Smoking - Chapter 3
Title:: Smoking
Genre:: Drama
Fandom:: RPS Vam, Villinde, Dugera, Lindunn, others.
Rating:: R
Summary:: A story, reaching back to the beginning like a twisted, curling whisp of smoke from a slow burning fire.
Disclaimer::Most characters are property only of themselves; I own the storyline and the writing. This is a work of ficiton; treat it as such.
Author's Note:: This chapter for nemo_forever, because I can.
Links
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
I spent the whole summer between 5th and 6th grade locked up in my room with my guitar, my outdated guitar books and my records, my fingers bleeding from the incessant battering they received against the steel strings of my acoustic.
In fact, I spent the whole of 6th grade locked up in my room with my guitar too. It was something that was mine, something that was secret. I never told anyone that I could play it at school. I don’t know why, especially not when Ville was sitting around, telling everyone how amazing he was at it. Maybe that was why. Maybe because I was worried that he was right, he was amazing at it, better than me, and that would just be one more thing to add to his list of things to make fun of me for.
I hated 6th grade. It was my worst year. It was like a living hell for me - maybe that’s why I spent so much time taking all of my feelings out on my guitar.
In 6th grade, physical education became a compulsory subject. We were in a new school, a bigger school, one specially designed for middle school students. We weren’t in the small elementary school we’d been in before that could barely afford to pay its teachers. This was one of the best public schools in Finland, and all of the students had to do gym.
The first time I walked into the locker rooms, there were 20 other boys in there, and they yelled at me to get out, that the girls’ room was next door. Ville was in the middle of the room, laughing his ass off.
“Don’t worry guys, its just Barbie. He only looks like a girl, but we think he’s telling the truth when he says he’s a guy.”
The tone of his comment made the other boys crack up, and it made me once again blush bright tomato red to the roots of my even longer, even blonder hair.
Neither Ville nor I were any good at sports. Perhaps I should have taken comfort in the fact that we were both useless at it. But I didn’t. I hated running, I hated balls, and I hated being so sweaty that my long hair was plastered to my red face. I hated that even though Ville was just as bad as I was, he still made fun of everything I did wrong, and I hated that he already had the whole of the new school against me before we even got through our first week.
It was a bigger school, and the kids here were a lot older. Ville found his niche quickly. There were people who were ‘cool’ like he was in this school, and in almost no time, he had a little posse of people who also wore shirts with the emblems of their musical gods plastered across their chests following him around, laughing at his jokes, doing just as he told them to do, showing off to get farther into his favor. And because he had a posse, all the other kids wanted to be in it. And because everyone wanted him to like them, they all had to not like anyone who he didn’t like - in other words, me.
So I grit my teeth everyday through school, ignored the taunts that I got from everyone and their brother, and hid behind my long hair until I could come home, lock myself in my room with my guitar and play until my fingers bled and the tears stopped flowing from my eyes.
Slowly, the locker rooms began to smell more and more, and slowly, more and more of the boys started turning into men, and slowly, that childish bashfulness wore off, and they all began to shower, walk around and goof off, completely naked.
And this was my second problem with gym class: getting out of the shower rooms without an embarrassing situation transpiring between my legs.
I had never had much interest in girls. I put it down to the fact that I was just shy with everyone that I had no desire to talk to them, to hang around or impress them. I just didn’t care about them.
But it wasn’t until the locker rooms in middle school that I started to think seriously about why that might be. It wasn’t until the time the first person decided to strip off and take a shower right in front of us that I had ever felt that odd tingling in my stomach, the weird tension of an oncoming erection. And as soon as I felt it, I pulled my clothes on and I fled that room faster than was normal for me - and that was pretty damned fast.
I hated 6th grade.
I hated the school, I hated the people, I hated myself for being incapable of being normal in any way, shape or form. I hated my dad because he hated me, because he made my mom cry, because he hit her and he was always drunk and smelling of stale smoke and alcohol. I hated my mom because she was weak, because she let him keep hurting her.
It was the first time in my life that I had ever hated anything, and all of a sudden I found myself hating everything I knew, and I hated that I hated it all.
