Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (15/?)
Title: Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (15/?)
Author: Rose Rose682
Rating: nc-17
Pairing: Jack Barakat/Alex Gaskarth
Summary: I’d lost count of how many had gaped at my arm with shocked expressions and open mouths, curious people unsure of whether or not they wanted to know the answer asking, “Did you cut your arm?”
Disclaimer: I own neither ATL or any other real person mentioned in this fic, though I wish for it constantly.
Author's Note: At the bottom.
Masterpost.
Matt Flyzik, jock, was not known for his intelligence. In fact, rumor was that teachers only gave him passing grades because Dulaney sports teams needed him. Even though this was well known, the apparent half of the school planning on attending his Halloween party put their faith in the fact that he would be able to use enough brain power to not ‘hide’ the alcohol he’d been hoarding in cardboard boxes in his garage.
We were wrong, because, smart as he was, Flyzik did exactly that, and his mom - from what I’d heard - went searching for baby albums, only to be met with copious amounts of booze. I imagine she was somewhat alarmed, because, seriously, half of the school was hardly an exaggeration, Dulaney had two thousand students, and that must have been fucking shit tons of alcohol.
So Flyzik was perennially grounded and hundreds of members of the student population were left with nowhere to go on Halloween night. Maybe it was a good thing, really, that the biggest rager had been canceled only the day before it was supposed to take place, considering that the thirty-first fell on a Wednesday, and teachers would surely be less than impressed when the majority of their students called in sick the next day. I wasn’t particularly disappointed, either - high school parties weren’t my favorite place to be. But I did not want to spend my night dealing with toddlers and watching the sweets in our plastic cauldron slowly be taken from my possession, either.
Luckily, Zack and Rian found me during brunch and informed me that we were going to the Merrick’s for pizza and shitty scary movies. I wasn’t presented with an option, just alerted that I would be there. I mean, it wasn’t like I would have refused the offer, but still. Some courtesy would have been nice, and Zack did look a bit guilty as his boyfriend rambled off the plan, but I didn’t expect anything less from the bossy geek. I hated my friends sometimes, but they were better than nothing, and I suppose that you learn to deal with your companion’s vices.
This demanding conversation took place after the initial discussion of costumes. Our high school was big on ‘school spirit’, and Spirit Week always took place somewhere around the end of October, this year including Halloween itself. School Colors and Crazy Day had already passed, the week to finish off with Jersey and Twin Day. Each grade got points depending on what percentage of its students participated, and the grand winner was announced at the end of Friday. I’d never been in to it, and tended to wear my trademark black instead of joining in on the activities. Besides, it was totally rigged. My sophomore class had been winning last year, until the seniors threw a hissy fit, pulled near fifty points out of their asses on the last day, and got their award. Literally no point in trying until you’re at the top of the school.
But on Halloween, everyone went all out. There was no official dress code - just the general understanding that shorts should be longer than vaginas and Ariel style seashell tops were not ok - but even that was thrown out on that one day of a year, which some people - Zack, for example - used to their full advantage. He was dressed as some sort of Mexican wrestler/half naked superhero/masked hooker/I don’t even know what, but the costume covered about as much as boxers, and I was slightly worried that Zack and Rian had, in fact, spent the first two periods of the day fucking. The guy had been my friend since fourth grade, and even I couldn’t help thinking that his very muscular, very exposed body was hot.
Rian was a police officer. Lame, overdone, and unoriginal. The buzz cut boy did not give a shit about Halloween, and the only reason I could see him being interested in being a cop was the handcuffs. There was definitely some kinky sex in that couple’s future; hopefully they’d wait until I was gone to get it on.
And I, well, I totally and completely forgot about Halloween. It was ten o’clock Tuesday night when I came out of the shower, noticed the date on my alarm clock, realized what tomorrow was, and panicked. On one hand, I really did not care about the supposedly spooky day at all, but, then again, I didn’t want to be an old man looking back on high school years of missed opportunities and Halloweens spent pretending I was too old and cool to dress up, when, in fact, a couple years later, I actually would be too old for a costume to be socially acceptable. So I seized that opportunity while I could.
That was why I’d spent twenty minutes that morning running around the house while the rest of my family was still asleep, shuffling through piles of old clothes and searching the back corners of my closet. I ended up in jeans, a t-shirt, and a hoodie that were all black, hair styled normally and black Converse with heels worn down to the racing stripes hastily tied on my feet - I really needed to replace those. I did manage to find May’s eighth grade costume on a hook in our junk room. She had been a cat, so I took the ears and tail and congratulated myself on putting in an effort.
