Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (Jalex)

Ten - Emo Cutter

“Jack, are you going to do anything?” Rian teased, repositioning the camera from where it was mounted on a tripod. Brendon and Jon were fiddling with our set, adjusting the print out of Starry Night and trying to hide the white edges from the camera’s view.

We were doing claymation in art, assignment commanding the class to bring a famous painting to life while demonstrating a color scheme. My group was having analogous men grow out of Da Vinci’s picture and interact with each other – or something along those lines. I hadn’t really been paying attention during the story board.

“I am totally being helpful!” I protested, indignantly holding up the ball of clay that I had been mixing for the past tweny minutes. It had assumed the consistency of Play-Doh and perfect shade of purple that I had been searching for, simultaneously staining my hands so that it appeared that I’d been mashing blueberries instead of art mediums.

“That does not count! Do we even need purple?” Rian retorted, smirking when Brendon tore his eyes away from the cardboard box he was trying to position to shake his head. Fuck. “See? That color is not even in this picture.”

“Fuck off Rian, you’ve known me long enough to know I’m not helpful,” I sighed, rolling the soft clay with the heels of my hands, watching as it stretched into a snake. The coil came up specked with black when I peeled it away from the table, my distasteful glare ignored by the project partners. Apparently, I was only one that cared that our table was contaminating my material.

“Ugh, this isn’t working! Damn it, I’m just gonna jump off a cliff,” Jon whined, trying to lower the camera and running into obvious problems as the tripod legs contracted to their minimum length. My eyes fell to my hands, mindlessly rolling the clay back into a ball as I scowled, stifling a sigh as Brendon’s voice piped up with a chuckle.

He grinned, leaning over to press his elbows onto the table and eye the set up in search of fixing the filming problems amounting, saying, “I thought that was supposed to be Jack.”

I laughed along, regrettably encouraging, “Yeah, I’m totally looking for a cliff to walk off in land locked Baltimore.”

“You could take a dive off the docks,” Jon suggested with a giggle in his voice, seemingly giving up on trying to mangle the tripod into submission and going to peer at the camera over Rian’s shoulder. The buzz cut boy was ignoring us, focusing on the settings instead. He’d probably piss himself if we got any grade below and A.

“Been there, done that,” I dismissed with a casual wave of the hand, slamming my palm down to flatten the purple clay as my two friends laughed.

Due to my frequent sarcasm and lack of ability to take anything seriously, my peers had eventually caught on, and the cuts on my arm became a joke. We chuckled about how I was an ‘emo cutter’ and poked fun at the least humorous maters. The cut on my thumb had been laughed off with Josh’s so called funny proclamation that my razor had slipped while slitting my wrists in Math earlier, dots of scabs on my arm going unnoticed, hidden under fabric. I knew the fake coincidences could only pile up so much before everyone realized I was full of shit.

I realized that it was completely despicable and horrifying, that suicide and self harm were not laughing matters, that I was quickly becoming a disturbingly terrible person. But, to be honest, I’d rather save my ass than my virtue. I wondered, though, what would happen if my classmates knew how accurate some of their jokes were.

The bell rang just as purple was squishing through my fingers, me jumping off my stool and snatching the permission slip for an upcoming art field trip to the local museum off the table as my group scrambled to clean up. I cast the messy table a glance, deciding to leave the other boys to it and run off to the other side of the school so I wasn’t late for gym.