Floating Face Down (boyxboy)

Chapter Twenty Eight

I didn't pause for a moment of introspection on the way out. I didn't need to get back into the habit of thinking about thinking, of agonizing about agonizing, and panicking about panicking.

Around two years ago I'd come to the same locker room, but back then my locker was in a different place. The one way the school seemed to help the kids getting picked on was by moving their lockers around, changing their seating placements and offering switching to different forms.

Changing forms would have been a great idea. It was one of the very real examples of how I sabotaged myself.

Pride had petrified me to the classroom floor. 

First there was the idea of knowing that they would sit smug and laugh about it, chuffed they'd pushed me to switching forms. And secondly there was the practical aspect of it. If I really thought it would stop what was going on I would have switched despite the humiliation of it, but I didn't.

It was turning your back on the tiger.

It would have been the next step down to hell. A sign that they could take things even further, because I was running, and now they had to chase me.

I'd showed up to put my books back in my locker and found a photo of me taped to the back of it with the marker they'd drawn on me, forced to smile. It was a photo they'd taken maybe two or even three months ago, and I had never wanted to see it.

Not to run a flashback in a flashback but I'd been late to leave class and I'd been caught, cornered and pinned against the wall with the whiteboard behind me, this had sparked the genius idea to use the coloured markers to draw on my face, colouring my lips red and to a cartoonish shape, with some colourful slurs on black here and there.

Actually Patrick wasn't there for that. It was Clyde leering at me with his phone out, giving orders to the other boys.

One winding punch was all it took for me to comply, other fists were raised and I didn't want to have to go to the hospital with whatever they'd put on my face on me. 

I'd smiled as they told me to, but tears had run down my face at the same time, and snot dripped out of my nose.

I doubted I would ever get over some of that rage I held for Clyde, who had probably forgotten all about me already.

The photo swam around but  I never looked for it.

I'd made some kind of uneasy peace with the fact that it would be available to others, that, knowing the teachers never got their hands on it, these 'others' would not report it, they would probably think it was just as amusing.

Back then I'd walked in with Victor because his locker was, luckily, just beside mine, on the side the door opened to. When he saw it he didn't laugh, the looked disgusted and gave me a sympathetic look, ripped it down and balled it up, throwing it in the bin.

He put a hesitant hand on my shoulder, wary eyes looking me over, and I nearly leaned into it. "They just think it's funny, okay Elliot?"

I just nodded said nothing, waiting for him to remove his hand instead of moving, wanting more than anything for the guy to hug me, even kiss me, for everyone to see and know.

It was unbelievable how much that brief contact meant to me.

I couldn't go home and cry about it to my mother, really the only person I had was Victor.

Later I would sit in a cubicle with my shoes on the door so no one would recognise them, sob noiselessly and just throw myself into the whirlwind of daydreams, dreams of revenge and escape, but mostly of the latter, because the former seemed so ruthlessly unachievable.