Alex had squealed upon appearing in Science - for whatever reason, we had sixth first on Wednesday - stealing a sharpie from my pencil case and drawing cat whiskers on my face after ten minutes of begging to do it. We were halfway through our dry ice lab - I was still wondering if it was a coincidence that that took place on Halloween - when he dropped the ice on the table, started giggling hysterically, and laughed out ‘ Barakitten!’ while I was using the forceps to get the ice off the table so nobody burned their skin off. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to coo at the boy and give him a popsicle for being so adorable or slap him for being an idiot. He was so confusing in so many ways, and, by the way, dressed as superman. I had a bit of trouble concentrating on Chemistry while Alex was sitting next to me in that fucking skin tight spandex suit.
And that was how I ended up in English, quietly wondering whether or not the cat ears got lost in my two tone hair and sucking on the inside of my cheeks. Every now and then I became overly aware of my mouth and ended up spending the next hour chewing on my cheeks and biting the edge of my lips. Why, I had no clue, although I tended to do the same thing - albeit a bit harder - when I got uncomfortable. As I’d discovered over the course of that year, pain was fantastic way to control emotions and focus yourself.
We finally got our grades back for the vignettes we’d turned in weeks ago, since Ms. Ellis seemed to have some difficulty grading in a timely manner. I got an A and exaggerated praise for the last sentence of the second paragraph of the vignette I wrote about a fence. It was actually about my neighbors, but I kind of showed who they were by writing different parts of their house in various ways. Like, I called their fence pretentious.
I found it completely hilarious that my English teacher believed they were good, considering that my thought process while writing those vignettes was something like ‘ok, be descriptive, mhm, adjectives, and - wait, I haven’t used a metaphor in a while, ok, uh… “lighting up the room like neon glow sticks” - yeah, that’ll do.’ I literally wrote each one in twenty minutes, and had no fucking clue what I was talking about. I mean, I spent three class periods editing them and searching for the perfect words, but, seriously, I still wasn’t entirely sure what the topic of each one was. Well, if my teacher wanted to hand me an easy A, I would gladly accept it.
___
Three hours, one art class spent staring at my sketchbook and trying to decide what dessert I wanted to make out of clay, and a foodless lunch later, I was in advisory, the forty minute non-class that concluded Wednesdays. The first twenty minutes were set aside for reading, while the last half it was for whatever the teacher wanted. My advisory head, Mr. Gralen, either did not care enough to plan anything, or couldn’t think of something to keep us occupied, and just let us loose with the suggestion to ‘do homework… or something’. He actually said that.
We also had no set seats, making me plop down at a table consisting of Matt Barnes and Chris Miller, who I had literally never seen with anybody besides each other outside of class. Chris sat next to me in English - Brendon on my other side - and basically didn’t talk to anybody. He would ask questions when necessary and things like that, but was mostly only reserved and quiet, seemingly preferring to keep to himself. Apparently, though, I was approachable and non-intimidating enough that he would laugh along with my stupid jokes and even occasionally complain to me about whatever we were doing; say something without my prompting. Generally, I was a pretty shitty person, but there were a few who I tried my absolute hardest to be nice to.
Matt and Chris each sent me an unsure smile when I sat down across from them, the long haired boy offering a quiet greeting and half wave before ducking his head back into the book he had flattened on the table. I wondered what I was while pulling out The Great Gatsby - which we were currently reading in English - and attempting to focus on it. My thoughts incessant, relentless tracking through my mind made it near impossible to get sucked into a book, no matter how good it was.
I’d lost my enjoyment for reading during middle school, though I spent countless hours of my earlier years living in the fictional worlds of stories, mostly because my elementary school was small, I didn’t have many friends, and had nothing better to do with my time. I’d always loved a good read, though; how if it was written just the right way, you only worried about the characters and their worlds, got distracted from your own life and fixated on theirs; how hours could slip by unnoticed while I had my knees tucked to my chest in my favorite chair, thumbs flicking through pages as I resisted the urge to ruin the book and skip to the end of the chapter to discern the conclusion of the events I was caught up in; the way I would finish a chapter, blinking away from the book, looking at the walls around me and suddenly realizing that I was a person in a completely different universe from the one represented on the pages.
And I’d heard that The Great Gatsby was a fabulous book, but I still found myself drumming my fingers across the table and examining the room we were in, book forgotten but held open in my fingers. I spotted a Blink-182 poster in Mr. Gralen’s office that I spent five minutes leaning backwards in my stool to see better and prove that I wasn’t hallucinating, instantly gaining five hundred percent more respect for him. I also vaguely wondered what it said about me that my favorite band was also liked by a fifty something year old, gray haired art teacher.
