blinding hair.

I left him in the parking lot gasping for air and headed back home. The bus ride sucked, like always. It kind of smelled like vomit and cigarettes, nothing out of the ordinary for New York, but a little unexpected in this humble little hell. At least I wasn’t sitting next to a drunk bringing up fresh vomit on my shoes at seven in the morning—that was a lovely day at school. Well, at least the smell kept me awake until my stop. I made sure Mom was out before I went up to my room and fished a fresh pack of smokes out of a pocket of a jacket still packed (shoved) in a duffle bag. After placing (shoving) all of the clothes and junk that was scattered about the room into various ‘storage’ areas in the room, mainly milk crates and boxes, I lit up in the house and headed for the back door. I ran into Kathy in the kitchen.

“Stressed?” She gestured to the smoke and I grimaced. The one—alright, the one of many—bad things about smoking was that it was a tell. A pathetic Modus Ponens or Tollens or something-or-another-that-I-never-actually-paid-attention-too-in-class-but-probably-should-have-because-then-I-would-actually-know-what-I-was-talking-about: When I’m stressed I need something to take the edge off; when I need something to take the edge off, I smoke; when I’m stressed, I smoke. When I’m smoking, I’m stressed.

And she knew this.

“You haven’t been at school,” I pointed out and she rolled her eyes. We sat down and ate together for the first time since we’d moved in. There wasn’t much conversation, but I didn’t have another smoke until the next day at lunch.

And yet again, Harold showed up to bug me. Although, he did seem a little more hesitant this time than he had on previous endeavours to harass me. He hung back and twisted his bag strap in his hands as he had done that first time he approached me. His knuckles looked to be turning a little white and he shook his head so that his hair fell into his eyes, instead of out.

I ignored him and continued to smoke. Is it just me, or did a lot of our encounters seem to go similarly to this? He eventually shuffled closer when I didn’t try to kill him. And it pissed me off. It pissed me off that he wasn’t afraid of me, and it pissed me off that he tried to talk to me.

I got up slowly and sauntered towards him. He backed up a little and I flashed that age old grinning sneer as I slammed him back against a wall and blew my smoke in his face just because I knew it made him gag.

“I thought I told you to fuck off?” I hissed into his ear as I leant forward, almost pressing flush with his quivering body. It kind of reminded me of a rape porn a friend of mine had shown me for god only knows what reason. I wasn’t friends with him for much longer, and I may have broken his nose when he tried to date my sister.

I swear to God I almost made Harold cry right there. It would have been fitting, and I almost wish I had. But he grew brave again as I hesitated. He drew himself up to his full height, forcing me to either tilt my head back or stare at his bottom lip. Backing up was not an option.

“What are you going to do? Hit me again?” It didn’t sound like a challenge, more like a legitimate question tinged with wonder and a little bit of hidden fear. Maybe that was why I relented.

“I was thinking about it,” said more as a thought that anything else. In the end I didn’t hit him; I backed off and ignored him until he left in a huff. I didn’t see him again for a while and almost wished I never had. I was doing a lot of wishing when it came to that boy. Kind of annoying because I didn’t like wishing for things. And It’s funny how I’m focusing on Harold when, most of the time, I wasn’t really thinking about him. In fact, I was trying really hard not to think about anything, even tempting myself with the thoughts of joining my mother in her destructive habits. Instead I just submerged myself in pointless fist fights in what passed as a down town with what passed as local drunks. I even took up a daily routine of having dinner with my sister.

Two weeks passed and I could barely even look at my mother and she didn’t seem to notice. She always noticed. Even at her worst she had always been like some kind of hero. A mildly-anorexic-at-times hero, but we can’t pick and choose the lives of our saviours.

I found myself sitting with her in front of the T.V one day and she started scratching at her hands and arms obsessively. Every few minutes she would frown and scratch at an imaginary spot until her skin turned red and raw. She would pick at it and frown for a minute. Then stop. Then she would watch T.V, or, pretend to watch T.V while she just kind of spaced out—Oh, and then it was back to the skin! Picking away and scratching until I could almost see the skin collecting under her fingernails.

“Stop it!” I snapped at her at one point and she gave me an owlish look, her eyes tearing up and then suddenly hardening before she stormed off with a few choice curse words in my direction. I stared blankly after her, turned back to the T.V, didn’t watch anything, got pissed, grabbed my smokes, and stormed out of the house. And didn’t return until the next day after school.

Back in NYC this kind of thing would have gone pretty much unnoticed, the whole spending the night in a park or at a bus station. In this sparkling Beverly Hills like town (have I ever mentioned how creepy I found this place? It had to be part of some science fiction novel somewhere about mind control or little aliens) I’m pretty sure almost everyone noticed that I hadn’t changed my clothing. No one said anything, of course, but it was still a little annoying to be stared at.

