Chapter Forty-Three Self-Taught

The next few weeks were so jammed packed that only fractions of memories stuck together in my mind and resonated with some meaning. It was as if someone had smashed a vase before, the shards strewn dangerously all over my and everyone else’s life. Each time we step forward, we cut ourselves, rose blossoms of blood blooming on our feet. Everything was so scattered, jagged, and condensed, we didn’t know what to do right away. There were too many things to do, and it took awhile before we started to clean off our feet, place band-aids where they needed to go, and started to get our lives back.

There were a lot of things helping me to get back on my feet. My camera was a main one, my finger still ever-twitching over the button. I had yet to develop any of my film, and I still had no idea where to get a dark room, but I didn’t let that stop me. My creative outlet was slowed in some regards from the hustle and bustle of repairing our lives again, but my camera was always there, always present, and always reminding me of what I was made of. I was made of the truth, and though I had to fight with lies, it was my only way to prevail.

Jasmine was the other aspect in my life helping me pick up the broken pieces, sometimes quite literally. She and I were good; better than good. We were friends again, and only friends. We were close, much like Vivian and Gerard, holding hands and occasionally stealing a kiss on the cheek or forehead when the time called for it. We did those tender actions every so often, but it still felt too awkward, too intimate. The images of her naked body were still fresh in my mind, along with the fact that I had been inside of her. I couldn’t just forget an event like that, and there would be times where the spark we felt between each other would feel like so much more than just a simple spark. It was like glue, drawing us and making us stick together, making me want to do the things I had with her before. It was sexual just as much as it was emotional, though the emotional side of matters didn’t exactly present itself visibly when I would have to cross my legs and think un-sexy thoughts as we sat on the couch watching TV.

Once school had started up again, she had made a habit of coming by to see me every day after the drudging task was over. I had been surprised and elated at first. My days were usually filled with meetings and appointments and testimonies and questioning. It was stressful, to say the least. My mother would be the one to drag me everywhere most of the time, and as soon as we got back, she was out the door again, needing breathing space. I was left alone in the house, stuck inside a prison. It was hard for my creative energy to flow behind bars, no matter how invisible or metaphorical, and after long the long days, though I wanted to take pictures, the couch looked so much more inviting. I had been face down on one of my mother’s fancy pillows, dead asleep (and probably drooling) when I first heard the doorbell ring and I had nearly missed her. She was only able to rouse me from my slumber because she could see me sleeping from our front bay window, and refused to leave the door alone. She said she knocked for at least ten minutes before I finally came to answer. There had been so much sleep clinging to my eyes when I saw her, I thought she may have been a dream herself.

“Why didn’t you just let me sleep?” I teased, both of us sitting down on the couch.

“Because that’s something Jason would do. Laze around all fucking day and then sleep some more, not get anything done,” she spouted, rolling her eyes. “I know you’re better than that, so you were getting the fuck up and talking to me.”

“At least that’s something productive,” I jested back, only it turned out to be less of a joke than I had imagined.

Talking and being around Jasmine was productive, not to mention gratifying. She kept me up-to-date on what was happening at school, while I kept her informed on what was happening with my case. Most of the time, her contribution outweighed mine. I felt so disconnected when she talked about what we were supposed to be learning in math (I had discovered we had the same math class, just at different times), but I knew it was better for me to stay at home. The school had been educated about what was going on, and though I wasn’t a stellar student to begin with, they made exceptions for me. I would still have to write exams, they assured me of that, but they would be sending my homework to me to figure out at my own leisure. Jasmine was their messenger, but she also brought other worldly news.

Like what Sam and Travis had been telling people about my ‘absence’. It was clearly notable that I sort of just disappeared from all my classes. I had been skipping a lot before, but I’d show up for the morning, at least, or some kind of class. Or people would see me with Sam and Travis. They hadn’t been seeing me at all, and when rumors started to develop, most kids figured the best source to go to would be my best friends.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong. Sam and Travis were the people who started the rumors people were hearing in the first place; just going back to them to clarify it was a whole other vicious circle that I wished my name wasn’t attached to. A lot of the time Jasmine wouldn’t tell me the exact wording behind things they were saying, but she eluded to it quite well.

“They’re jerks,” she told me one day, grasping at my hands that were placed in front of the small space between us. This was usually the most I ever got out of her, but one instance, I managed to pry and get her to do more than just elude. She assured me that this had been the worse ever said, but there was something in the far corners of her eye that there was something much more heinous that she wasn’t telling me about. Regardless, this day Sam had come up to Jasmine and bad mouthed me in front of the whole cafeteria, saying I had AIDS and most likely, she did as well.

I had nearly fallen apart when the words slipped past her lips, my head sinking down to my chest and my face going blank. They could say all the shit they wanted to about me, but I wanted them to leave her the fuck out of this mess. She hadn’t done anything but be there for me; she didn’t deserve this. And I had a sneaking feeling that this hadn’t been the first time.

While I crumbled, Jasmine overcame. Being just like her strong self, she kept a tough exterior at school, telling Sam that he only wished his cock was big enough for another man’s ass. She still held this composed nature in my house as she tried to comfort me, of all people.

“Don’t listen to them. They can’t touch you,” she assured me once again, rubbing my shoulder with her free hand.

“It’s not them I’m worried about. It’s you. ”

She nearly laughed in my face, returning to her chipper self, and deflecting all negative attention away from her. “I’m a big girl,” she stated, flexing her arms in front of her chest. Her words contrasted her physical appearance, but when she measured in with emotional capacity, she wasn’t just big; she was a giant. I laughed to ease the tension, and pulled her into an unexpected hug.

