Tim
And so we clean. Armed with trashbags and rubber gloves we scrounge the forest landscape for rubbish, eyes darting, eager to catch onto any stray piece of litter.
After a scolding from Donna and a subborn silence from the four of us offering no explanation, we have been ushered outside and handed our punishment.
Each and everyone of us must fill one black sack with rubbish, and we're not getting any food until all four the bags are full.
I would try to care, but my stomach can't take anything. Even thinking about food pulls bile from my stomach up my oesophagus and leaves a foul taste in my mouth.
Our gawking fellow campers have left for an archery lesson and we're stuck here. A pity. I feel like shooting something.
Our involvement in the competition has also been terminated, gold stars stripped. With the strongest team out, the other teams at Camp Turmoil set out to complete todays task in high spirits. After all, now anyone could win.
And all because of Lorraine and Atlanta.
We don't talk as we work, I stay between Atlanta and Lorraine, the latter acting as a barrier between Phoenix and me.
Phoenix.
It was an act of madness, kissing him like I did. Ridiculous. Rash. Uncalculated.
His face, the shock and the confusion scraped onto it, dragged across his pretty eyes with bloody fingers, it's all lodged in my mind. A thorn inbedded in my brain.
This, this is what it means. Faggot.
That word, prodded, tested then hurled at me by angry mouths hissing venom.
My father, disappointed. Not manly enough Tim, he had said and when the tears came that disappointment morphed into something else.
Resentment?
Disgust?
And then the subdued acceptance. Because I am a failure, I failed to be the man, this masculine creature dad wanted me to be.
I'm just a boy.
He should hate me. I hate me. I despise my own existance. Disgusting. I am revolting, a gun shot wound in the face, rotting dead things coated in slime and the putrid smell of burning flesh.
"Tim?" Atlanta says carefully and I look up. The other two, Lorraine and... and him are a few feet ahead, and the whole schism, the jagged cut tearing us all apart has never been so visible before.
I see it. I see it all.
And for the first time in years, for the first time since the coming out, since the move, I feel.
I feel my body, gasping for air, head too cramped, too crowded with thoughts, I feel my gut trying to wretch it's way out of me, away, away from this mess.
I feel the aching burn of "I fucked up" the regret, drowning me within it's pitchers.
There's everything chocked across my skin, prickling, scalding, wounds blistering and old hurt blooming into blossoms of venom again.
I feel it all.
And it does not feel good.
"Tim?"
Their voices are here, forgetting, forgetting that they hate each other, that they killed each other, peering down, down at me.
Down?
I am on the ground, panting.
"Tim, breath, just breath,"
Lorraine tells me this like I don't know.
I know. I fucking know I need to breath, but how? Why doesn't anyone tell my stupid, useless lungs how?
A hand settles on my shoulder. They are making it worse. I wretch the hand off.
"Don't touch me," I scream.
"Tim-"
I scramble to my feet and run their calls echoing behind me. I'm running to the hide out.
The only way to feel better is to be numb.
And there's only one way to do that.
The pills are easy to swallow. One, then two then a bottle.
Blue and green and red and white. Inside me.
Two pills of the floor.
I breath.
Why is it so dark?
Why-
YOU ARE READING
Turmoil
Teen Fiction""And you see, maybe people, maybe we're like those cars. We meet others, we crash, some crashes more powerful than others, we change. Impact. It means the death of something, doesn't it?" Tim : (adjective), a writer who's feelings are pressed into...