Eventually, the second hand ticked around the clock enough times, and our twenty minutes of silent reading were up. I folded over the corner of my page - exactly two pages later than the one I’d originally straightened out - unceremoniously dropped the book on the table, and pulled out my science homework.
We were doing a project where each group of three was assigned a period in the periodic table, every person having to make a square for two elements in that period. I ended up with potassium and rubidium, making me extremely tempted to decorate one of the cubes with bananas. Ms. Garcia probably wouldn’t appreciate that.
I was half way through drawing rubidium’s Bohr model when I realized that I put the wrong number of electrons in the third energy level, made it in pen, and had no fucking idea what I was doing. Now, at almost any other time during my life, I would have shrugged and called myself an idiot, asked around for white out, and indifferently continued on with my life. But that is not what happened, because I was fucked up during Junior year, and there was something wrong with me.
Whatever was off in my head, it had me staring blankly at the tiny paper square before me, that burning sensation you get in your nose when you’re about to start crying stinging in. I sniffed, scrunching up my nostrils and blinking my watery eyes, confused about why the fuck that made me upset. Seriously, I hated science and I was shit at it, but I also did not care about atoms at all. The fact that I had the inability to draw a freaking bohr model for an element I’d never head of should not have bothered me in the least.
But, like I said, and was currently thinking on loop, something was wrong with me.
And, apparently, I was dedicated to destroying myself, since my hands were curling on their own accord, fingernails that I’d mindlessly chewed into ragged edges digging into the back of my thumbs. I scraped them down, flinching as they cut across my knuckles, strangled sigh blowing out my lips. I glanced around the room, seeing everyone completely unaware of my inner pandemonium, leaning back in my chair and flattening my hands against my thighs under the table. Each of my thumbs had two fine, red lines scratched across them.
No blood, but tilting them in the light revealed the skin I’d scraped off, still desperately clinging on. It hurt. I liked it.
It was at that moment that I realized I had managed to conform to Alex’s warning: I never got addicted to cutting.
I was addicted to pain.
____________________
A/N: I don't actually have anything to say this chapter. This story just keeps getting happier and happier though, doesn't it? Anyways, I hope you liked it, and thanks to everyone that commented! Please comment and make me happy.-Rose
Author: Rose Rose682
Rating: nc-17
Pairing: Jack Barakat/Alex Gaskarth
Summary: I’d lost count of how many had gaped at my arm with shocked expressions and open mouths, curious people unsure of whether or not they wanted to know the answer asking, “Did you cut your arm?”
Disclaimer: I own neither ATL or any other real person mentioned in this fic, though I wish for it constantly.
Author's Note: At the bottom.
Masterpost.
Matt Flyzik, jock, was not known for his intelligence. In fact, rumor was that teachers only gave him passing grades because Dulaney sports teams needed him. Even though this was well known, the apparent half of the school planning on attending his Halloween party put their faith in the fact that he would be able to use enough brain power to not ‘hide’ the alcohol he’d been hoarding in cardboard boxes in his garage.
We were wrong, because, smart as he was, Flyzik did exactly that, and his mom - from what I’d heard - went searching for baby albums, only to be met with copious amounts of booze. I imagine she was somewhat alarmed, because, seriously, half of the school was hardly an exaggeration, Dulaney had two thousand students, and that must have been fucking shit tons of alcohol.
So Flyzik was perennially grounded and hundreds of members of the student population were left with nowhere to go on Halloween night. Maybe it was a good thing, really, that the biggest rager had been canceled only the day before it was supposed to take place, considering that the thirty-first fell on a Wednesday, and teachers would surely be less than impressed when the majority of their students called in sick the next day. I wasn’t particularly disappointed, either - high school parties weren’t my favorite place to be. But I did not want to spend my night dealing with toddlers and watching the sweets in our plastic cauldron slowly be taken from my possession, either.
Luckily, Zack and Rian found me during brunch and informed me that we were going to the Merrick’s for pizza and shitty scary movies. I wasn’t presented with an option, just alerted that I would be there. I mean, it wasn’t like I would have refused the offer, but still. Some courtesy would have been nice, and Zack did look a bit guilty as his boyfriend rambled off the plan, but I didn’t expect anything less from the bossy geek. I hated my friends sometimes, but they were better than nothing, and I suppose that you learn to deal with your companion’s vices.
