pretty chapped lips : malum :

3.8

It turns out I was out of it for a month.

It didn't feel like long, yet it somehow did. Time became unmeasurable for some reason, I couldn't wrap my mind around it. But when I finally came to, it was almost the end of August.

Coming down was the worst of it. Stomach churning and feeling empty on the inside after too much in too short of a time period. I couldn't keep anything down, much less force something in. My mother looked at me like I was a ghost, my father cursed that I was a failure and I craved something that could make me forget the hash light in his eyes that screamed the bitter honesty of his words.

I ditched school. Acted like I went when in reality I'd just wait until my parents weren't home to sneak back in and hide under my duvet and pray for sleep. I couldn't look in a mirror because I was too afraid I wouldn't even know who was looking back at me. It was only a month, but nothing felt the same.

For a long time I stayed like that. Hiding away in my room to try and bring back some sense to my life. I began writing down what I remembered, jotting events on pieces of paper that I tried to push into the right order as if finding that out would make things make sense again. I barely remembered anything,. First joint, first kiss, first party, then - nothing. Blanked, for what could have been a few days to two weeks. All I remembered was what happened only a few days prior where Alex held me so tight I swore I couldn't breathe and Jack wouldn't stop yelling.

I swore I heard sobbing in that memory, but it wasn't mine.

When I went back, after four weeks of fading in and out, pink hair, sullen eyes and teachers glares clinging to my skin it was like no matter where I looked, where I went, it was like someone knew everything and everyone knew something. I wanted to tear off my skin, to rip my flesh from my bones to try and shed the skin they stared at that clung to my body. I wanted to hide, to tear myself apart until no one could recognise who I was anymore.

So, I did the only thing that I could think to do.

I hid.

I avoided the boy I knew as my only friend as if he were the plague personified and his friend wherever I could. In the back of the library in between the shelves until the end of lunch. On the back stairs to HE that no one goes up anymore since the flood of the bathrooms. Behind the back of the canteen by the trash that smelled so bad that no one dared come near.

The way I viewed it, there were only two more years left until I could get out. Until I could hit the ground running and never look back. I'll go to college, somewhere so far that no one will ever have known about the sixteen year old that covered bruises with his mothers make up and his faded pink hair dyed by a boy who could disappear as quick as he can appears before head lights. I could escape. Be someone else. But I knew the thought was nothing more than a dream which could never be.

"So, what did he do?"

I was sitting under the stairs when he found me. I didn't look up, I didn't care to see his pitying eyes and that look of how he knows the feeling all too well. I just let him stand there, looking down at me with those oh so bright hazel eyes that were probably never as pathetically fooled as mine.

"Did he make you take something? Did he make you... Do something?"

"Why do you care?"

I wanted to sound angry. To glare up at him and tell him to piss off, that it was none of his business. But I couldn't. I just sat there and stared at my lap and wondered why, Ashton Irwin of all people had to be pulled under by him as well.

"Because I know he'll hurt you, and you're just a kid, Michael."

It was the pity that I couldn't take. Because I was a kid, but that wasn't what mattered. So, I grabbed my bag and prayed for lunch to end as I got up from where I sat on the floor, willing myself not to say a word while brushing past.

But he reached out, he grabbed my arm and gave me that pleading look of pity that made my stomach churn. "Michael, he's a bad guy and you can't-"

I felt anger. Pure, hot, burning rage that made my chest feel tight and my stomach bubble and burn. I was angry at Ashton, at the pretty boy two years above who acted like he knew. I was angry at the Luke, too in love to notice I was falling apart. I was angry at myself for giving myself to someone who'll kill me in the end.

But most of all, I was angry because the boy that held my heart in his calloused hands was in the wrong and I was too weak to hate him for it.

"Mind your own business."