Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (18/?)
Title: Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (18/?)
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.
I got an F on my math test.
See, I was not the type of person who cared about math. I had this weird thing where I was a total obsessive perfectionist when it came to English and art, and would spend forever improving whatever I was fixating on until it was as impeccable as possible, and then still only see the imperfections in my final product. But with math, science, and history, I bullshitted my way through every assignment and didn’t blink an eye when the frequent B’s rolled in.
Because I did not care. C’s on math quizzes and tests were regular occurrences in my life, and didn’t bother me in the least. I was not going to grow up to be a mathematician or accountant or physicist, or, God forbid, teacher, and, therefore, only needed a basic, shitty understanding of what we were learning in order to graduate High School and get on with my life. Actually, in most cases, I never bothered to try to fully figure out what we were being taught in math and just cram studied the night before tests, forcing enough formulas and facts into my mind to get a passing grade on the upcoming assessment.
So it was no surprise that I literally had no fucking idea how to do any of the advanced Geometry that we had been working on for the last month. However, I ended up having a complete ‘fuck the world’ night when I was supposed to be studying for that chapter test, failed to force up any amount of motivation to discover out how to find the volume of cylinders, and spent the night listening to Green Day while dancing around my room and hanging up posters instead. I was totally screwed the next morning when I realized I only knew half the formulas necessary and could not complete either of the word problems that counted for 20 percent of that test.
I expected a B from it, wouldn’t be surprised - or all that disappointed, really - with a C minus, and knew that I had done terribly. But when I checked my grades online a week later and was confronted with a fucking 54 percent in little black and white text from my laptop screen, I felt unprecedentedly bad.
I was well aware that math was, by far, my worst subject, and had no shame in admitting how horrible I was at it. But I had never gotten a F before. On anything. Ever.
My brain was too muddled to perceive that, really, it was only a numerical percentage difference, and didn’t actually matter, because I was starting to doubt one of the only things I was sure of about myself. And, fuck, I was getting to the point where absolutely nothing was definite, and, let me tell you, that is not a fun way to live.
One thing that I’d been secure with throughout my sixteen years of life was that I was a relatively smart person. I was not an A plus student, but I was also not - and never had been - failing any classes. I was an exceptional reader and writer, knew how the universe came to be, was aware of the date that the Constitution had been signed, and could do long division provided that a calculator was somehow missing from my possession.
The schools in my district were good. They were well funded and had advanced classes to suit each individual’s needs. I was in the second highest math lane. I was intelligent, and I had always been sure of that, even if I wasn’t some kind of ingenious child prodigy.
But I got an F. A fucking F. I did not get F’s on tests. And I knew, I was completely and totally observant of the fact that school is probably the single worst system of judging intelligence in our world, but that did not stop me from beginning to worry that, after all those years of education and studying late into the night, spending my short life scrawling homework assignments, doing my best to pay attention as teachers blabbered about cell reproduction and the French influence on the American revolution, that I might be stupid.
And I was already overwhelmed enough, trying to scribble out enough semi-legible chapter summaries of the science non-fiction book that I’d been assigned to read for a project to make it look like I’d actually, you know, read it, before the deadline, and write a farewell letter to my classmates for history even though we weren’t graduating for another year and my history teacher was on crack when she decided that would be a good way to teach us about the end of George Washington’s presidency, as well as, of course, do my mother fucking math homework that I didn’t get.
Throw on top of that that I had an ode to an everyday object due tomorrow and poetry made me feel like a talentless, shifty human being, because my moderate skills in writing did not translate into that category at all and made the one class that I was actually good at a total embarrassing pain in the ass, and I was about ready to have a mental breakdown. Because I was dumb and I couldn’t even write well even though writing was the only thing I was good at in school and I was stressed out and I really hated myself and it was not fucking going well.
So I was sitting in my chair, arms tightly gripping the sides of my laptop as I tried to calm down and get back to work so I wouldn’t end up as a high school dropout, when my dad started yelling from the kitchen about how I needed to clean the cooking sheet that I’d used to make freezer pizza after school earlier because it was sitting in the sink, and, suddenly, my arm hurt.