Ville sparked a whole trend of people picking on me, so much so that he actually did very little of it himself. In fact, in 6th grade, I came to realize that what Ville had done before, in grade school, was nothing compared to what it could have been.
And because of that - and that only - Ville was one of the only things that I didn’t actually hate that year.
------------
Mikko was late home from school that day, just a few days into 7th grade. A teacher had wanted to talk to him about his progress on a class project. When he finally got home, his fingers were itching to get to his guitar. All he could think about on the long bus-ride home was the feeling of the familiar wooden neck between his fingers, the twanging of the strings; one hand picking at the strings with his favorite bright-pink pick whilst the other danced over the frets and the strings, dictating a tune whilst the other hand kept the rhythm. He could hear a new riff in his head, had been planning it all day, and he couldn’t wait to get home and try it out. It was a bit melancholy but it was quick; some parts were intricate, maybe too intricate for him to actually carry out, but he was sure he’d manage somehow. If not, he could always rewrite the tune so that he could actually play it.
But when he opened the door and shouted his usual, “Mom, I’m home!” through the house, instead of the usual, “Hey, sweetheart, how was your day?” he heard nothing but a muffled sniffling, coming from the kitchen.
“Mom?” He dropped his schoolbag, made his way to the kitchen. It was like everything had suddenly turned slow motion, like everything had suddenly been thrown into sharp relief. The door creaked when he opened it. The kitchen was a mess. There were pots and pans everywhere. There was a towel draped over the faucet; half of it had fallen in the water in the sink. There was a pile of flour on the floor. There were eggshells on one of the cutting boards. A recipe book lay open on the counter; its pages turned themselves in the wind coming from the open window.
“Mom, what happened?” Mikko’s mom was sitting at the table, her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking with sobs. “Mom? Äiti?” She looked up from her hands, shaking her head. There was a birthday cake in front of her. It was a while before Mikko remembered that it was his dad’s birthday. It was a while before his mom could speak to tell him what had happened - before he sank in the chair, eyes wide, staring at the table in front of him, unable to think anything but: “He’s gone. He’s gone. He’s gone.”
---------------
I never cried at my dad’s funeral.
I never shed one tear.
My mother was a blubbering mess, her eye still blue-black from the last time he hit her, crying her eyes out over how much she loved him, how great a person he was, and it made me sick.
The next day I had to go to school.
I was anything but happy. But it wasn’t as if I was in the depths of despair either. I never liked my dad much, and the feeling was well reciprocated. He was either too drunk to remember who I was, or too disgusted by how girly I was to even give me the time of day. He hurt my mother, and though she disgusted me with her weakness, she was also the only person in the world that I loved.
I walked into class and slung my backpack sullenly onto my desk. The tables sat two people in this classroom, and, as always, my teacher thought it would be fun to sit Ville and I next to each other. I always used to swear by the fact that all my teachers since the third grade would get together and swap stories of how Ville used to torture me, and plan to set things up so that they could generate more stories for their next little morbid meet-up before I went into the next grade.
He was already there, and my bag knocked into his and almost pushed it off the table. I groaned, pulled it back and slammed my head into it, thoughts whirling through it so much that it almost hurt. Did people know? Did someone tell the school? Should I feel bad? Should I have cried? What’s going to happen? Äiti doesn’t work, what are we going to do for money?
“Jesus, Barbie, you look like shit. Who died?” My head snapped up at that. Ville could make fun of every other aspect of my life but this… this was too far.
“Who died? Who died? My fucking father, that’s who. So shut the fuck up and leave me alone.”
I don’t know who was more shocked, he or I. I think our expressions must have mirrored each other. His was one of slack jawed awe and shock. Mine was one of horror and shock. They must have looked pretty similar.
“Uh… sorry… I mean… you serious?” The look on his face was one that I couldn’t fathom - it was almost like concern. But that didn’t fit the context.
“Like you care anyways. Just leave me alone.” And I buried my head back in my arms and let my hair splay out everywhere again, just like I had done since the third grade, and tried to pretend that the rest of the world wasn’t there and that I was at home, locked in my room with my guitar, where that was all that mattered.
