Meant to be Broken [boyxboy] [Watty Awards 2012]

Chapter Three

A week passed. For Ives, it dragged on endlessly. He transferred classes to get away from Sam, but when they crossed paths in the halls he always felt Sam's hateful glare piercing his skin like foot-long needles. Ives didn't know why noticing Sam made him feel this way. After all, Sam had practically been stalking him, and wouldn't take no for an answer. Ives hadn't done anything wrong.

He just felt so lonely all of a sudden, and he hated it.

The few friends he'd had in school had dropped him like a hot rock the minute he'd tried to get support after his dad's death. Ives refused to speak to them, except for those acquaintances from the archery team who either hadn't known or who had and had come to calling hours. Mark Salazar, the team captain, had been one of those few.

Practice wasn't going exceedingly well for him, since he'd failed to practice on his own all summer. He'd have to start working harder to be a useful teammate again.

But he'd go home determined to practice, only to be hit by depression again almost instantly. His mother no longer bothered to clean up the house. Junk mail and newspapers always covered the kitchen table, until they had no room to eat and Kylle finally threw the things on the floor. Ives always made sure he looked through it all before taking it out to the recycling; the water had been shut off for two days only the week before school started because the bill had been forgotten. At least he could convince his mother to keep up with those payments if he opened the envelopes and handed the bills directly to her.

Kylle wasn't helping with anything, except cooking from time-to-time. The dishes never got cleaned unless Ives did them, and she only ever did her own laundry. Ives had to start doing his own, occasionally throwing in some pieces of clothing for his mom.

Her depression was making it so difficult for her to do anything that Ives wondered how she hadn't been fired from her secretary job yet. With their luck, she would be soon and the problems would just multiply.

Ives was tired of it all. He sat in his room, trying to cover the sounds of his sister and mother arguing in the kitchen about whatever Kylle felt like complaining about tonight with rock music blaring from his computer. Somewhere, a door slammed, rattling the little ranch-style house.

Ives knew what was happening now, in the suddenly silent house: Kylle had left – he could see her headlights as she backed out of the driveway – and his mother was smoking, staring at the blank TV she didn't feel like turning on, and possibly drinking something alcoholic. In the last week she had started buying a lot more alcohol than usual, which made him worry even more.

The impulse came to him almost without him thinking about it; he pulled out the drawer on his desk and pulled out an X-ACTO knife left over from a project he had once done for school, a project his dad had helped him with.

I just want to...

He slowly brought the blade to the base of his thumb. He barely had to press on it to feel the bite of the blade as it pierced his skin. For a moment all of Ives' being was centered around that sting, and the little beads of blood that went with it.

Then he moved the blade a few inches up his arm, feeling more at ease than he had in months, as he took his emotional pain and made it physical.

Ives was glad he owned so many sweatshirts. His teammates gave him questioning looks when he didn't remove his hoodies or even roll up the sleeves for practice, but he had no intention of letting his guilty secret out anytime soon. If they knew he was a cutter he'd never be able to look any of them in the eye again.

But, no matter how embarrassed he felt during the day, at night he just couldn't stop himself. Until the night Kylle slipped into his room unannounced. He was sitting at his desk holding the knife, but he hadn't put it to his skin quite yet. If his sister realized what he was doing, she didn't make a comment; she simply handed him a full bottle of rum.

"She'll never know," Kylle assured him, "not with the stock she has now."

So Ives let himself start drinking, and it was just as good, if not not better than the cutting was. It was a perfect escape, while cutting had been a release. Suddenly, he had two weapons to combat his depression with.

He spent the next morning in the bathroom, losing everything he'd eaten the night before, then fighting dry heaves. Learning his limits was something he knew he'd have to do, but he hoped he'd never make himself so sick again. The consolation he found was the knowledge that it was Saturday and that he wouldn't be missing a day of school.

Kylle found his predicament hilarious.