It was true love at first prick, and pretty quickly, I got to a place where I couldn’t even stop if I’d wanted to. It wasn’t a huge problem or something I couldn’t figure out how to hide, until one day, I cut too close to the vein, and my mother found me on my bedroom floor bleeding out. I’d lost consciousness and probably would have died had she not walked in.
I learned my lesson the hard way. The doctors told me that with my seizures, I was high risk. That cutting could induce one and that might be the end of me, especially if I was alone.
The amount of shame I felt when I came to, in the hospital and saw the look on my parents' faces, forced me to get the help I needed to learn how to keep from inflicting pain on myself. I came mighty close to making them childless. That wasn’t me, I wasn’t that selfish.
It was hard for them to understand. I was a good kid, a great student. But I still had to do in-patient treatment, had to prove to everyone I’d recovered. The therapy helped me discover that my need to be perfect put so much pressure on me, that it also created a need to escape. It was like I’d set up a trap for myself with no exit, no way to achieve happiness since it was based on impossible standards that I held myself to.
I always felt like I had to compensate for things that happened to my family. I now know it’s ok to trip and fall because my parents are always there to catch me. They don’t expect me to be anything other than Ellison, don’t put pressure on me—that issue comes from within. Sometimes my thoughts go back to that dark place, to that night, but I always fight my way out of it. I can persevere, I’m a natural-born fighter.
“Fine,” my dad says. “But if I find out that kid’s got a record, it stops right there.”
I could hear my mom kiss my dad because she was happy she had won. I ran off down the carpeted hallway and carefully opened my bedroom door. It smelled like fresh paint and new bedding; I lit the scented candle by my bed and blew out the match. Walking over to the dormered windows I stared at his house. It seemed all the lights were on, and I wondered which room belonged to him and what he was doing. There were lots of bikes out front just like my father said. The idea of riding one terrified me, but I wanted to prove myself to Calvin. Show him that I wasn’t scared, that I was worthy of both his kiss and his attention. I drew the shade despite feeling like I could watch his house all night. After climbing into my canopy bed, I hit the light switch and pulled up the covers. Before I drifted off, I touched my lips and smiled thinking that I was going to see Calvin again.
Chapter 11
CALVIN
I was actually awake and not wishing I could go straight back to bed, which was my usual modus operandi, either stay in my room or get the hell out of this house, away from my dad and his stupid club brothers. Usually, my life wasn’t worth getting out of bed for, I went to sleep at night not giving a fuck if I woke up the next morning or not. I was only able to rally myself for a strong cup of coffee or a cold lifted beer, my dad never bothered counting. Sometimes I got up for my guitar, to jot down a song or try out a melody I had playing in my head. If my guitar popped a string, I played beer bottles, drinking glass rims, spoons, I made any tangible object into an instrument to make music, to work out the songs that constantly ran through my mind. But today was different, today I had something that made me happy. I had a date with Ellison and I’d practically jumped out of bed in the morning. She made me feel like life was worth living.
I wasn’t a trained musician, I was self-taught. My parents didn’t read or write music and neither did Fox. I didn’t share my music with anyone, my dad called it “pansy stuff,” my mom was too busy, or too traumatized to encourage anything that might make my dad hate me more, or like me less.
Occasionally I played a tune for Fox, but I think he felt the same way my mother did. The two of them wanted to protect me from my father, keep him from laying a hand on me. But I gladly took my dad’s blows when it meant they wouldn’t fall on my mother. I think we all protected one another from his temper, from his indifference, and the ease with which he would commit violence against us.