“Besides,” she cut in, her chin pressed into my shoulder. “I don’t need them. I have you.”

Honestly, we did have each other, and I was entirely grateful for that. We didn’t even have to talk all the time, constantly keeping up a witty banter or a thought provoking conversation. There were times were we just started to watch TV. Never TV-TV, of course – we avoided cable at all costs. Or at least, I insisted we avoided cable. I had grown accustomed to Gerard’s lack of working television set in his place, and his theory on the whole thing being a waste of time and stealing away precious moments. Since all I wanted to do was waste time until all of this blew over, however, the infernal box seemed to offer some kind of comfort. Jasmine and I merely watched movies instead. I figured that since there were no commercials trying to sell us products we didn’t need and the globalization factor was gone, that the box was less evil. Besides, we were teenagers – what else we were going to do with our time? Rumors were prevalent at school, and since I wanted to avoid as much prejudice and people as possible, the indoors were our solace.

Sometimes we watched brainless comedies, other times thought-provoking dramas. I raided my parent’s movie collection in the basement and found things I never knew we even possessed. Some titles I recognized, simply from Gerard talking about them, and I made sure we watched those first. She gave me a strange look when I practically jumped with joy when I found the movie Casablanca, but all I had to do was shrug my shoulders and utter a low “Gerard” and she understood.

It was during these movie times, these moments when we were together in silence against the roar and sonorous hum of the TV where I felt the strongest for Jasmine. I would catch myself staring at her a lot, and not even at her face. I locked into her hands as we watched Schindler’s List one afternoon, noticing the way she balled her fists when she was furious with what was happening on screen. When it came to a somber moment, I became preoccupied with the way her eyes crinkled when she felt like she was about to cry. I had stared at her through the beginning of the movie too (the thing was long and I had a very short attention span) and I would have to snap myself back into reality before she caught me. She never out rightly realized my glare, but I had a feeling she knew. But I also had a feeling that she was staring too (short attention spans were common, I deduced).

Though we never really talked about our feelings aside from that one previous afternoon, it was clear they were still there, lingering in between us. It would probably be there for a long time before they dissipated, but we never vocalized them because we understood that now just wasn’t our time. It wasn’t our chapter in the book, but I could see the pages being written. My feelings for her were annoying and often frustrating, but I hoped that they never erased themselves from my body entirely. I loved the way my heart fluttered when she knocked on my door, and I even sometimes pretended to be sleeping again just so she would knock a few more times, and I could feel wanted and needed. I could tell she was doing the same type of actions, sometimes showing up late and playing coy when I asked where she had been, rubbing up against my leg accidentally just to see if I would do it again to her. More often than not, I did, and by the end of the movie, we would be tangled in each other, my arm around her and her head on my shoulder or chest.

There were times where our awkward and forbidden sexual tension would arise, the peck on the cheek becoming a little too dangerously close to a mouth. We tried to tell ourselves internally that we were just close, just good friends, but I didn’t believe myself some days and had to make an excuse to get up and untangle ourselves, so we could start off fresh. Jasmine was always good at recovering from it, and I seriously admired her for it. I could see in her eyes that she felt the same way as me, but she was so much better at shrugging it off. More often than not, when something happened, she would play-insult me to lighten the intense air and then, after that, we would both come up with a random story to tell each other so we could get to know the other a little more. We had moved so fast with our physical relationship, now that we had to back-peddle, we needed some stories to fill in the bumps.

We were big on telling stories; since it already felt like we knew each other, there was no use with small conversation. I wanted to know the big things, what happened when I wasn’t around, before we had met. Most of her tales migrated into light humor, like the time Jason got a candy stuck up his nose and didn’t tell his mother for four days until he finally had to go to the hospital.

“The fucker almost died,” she laughed, batting me on the arms and then waiting for me to continue the pattern.

All of my narratives, no matter how hard I tried, always focused on Gerard. It was always Gerard this, Gerard that, coming out of my mouth and she even poked fun at it a few times mocking me and the way my hands moved overzealously – just like Gerard’s. It seemed that without him around, I developed his mannerisms and even his philosophical babble. Jasmine usually ate up every word, or at least listened, but I could tell some days it was too much for her.

“Aren’t you and Gerard ever normal?” she asked once, when I had told her about the time we had jacked off outside in the middle of a park. (Despite the sexual tension between us, it was getting easier and easier to talk about sex as a whole without any discomfort).

“I asked the exact same question to him, you know that?” I fired back at her, not skipping a beat.

“And what did he say?”

We had been laying down on the floor in the middle of the living room, pushing the couch and chair out of the way so we could take up the entire living space. My mom had been gone that day, so she wasn’t there to oversea our annihilation of her living room furniture scene.

“Which time?” I joked, but the seriousness in my voice came through. I had asked Gerard a lot if we could just be normal, and each time gotten a different answer, but with some similar an underlying meaning; it was just impossible. Regarding the nature of our relationship, we could never ever be normal. The society wouldn’t allow it.

“But you’re not the society,” Jasmine said when I had explained the situation as best as I could. “You’re Gerard and Frank – artistes extraordinaire!” she teased, waving her hands in the air. I chortled with her, but she cut out before I did, her voice becoming serious once again. “You can do anything you want. You can be normal if you want. Fuck society. It only screws everyone up.”

