Content with Losing

📅 Late Summer/Autumn 2010

〚ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ ʙᴜʟʟʏɪɴɢ, ᴇᴍᴏᴛɪᴏɴᴀʟ ɴᴇɢʟᴇᴄᴛ/ᴀʙᴜsᴇ, ᴀᴛᴛᴇᴍᴘᴛᴇᴅ sᴜɪᴄɪᴅᴇ, ᴀɴᴅ ʜᴏᴍᴏᴘʜᴏʙɪᴀ〛

 Walking back into the school building with Kato this time felt vastly different to Athena than when she’d first sat down with him at lunch the previous year. Back then they hadn’t yet become a unified force, and he’d still ducked his head and more or less hidden, to the best of his ability, in his worn black hoodie. They’d grown to walk in step over the course of spring, of course, and playing music together proved them in perfect sync, and then they’d started fighting back. Now he, at least, had started looking almost formidable, or she thought so. He still wasn’t as tall as Trent and his buddies, but he was taller than he’d been, and his adderall side-hustle had allowed him to add a pair of steel-toed combat boots and an upside-down cross pendant to his all-black wardrobe. Before school started, he let Athena paint his nails to match. He’d started stretching his earlobes with spike-shaped steel tapers, which glinted like metal fangs beneath the safety-pin and silver stud he’d forced through his upper lobes in late August. He stood at the corner of the property and smoked his cigarettes, staring down the building through ash and shrewd, narrowed eyes. Athena’d added a pair of Docs to her wardrobe while overseas, and since she’d started throwing on some fishnets under her ripped jeans the last spring, the two of them together actually threatened to be…well, cool, as far as she was concerned.
 He followed through on the aggression they’d both harnessed the year prior, too, and started to become rather vocal about his issues with religion, which hadn’t had cause to come up before, really—but all of a sudden he was dressing for confrontation and derailing social studies classes to ask why—if America had no national religion and there was meant to be separation of church and state—the currency had ‘In God we trust’ on it, and therein started a debate on ceremonial deism that managed to involve the teacher. 

 Though he was drawing more attention to himself at school with his dress sense and intermittent dramatics, he remained as closed off socially as ever. He still got shit from the “in” crowd, just like she did, but there was a new vibe to him that maybe rendered less as an inherent target. People seemed…a bit more scared of him, maybe, and in that, the bullying seemed to be less widespread. Sure, the two of them had some dedicated enemies, but maybe his new energy and their relative insanity last year had managed to buy them at least a little overdue respect. 
 Or at least managed to quell the idea that they were easy prey.

 Still, they were pariahs: Sitting at the edge of the parking lot during lunch, alone. Somewhere along the line people had decided that they were an item, which handicapped some of the homophobia they’d faced so frequently the previous school year…though people did continue to spin it in insulting ways by implying things regarding her looking ‘mannish’ or him looking ‘girly.’ It was such obvious reaching, however, that Athena eventually found it at least a little laughable. It wasn’t funny that people were willing to put extra effort into hurting them, no, but she had to find the humor somewhere. 
 “I don’t know, it’s just so pathetic that it ends up being goofy,” she told Kato. “Maybe it would hurt more if they could keep their stories straight. But they can’t even remember if they think I’m straight. If you think I’m lez then why are you expecting me to cry over you, a dude, not finding me hot, Jake? Like… L-O-L.”
 “Yeah. They can’t decide if they want to shit on me because I'm ugly or because I'm ‘pretty,’” Kato replied. There was less humor in his tone than there’d been in hers; it came out like his laugh usually did—cold and sardonic. “Today I got asked if I was born hideous or if my botched nose job was courtesy of Trent. I just told them it was both.”
 Athena rolled her eyes. “That's still crazy to me, that they say that.”
 “What?”
 “That you’re ugly. Like, all of it is dumb as fuck, but with that, it’s like, bruh… Anyone with eyes can tell you’re good looking.” 
 Kato’s eyes went from brooding and lidded to wide and startled in a split second; he choked on the puff of his cigarette he’d just taken and flushed so red he nearly matched her hoodie.
 “S-Sorry,” Athena said, her own cheeks growing warm. She looked swiftly away. “I didn’t mean that, like, weird at all.”
 “No, it’s fine. Thanks. You too, ya know,” he said, rather quickly, and then inhaled almost his entire cigarette in one go and ended up coughing so hard he nearly puked.

