Shattered

I don’t remember it all well; it comes and goes in flashes of clarity and long patches of darkness. But I’ll do my best to tell this story, my story. You deserve to know. Whoever you are, you deserve to know. God knows I don’t anymore.

I don’t even know enough to tell if my story will absolve me or trap me forever. I don’t think I’m crazy, I really don’t. I’m nothing like the other boys in this madhouse.

My name is Shane, and this is my story.

The first clear memory I have that relates to The Incident is of lying on the cold, bleak white tile of my bathroom floor. I wasn’t crying. I couldn’t feel anything, to be truthful. Nothing but an emptiness that chewed me up, this ghastly, gaping hole in my stomach, and a sharp pricking as the shattered edges around the hole pierced me with every move. I swear to you, the pain was not only emotional: it was tangible. I had never felt such pain, such isolation. She had been my sole friend, the only person on the face of this godforsaken planet who understood me. Who understood the daily struggle I went through, being the way I was. Who hadn’t judged me.

And she was gone. Forever.

There was a little white pill bottle behind the closed doors of the medicine cabinet, perhaps even multiple bottles. I couldn’t actually see them, but I felt like I could, and they called to me with promises of oblivion.

It can all be over, I heard them whisper seductively, their tiny voices in my mind like music. You don’t have to deal with any of this for one more day, not if you don’t want to. You can be free.

The word “free” sent horrible pangs through me. My insides were empty, hollowed out, shattered, irreparable. My outsides were bruised and scarred by the sheer effort of putting one foot in front of the other, day after day, through eighteen miserable years in this hellhole.

God, for it all to be over…

I believed, and still believe, that walking out of that bathroom and climbing into bed was the most difficult thing I ever did.

When I looked my reflection in the eye the next morning, I could barely recognize the person I saw. The boy staring back at me had the same dark wavy hair as always, with a deep midnight blue-black color that obviously came out of a bottle. High forehead and strong cheekbones. Clear, lightly tanned skin, smattered with freckles across a straight nose. The same, but different somehow. Dark, unfamiliar purple shadows hung under his eyes; he looked gaunt, messy and unkempt. There was a haunted look in the familiar piercing green eyes, and a crease in his brow that made a stranger out of him.

Was that me?

I leaned forward brusquely and splashed frigid water into my face, breaking the spell.

The announcement they made at school that day regarding her death was solemn, but the voices of the people speaking were full of false sorrow. They hadn’t really known her. They weren’t broken inside – breathing didn’t hurt them. When they looked in their mirrors, they recognized the reflections looking back at them. I felt an irrational anger welling that they dared to speak in her memory. As I brooded, the cautionary word was put out: they hadn’t caught her killer. Sandra, my fabulous Sandra, had been the second victim in as many weeks, and the deaths were a complete mystery. Everyone needed to take care and lock their doors, the voices of false sorrow warned.

As if they cared. Fake people, fake feelings, fake warning. My fists were clenched, my pulse a nervous tic at my temple. I was wound tight, a wild animal, unmannered and fully prepared to attack given the slightest provocation.

The announcements wrapped up with a halfhearted reminder about basketball tryouts, and then the screen went black. For a tense moment, we all just sat there; then Mr. Proser switched off the projector with a mechanical snap.

I could feel the wondering eyes of the other kids all around me boring into my back, straight through into my soul. That’s her friend. The weird one. Is he going to snap? Go crazy? Shoot up the school? Cry?  I tried to meet their gazes, but their eyes flicked away with ridiculous false casualness, refusing to meet mine.

Cowards.

“What?” I asked, and my voice cracked. Under my false bravado, I knew everyone could hear the tears. Whispers turned into snickers as they remembered exactly who I was to them. I had held their sympathy, or as close as I was going to get to it, for all of two seconds.

“Yes, Mr. Ellingsworth?” Mr. Proser’s voice, dripping sarcasm, was the only one to respond brazenly to my question. “Is there a problem, young sir?”

The terms of respect that he used when he addressed me were twisted, warped into something ironic and cruel. Every time he spoke to me, I cringed into myself, letting self-loathing settle around my shoulders like a warm coat in a brutal winter. His disgusted voice slithered across my spine uncomfortably, the embodiment of the attitude that literally everyone in my life had always taken towards me.

Everyone but Sandra.

Mr. Proser made his way to the front of the classroom, breaking the spell of still severity left lingering after the day’s depressing announcements. His eyes, when they took me in, held no sympathy, not even a fleeting glimpse of it the way my classmates’ had. His were cold little round orbs of hatred as he beheld the sight of me; his hand fidgeted with the cross he wore around his neck, the way it always did in my presence. He wasn’t supposed to wear that stupid cross, according to the school code, but he insisted.

