Someone Out There Loves You (Adopted by Frank Iero)

94

ALEXA

Being at school and not being off my face was something I was still getting used to.

It was weird though; all the time I was getting high and abusing my meds so I would be shaky and dizzy and unable to have thoughts pertaining to anything other than the state my body was in and how sick I felt, the bullying from what felt like the entire school was unbearable. It was the drugs that allowed me to get through it because I didn't have to be completely aware of everything going on, or I didn't care as much about it. But now, having been clean of substances and stable on my meds for a few excruciating weeks, it seemed like it wasn't so bad.

If it weren't for the bruises and cuts that I had received from the encounters with the top crew, I could have been convinced that I made it all up. But I was sure it actually happened. The drugs couldn't have just created that whole scenario. Could they?

But then there was that whole thing with Calli. How she hated me and was set on breaking me down and humiliating me in front of everyone, and then that just... went away? The slurs she threw and how they stuck. Emo Faggot. That was how I was known to everyone. Half the school probably didn't even know my name, but if someone said 'Emo Faggot' they knew exactly who they were talking about. That was definitely real. I couldn't have hallucinated something so elaborate. Plus Calli and I had that whole fight in the corridor and everything. And that detention.

No, I couldn't have been making all that up.

It was just weird being back since the week break because nothing like what had happened on the day before it commenced - where I got my ass absolutely kicked - had really happened since. I still got shoved into lockers and my books swept off my desk because I was slow at collecting my things to leave when the bell would ring, but the daily beatings hadn't really been a thing for the past few weeks.

I knew I should have been relieved by that - that would be the normal, appropriate response - but I was oddly dissatisfied. Something felt missing when I went a day without a punch landing on me. When my skin wasn't discoloured in brown and green tinges from impact sites.

What was particularly weird was the feelings I had towards Calli seemed to have vanished the less she threatened and physically hurt me. She was still drop dead gorgeous and I would catch myself glancing around the halls for her head of blonde hair, or I'd listen for her melodic laughter that would ring out above the noise between classes, and I'd stare at her back as she sat in front of me and a seat to the left in maths. But my heart wouldn't race the way it used to. I was no longer desperate for her to look my way, and if she would, I could either casually avert my eyes like I wasn't actually meaning to look her way and it was just a passing glance, or I could give her a socially polite smile and that would be that. If Frank knew of this, I had a feeling he would say something along the lines of me feeling a pull to the abuse rather than love, and that it wasn't butterflies but anxiety and a sense of familiarity and feeling like that was what I deserve because I had grown up to see relationships as abusive and hence that was my norm.

When I realised I was analysing my behaviour without being prompted to, I shook my head to clear the thoughts. My therapy sessions with Frank were rubbing off on me, but now was not the time to be doing that. I was in the middle of art class and school was almost over. I should be focusing on getting through it.

Instead of actually picking up a pencil and doing anything though, my thoughts continued to wander. While it was a no brainer that school was better when you weren't coming home every day in agony and trying to hide the permanent aches and pains and dreading the next day because your scraped palms and knees hadn't healed and you couldn't take another shove onto the rough concrete, I kind of missed it. It was terror inducing, but there was also something so strangely comforting about getting beaten up. Like, 'ahh, yes, this is my place,' or something. Feeling less than. Or maybe it came down to pain and getting what I deserved and justifying my sadness and all that again.