 They sort of left it there. Athena couldn’t pretend his reaction didn’t make her think, a little bit, which she hadn’t done before she’d spoken. He was good-looking, and kind of badass, and funny and sweet to her. He was also her friend, though, first and foremost her friend, and there was a way she felt protective of that. The idea of seeing him as “more” than a friend—or him thinking that she saw him as more than a friend—seemed…sticky, and a little scary, and so she was grateful when he didn’t take their exchange in a weird direction and they could both shrug it off. He probably just wasn’t used to being called anything nice, which was sad.

 He really was isolated. Everyone was growing up and testing boundaries, though, not just him, and so some of the kids in their same grade actually started getting in on buying addy from him here and there; most of them at least claiming it as a study drug; others not so much, because they’d ask if they could split the pill and snort it outright or if they needed to crush the stuff inside.

 Gabe, Athena’s almost-acquaintance from the previous year, ended up buying a couple pills at one point—he thought he might have ADHD, he said—and while Kato ‘kept it professional’ and dismissed the potential conversation with “Whatever, man, you don’t gotta justify shit to your dealer,” he’d made note of Gabe’s split lip at the time and seemed potentially impressed later, when they learned, according to rumor, it was the result of Gabe having spat at a footballer who’d called his twin brother ‘retarded.’
 “Maybe he wouldn’t be bad to hang with,” Athena offered, again.
 “Maybe. But he’s got his own crowd,” Kato said. 

 It was true; Gabe did seem to have a little ‘tribe’ of fellow skaters and grunge-y hipsters, who milled around as a group and sometimes graffiti-tagged the walls of the gym or the cars of particularly disliked teachers. Athena felt like the behavior should have been enough to establish an alliance over, but even if Kato might have agreed, he couldn’t seem to stomach approaching them. It was maybe too vulnerable a position, when at least one or two of the kids were ones from his fiasco friend group in middle school and who had not yet apologized. They did seem to avoid looking at him, which Athena thought was likely because they felt guilty, but which Kato decided was because they still saw him as some kind of social-status pathogen.

 Nonetheless, Gabe and some other assorted people started talking to Athena more, bit by bit—in class, in the halls. Sometimes they’d say “what's up” at lunch, even, but Kato's wary echo of the greeting frequently came across like a challenge—harsh; territorial, almost. 
 Athena attempted to offer them some grace, but Kato would frown and shake his head like someone being buzzed by gnats. He held onto the fact that no-one had stepped in for him aside from her as proof that no-one had or would ever care about him at all, and so any potential interest she pointed out was something he found highly circumspect.
 “Even if I buy it, where were they before?” he asked. “Laughing and gawking with everyone else, probably. Fucking bystanders. You’re the only person in this place with any guts.”

 Athena tried to convince him of how big the school was; and that maybe not everyone bore direct witness to his plight; and that if they did, maybe cowardice did not an enemy make. He listened to her at least, but remained relatively unconvinced for the most part, and otherwise asserted that he wasn’t likable in close quarters anyway; she was just special, and anyone else was sure to see him as a skin tag at best, so fuck ‘em. 
 It was hard to apply the word ‘anxious’ to him, because of how challenging and defiant he could be, but the entire topic seemed to stress him out, and privately Athena did wonder if he didn’t have some bizarre-o version of bullying-induced social anxiety. He acted out a lot, and maybe was willing to wait for people to approach him, but couldn’t seem to take initiative himself or comprehend that rejection wasn’t necessarily a given.  He was much the same socially as he’d been the first time he went over to her house: Waiting at the threshold, in case he wasn’t actually allowed in. 

 “I don’t want more friends,” he finally said, interrupting one of her attempts to convince him that there wasn’t something inherently wrong with him that drove people away which she alone happened to be blind to; “They don’t actually want anything to do with me and they’ll find my Rome thing annoying anyway; let’s just save everyone the fuckin’ trouble. I don’t need anyone else, and I don’t need them only talking to me ‘cause you guilt them into it, either. All that shit’s just a hassle.” He crossed his arms. “Like, you can talk to whoever you want, I’m not surprised people wanna be your friend. You’re awesome, you know, don’t let me hold you back. But I’m not gonna try and shoulder my way into someone else’s life just so they can tell me to get lost…If people wanna talk to me, they can come up and talk.”

 She wanted to point out that sometimes people did come up to try and talk, and that when they did, he tended to say “‘Sup” in the same tone as a Rottweiler, or stay so silent and removed that they had no choice but to only talk to her, what with him counting himself out of the conversation before it even started. It seemed like saying all that would only feed into his belief that there was something wrong with him anyway, though. 