“Tell me about it,” was all I had said, but her words had struck me. Gerard and I could be anything we wanted to be. We had been trying to do that since the beginning, but were put up with way too many restrictions. Or what we told ourselves were restrictions.

We knew the society would pull us apart if they found out about us. Though our lies were slowing unraveling before me as I was stuck in suburbia while he was in the makeshift universe we had created for ourselves, they still weren’t finding out about us.

Perhaps restrictions were only there if you thought they were there, I had started to philosophize on my own. Maybe if we had always thought we could do anything outside those painted walls, we could have. The law was still the law, and though we had broken in and they had caught us, at least in little minute ways, they weren’t proving the big picture.

I was the one who had been stupid enough to fuck everything up. I was stupid and ignorant and such a fucking teenager that night with the van that it scared me. I never wanted to touch a drop of alcohol after that, even the wine I loved so much. When I drank it out of context, out of Gerard’s apartment, and for the wrong reasons, I began to realize I couldn’t control myself. I was drowning myself, drowning my feelings, drowning the person I had worked so hard to find with Gerard. I had not been drinking to inspire, create, or appreciate. I had been drinking to get drunk. To dull senses rather than fuel them. That night I did what I would have done with Sam and Travis and fuck, I never ever wanted to go back to that. I had been stupid that once, and it had almost cost me everything. The van and the alcohol led everyone, society as a whole, to Gerard and questions started to arise.

Why was this old man giving a young kid everything he asked for? Why was this happening? Why was that happening? Since I had not been quick enough to answer, or me too much of a child and Gerard too much of a pedophile to be taken seriously, they began to answer the questions for themselves, getting all the wrong answers.

God, didn’t these people understand that some questions didn’t have answers?

I had screwed up and exposed our secret, but like with intimacy, there were many levels and layers to this. They had only ripped off one and yeah, it was exposed a little too soon. It was too raw and gritty to face the real world. But as the air hit the secret, it began to form a second skin, one healing and fixing everything at the same time.

The questions people were asking, the allegations people were coming up with were nothing to put an entire life threatening crime on, and as they gathered more evidence, more testimonies and lawyers were convened, everyone soon began to realize that nothing would happen. There was nothing wrong here; the evidence was saying what we had been saying since day one. Gerard was my teacher, and I was his loyal student. He may have broken the law and given me alcohol; that was one thing we couldn’t deny and ignore. That was one thing we had to confess.

But rape? No, that had not happened. Statutory rape still came into play, but when Bonnie had informed me and my mother that there was no trauma, and probably wouldn’t come back as anything, I had been liberated. Everyone was still skeptical, especially my father. He wanted more evidence. He had not been at the hospital, had not heard Bonnie say this, and therefore, didn’t believe her. He didn’t even believe my mother when she had repeated the same story again and again. He went so far as to calling the hospital, asking for the this ‘Dr. Lansing character’ (I had no idea why everyone was a character to him. Was he the only person that was real? Was I just a character to him too?). When he finally got a hold of her and she told him she couldn’t give out this sort of information on the phone, he drove down there. My mother and I were close behind; she followed him passively, I followed him to make sure he didn’t hurt or kill the doctor that had given me a part of myself back. When we got there, after a lot of rude remarks, pushing, and all eyes on us, Dr. Lansing told my father there had been no trauma.

And even then, he wanted more evidence.

“That’s just what you think. I want to know what the rape kit actually says,” he practically spat in her face. She scanned her eyes to behind me, and I tried to hide my face. I had no idea why this was happening, and if I had been braver (and didn’t think my father would kill me) I would have apologized. I was pretty sure she knew how sorry I was though, and finally knew what I had to deal with, why I had flipped out in the examination room.

She held her composure like a pro, and breathed deeply. “The lab hasn’t called you about the kit yet?” she questioned clearly. “Or the blood test?”

“Do you really think I would be here if they had?” my father questioned rhetorically, even though I was pretty sure we all knew the answer would be a yes, he would still be here if he had the answers, because he was never satisfied.

“Well,” Bonnie enunciated, forcing a smile. “Haven’t you heard? No news is always good news. I’m sure Frank is fine with his blood, and the rape kit is probably nothing to be concerned about. Now, if you excuse me, I have cases to see.”

She smiled for real at me this time, and my heart kick started again.

We left shortly after that, but my father, of course, was never satisfied. Even when miraculously, the lab phoned that afternoon and told me that indeed, my blood had been okay, but the rape kit was still in the process of being examined, my father wasn’t happy. I didn’t think he ever would be, and at that point in time, I figured I may as well stop trying. I was only digging both of our graves faster and faster with each word I said (positive or negative), so I eventually stopped speaking to him. It took my mother a little longer to realize that it was just no use, one night during dinner where she finally caved. My father had barged in late, consuming his food like he was a mix between a gluttonous king and a starving child, and never uttering a word. My mother tried to speak, and when he merely swallowed, got up and left for the basement and stayed down there the rest of the night, she got the idea.

We both bowed our elegantly. My father was left to fight, but he was only battling himself. The phone never rang, no one would take his calls, and soon enough, he stopped staring at the dreaded object every night. As the information which he chose to ignore was passed onto the right officials, my liberation began to take its course.

There was a huge polarity in the people I talked to about my case. Some wanted more evidence, and others were content. Most people seemed to have lingering doubt in their mind, especially the police force. They had nothing to officially charge Gerard with, yet, they still kicked the idea around in their heads.

