Inconsolable » Squid [Holes]

21: When the Bubble Breaks

While not explicit, this chapter contains moments of depression and implied suicidal ideation, and therefor is potentially triggering. Proceed with caution.

Lifting the hem of his shirt, Squid waited for Mom to get his injection ready and get it over with. He wasn't sure which was worse at this point, crashing through his highs and lows due to the uncertainty of his next dose or having Mom fuss over him.

"Now you let me know if at any moment you feel pain," Mom said, plunging the tip of the syringe into the little bottle of insulin. As he spoke, he kept his wide, tooth-filled smile on his face.

Squid rolled his eyes. Never mind, this definitely was worse.

He hated when Mom smiled that that, as if he and Squid were on the same team and that he was only trying to help. If Mom really wanted to help, he'd let Squid handle his insulin on his own. He wasn't a baby; he'd been dealing with it since he was diagnosed at twelve. A diagnosis that had his mother attempt to be present in his life. At least for the first four months. That was a record.

It was then that he knew he was truly alone. His father ha been long gone for ten years at that point and his mother, between her bouts of clarity, looked at him with disdain so palpable it crushed his chest, forcing all the air out of him. When she wasn't blaming him for being expensive, she was stealing his syringes to give to her at-the-time boyfriends to shoot up. He learned that lesson the hard way. One doesn't forget someone bursting into their room with a gun pointed at them, screaming for more needles. It was free for them. It cost Squid his control.

He couldn't control his failing pancreas. He couldn't control his mother needing to spend most of her paltry paychecks on his medication. He couldn't control needing to check his blood sugar many times during the day. He couldn't control his classmates' dumb questions about his disease nor could he control their taunts and jeers the one time he passed out during a free period because he kept playing a soccer game rather than stopping to check his levels or grab something to eat. He couldn't control how weak his friends viewed him.

But he could change it.

He played harder, earning the title of soccer captain on his junior high team with ease, a position he held through the years up until he was arrested, even through his repeats. Rather than absorbing jokes and keeping his head down, he fought back. He hardened his heart, hurt others before they could hurt him. Got into fights. Ran with a tougher crowd. Regained control. Got the upper hand.

Now, here at Camp Green Lake, it was taken from him all over again.

"Is this the right amount?" Mom asked.

Squid blinked, turning his once blank and now focused stare from the wall across the room and down to the needle Mom held upside-down. Squid glanced at the numbers on the side of the syringe, where a plunger had stopped. He quickly calculated the amount in his head. Math had always been a subject he excelled at, science as well by default. Math made sense to him. Numbers and letters gave you a specific, concrete answer. There were no underlying answers, no opinions, no clauses, no exceptions. One plus one always equaled two.

"Yeah, that's fine," Squid replied. They were having beans and some sort of green mush for dinner. He knew the exact amount of bolus he needed to get that mess of so-called-food to be process properly. It didn't take long for him to get his carb intake numbers down to the exact number. (Not that that was any special sort of skill, their food choices were few and far between. Besides, he was the only one that he knew of that had to pay attention to his caloric intake).

Mom pinched a few inches of skin on his abdomen and jabbed the insulin needle in. Squid didn't flinch anymore. He was used to it. Besides, he didn't expect his treatments to last much longer. The Warden was getting impatient with them. He would—they would—be punished soon enough. Then everything could go back to the way it was and his heartbeats could go back to being a countdown.