 Unwilling to abandon him to sit rigidly alone in his belief that no-one liked him, but unable to drag him into anything—and worried about making him feel replaced—she didn’t just go over and start chatting up the theatre kids or anything. She did talk a little more to a few of the kids she shared classes with, though.
 It turned out that Gabe and his brother, Gracian—“Ian”—did do music, and she’d been right about the piano. They were even putting stuff up on Soundcloud. She wanted to invite them to come play with her and Kato, but knowing that Kato wouldn't be cool with it, she reluctantly told Gabe “that’s neat,” and let the topic go for the moment. 
 Maybe this year would be less rocky overall; overwrite some of the misery, or something. Kato might warm up a bit and she could bring it up again later.

 Unfortunately, the first few weeks seemed to have been a sort of calm before the storm, while everyone adjusted to their new standings as sophomores or juniors or seniors and milled around hating the end of summer break instead of each other. There was new blood with the incoming freshmen, who needed to be put in their place or protected, depending on who was acting on which impulse towards whom, and the establishing of a new hierarchy had temporarily displaced the necessary reinforcement of the old one. But only temporarily. 
 Having apparently decided that her and Kato’s new, bolder standing was inexcusable, someone decided to revive the middle school rumor about Kato being the “creepy, desperate” kind of gay and not just the gay kind of gay, which he took harder than he did getting punched about it.
 “I’d rather they thought that I torture animals,” he told her. 
 “At least I’m in on it with you this time,” Athena said dryly. “Apparently that’s why we’re allegedly dating: It’s to try and hide the fact that I wanna grope the girls in the locker room. Can’t believe they found us out. Where do they get this stuff?”

 It didn’t entirely blow up everything, and the kids who’d already started giving them the time of day didn’t totally up and disappear into the ether, but both she and Kato could feel the targets re-branded on their backs and it definitely jammed the gears in terms of trying to convince Kato that people would necessarily change or be inclined to befriend him, what with the whispering and the sideways glances and the threat of things getting physical having been refreshed once more.

 Academically, shit started, too. For Athena, sitting in Geometry was about as comprehensible as being in on a conference call held entirely in Polish. Nothing made any sense whatsoever, and the only thing she really picked up on was that there were shapes involved. At school she wasn’t just a creepy lesbian; she was a stupid creepy lesbian. Her teacher and parents all seemed just as disgusted with her for the first bit as her peers were with her for the latter.

 Kato started out the school year with mostly B’s, himself, which Athena envied and which his dad had called “inexcusable,” after which, Kato relayed to her, the two of them had gotten into a screaming match, because Kato argued that actually, it was perfectly fine—for anyone without a stick lodged so far up their ass that they could moonlight as a scarecrow. He said he’d eventually turned to his mother and asked, “Doesn’t it bother you that he’s screaming at me about an 86-fucking-percent?!” to which she’d responded by “doing fucking nothing except looking sad and shuffling out of the room, like fucking always.” 
 Athena wasn’t exactly grateful for her parents, because they also found her grades “inexcusable,” and made sure to pointedly comment on her “lack of drive” and “obstinate nature regarding academia,” but at least she was being compared to Seth and then dismissed. Kato just had to be a standalone failure and in full focus about it.

A few days later he came into school looking terrible: Paler, more underslept beneath the eyes than usual. He forwent getting any lunch and sat hunched over in the parking lot beside Athena, not even bothering for a cigarette, his arms tucked close to his stomach.
 “Are you sick?” she asked, concerned.
 He shook his head and rubbed his ear. “No.” He grimaced and his body jerked a little—a barely suppressed retch.
 “K-O, you’re sick. Why aren’t you at home?”
 “I’m not sick,” he said. He curled up into the fetal position. His breathing seemed rapid.
 Athena frowned, unnerved. “You’re sick,” she repeated. “Let's just go to the nurse.”

 He let her drag him to the nurse’s office, even though his dad hadn’t cared that he threw up that morning. The nurse called his house; no answer. When she tried his dad at work, Walt irritably informed her that he was on a strict schedule and couldn’t do anything about it, and asked why they couldn't just keep him there or call him a cab. 
 Kato looked ill and sad the entire time; some Old Yeller-esque expression on his face, and retreated from the nurse trying to figure out how to handle things by going and throwing up in the single stall bathroom, after which he tried saying he was fine, and not to bother with anything. She made him lay down and took his temperature. He was a little feverish. The end-of-lunch bell rang without anything having been sorted out, and with Kato still curled up on the white cot, but the nurse wouldn’t let Athena stay; despite her protests, she did have to let herself be herded off to class, however reluctantly. 
 He missed the following two days of school. 