Luckily, my sanity had not yet regressed to the point at which I was feeling nonexistent, fake pains - it turned out that the bare skin of my forearm was pressed right against one of the ports on the left side of my laptop, which was, for some technological reason that I would never care understand, literally burning hot. And it hurt like a bitch. So, of course, being the totally mentally healthy person that I was, I pushed my skin against it harder and relaxed into the pain.
It became a sick sort of challenge for myself. I wanted to prove that I had enough restraint to stay still as the heat scorched my arm, even though no one else would ever know, and would be downright disturbed if they were aware that I found pride in having the ability to withstand intentional pain. So I ended up with three semi-circles burned onto my arm, the last mark made by being pressed against that blistering piece of metal for a full minute. I didn’t realize it yet, but the triple burn would end up forming a Y and make it that much harder to explain how I accidently scorched a letter onto the inside of my arm, just above my wrist.
I had this weird thing about my wrists. They seemed so delicate and fragile, like if I ever scratched the flesh there, I’d instantaneously bleed to death and die. They were my life line, and I ever decided to try to cut that, I knew that that was where the first slashes were be.
But the blazing red half moons were close enough to my elbow to still leave my paper wrists unscathed. Odd, that after all those months of falling for pain and hurting myself, never once did I harm the stereotypical, poster-cutter body part.
And I was feeling a bit better, calmer, more collected after the agony had settled my mind. It was strange how pain was seen as this unambiguously bad thing when, in reality, it was fucking fantastic for fixing so many things. Like me. Best, most affective temporary solution to problems that I’d ever experienced.
I was right about to turn back to my computer and start writing metaphors about ball point pens when my dad appeared from the kitchen, placing the tray that I had failed to wash on the arm of the chair next to me. And that was it. Too much. I could not handle it. Too far.
So I stumbled up, throwing all my books into the depleted backpack on the ground beside me, unplugging my laptop, hastily bundling everything under my arms, and wobbly sprinting out of the room because my eyes were watering and I had this strict rule against crying in front of my family.
I spent half an hour in my room, blasting my favorite depressing music on full volume, curling the sheets of my bed through my fingers and trying to relieve the tension smothering me. As always, though, my thoughts overpowered everything else, shouting about how pathetic and useless I was, how I was a fucking stupid idiot, how even my own family, who were supposed to constantly offer unconditional love, hated me.
My dad was my dad, and I loved him, but I was starting to worry that I didn’t like him as a person.
Being that I couldn’t do anything right, I failed to find any way to get myself and my brain back under sane control. And, as usual, I got desperate.
I was becoming concerned that with the lack of emotion and high levels of desperation that I’d recently been experiencing, I was going to become a psychopath. I'd been beginning to sympathize with serial arsonists, meth heads, sadomasochists, and those motorcycle extremists who jumped through flaming hoops. People who would do anything for a thrill. To feel alive.
That couldn’t possibly be good. I was hoping that I’d never get to the point where I'd do something like that, but I wasn’t so sure anymore.
And, really, my solutions weren’t any better.
The thing is, at that point in my life, I did not think that I had a problem. Yes, I knew that what I did to myself was abnormal, unhealthy, and very heavily frowned upon by society, but it made me feel ok, less miserable, so why should that matter? I was a person who had slit their skin, but I was not a cutter. I had scratched my arms raw, but I did not self harm. I spent sixteen hours of my day hating everything about myself and my life, but I was not depressed.
So when I scrambled over to my dresser and started frantically searching for the pack of razors I’d been storing there in secret, having fooled myself into believing I’d only use them for innocent shaving purposes - I was a guy, after all, it wasn’t like I could throw out all the razors in the house without looking like emo Jesus - I was only trying to make myself feel better. Not doing anything bad. Not at all.
I never would have admitted it at the time, but, in retrospect, I realized that I pulled my jeans to my knees, laid out on my stained sheets with my hips up, and pressed the metal to my skin.
And I relapsed.
I ended up with a burned red Y on my arm, five cuts on my left hip, a dirty, crusty cooking sheet, and an Ode to the Pen to show for that night. And that was my life.
____________________
A/N: I never have any idea what to say about chapters like this, like, here's Jack slowly going crazy and doing things that seem like they should be impossible (trust me, it is totally possible to accidently burn a Y onto your arm with the side of a laptop). I'll just leave it at that, I suppose, thanks for the comments and please comment!-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.