“It’s still too soon,” one of the officers told my mother on the phone. I was getting good at listening in by this point. “We still have Gerard on giving alcohol to a minor with specific bail conditions surrounding the other charge. We don’t want to drop anything right away because we’re afraid he’ll flee.”

If I had not been so infuriated with no one believing me, I would have laughed. Gerard’s idea of fleeing would be to hide in a paint store or at Vivian’s. There was no way he would leave Jersey – he had no where to go, really. And I knew he couldn’t leave me hanging like this. He just couldn’t. I was still just as stuck as he was with legal proceedings, though I didn’t have as much damnation hanging over my forehead. Just a lot of prejudice.

Despite my vexation, I knew I had to play along with this more evidence claim. Jasmine was there with me, telling me I could do it. She knew deep in her heart that nothing bad had happened – she heard my stories, heard my every idiosyncrasy that I loved about Gerard, and she knew it was a healthy relationship. She had witnessed abuse first hand with her father. She knew the signs of something unhealthy and there was nothing bad here. She even offered to give a testimony, saying that I had not even had a sexual relationship with him. She told me she would lie for me – just to make sure that me and this man she had never met before were safe.

“There are some things that should be exempted from the law,” she explained to me, when I had been so baffled as to why she risk her morals lying under oath like that. “You and Gerard are happy, the officers and everyone else just can’t know it’s together. They don’t understand it, are threatened by it, and therefore make a law for it. Some things don’t follow the rules and a lot of things in this life don’t have rules.”

“A relationship is not a game,” I said back to her, channeling her train of thought and realizing where it was all going. I had told her the story of Gerard’s theory on cheating many, many times before. She knew what I was talking about, and we said the next line together.

“There are no rules.”

“And when there are rules, there are always exceptions,” I added, just to make Gerard proud even if he couldn’t hear me.

Jasmine couldn’t give her testimony, however, because she was too young and had not witnessed Gerard and I together. But, I had heard through snooped phone conversations and mail tampering that Vivian had come foreword and given a statement, saying there was no sexual conduct between Gerard and I, that it was a purely teaching relationship. I never saw her, only heard of this information, and I felt my heart explode inside my chest with happiness when I did. She was blatantly lying as well; Gerard had told her about us, and she had seen me next to naked in his place on a Saturday morning. No student did that; only lovers did. But in Vivian’s mind again, there was nothing wrong with this.

Souls don’t have ages.

She knew that the law didn’t have a soul, so we had to bend ours to fit with it. It hurt a little, the constant lying and hiding, but I hoped it would be worth it.

I knew that legal proceedings took forever to deal with, being government jobs and all; they didn’t feel the need to force themselves to work any faster than they needed to. I still found myself growing impatient, and no matter how many questions I asked, or was asked, it seemed as if we were all standing still in a vortex. We were not moving backwards at least, but we sure as hell weren’t moving forwards. I would occasionally get called into the station or have appointments with my lawyer, and even a shrink they had gotten me.

The shrink was an interesting experience. It was recommended that I be evaluated to make sure I was emotionally stable. I finally managed to grab a free appointment (free was very essential here seeing as how we weren’t very rich to begin with, and my father didn’t want to part with any more money than what he had to with the lawyer) with the local community chain, her office nestled inside a far corner of the hospital. The person they stuck me with was this twenty-something red head, slightly chunky girl who looked harmless at first. She smiled sweetly when I sat down, and began to ask small questions to warm me up. After the small welcoming period, she moved quickly onto the constant questions about how often I cried, if anyone had ever hurt me, abused me, and so on. I was tempted to tell them about my father and the hit I could still feel every time I looked at his stone cold face, but I didn’t. I didn’t need anymore trouble to deal with.

I thought her tone had been a bit cynical at first, but I ignored it as my own paranoia. Soon enough however, I began to unfold her methods behind things.

No matter what it was, she seemed to want to get me to cry, or confess something. She would ask me a question, stop me suddenly in my answer, and twist it around to see what I would say the next time. Though I stuttered and stopped a few times, looking at her confused, I managed to be consistent. Consistency was key. If she saw no flaws in my story, she saw no flaws in me. She was determined to pick away layers until she found some kind of marring, but I had been familiarized with the advantage of layers. I knew how to cover my tracks. She looked sad when I left her brightly colored office, but I had been walking on air. I felt a triumph and defeat in my voice. I knew I had answered all of those questions she fired at me verbally and slid at me in the form of cheap questionnaires, correctly. I was not damaged. If anything, I was a mosaic of broken pieces, trying to find its place together in the world. If it would only let me back inside.

I was never able to talk to Gerard directly, though I knew on some days he was in the station at the same time I was. I recognized his van in the parking lot one day, and I nearly flipped out. I wanted to run over to it, jump on it, hide inside – anything. I felt memories of when I had been inside that van, driving it, and being with Gerard. It hurt when I just had to walk past it. My mother was always with me, and if she saw my sudden outburst, it would arise too many questions. I had to keep both feet firmly planted on the ground and walk. I had to ignore Gerard, as much as it hurt.

