Home Sweet Home | Gerard Way

2

EVERYDAY CONSISTED of pure devil-sent-from-hell torture. It had been months since our talk, our family talk. We did not discuss it much after, since there was a reported missing girl-the same age I was when I was taken-on the five o'clock news. The girl had shiny, golden locks and bright blue eyes with dimples so deep you could swim in them.

But the picture they put out to the public was the problem. Tight, small Hello Kitty bikini that her mom had taken the month before at the shore.
"That's why she got taken," Gerard said. "She's a whore at twelve."

The whole situation pissed him off more than I thought. He would remind me how lucky I was that he chose me and that I wasn't a whore, since he saved me.
Saved me. He used those words. He acted like he didn't rip a little girl at the seams from her family, that the little girl was so blessed to be put into his hell.

But today was going to be different. I knew it.

Gerard gets up at 6, showers and dresses. He whistles while he shaves, and I listen to the clanking hum of the refrigerator. Count out its wheezing rhythm. 1, 2, 3 . . . 4. 1, 2, 3 . . . 4.

He tried to teach me how to whistle once, in one of his better moods, but I could never pick it up. He said he still loved me anyway.

Lucky me.

"I should get off at 3 today," he says. "We're not looking for much of an outcome for the next couple of weeks."

Gerard is a co-coordinator manager at Saint Six's Art Gallery. It's the only acknowledged attraction here in Summit, since the rest of the city is nothing but Joisey Matiereal.

I emerge from the bedroom. His bedroom. Our bedroom.

"I am old."

Gerard glanced over his shoulder with a what-he-fuck-are-you-talking-about expression his face.

"I turn nineteen in two months."

"Yeah, what of it?" He faces back towards the counter, coffee pot dispensing brown liquid. "That's not old."

Here we go.

"I want my family," I shuffle towards the fridge but Gerard's hand blocks the handle with his large hands.

"Family? Since when did this come about?"

"It's been months since the talk," I signal "the talk" with my fruitless hands. "What if our son is too old now? What about our little girl?"

I intend to go on with nonsense but Gerard put his hand up to silence me. It works every time.

Some time passes by, the wooden floors creaking under my shifting steps.

"You're right." He says. "These kids that grow up around here, all blessed with useless wholly water, it needs to come to an end." His voice deepens, eyes ripening an evil red.

I agree. Why do I agree? Because I cannot be the only girl in the world whose life was taken away. At least, taken under Gerard's weight.

I can visualize the vein popping out of his right temple, all flesh-coloured and pulsing.

"We need to teach our soon-to-be son and daughter how to be people. How to be independent, worthy-"

"Teach him to be a man." He cuts me off. I can see it in his eyes, the feelings that are rushing through his body. Making a boy into a man-making what was left of his mother in him into someone else. Someone innocent.

But innocence does not matter in this game.

Stirring the spoon around and tapping it on the mug rim, Gerard abandons the coffee a second later, pulling me to the dining table. More like an IKEA nightstand with two thrift store chairs on each side.