I got an F on my math test.
See, I was not the type of person who cared about math. I had this weird thing where I was a total obsessive perfectionist when it came to English and art, and would spend forever improving whatever I was fixating on until it was as impeccable as possible, and then still only see the imperfections in my final product. But with math, science, and history, I bullshitted my way through every assignment and didn’t blink an eye when the frequent B’s rolled in.
Because I did not care. C’s on math quizzes and tests were regular occurrences in my life, and didn’t bother me in the least. I was not going to grow up to be a mathematician or accountant or physicist, or, God forbid, teacher, and, therefore, only needed a basic, shitty understanding of what we were learning in order to graduate High School and get on with my life. Actually, in most cases, I never bothered to try to fully figure out what we were being taught in math and just cram studied the night before tests, forcing enough formulas and facts into my mind to get a passing grade on the upcoming assessment.
So it was no surprise that I literally had no fucking idea how to do any of the advanced Geometry that we had been working on for the last month. However, I ended up having a complete ‘fuck the world’ night when I was supposed to be studying for that chapter test, failed to force up any amount of motivation to discover out how to find the volume of cylinders, and spent the night listening to Green Day while dancing around my room and hanging up posters instead. I was totally screwed the next morning when I realized I only knew half the formulas necessary and could not complete either of the word problems that counted for 20 percent of that test.
I expected a B from it, wouldn’t be surprised - or all that disappointed, really - with a C minus, and knew that I had done terribly. But when I checked my grades online a week later and was confronted with a fucking 54 percent in little black and white text from my laptop screen, I felt unprecedentedly bad.
I was well aware that math was, by far, my worst subject, and had no shame in admitting how horrible I was at it. But I had never gotten a F before. On anything. Ever.
My brain was too muddled to perceive that, really, it was only a numerical percentage difference, and didn’t actually matter, because I was starting to doubt one of the only things I was sure of about myself. And, fuck, I was getting to the point where absolutely nothing was definite, and, let me tell you, that is not a fun way to live.
One thing that I’d been secure with throughout my sixteen years of life was that I was a relatively smart person. I was not an A plus student, but I was also not - and never had been - failing any classes. I was an exceptional reader and writer, knew how the universe came to be, was aware of the date that the Constitution had been signed, and could do long division provided that a calculator was somehow missing from my possession.
The schools in my district were good. They were well funded and had advanced classes to suit each individual’s needs. I was in the second highest math lane. I was intelligent, and I had always been sure of that, even if I wasn’t some kind of ingenious child prodigy.
But I got an F. A fucking F. I did not get F’s on tests. And I knew, I was completely and totally observant of the fact that school is probably the single worst system of judging intelligence in our world, but that did not stop me from beginning to worry that, after all those years of education and studying late into the night, spending my short life scrawling homework assignments, doing my best to pay attention as teachers blabbered about cell reproduction and the French influence on the American revolution, that I might be stupid.
And I was already overwhelmed enough, trying to scribble out enough semi-legible chapter summaries of the science non-fiction book that I’d been assigned to read for a project to make it look like I’d actually, you know, read it, before the deadline, and write a farewell letter to my classmates for history even though we weren’t graduating for another year and my history teacher was on crack when she decided that would be a good way to teach us about the end of George Washington’s presidency, as well as, of course, do my mother fucking math homework that I didn’t get.
Throw on top of that that I had an ode to an everyday object due tomorrow and poetry made me feel like a talentless, shifty human being, because my moderate skills in writing did not translate into that category at all and made the one class that I was actually good at a total embarrassing pain in the ass, and I was about ready to have a mental breakdown. Because I was dumb and I couldn’t even write well even though writing was the only thing I was good at in school and I was stressed out and I really hated myself and it was not fucking going well.
So I was sitting in my chair, arms tightly gripping the sides of my laptop as I tried to calm down and get back to work so I wouldn’t end up as a high school dropout, when my dad started yelling from the kitchen about how I needed to clean the cooking sheet that I’d used to make freezer pizza after school earlier because it was sitting in the sink, and, suddenly, my arm hurt.