This demanding conversation took place after the initial discussion of costumes. Our high school was big on ‘school spirit’, and Spirit Week always took place somewhere around the end of October, this year including Halloween itself. School Colors and Crazy Day had already passed, the week to finish off with Jersey and Twin Day. Each grade got points depending on what percentage of its students participated, and the grand winner was announced at the end of Friday. I’d never been in to it, and tended to wear my trademark black instead of joining in on the activities. Besides, it was totally rigged. My sophomore class had been winning last year, until the seniors threw a hissy fit, pulled near fifty points out of their asses on the last day, and got their award. Literally no point in trying until you’re at the top of the school.
But on Halloween, everyone went all out. There was no official dress code - just the general understanding that shorts should be longer than vaginas and Ariel style seashell tops were not ok - but even that was thrown out on that one day of a year, which some people - Zack, for example - used to their full advantage. He was dressed as some sort of Mexican wrestler/half naked superhero/masked hooker/I don’t even know what, but the costume covered about as much as boxers, and I was slightly worried that Zack and Rian had, in fact, spent the first two periods of the day fucking. The guy had been my friend since fourth grade, and even I couldn’t help thinking that his very muscular, very exposed body was hot.
Rian was a police officer. Lame, overdone, and unoriginal. The buzz cut boy did not give a shit about Halloween, and the only reason I could see him being interested in being a cop was the handcuffs. There was definitely some kinky sex in that couple’s future; hopefully they’d wait until I was gone to get it on.
And I, well, I totally and completely forgot about Halloween. It was ten o’clock Tuesday night when I came out of the shower, noticed the date on my alarm clock, realized what tomorrow was, and panicked. On one hand, I really did not care about the supposedly spooky day at all, but, then again, I didn’t want to be an old man looking back on high school years of missed opportunities and Halloweens spent pretending I was too old and cool to dress up, when, in fact, a couple years later, I actually would be too old for a costume to be socially acceptable. So I seized that opportunity while I could.
That was why I’d spent twenty minutes that morning running around the house while the rest of my family was still asleep, shuffling through piles of old clothes and searching the back corners of my closet. I ended up in jeans, a t-shirt, and a hoodie that were all black, hair styled normally and black Converse with heels worn down to the racing stripes hastily tied on my feet - I really needed to replace those. I did manage to find May’s eighth grade costume on a hook in our junk room. She had been a cat, so I took the ears and tail and congratulated myself on putting in an effort.
Alex had squealed upon appearing in Science - for whatever reason, we had sixth first on Wednesday - stealing a sharpie from my pencil case and drawing cat whiskers on my face after ten minutes of begging to do it. We were halfway through our dry ice lab - I was still wondering if it was a coincidence that that took place on Halloween - when he dropped the ice on the table, started giggling hysterically, and laughed out ‘ Barakitten!’ while I was using the forceps to get the ice off the table so nobody burned their skin off. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to coo at the boy and give him a popsicle for being so adorable or slap him for being an idiot. He was so confusing in so many ways, and, by the way, dressed as superman. I had a bit of trouble concentrating on Chemistry while Alex was sitting next to me in that fucking skin tight spandex suit.
And that was how I ended up in English, quietly wondering whether or not the cat ears got lost in my two tone hair and sucking on the inside of my cheeks. Every now and then I became overly aware of my mouth and ended up spending the next hour chewing on my cheeks and biting the edge of my lips. Why, I had no clue, although I tended to do the same thing - albeit a bit harder - when I got uncomfortable. As I’d discovered over the course of that year, pain was fantastic way to control emotions and focus yourself.
We finally got our grades back for the vignettes we’d turned in weeks ago, since Ms. Ellis seemed to have some difficulty grading in a timely manner. I got an A and exaggerated praise for the last sentence of the second paragraph of the vignette I wrote about a fence. It was actually about my neighbors, but I kind of showed who they were by writing different parts of their house in various ways. Like, I called their fence pretentious.
I found it completely hilarious that my English teacher believed they were good, considering that my thought process while writing those vignettes was something like ‘ok, be descriptive, mhm, adjectives, and - wait, I haven’t used a metaphor in a while, ok, uh… “lighting up the room like neon glow sticks” - yeah, that’ll do.’ I literally wrote each one in twenty minutes, and had no fucking clue what I was talking about. I mean, I spent three class periods editing them and searching for the perfect words, but, seriously, I still wasn’t entirely sure what the topic of each one was. Well, if my teacher wanted to hand me an easy A, I would gladly accept it.
___
Three hours, one art class spent staring at my sketchbook and trying to decide what dessert I wanted to make out of clay, and a foodless lunch later, I was in advisory, the forty minute non-class that concluded Wednesdays. The first twenty minutes were set aside for reading, while the last half it was for whatever the teacher wanted. My advisory head, Mr. Gralen, either did not care enough to plan anything, or couldn’t think of something to keep us occupied, and just let us loose with the suggestion to ‘do homework… or something’. He actually said that.