 “What happened?” Athena asked when he returned. “One day you were fine, not even sneezy. You get the uber-flu or something?”
 “As far as they know? It was food poisoning,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets as they crossed through the cafeteria on the way outside and jerking his chin to maybe indicate the world at large.
 “What does ‘as far as they know’ mean?” she asked, furrowing her brow.
 They stopped and stood in silence just outside the cafeteria door. He kicked a brittle early-autumn leaf off the curb and watched the breeze tug it into a wayward skitter across the asphalt.
 “…I overdosed on aspirin,” he eventually muttered, still looking at the ground instead of at her.
 “What?” Athena’s heart didn’t even sink; it skipped and then dropped, so hard and fast it was almost shocking it didn't make a thud. “On purpose?”
 “No, no…” he said in a monotone, continuing to avoid her eyes and waving his hands facetiously. “I had a headache and accidentally took 35 instead of 1. Whoops.”
 “Don’t do that.” Her voice came out harsher than she wanted it to; her eyes burned. “Don’t—don’t be sarcastic with me, not about—about this,” she said; her voice cracked and he looked up, startled, when she had to fist her hoodie sleeves and wipe her eyes. 
 “Sorry.” He put his hands in his pockets and seemed to shrink inward, looking back at the ground.
 “Why?” she asked. Maybe begged. “Why did you do it?”
 “I guess ‘cause the first time I just threw all of ‘em up, basically. Maybe I took too many, I dunno. Nothing real different happened then,” he said. 
 “What do you mean, the first time?” 

 Faced with the mounting panic on her face, her teary eyes and shaking shoulders, he somewhat reluctantly admitted that this had been his second attempt; he tried while she was on holiday, too, “so that she wouldn't have to deal with it,” but it “obviously hadn’t worked out.” Not that this one did either—his ears were still ringing. He described vomiting a little bit of blood with something weirdly like pride in his voice—which made her stomach clench—but it dissipated quickly and his face dropped back into a morose, tired mask.
 “I thought if I didn’t die then at least they’d notice, or care, or something…and that if I died, they’d care then,” he said. “Stupid.”

 She wanted to hit him. Not hard, but she did—wanted to wail and kick and flail her fists at his chest like a toddler and force him to face her distress, because this wasn’t okay, it wasn’t okay at all, it was the abject fucking opposite of okay, and he was standing there and acting like he’d done something as “stupid” and disappointing as having forgotten to get a permission slip signed. She ended up crying into her hoodie sleeves and essentially begging to know if he still wanted to die.
 He was quiet for a couple moments. “Usually,” he said. “I guess not right now, though. Life doesn’t feel as shit with you…Even though I upset you. I am sorry.” 
 “Stop being sorry! You and Seth, you’re both ‘sorry!’ I don’t want you sorry,” she all but sobbed. “I want you alive!” 
 Beside herself, she tearfully demanded he not put her through it; through losing him; he can’t do that to her—he knew about Seth, so how could he even think about it? How could he think about her enough to decide he’d choke down pills while she was away so she “wouldn’t have to deal with it,” and then still do it?
  “I don’t want you thinking about me while you’re killing yourself,” she ended up essentially weeping; “I don’t want you timing it for me; I don’t want you dying!” Her tone kept slip-sliding all over the place between anger and terror and sadness and by the end she didn’t know if she was even managing to say anything coherent. 

 “I’m sorry!” He grabbed her shoulders and gave her a small shake. “It didn’t work, okay, I know it was stupid, I won’t do it again! I need my hearing for my music anyway—our music,” he said. His eyes were wide and apologetic; maybe even worried. His hair was in his face again. She collapsed into his arms and clung to the back of his jacket like he was all she had a hold on at the edge of the world.
 She was scared, but even more than that—with her ear pressed to his chest, listening to his heart still beating—enraged with the world for driving him so close to the brink. 

 Despite how angry she’d felt with him, after the shock wore off, she could almost understand why he didn’t see another way out. He was kind of trapped: With his chronically disapproving father and his impotent, frequently-infirm mother; and then positively reviled at school, mostly for things that were blatantly untrue. 
 His new, icy fire started getting him in more trouble amongst the teachers, too, despite admittedly having been a bit of a teacher's pet in middle school and early the previous year, mostly in history and English class, where he’d excelled—not that his dad would’ve agreed, but he did.
 Done with being a doormat, though, and maybe ready to shed the extant rumors and hoping to spawn some new ones, he started making inflammatory or concerning comments about what he thought should happen to people picking on him; or standing up and overturning his desk to turn and front on somebody snickering at him or discreetly prodding him with a pencil during class, and so he frequently ended up in the principal’s office. 
 “They all thought I was ‘a pleasure to have in class’ when I kept my head down and let people throw shit at it,” Kato snarled, gesturing broadly. “The teachers. They’ll never protect you, though. They just tell you to ignore it. Sit and take it. And if you don’t, you’re a problem. Sick of disappointing people, might as well let them know off the bat what they’re getting.”

