Anatomy Of A Fall |Frerard

Chapter 2

The next morning, for the first time in years, Gerard actually woke up on his own. No alarm or mother screeching, just the morning sun, hanging at the perfect angle to flood his room. He suddenly jerked up in bed, out of a spider dream of bloated black widows, tangled in hot damp sheets. For a moment he blinked in the light, and had no idea where he was, where he'd woken up. Then he got to realize all over again that he was trapped in fucking Vermont, that he had to walk to school, that Mikey wasn't in the next room and that Gabe and Pete weren't in any of his classes. That his day was stretching hopelessly long in front of him.

"Fuuuuuck," he groaned into his pillow, and made a valiant effort to go back to sleep. Useless. He opened one eye and glared hatefully at the giant bay window. First thing tonight, he was getting a bucket of black paint and covering that shit up.

He finally just staggered downstairs and prodded the coffee maker for a while until it looked like it was working, then stood zombie-like, watching the pot slowly fill. He really didn't want to deal with high school bullshit today. He wasn't eager to stage a repeat of yesterday's morning encounter. Either he could go in really early and hide out somewhere Ted couldn't find him, or he could go in really late and skitter into Geometry at the last minute.

Fuck. Geometry. He collected his coffee and settled down at the table with his homework assignment, graphing sine waves and adding tiny demon snowboarders to the slopes. He wished more math involved drawing shit. They'd already covered this twice back in Belleville, so he finished the assignment pretty quickly, and then there was nothing to do but finish off the pot of Folgers and glare balefully out the window at the sunny street.

Before he left—just late enough to miss the first bell by a minute or two, he hoped—he looked in the mirror for a while. A long greenish bruise was forming along his lower jaw where Ted had slammed him into the truck, and the corner of his mouth had scabbed over, dark red and scaly. How attractive. He hesitated a moment before pulling out his Sephora coal-black eye pencil and ringing his eyes, thicker today. Never let them see you're scared, right?

Outside, the wind had finally died down and the sky was perfectly clear, that kind of cloud-free bright blue that only came during the fall. The streets were almost totally empty; a distant car puttered across an intersection two blocks down and disappeared, but other than that no one was out. Next door he could see some lady peering out of her curtains at him and making cursory window-cleaning gestures with a checkered cloth as she stared, like that wasn't totally creepy. Gerard did a little finger wave at her and the curtains swirled shut immediately.

"Weeeird fucking town," Gerard muttered to himself, and kept walking.

There was still a sizable population of students milling around in the parking lot when he got there, but no sign of Sikowski or his deluded minions. His truck was still there as an antler-bedecked reminder, though. Gerard was sorely tempted to deface it. Maybe spit on it or something. People keyed cars, right? It might be better to come late one morning and cover it with pink bows and gay pride stickers. The downside of that was the fact that the culprit would be fairly obvious, and then Ted would beat the shit out of him.

Mrs. Hall was thrilled to see him. Apparently the homework was actually due Thursday, and so he'd inadvertently done it early. Because he needed to look like that much more of a geek. Ted was predictably dickish about it, but the guy next to him, Letter Jacket #2, Isaac Barrows, or something, was genuinely scowling at Gerard and muttering about him being a fucking show-off. Whatever.

Luckily Ted wasn't sitting next to Gerard and couldn't harass him as directly as he had the day before, but Gerard still had to spend the period listening to him snickering about god knew what. The fact that girls had breasts, probably. He'd run into Ted enthusiastically making out with some chick before class, and that seemed to be featuring prominently in the conversation. Gerard didn't want to know what Ted had gotten up to last night. Even Geometry was better than listening to that.