Luckily, my sanity had not yet regressed to the point at which I was feeling nonexistent, fake pains - it turned out that the bare skin of my forearm was pressed right against one of the ports on the left side of my laptop, which was, for some technological reason that I would never care understand, literally burning hot. And it hurt like a bitch. So, of course, being the totally mentally healthy person that I was, I pushed my skin against it harder and relaxed into the pain.
It became a sick sort of challenge for myself. I wanted to prove that I had enough restraint to stay still as the heat scorched my arm, even though no one else would ever know, and would be downright disturbed if they were aware that I found pride in having the ability to withstand intentional pain. So I ended up with three semi-circles burned onto my arm, the last mark made by being pressed against that blistering piece of metal for a full minute. I didn’t realize it yet, but the triple burn would end up forming a Y and make it that much harder to explain how I accidently scorched a letter onto the inside of my arm, just above my wrist.
I had this weird thing about my wrists. They seemed so delicate and fragile, like if I ever scratched the flesh there, I’d instantaneously bleed to death and die. They were my life line, and I ever decided to try to cut that, I knew that that was where the first slashes were be.
But the blazing red half moons were close enough to my elbow to still leave my paper wrists unscathed. Odd, that after all those months of falling for pain and hurting myself, never once did I harm the stereotypical, poster-cutter body part.
And I was feeling a bit better, calmer, more collected after the agony had settled my mind. It was strange how pain was seen as this unambiguously bad thing when, in reality, it was fucking fantastic for fixing so many things. Like me. Best, most affective temporary solution to problems that I’d ever experienced.
I was right about to turn back to my computer and start writing metaphors about ball point pens when my dad appeared from the kitchen, placing the tray that I had failed to wash on the arm of the chair next to me. And that was it. Too much. I could not handle it. Too far.
So I stumbled up, throwing all my books into the depleted backpack on the ground beside me, unplugging my laptop, hastily bundling everything under my arms, and wobbly sprinting out of the room because my eyes were watering and I had this strict rule against crying in front of my family.
I spent half an hour in my room, blasting my favorite depressing music on full volume, curling the sheets of my bed through my fingers and trying to relieve the tension smothering me. As always, though, my thoughts overpowered everything else, shouting about how pathetic and useless I was, how I was a fucking stupid idiot, how even my own family, who were supposed to constantly offer unconditional love, hated me.
My dad was my dad, and I loved him, but I was starting to worry that I didn’t like him as a person.
Being that I couldn’t do anything right, I failed to find any way to get myself and my brain back under sane control. And, as usual, I got desperate.
I was becoming concerned that with the lack of emotion and high levels of desperation that I’d recently been experiencing, I was going to become a psychopath. I'd been beginning to sympathize with serial arsonists, meth heads, sadomasochists, and those motorcycle extremists who jumped through flaming hoops. People who would do anything for a thrill. To feel alive.
That couldn’t possibly be good. I was hoping that I’d never get to the point where I'd do something like that, but I wasn’t so sure anymore.
And, really, my solutions weren’t any better.
The thing is, at that point in my life, I did not think that I had a problem. Yes, I knew that what I did to myself was abnormal, unhealthy, and very heavily frowned upon by society, but it made me feel ok, less miserable, so why should that matter? I was a person who had slit their skin, but I was not a cutter. I had scratched my arms raw, but I did not self harm. I spent sixteen hours of my day hating everything about myself and my life, but I was not depressed.
So when I scrambled over to my dresser and started frantically searching for the pack of razors I’d been storing there in secret, having fooled myself into believing I’d only use them for innocent shaving purposes - I was a guy, after all, it wasn’t like I could throw out all the razors in the house without looking like emo Jesus - I was only trying to make myself feel better. Not doing anything bad. Not at all.
I never would have admitted it at the time, but, in retrospect, I realized that I pulled my jeans to my knees, laid out on my stained sheets with my hips up, and pressed the metal to my skin.
And I relapsed.
I ended up with a burned red Y on my arm, five cuts on my left hip, a dirty, crusty cooking sheet, and an Ode to the Pen to show for that night. And that was my life.
____________________
A/N: I never have any idea what to say about chapters like this, like, here's Jack slowly going crazy and doing things that seem like they should be impossible (trust me, it is totally possible to accidently burn a Y onto your arm with the side of a laptop). I'll just leave it at that, I suppose, thanks for the comments and please comment!-Rose