 They stopped getting a bright, shy kid who could reel off significant years for the Roman expansion and who eagerly explained the circumstances, and they started getting a volatile young man who pulled A’s and B’s on quizzes for three straight weeks and then filled out a scantron for some major test so the bubbles spelled “FUCK THIS SHIT” before leaning back and lighting a cigarette in the classroom.
 “DAVID WINTERS!” their teacher shouted, appalled, turning all heads that hadn’t already jerked around at the flint-click of his lighter.
 He raised his eyebrows and gestured around as though legitimately bemused. “Well, the fuck am I supposed to do?” he asked; “You gave the hall pass to the kid who drinks vodka out of his locker.”

 Sometimes, he went on the offensive and smacked a tray out of one of their bullies’ hands at lunch like they would do to him: If everyone was going to act like he was starting fights, he might as well go on ahead, he told Athena. When their adversaries called him names, apparently enjoying the new rise they found they could get out of him, he escalated things by saying, “Either flirt harder or hit me, bitch,” and the ensuing beatdown would get everyone involved in trouble.
 “You know, he’s got balls,” Gabe said to Athena as an aside, lingering briefly outside the guidance counselor’s office with her on his way to meet his friends outside, his skateboard on his shoulder. Behind the door, they heard the words “fucking THEORETICAL pipe-bomb” in Kato’s frustrated voice.
 “You should tell him yourself,” Athena replied.
 “Ha! Maybe, but I wouldn't want him to take it the wrong way and kick me in mine,” Gabe said. “Tell him I say hey if he won’t deck me for talkin’ to his girl.” He winked, tossed his board down, and skated the rest of the way to the open exit, jumping the threshold. 

 Though he’d unfortunately seemed to make himself even less approachable than he’d been before, Kato had been largely successful, at least, with replacing the creepy-gay rumors; now he was—varyingly, depending on the source—on PCP, clinically insane, a satanist, secretly poisoning his mom with antifreeze, a neo-Nazi (which did make Athena laugh, as his alleged beard/girlfriend), or the next Jeffrey Dahmer, since he supposedly drank his own blood and thought he was a vampire. Still gay, of course, though. They couldn’t seem to let it go.
 “They’re getting Dahmer and Richard Chase mixed up,” Kato said with disgust, regarding the vampiric rumors. He’d recently added serial killer trivia to the list of things, like Rome, that he had encyclopedic knowledge about, which had definitely helped him along in finding a different flavor of ostracism. And in getting in additional trouble with the administration for being “an instigator.”
 “Probably don’t try and school anyone about it, Jules,” Athena said, sympathetically side-eyeing him. “They’ll think you’re threatening people again.”
 “Hey, I only said I’d kill his dog because he said he’d sic it on me. He made up the thing about me threatening to drink its guts all by himself.”
 “I know, but now even admin thinks you’re a wacko.”

 By the time Thanksgiving break rolled around, Kato lived in detention or in-school suspension, careless about it: Walking into the school with his cig still lit, and when the passing security guard stepped in with a “Nope, not flying, pal,” he just made direct, piercing eye contact and put it out on his own collarbone before chucking the butt onto the school floor and walking off down the hall to the detention room without being told to.

 His dad was apoplectic at a constant. Kato said he was “probably approaching a cardiac event at this point.” He was chronically grounded, and even though Mr. Winters was trapped by his over-commitment to work and struggled to consistently enforce anything at first, he finally threatened to drop Kato’s guitar at the dump and managed to keep him stuck at home, where they had repeated shouting matches during which he emphasized that Kato was gunning for failure, actively a disappointment, and he ought to have some pride because if he kept on like this he’d never amount to anything, to anyone, including himself.

 “What a tragedy that would be,” Kato said ruefully to Athena after relaying the altercation to her out in the parking lot, where he took one of the numerous dried-up leaves on the ground and burned a hole in it with his lit cigarette. “Ending up a nobody. Better put my nose to the grindstone again…just study hard, go to school…and get the shit kicked out of me until I get to go home to be screamed at, every day for two more years. Then I can fail out of a college my dad still thinks is for idiots and slit my wrists in the gutter anyway.” He studied the burned leaf and twirled it between his fingers. “Options, options.”