Genre:: Drama
Fandom:: RPS Vam, Villinde, Dugera, Lindunn, others.
Rating:: R
Summary:: A story, reaching back to the beginning like a twisted, curling whisp of smoke from a slow burning fire.
Disclaimer::Most characters are property only of themselves; I own the storyline and the writing. This is a work of ficiton; treat it as such.
Author's Note:: This chapter for nemo_forever, because I can.
Links
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
I spent the whole summer between 5th and 6th grade locked up in my room with my guitar, my outdated guitar books and my records, my fingers bleeding from the incessant battering they received against the steel strings of my acoustic.
In fact, I spent the whole of 6th grade locked up in my room with my guitar too. It was something that was mine, something that was secret. I never told anyone that I could play it at school. I don’t know why, especially not when Ville was sitting around, telling everyone how amazing he was at it. Maybe that was why. Maybe because I was worried that he was right, he was amazing at it, better than me, and that would just be one more thing to add to his list of things to make fun of me for.
I hated 6th grade. It was my worst year. It was like a living hell for me - maybe that’s why I spent so much time taking all of my feelings out on my guitar.
In 6th grade, physical education became a compulsory subject. We were in a new school, a bigger school, one specially designed for middle school students. We weren’t in the small elementary school we’d been in before that could barely afford to pay its teachers. This was one of the best public schools in Finland, and all of the students had to do gym.
The first time I walked into the locker rooms, there were 20 other boys in there, and they yelled at me to get out, that the girls’ room was next door. Ville was in the middle of the room, laughing his ass off.
“Don’t worry guys, its just Barbie. He only looks like a girl, but we think he’s telling the truth when he says he’s a guy.”
The tone of his comment made the other boys crack up, and it made me once again blush bright tomato red to the roots of my even longer, even blonder hair.
Neither Ville nor I were any good at sports. Perhaps I should have taken comfort in the fact that we were both useless at it. But I didn’t. I hated running, I hated balls, and I hated being so sweaty that my long hair was plastered to my red face. I hated that even though Ville was just as bad as I was, he still made fun of everything I did wrong, and I hated that he already had the whole of the new school against me before we even got through our first week.
It was a bigger school, and the kids here were a lot older. Ville found his niche quickly. There were people who were ‘cool’ like he was in this school, and in almost no time, he had a little posse of people who also wore shirts with the emblems of their musical gods plastered across their chests following him around, laughing at his jokes, doing just as he told them to do, showing off to get farther into his favor. And because he had a posse, all the other kids wanted to be in it. And because everyone wanted him to like them, they all had to not like anyone who he didn’t like - in other words, me.
So I grit my teeth everyday through school, ignored the taunts that I got from everyone and their brother, and hid behind my long hair until I could come home, lock myself in my room with my guitar and play until my fingers bled and the tears stopped flowing from my eyes.
Slowly, the locker rooms began to smell more and more, and slowly, more and more of the boys started turning into men, and slowly, that childish bashfulness wore off, and they all began to shower, walk around and goof off, completely naked.
And this was my second problem with gym class: getting out of the shower rooms without an embarrassing situation transpiring between my legs.
I had never had much interest in girls. I put it down to the fact that I was just shy with everyone that I had no desire to talk to them, to hang around or impress them. I just didn’t care about them.
But it wasn’t until the locker rooms in middle school that I started to think seriously about why that might be. It wasn’t until the time the first person decided to strip off and take a shower right in front of us that I had ever felt that odd tingling in my stomach, the weird tension of an oncoming erection. And as soon as I felt it, I pulled my clothes on and I fled that room faster than was normal for me - and that was pretty damned fast.
I hated 6th grade.
I hated the school, I hated the people, I hated myself for being incapable of being normal in any way, shape or form. I hated my dad because he hated me, because he made my mom cry, because he hit her and he was always drunk and smelling of stale smoke and alcohol. I hated my mom because she was weak, because she let him keep hurting her.
It was the first time in my life that I had ever hated anything, and all of a sudden I found myself hating everything I knew, and I hated that I hated it all.