When I had been in the station at the same time as Gerard, the officer always kept a close eye on me. They were very adamant about keeping us apart for obvious ‘sexual’ reasons in their mind (like we would have been stupid enough to start fucking in the middle of the police station) but it was to also keep our stories separated from the other, so we couldn’t work together and devise a master plan. Little did they know we were already prepared and waiting to use it. I just thought it would be me, rather than the both of us, interrogated and questioned. I had all my answers worked out in my head, but I never felt satisfied. I wanted to know so much what they were asking Gerard and what he was saying. I knew he was good with words about art, but law? About denying the truth? I wasn’t entirely sure. I could listen to him talk for hours, but could the cops? They would get bored and annoyed at his constant banter; I knew they would. Gerard had to be strong. He needed to deflect each question, like I was doing. I was surprised at how well I was doing at that some days. It was one thing to keep my composure at home, alone, or with Jasmine, but when I was in the cold sterile rooms they seemed to like to put me in, with my vacant mother right beside me, everything seemed so hard. I was pretty much a bumbling fool, and I had no idea what the terms they were telling me meant. I needed someone with more guidance and more knowledge than I had; I needed a fucking lawyer.

It took a lot longer than average to find one for all of this, given the circumstances. My parents had a lawyer, but he only did real-estate and family law (like wills, power of attorney, etc). We had never needed a criminal lawyer before. I hated the term – criminal lawyer. It was so distant, unsympathetic, and dangerous. I was well aware of the fact that I been arrested and was being charged, but I had never thought of myself as a criminal before. I could only imagine how Gerard must have felt.

Just from hearing the term, I was nervous walking into my first appointment with this guy, recommended to us from one of my distant cousins who did nothing but get in trouble for petty theft and vandalism. I was sure I was going to be talking to some grease ball lawyer, with slicked hair and a stereotypical New Jersey drawl to his voice – just like people saw on the screen. When I walked in and found a tall man, over six feet with gangly limbs, a thick orange beard, and a smile on his face, I wasn’t sure what to expect anymore. And when the first words out of his mouth were, “I know this is a fucked up situation,” my faith was restored in the system, and my trust to this man.

His name was Tom, and he was unlike most people I had been coming into contact with. They had sunken faces with swollen eyes and worried glares, stiff upper lips or water-logged sympathies. This guy was just like a teenager, but older and brandishing a law degree. He swore a lot, something my mother didn’t exactly approve of, but she wasn’t around a lot of the time. He would ask her to leave occasionally, just because he knew he could get more out of me when she was gone. She had stayed for our first normal meeting for the boring and drudging paperwork and whatnot. I had zoned out countless times during that meeting, looking at all the degrees on the wall, and the small artwork hidden amongst diplomas and prestige. It was a print of a piece done by some obscure artist I didn’t know. Probably local talent, but I highly doubted that anything talented came out of Jersey. It was a simple picture will rolling hills and blue sky. It wasn’t the best thing I had seen, but it reinforced my trust in Tom even more. He had art in his office; he must have had some kind of sympathy.

As it turned out, he did. Nearing the end of that first meeting, he turned to me suddenly, and called me by name.

“Frank. How are you?”

His question had been something I was not familiar with. Even the shrink had not asked me how I was in that very moment in time. She had asked how I had been that week, that month, in regards to my family, in regards to my friends, and Gerard. She was not asking in the general sense because she could, it was because she had to. Bonnie had asked that too, but she was a doctor. She almost had to as well; she was just more sympathetic than most people had been.

I looked at Tom, and he nodded. He actually wanted to know how I was doing. He was supposed to be dealing with law, not feelings. This was a change.

“I’m okay. Kind of tired.”

“Do you know who looks really tired?” he pondered out loud, and I noticed his Jersey accent, just not as thick as the stereotypes that bled into real life. He didn’t give me much time to answer before motioning to the vacant body beside me. “Your mom looks exhausted. How about she goes to take a break while you and I figure out the rest of this stuff, okay?”

The lawyer’s words had startled both of us into gaped mouths. We looked at each other, then back at him, trying to see if he was serious. He was. When my mother had regained some kind of composure, she had not wanted to leave. She tried to shoo Tom’s offer away, blinking and rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. It was when Tom mentioned it that I really noticed how tired she was. There were bags and dark circles under her sallow skin, and her hands were trembling slightly. Her voice faltered as she talked, especially when she mentioned my name. I didn’t know I had hurt her this much.

Tom stepped in, trying to fix the mess I had created.

“Nah, don’t worry about Frank, Mrs. Iero. He looks pretty fine to me. Go get a coffee and he’ll meet you by your car. I only need him for a little while.”

When she opened her mouth again and tried to argue, Tom flung some change on the table from his pocket for that coffee, and really, my mother couldn’t argue anymore.

I felt comfortable around him just from the way he treated my mom and I as a unit, but when left alone, I could feel my blood thickening. I wasn’t sure how this would turn out. I should have never have doubted him, because just like his first question to me, his inquiry into how I actually was, he talked to me first. We actually had a conversation before the legal shit was brought to the surface again. We discussed favorite bands and some of his I had actually heard of, same with some of mine. The majority of our conversation was reminiscing about our first concerts before he finally got out to the nitty-gritty of things.

“Like I said, I know it’s fucked,” he started, waving his hands in the air and looking over his paperwork in a half-assed attempt to be professional. “But did Gerard do anything inappropriate to you, other than give you alcohol?” His eyes rolled around in his head as he asked, trying to add a comic light to the situation.

When I had answered my standard no, this time with my voice as strong as ever, he only asked me one other time if I was sure. And then he moved onto my other charges, like drinking and driving.