We also had no set seats, making me plop down at a table consisting of Matt Barnes and Chris Miller, who I had literally never seen with anybody besides each other outside of class. Chris sat next to me in English - Brendon on my other side - and basically didn’t talk to anybody. He would ask questions when necessary and things like that, but was mostly only reserved and quiet, seemingly preferring to keep to himself. Apparently, though, I was approachable and non-intimidating enough that he would laugh along with my stupid jokes and even occasionally complain to me about whatever we were doing; say something without my prompting. Generally, I was a pretty shitty person, but there were a few who I tried my absolute hardest to be nice to.
Matt and Chris each sent me an unsure smile when I sat down across from them, the long haired boy offering a quiet greeting and half wave before ducking his head back into the book he had flattened on the table. I wondered what I was while pulling out The Great Gatsby - which we were currently reading in English - and attempting to focus on it. My thoughts incessant, relentless tracking through my mind made it near impossible to get sucked into a book, no matter how good it was.
I’d lost my enjoyment for reading during middle school, though I spent countless hours of my earlier years living in the fictional worlds of stories, mostly because my elementary school was small, I didn’t have many friends, and had nothing better to do with my time. I’d always loved a good read, though; how if it was written just the right way, you only worried about the characters and their worlds, got distracted from your own life and fixated on theirs; how hours could slip by unnoticed while I had my knees tucked to my chest in my favorite chair, thumbs flicking through pages as I resisted the urge to ruin the book and skip to the end of the chapter to discern the conclusion of the events I was caught up in; the way I would finish a chapter, blinking away from the book, looking at the walls around me and suddenly realizing that I was a person in a completely different universe from the one represented on the pages.
And I’d heard that The Great Gatsby was a fabulous book, but I still found myself drumming my fingers across the table and examining the room we were in, book forgotten but held open in my fingers. I spotted a Blink-182 poster in Mr. Gralen’s office that I spent five minutes leaning backwards in my stool to see better and prove that I wasn’t hallucinating, instantly gaining five hundred percent more respect for him. I also vaguely wondered what it said about me that my favorite band was also liked by a fifty something year old, gray haired art teacher.
Eventually, the second hand ticked around the clock enough times, and our twenty minutes of silent reading were up. I folded over the corner of my page - exactly two pages later than the one I’d originally straightened out - unceremoniously dropped the book on the table, and pulled out my science homework.
We were doing a project where each group of three was assigned a period in the periodic table, every person having to make a square for two elements in that period. I ended up with potassium and rubidium, making me extremely tempted to decorate one of the cubes with bananas. Ms. Garcia probably wouldn’t appreciate that.
I was half way through drawing rubidium’s Bohr model when I realized that I put the wrong number of electrons in the third energy level, made it in pen, and had no fucking idea what I was doing. Now, at almost any other time during my life, I would have shrugged and called myself an idiot, asked around for white out, and indifferently continued on with my life. But that is not what happened, because I was fucked up during Junior year, and there was something wrong with me.
Whatever was off in my head, it had me staring blankly at the tiny paper square before me, that burning sensation you get in your nose when you’re about to start crying stinging in. I sniffed, scrunching up my nostrils and blinking my watery eyes, confused about why the fuck that made me upset. Seriously, I hated science and I was shit at it, but I also did not care about atoms at all. The fact that I had the inability to draw a freaking bohr model for an element I’d never head of should not have bothered me in the least.
But, like I said, and was currently thinking on loop, something was wrong with me.
And, apparently, I was dedicated to destroying myself, since my hands were curling on their own accord, fingernails that I’d mindlessly chewed into ragged edges digging into the back of my thumbs. I scraped them down, flinching as they cut across my knuckles, strangled sigh blowing out my lips. I glanced around the room, seeing everyone completely unaware of my inner pandemonium, leaning back in my chair and flattening my hands against my thighs under the table. Each of my thumbs had two fine, red lines scratched across them.
No blood, but tilting them in the light revealed the skin I’d scraped off, still desperately clinging on. It hurt. I liked it.
It was at that moment that I realized I had managed to conform to Alex’s warning: I never got addicted to cutting.
I was addicted to pain.
____________________
A/N: I don't actually have anything to say this chapter. This story just keeps getting happier and happier though, doesn't it? Anyways, I hope you liked it, and thanks to everyone that commented! Please comment and make me happy.-Rose