I bypassed Harold that day, even going as far as to avoid my usual hangout spot and going to all of my classes instead. I took the bus home again the next Tuesday and found social workers in our excuse of a living room.

I always hated these prissy bastards. Some were okay, I guess, the ones who actually tried to help. Not these ones, though. They were young, but their souls were dried up and withered.

They looked at me with pity, like they knew the proper way of things and I didn’t fit into it. And they acted like I should have been grateful, like I should have thanked them in tears as they escorted my sister and I out of our home to a waiting car out back with no word on why. The rap playing neighbours were watching, lounging on the back step with a beer in hand. They laughed and the social workers were incredibly shocked when Kathy started swearing under her breath. I asked where Mom was and they looked at me with fake understanding and told me that everything was ‘alright now’. What did they honestly think our mother had done to us?

I just raised my eyebrows and scowled at the social workers and informed them that that wasn’t what I had asked. I didn’t get an answer.

A short drive away from ‘home’ and the next thing I knew a week had passed! Almost like a blur. The day after we arrived a new social worker, a balding man that mildly resembled an ape crossed with Michael Jackson, sat us down in a clean white room that would have almost reminded me of a hospital if it hadn’t been reminding me of a psyche ward. He told us that Mom had ODed. I thought she was dead. It was my first thought and my ears began to ring. The only thing that brought me back was, ‘intensive care’.

“Will she be alright?”

They said they didn’t know that, but they did know that she was an unfit mother and would never get us back. Kathy threw her glass of water in the balding man’s face. I commend her for it, but kept a firm hold on my own cup. It was green tea, and no matter how bad it was, it was still tea. I almost couldn’t get enough of the shocked look the man sported as woman in the room tried to dry him off with a paper towel. I’m not quite sure where she got the paper towel from.

Kathy and I bickered a lot in the following days and called each other so many names and traded so many bruises that they separated us from our shared room that, surprisingly enough, didn’t remind me of a hospital psyche ward. It reminded me of a military bunker.

“You goddamned FUCKS! You can’t keep me from him!” She shrieked when they came to remove her. I laughed loudly and obnoxiously as she was escorted from the room for no one but us knew that this was just an act. My sister and I never truly hated each other; we just had our own way of interacting.

Kathy found a placement a few days later. She must have laid on the charm to get the fuck out of the ammonia scented rat hole (metaphorical rat hole, because it was actually a really clean place) we resided in. Me though? I refused to be anything but my obnoxious self. And there I stayed for another week, each day spent mostly sitting on a blood stained cot. I guessed that a woman had used it before. This didn’t really bug me, as it would most people, because, unlike most people, I had slept on far worse.

I was sitting/lounging on this aforementioned cot when they brought in Little Kyle. He was a cute kid, but I kind of scared him. As he so stated a few hours after his arrival ... once the woman comforting him had left and he had ceased the loud and obnoxious noise known as sobbing.

Maybe they had stolen him from his Mommy too—hopefully she hadn’t ODed as well.

“You’re scary,” he uttered through a still slightly trembling lip.

“Why?” I don’t know why I really cared, but I didn’t want him to start crying again. It had reminded me of our first foster care. The only difference was that the boy wasn’t being force fed pees by a disgruntled volunteer.

“You stare,” was his simple reason. I hadn’t realised I was. He was such a sweet kid, though. A little under fed and bashful, but honest and bright.

I got off the cot and pulled a small spin top from my bag. Kyle backed up a little as I came closer so I stopped and crouched a few feet away. I placed the top on the ground and spun it. It wasn’t as colourful as it had been when I’d gotten it, but the faded blue and red strips still brought out the purple colour as it twirled. Kyle watched as I spun it a few more times. It stopped after the third spin and I didn’t move for it. I just sat and waited, a small, gentle smile that I am glad there were no cameras around to catch graced my lips. Kyle hesitated a moment before crawling forward to pick it up. It took him a few tried to get it to spin right, but when it did, I swear the smile never left his lips.

It was like approaching a beaten puppy. It took nearly twenty minutes playing with the top to get anywhere near him. He told me he didn’t like men, and I told him that a lot of people wouldn’t consider me a ‘real man’. He didn’t understand, of course, but I was eventually able to get a bit closer without the poor kid coming close to tears. I played with him for a few hours and the social workers were shocked to come in and find him curled up in my lap. They probably checked him for head injuries, just to make sure I wasn’t trying to put on a show.

I got put into a foster home three days later.

I let Kyle keep the spinning top. I found it fitting since I’d gotten it from an older boy in my first group home.