“You’re a good kid,” he stated, clucking his tongue as he looked over some statements and other legal jargon I couldn’t understand. He brought his eyes to meet with my own, scratching his beard with his long fingers. “I can probably get you community service. You just made one mistake, and hopefully you won’t do it again?”

He narrowed his eyes at me, but in a comical way so I didn’t feel like he was looking down on me. Everyone else around me had been doing that, even my own mother on some instances. It felt so good for a person in power to actually treat me like a person, an adult – instead of this child who didn’t know what they were talking about. I did know what I was talking about, and fuck, Tom believed me. He was going to fight for me, not against me, even when my parents spoke up.

On our second meeting, my mother and I had made the foolish mistake in letting my father come too. We didn’t really have much say in the matter actually; his death glare had shut me up, and my mother was too much of a silent shell to say anything at all against him. The moment we set foot in the door, things started to go bad. Before Tom could even shake my father’s hand he was running off at the mouth about Gerard, and just what should be happening to him.

“I want him arrested. No fucking trial - just put him jail. He’s not going to touch another kid again. Sick pedophile.”

Tom placed his extended hand at his side, forgoing the greeting. His face was surprisingly calm, while I closed my eyes for impact.

“Well, first of all, if he’s charged with anything, it won’t be pedophilia,” Tom started with stealth, using knowledge like bullets. “Pedophilia only pertains to people who are interested in prepubescent children, and as much as we hate to say it, Frank’s not thirteen anymore. He’s almost an adult, but still very far away at the same time. He’s capable of taking for himself, believe it or not, and he’s told me in the company of your wife, and in private, that nothing inappropriate has happened.”

I could see my dad’s skin toughen upon impact of those words. I could have sworn I saw red bloom beneath his tanned skin, but it could have been the light, or the vexation in his system.

“ If Gerard is charged with anything, it will be pederasty. But,” Tom quipped quickly, moving on. “I am not Gerard’s lawyer so I cannot predict anything at this point in time. I am Frank’s lawyer, and how about we talk about his case, Mr. Iero?”

Both Tom and my father swallowed their pride, while my mother and I tried to remain visible in the crowded room. Tom began to explain some details to us, looking in each of our eyes as he talked, but my dad still required his full attention. He would constantly cut in, trying to find errors in what he was saying, and each time, Tom would bounce back. He was extremely professional, though I could tell the constant scrutiny was getting to him by the way he gritted his teeth. I knew it was only a matter of time before he snapped, my father snapped, and everything went downhill again. It happened as I began to talk to Tom and explain a few things that involved Gerard when my dad’s deep booming voice looming high in the air tried to intercept every word I said and change it around. Tom finally called my father out, telling him by his first name to please leave the room. My dad refused to go, saying he wasn’t breaking any law, but when Tom turned around got out a thick text book from behind his desk (that I had thought were for display purposes only) and started to read him a passage about coercion, my father left in a huff.

He didn’t come back again. It was around that time where he began to seclude himself more and more from the family, but I tried to not let it bother me. Tom was listening to me, my mom was getting better, and Gerard wasn’t going to get charged. Tom had confided to me during one of our alone sessions that things just weren’t holding up like they needed to. It had taken so long for things to finally come down from hiding up in the air, but when it rained, it fucking poured. Gerard just had to deal with the charge of giving alcohol to a minor, something that could be settled out of court. I had no idea who his lawyer was, but Tom knew him briefly from law school and said he was a good guy. Gerard merely got a fine and some community service of his own like me. My proceedings were still in the process of being worked out, but Tom assured me that community service, even if it was an insane amount of hours, would probably be the only thing I got. But I didn’t care what I got anymore; Gerard was fine.

“What about his bail conditions?” I asked the last time I had seen Tom. “Is Gerard allowed to be outside and around minors now?”

Tom had sighed, scratching his beard again; a nervous habit I noticed he had. His face was serious and there was another emotion hidden behind that thick mane of hair. “Yes, but it’s not a good idea to see him.”

My head fell into my hands that I had draped over my lap. My mother was outside; it was another quick visit where Tom had kicked her out, just to talk to me privately for a while. I was glad she wasn’t in the room so see how fucking disappointed I was in his statement. Tom saw it though, and quickly corrected himself.

“Just yet,” he added, cocking his head to the side. I nearly leaped out of my seat, my eyes bulging and wanting more details, like when and where, but that was not what I got. I got sympathy, but in the best for possible.

“You shouldn’t see him so soon because it could mean a lot of trouble for both of you.” He looked at me with an austere face. “It’s just starting to blow over now. People are starting to forget, and with that double homicide up the street from your place, I think people are going to have better things to talk about.”

We laughed at the black humor in the situation. I vaguely recalled glancing at the headlines and hearing something about a domestic squabble gone very badly. Honestly, I had just been searching headlines for anything about Gerard that morning at breakfast, and barely paid attention to anything else.

“If you see Gerard while it’s still somewhat fresh in people’s minds, you’ll remind them why they think they need to be afraid.”

I sighed, nodded. Just because Tom was able to disprove to the police force and my mother that there was nothing to hide from, that didn’t transcend to everyone else around us. There were still people like my father would chose to believe the worse, and sadly, people like him were far too common.

“I can understand why you want to see him, though,” Tom started, still scratching, but a smile emerging. “I met with him once in the station for awhile, and privately. He seems like a good guy. A little fruity, but a good guy. I’d want to hang out with him too.”