“No, sir,” I answered after a long moment in which I considered a variety of more satisfying reactions to his question. “Everything’s fine. Peachy.”

“Good,” was all he said, turning away from me to begin his normal routine of blandly ignoring me.

Dinner with my parents that night was uncomfortably silent but for the clanking of spoons against bowls and cups being raised and lowered again to the chipped old table. I was an only child, leaving me to fend for myself every single day of my miserable life.

My mom cleared her throat periodically, as if she was preparing to speak then thinking better of it. My dad simply sat, stoic, his face completely unreadable. His posture was decidedly uncomfortable; I knew that neither of them liked this situation any more than I did, although their discomfort stemmed from very different reasons.

I stared intently at the table, unable to focus on either of their faces. I knew parental concern was currently at war with the usual, very different expressions they took whenever I was concerned. My eyes traced the grain in the wood over and over again, scarfing down what food I could stomach in order to escape this as fast as I possibly could. The piping hot food scalded my lips and tongue as it passed over them, but I couldn’t stop; I think a part of me drank in the pain, relishing it. It felt like a tether to reality in a world that was slowly splintering and falling apart. Shattering all around me.

“She was a sweet girl,” my dad finally said, by way of condolence. His scratchy voice seemed abnormally harsh overlying the awkward silence, and I flinched involuntarily.

“Yeah,” I said, tonelessly recovering myself.

God, I was tired.

“The two of you would have been lovely together,” my mom said not-so-subtly. “Just lovely.” Her voice was unapologetically wistful, her eyes mournful for reasons that had nothing to do with Sandra’s death.

“No,” I said, just as tonelessly as before. I didn’t have the energy to argue, to tell them the same thing I’d tried to explain hundreds of times before. In the past I suppose I had thought that maybe, just maybe, if I put it a certain way, they would understand. They would get it. There could be some miracle breakthrough, and they could accept me, and love me. We could be a family. But they never did, and now I was just too tired to try.

My dad’s always-thin patience wore out with my blunt refusal to cooperate with my mom’s fantasies. Years of anger and disgust were clear as he spit: “You should consider yourself lucky a girl like that even wanted to try to fix you. Don’t let her have wasted her time on a hopeless faggot.”

My mouth fell open. There was ringing silence, then the vicious crack of my mother’s hand across his face.

“Harry!” She screeched, as if her quiet disappointment was any better than his hateful words. The shards in my chest were shifting, digging deeper.  Tears were pricking in my eyes as I quietly got up and walked out the back door, into the blackness of the empty, lonely night.

There was no school the next day, or the day after that. Mr. Proser was gone.

The county was on emergency lockdown at the news of his passing; in our small rural community, there was a killer on the loose. The mutilated remains of Mr. Proser had been found the day after they had found the remains of my dearest friend, abandoned by the road in the same manner. People were in a panic; nothing like this had happened here in living memory. Doors were locked and windows shuttered. Playgrounds became desolate, haunted with the memory that had played there when their mothers had felt secure stepping outside. Lonely swings watched the world like sad eyes, waiting for this troubled time to pass.

I was sitting in my room when I heard the news. The news came as a shock; I curled up into myself, clutching my knees to my chest. Then I just sat, still, just absorbing it. The many posters on my walls seemed to be closing in all around me, the almost inhumanly beautiful faces of actors and band members leering at me. I choked out a sob.

Was I sad?

Was I glad?

Was I a monster for not knowing?

The next thing I knew, I was opening my bleary eyes in a hospital bed.

The sterile white room went in and out of focus as I slowly drifted into consciousness. The beeps of machinery and buzzing of hushed conversation in the background filled my ears as I fought a losing battle against my own weak muscles, trying to force myself to sit up and look around my surroundings. There was no window, and that fact made me feel trapped. Like an animal chained to a heart monitor. A tasteless, blatantly fake potted plant flowered grotesquely in the corner of the obscenely small space allotted to this room.

“Hello…?” I called out, and my voice was hoarse with disuse. It sounded alien to me, like a demon dragged from the pits of hell to wreak havoc. I choked out a phlegmy old-man cough and tried again, but no sound would come out of me for a few moments, and then a nurse was at my side. I couldn’t seem to focus on her, but I could tell she was portly and middle-aged. Probably someone’s grandmother; she smelled like chocolate chip cookies, antiseptic and death.

“Now, don’t strain yourself, dear,” she told me, sugary sweet, and her voice, high above me as it was, seemed to me to resonate from the very walls and floors of the small room all around me. The edges of my vision began to grow blurry, unclear and unfocused as the chocolate-chip-death lady adjusted some unknown setting on the machine attached to me through the IV drip. Slowly and then all at once, I slid back down the slippery slope into blissful unconsciousness.