Ville sparked a whole trend of people picking on me, so much so that he actually did very little of it himself. In fact, in 6th grade, I came to realize that what Ville had done before, in grade school, was nothing compared to what it could have been.
And because of that - and that only - Ville was one of the only things that I didn’t actually hate that year.
------------
Mikko was late home from school that day, just a few days into 7th grade. A teacher had wanted to talk to him about his progress on a class project. When he finally got home, his fingers were itching to get to his guitar. All he could think about on the long bus-ride home was the feeling of the familiar wooden neck between his fingers, the twanging of the strings; one hand picking at the strings with his favorite bright-pink pick whilst the other danced over the frets and the strings, dictating a tune whilst the other hand kept the rhythm. He could hear a new riff in his head, had been planning it all day, and he couldn’t wait to get home and try it out. It was a bit melancholy but it was quick; some parts were intricate, maybe too intricate for him to actually carry out, but he was sure he’d manage somehow. If not, he could always rewrite the tune so that he could actually play it.
But when he opened the door and shouted his usual, “Mom, I’m home!” through the house, instead of the usual, “Hey, sweetheart, how was your day?” he heard nothing but a muffled sniffling, coming from the kitchen.
“Mom?” He dropped his schoolbag, made his way to the kitchen. It was like everything had suddenly turned slow motion, like everything had suddenly been thrown into sharp relief. The door creaked when he opened it. The kitchen was a mess. There were pots and pans everywhere. There was a towel draped over the faucet; half of it had fallen in the water in the sink. There was a pile of flour on the floor. There were eggshells on one of the cutting boards. A recipe book lay open on the counter; its pages turned themselves in the wind coming from the open window.
“Mom, what happened?” Mikko’s mom was sitting at the table, her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking with sobs. “Mom? Äiti?” She looked up from her hands, shaking her head. There was a birthday cake in front of her. It was a while before Mikko remembered that it was his dad’s birthday. It was a while before his mom could speak to tell him what had happened - before he sank in the chair, eyes wide, staring at the table in front of him, unable to think anything but: “He’s gone. He’s gone. He’s gone.”
---------------
I never cried at my dad’s funeral.
I never shed one tear.
My mother was a blubbering mess, her eye still blue-black from the last time he hit her, crying her eyes out over how much she loved him, how great a person he was, and it made me sick.
The next day I had to go to school.
I was anything but happy. But it wasn’t as if I was in the depths of despair either. I never liked my dad much, and the feeling was well reciprocated. He was either too drunk to remember who I was, or too disgusted by how girly I was to even give me the time of day. He hurt my mother, and though she disgusted me with her weakness, she was also the only person in the world that I loved.
I walked into class and slung my backpack sullenly onto my desk. The tables sat two people in this classroom, and, as always, my teacher thought it would be fun to sit Ville and I next to each other. I always used to swear by the fact that all my teachers since the third grade would get together and swap stories of how Ville used to torture me, and plan to set things up so that they could generate more stories for their next little morbid meet-up before I went into the next grade.
He was already there, and my bag knocked into his and almost pushed it off the table. I groaned, pulled it back and slammed my head into it, thoughts whirling through it so much that it almost hurt. Did people know? Did someone tell the school? Should I feel bad? Should I have cried? What’s going to happen? Äiti doesn’t work, what are we going to do for money?
“Jesus, Barbie, you look like shit. Who died?” My head snapped up at that. Ville could make fun of every other aspect of my life but this… this was too far.
“Who died? Who died? My fucking father, that’s who. So shut the fuck up and leave me alone.”
I don’t know who was more shocked, he or I. I think our expressions must have mirrored each other. His was one of slack jawed awe and shock. Mine was one of horror and shock. They must have looked pretty similar.
“Uh… sorry… I mean… you serious?” The look on his face was one that I couldn’t fathom - it was almost like concern. But that didn’t fit the context.
“Like you care anyways. Just leave me alone.” And I buried my head back in my arms and let my hair splay out everywhere again, just like I had done since the third grade, and tried to pretend that the rest of the world wasn’t there and that I was at home, locked in my room with my guitar, where that was all that mattered.