He looked up at me, his eyes whole and serious – for the first time since I had met him. I hadn’t known him long in calendar days, but we had spent so many hours together over paperwork and testimonies, hours I should have been at school, hours I should have been with Gerard and taking pictures, but I had been with him instead. You got to know people in crisis situations and when a lot depends on them. I depended on Tom, and he delivered, with more real sympathy than I had ever seen in my life. Sympathy that made me feel human, instead of broken. And he was only my lawyer.

“Thank you,” I stated earnestly, getting up as he did from his seat to guide me out of the room. I didn’t know what else I could say, what else I could do. I just wanted to let him know how much I appreciated everything.

“Hey, no problem,” he insisted waving his hand in the air as the other one reached for the doorknob. “It’s what I’m paid the big bucks for,” he joked, tapping his chest mockingly. I laughed, realizing that money and my simple thank you was probably enough. Especially the money part.

As I met up with my mother, smile still planted on our face from the most recent (but not last I knew, at least not for awhile) meeting with Tom, I heard the lawyer add yet another thing to his statement.

“Just stay out of trouble, okay, Frank?” His voice still resonated the serious tone as before, his thick bushy eyebrows meeting in the middle and sinking down.

I knew he chose to believe that Gerard and I were a teacher-student relationship, and probably he thought that was all that was there, but he still didn’t want either of us to get in anymore trouble. His brow displayed his worried features, knowing that I would probably see Gerard sooner than society needed me too.

“I will,” I assured him, then walked out the door.

***

Days passed a lot faster, but I still felt like I was missing something. I had done all the legal things I could have done for then, but I was still trapped at home. I was determined to keep Tom’s word, and though it would be hard, I knew I could. I had gone to a shrink and I had mended things with Jasmine. Fixing anything with Gerard I knew had to wait, and though I was okay with that, something was still missing inside me. Gone. I couldn’t figure out what it was at first, and it plagued me to no end. I started to become paranoid that one of my lies had fallen through, or I didn’t cover them up properly enough. I stared at the phone for one entire afternoon, thinking that they were going to call and tell me some horrible news. When my mother called me for dinner, and nothing had happened, I realized what I had been missing. There had been no phone calls from the lab, other than for my blood work. Any closure of the rape kit had not been had, though its name and presence still buzzed within us all. My dad’s obsession with it beforehand had make me discount it entirely, but now that my dad had been a mere mute the past few days, I began to pick up the slack.

The rape kit was something that I figured and hoped would be done as soon as it could be, even before my dad’s little out burst. I knew the results deep down inside, and ever so slowly, my mother was starting to believe them without any official word just yet. I needed evidence though, solid, factual, and tactful evidence if I ever wanted to be completely free of myself and my worries and doubts. That was what I was missing inside, why I didn’t feel right in my own skin. I needed the lab to call me, and soon because time was running out as much as it was passing by slowly.

But I found out soon enough, from piecing together little things and observing the details that Gerard had taught me about, that nothing was going to happen. The rape kit wasn’t going to be processed, and if it was, nothing was going to come from it. After one meeting with Tom where he got too flustered to even answer any of my questions about the kit, I took to myself to figure my own answers out. All I had asked him was if people had called him, and his face had grown despondent. He told me I had a lot I needed to learn about the system, and before I could ask for any guidance, my mother had come in to get me.

I had no idea where to go or what to do after that. I needed answers, and since Tom was too far away, and Gerard was just unreachable, I dipped into my youth and used the place where I used to go to for all the answers: the library. As nerdy as it sounded, it was one of the only logical places I could get to without getting into more trouble. I walked there to busy myself one night after dinner, and soon found out that I had a lot I needed to learn. I wanted to educate myself and know what I was talking about, especially if I had to defend myself. Law went straight over my head, and so did medical jargon, but there was one clear fact that I began to comprehend completely.

Rapes were almost never charged outright. The facts horrified me at first, and fueled my constant reading. I found out that though rape kits were done, most of them ended up sitting in a freezer, and if anything was ever found, charges were hard to lay. Often times, it was only because the victim was physically injured as well, and the rape charge was tacked onto an assault arrest. Some people were even discouraged from having a rape kit because the hospital knew that the staff wouldn’t do anything about it. I read that cops often tampered with them, and lab technicians often times let their own personal biases to the surface. If the case wasn’t anything too special to let a bias through on, it was just a number, a statistic, and something that when too many were put together, they fell side by side against one another, eventually lost in the back of a lab.

This, in essence, meant good news for me (I wouldn’t have to worry about any kind of results fucking up my story because it seemed that there would be no result to do that), but it infuriated me nonetheless. The statistics I was finding out were for women mostly, but I figured it would be the same for men. In fact, the details may have even proved to be better for men because they were the source of power in society and would get taken seriously easier. I just couldn’t believe that our government, the system we had to depend on worked that way. I couldn’t believe that they would tell a prostitute to never bother getting a rape kit done, and some women would never have closure or results from theirs when something serious had happened. I was being fucking forced to get one, and nothing had happened to me. I didn’t understand, and in a way, I didn’t want to understand. I didn’t want to be a part of those individuals who judged upon looking at a victim if they were worthy enough to still be a victim. I didn’t want to be a part of a society that was based on numbers and restrictions. I wanted art, I wanted equality. I wanted every picture, every case I looked at to be beautiful and validated in some form. I wanted to be free from all of this.

I thought getting results for myself in my hands so I could brandish to the world would make me liberated. I thought it would give me some foreign sense of sovereignty that I could hold in my hands and use as my ticket out of here. But when I read about other victims, people who had gone though much worse than I could even fathom, and got nothing from this law, I changed my perspective.