This was my only intact shard of memory from the entire two week period I spent in the hospital.

Afterwards, they told me I tried to kill myself. My mind rejected it, rejected even the idea. I wouldn’t have considered that. They didn’t understand I was stronger than that.

They told me it was normal not to remember, that there was nothing wrong with me. They didn’t understand that I hadn’t believed anything was wrong with me in the first place.

They told “we” were going to “get to the root” of my “issues.” They didn’t understand.

“Hmm.” My dad’s tone was full of strained but well-intentioned humor as he drove me home from the hospital for the first time. “Well. That one bitch is in rehab, and what’s-her-face’s baby was born. And I’m sure an A-Dawg or a T-Diddy somewhere dropped a new album. And the weather’s been a little funky.”

I forced a small laugh, fiddling with the lock on my door. Outside the window, other cars zipped by, each of them full of other people, living other lives. And some of them were happy, and some of them were sad, and some were old and some were young and they were all just as solid, as real, as I was. The thought left a strange sour taste in my mouth, and I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. “Thanks for catching me up, Dad.”

“A lot goes down in the fast lane in a few weeks, ya feel, my man. Gotta let a lil homie know wassup. What’s happenin. Ya know.”

I snorted with laughter and sprayed mocha latte out my nose, caught way off guard by his completely uncharacteristic attempt to make me smile. My dad grinned, a real, genuine grin.

Maybe seeing your only child hover at death’s door is what it takes to make a man realize there are worse things in life than being the parent of a boy who likes boys. Food for thought.

“Oh, but in serious news,” my dad added, “you’ll be glad to know they’re pretty sure they got the guy who killed all those people. Older African American gentleman. They took him into custody, and no one else has been hurt. Rumor is they have all but a confession.”

My heart clenched up palpably in my chest, the laughter immediately draining out of me. They had him.

The man who had taken Sandra away from me.

I imagined seeing his face. I imagined him behind bars. Too good for him, I thought with a wave of vicious disgust that overtook me incredibly suddenly. He deserves to suffer more than that. He deserves to bleed. To cry. To be torn apart, the way he tore my life apart.

“And school is back in session,” my dad added, oblivious. “Don’t worry, though, you don’t need to go back until you feel ready… we’ve been getting your assignments from your teachers, we want you to be fully caught up, and we can continue a homebound plan for as long as you need, if you’d like…”

For all of a week or two, my life was better than it ever had been or would be again. My “suicide attempt” completely rocked the foundations of everything my parents felt towards me; my entire home life changed. Between regular meetings with psychiatric professionals who wanted nothing but to understand me, and being overwhelmingly spoiled at home in a cautious attempt to forge “family bonds,” I had never had so much positive attention in my life. I was almost happy, but for the constant ache of the shattered place in my heart where Sandra had been.

Then they found the new body.

Apparently he had been killed much earlier than they found him; the corpse was days old. The police put his murder at the same time I got out of the hospital.

A shiver went down my back when I heard that. That could have been me.

Although ironically, the victim couldn’t have been farther than me. Ryan Jenkins, quarterback, bully. We hadn’t exactly gotten along when he was alive, and I didn’t exactly mourn his passing.

The worst part of the news was that the suspect the police had taken into custody was pretty much off the hook. The hunt was on yet again.

The knock on the door came on a Saturday, 10:15 AM sharp. I would remember that time and that day for the rest of my life.

“Good morning, ma’am,” the officer had said to my mother on the morning of the day they came to take me away forever.

So there you have it. You know as much as I do. If you can figure out why I’m standing trial, then good for you, because I have no clue. The things they told me were lies. Terrible, awful lies. They told me impossible things, things I never would have done; sick words swim through my head whenever it’s too quiet. “Multiple-personality,” they said. “Killer.” “Victims, death penalty, insanity plea…” The awful, hateful words can go on forever, if I let them. None of them ring true to me; but no matter what I do or say, they are always there now, written on the backs of my closed eyelids and creeping across strangers’ tongues. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, but I sweat, those words aren’t true, none of them.

There’s no way.

Thank you, though, for listening to my story. I hope you got something out of this madness. Some insight or understanding, maybe of my life, or maybe even of your own. There’s probably a kid like me in your life. Everyone’s life has a kid like me.

And thank you for hearing me out. I don’t understand what’s happening to me, but it’s a good thought to think that someone might care enough to read about it. I hope you understand, I really do. I didn’t hurt anyone. I never wanted to hurt anyone.

All I ever wanted was for someone to be kind.