I looked at this one case study in a book of this girl. Her name was Mary, but it said it was changed to protect her identify. There was no picture, just a silhouetted picture of this woman. Even in this darkened shadow of a life, I could see some distinct features. Her nose was like Gerard’s; sharp, pointed, and drawn thinly to the front. And I knew that after seeing her nose, that her name should not be Mary. It was too plain for her. It was the name of a rape victim on a file, not the name of a person. There must have been at least a million Marys in the world. There were too many of them, and by forcing this title on her, it made her a statistic.

So I changed her name before I even read her story to something far greater, far better. Her name was Minerva. Gerard had told me that she was some Roman Goddess of War or something. We had seen it in a painting, and it had stuck with me. I had to name her that so this girl – Minerva now – would stick with me. Her name fit her. She had put up a hell of a fight.

When she was sixteen, she was raped constantly by her former boyfriend. I wasn’t even sure at first how someone could be raped by someone they chose to call their boyfriend, but as I read on, I was enlightened even more. If you say no, it’s a fucking no. Just because you were dating, didn’t grant anyone full permission. Fuck, I had known that all along, but I had never seen it in such black and white terms. Gerard made sure each and every time we had sex that I wanted this; he always gave me a chance to say no. I never did. I never wanted to. This only reinforced in my mind that the police and everyone were after us for the wrong reasons.

I continued to read about Minerva, about her struggles to get people to believe her. One night, her boyfriend went too far and started to beat her. Gave her a broken and bloodied nose. In the hospital, she asked for a rape kit, and one was done, but the person committing it had been cynical at best. She judged Minerva for not being a nervous wreck when she was telling the story, informing police that she couldn’t have been serious because she spoke so calmly about such an invasive crime. Minerva’s boyfriend was charged, but never with rape. The kit had been done, but nothing was done about it. Minerva had some closure for her physical scars, but none for her emotional.

Or at least, that was what I had thought at first. I had been so angry while reading this book, I nearly swore and cursed in the library. I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t understand how anyone could find peace with themselves after being so violated, and then have no one do anything about it. But my eyes pushed forward through the text, and my mind kept changing and bending in ways it hadn’t done since I had left Gerard’s apartment.

“You have to find peace within yourself before you can find peace within anyone else,” Minerva had spoken in the book, explaining how she had gotten on with her life. Her rape still haunted her at the best of times, but she knew what happened and how she felt because of it. Her family and friends knew the logistics of it all, but even then, they could only imagine what had occurred. She didn’t need them to imagine. Nor did she need the cops or anyone else to tell her what had happened because, as much as it hurt, she would always know. There was a warped sense of tranquility in that, and it was what allowed her to go on with her life, and finally sleep at night without nightmares. As I closed the book, I felt that peace and serenity rush through my body too.

I was in a far better situation than Minerva. I had not actually been raped, but we had both still been clinging onto results that we couldn’t control for the sake of our happiness. We had to step back and realize that we were already in charge of it.

The event was parallel to what Gerard and Vivian had done after Ray’s death. They didn’t have to go back to doing art their old fashion way because it had made them happy then. It had only made them happy because they wanted to do it, and so they did. It wasn’t the action behind the happiness; it was the freedom in the action that triggered that bliss. Once they realized they were in possession of themselves and no one else, they could move forward. Minerva had done that too, and when this book was written, it had been ten years since her attack. She was happily married with a baby on the way. She had moved on.

I needed to do that. I had to realize first that the sovereignty I craved did not always come from answers. Sure, I knew how to ask the questions, I was doing it constantly and proving that fact by staking out a fucking library for a night, but even if I got answers, that wasn’t going to keep me completely sane. I needed to figure out how to be happy and free on my own – even when I still lacked essential pieces – and be okay with it.

As I walked home from the library I hit that fork in the road where I could either go to Gerard’s or go to my place. Staring down each road, I knew that it was going to be hard. So hard, I could feel the weight in my chest and lead in my blood, ceasing me in my deliberation. I couldn’t go to Gerard’s yet, but I could walk into my house and be content in staying there. It was my house too, regardless of what my father claimed about bills and mortgage payments. I lived there too – I just needed to feel alive while I dwelled there too.

That night, I took a lot of pictures. Jasmine had come over for a bit, but when she saw me itching at my skin and staring distantly at my camera in the background, she let me be. She promised to come around and see me extra early the next day, or something like that – I was never too sure. I was just trying to get her outside so I could do something with my hands. I took some pictures, and then dug around in the basement until I found some of my old childhood paint set, and even some crayons. I colored, I drew, I painted. It didn’t matter that I felt so juvenile for all of this, I needed to do it.

This urge inside of me persisted until well into the night, until the moon reached its zenith in the sky and I had drawn it using Eggshell White crayon. The last piece I completed that night had been Minerva as the Goddess of war. Only this war was the very same one I was facing, and it was called real life. I gave her the features she was lacking in the book. I gave her a face, a body, and real tangible color outside of her shadows. I had already given her a name; I knew I had to complete the rest of task. I needed to give her a full bodied identity because I would somehow find myself in her art. I made her eyes Cornflower Blue, her hair Coal Black, and the horizon above her Tickled Pink. I painted right along side the wax of the crayons, creating an anarchic mix of mediums. Once done, proud and content, I fell asleep in my inspired fury.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14