Cross Out the Eyes

📅 2010

〚ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴇᴍᴏᴛɪᴏɴᴀʟ ɴᴇɢʟᴇᴄᴛ & ᴀʙᴜsᴇ, ᴇᴀᴛɪɴɢ ᴅɪsᴏʀᴅᴇʀs, ʙᴜʟʟʏɪɴɢ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴ, ᴀɴᴅ ᴅʀᴜɢs〛

 Spring swept in—first raining, then blooming, and Athena finally got the chance to meet Mary Winters during a ‘good’ month. She was cooking in the kitchen when they dropped by Kato's house to pick up his guitar. He had a cut eyebrow from someone throwing a full can of Fanta at him during lunch and his temple sported a small but impressive watercolor of bruising.

 “Oh, David, what happened?” his mom asked, when they walked in, but she didn't hurry over to inspect him. Athena’s mom, even, would have rushed over if it were her, even if the end result would have been to fuss over how ‘put together’ she did or didn’t look anymore, or that she needed to not get into trouble, or that people would think things. But Mrs. Winters stood still by the sink, instead, almost rigid, and then her eyes lost focus and she abruptly became distracted with searching the kitchen cabinets for something.

 “Got beat the shit out of at school,” Kato answered flatly. “Again, you know. Second time this month.”
 “Do you see where I put the oregano?” his mom asked, sounding stressed, even tearful. “Your dad will be worried if I leave it somewhere…”
 “Yeah. Worried.” Kato opened the fridge. The oregano was in there, on top of an egg carton. “You put it in the fridge,” he said, just as coldly, and added, “This is my friend Athena,” when his mom came over to retrieve her wayward spice shaker. “Anyway, we’re leaving.”
 “We, uh, met once before, but you weren’t feeling very well,” Athena greeted awkwardly. She wanted to point at the side of Kato's head and say something rude, like, “Do your eyes work? Your fucking son is bleeding,” because his brow-furrowed scowl had cracked his scab, but Kato was already dragging her away by the arm. 

 “It doesn’t matter,” he told her when she opened her mouth. “I can sneak out of the house and wander around for 18 hours just to see if she’ll notice I’m missing and she doesn’t. And dad only cares because it breaks the rules. He doesn’t worry. Neither of them worry.”

 He said it didn't matter, but it sure seemed like it did. He’d already expressed that the cutting had some attention-seeking splinter to it that he felt ashamed of, but it’d been unsuccessful, and even so…he’d sneak out to ‘go missing,’ just in case. Go home without hiding his bruises. Try to ace a test; purposefully fail a test. 
 “Sometimes I think about walking into traffic to see if they’d give a shit about me getting flattened by a Ford Ranger,” he wryly told her, one day in the cafeteria.

 He didn’t end up following through on that, but she did notice that he started disappearing into the bathroom immediately after eating lunch. He’d come back flushed, with watery eyes and reddened knuckles.
 “Are you throwing up?” she finally confronted him.

 He insisted he’d abruptly developed stomach problems, and then he stopped eating lunch all together. 
 “Maybe I have stomach cancer,” he said, when she asked about it again. “God willing.”
 “Shut up,” Athena replied, and fretted.

 The weeks dragged on, and, already skinny, he started looking gaunt. He couldn’t hide it with his hoodie, which started to hang on his frame and had no way of concealing his sunken eyes or sharpening cheekbones. The tendons in his hands stood out when he positioned his fingers on his guitar.
 “Are you eating anything?” she demanded to know. He was looking skinnier than her own mother, whose chest bones sometimes cast a faint shadow on her sternum when she wore something where the neckline plunged. 
 “Yeah, of course I am,” he dismissed, shooting her a disarming smile and allowing her to force veggies and dip on him before they started “band practice” at her house. She didn’t miss that he carefully scraped the majority of the dip off on the rim of his plate. 
 Apparently she was the only one who noticed, though—other than her mother, who privately commented that ‘that David boy’ was looking rather sickly. 

 He eventually started eating lunch again near the end of spring, to her relief, and didn’t dart to the bathroom afterwards.
 “It’s good you’re eating again,” Athena offered, cautiously.
 “They didn’t care…they weren’t going to,” Kato replied moodily. “He didn’t ask if I was sick or anything. He’d just lose his shit about his grocery spreadsheet being out of whack or if I didn’t clean under the toilet rim well enough.”
 “Your dad’s a moron,” Athena said.
 “Yeah, well, me too, I guess.”

 She hoped that meant he’d take better care of himself, and he did for a while—his face started to fill out and look less skeletal, but every so often he’d go hollow again and make pre-emptive excuses that made her feel like she couldn’t address it with him. She wanted to, and tried, intermittently, but he’d rebuff her and say he ate already, or felt sick, or that he’d decided maybe he was lactose intolerant and he was seeing if cutting out dairy wouldn’t fix it, so no, he couldn’t have mac n’ cheese. He’d take a pear, though, and he’d toss it up in the air and catch it and change the topic.

 He was so open about everything else, she didn’t know how to approach him hiding something.

— 

 May seemed to drag out the closing weeks of the school year, refusing to relinquish its grip on the calendar, but the two of them made up for the waiting by indulging in the warmer weather and their music-playing. Kato seemed to be doing better—food-wise, at least—and that let Athena feel more at ease. 
 They got together frequently, continuing to take all possible advantage of his dad’s long work hours and relative absence, and would while away at her house; making a bunch of noise and having a near literal blast with it until they got bored, and then they’d go exploring: Sometimes to parks or the scattered museums and historical landmarks around that were walking distance or short bus rides, rather than an hour or more of a commitment to a train ride, which felt like a bit of a waste of time to Athena since she generally found standing around looking at stuff behind glass to be a bit boring. Kato didn’t, but he didn’t seem bothered by her opinion either; despite his meds—or maybe because he sometimes skipped them, he admitted—he had plenty of energy to walk off. 

 He took her to a spot on Little Neck Bay that he’d walk to from his house in the middle of the night alone, sometimes, when he’d ‘go missing,’ and they spent the day alternately trespassing on “rich folks’” private pieces of shoreline and wandering streets that all had ‘bay’ or ‘shore’ or something in the name, and it already felt like summer vacation. 

 They sat on the revetment at Douglas Manor Point and watched little white boats move back and forth across the water until Kato couldn’t sit still anymore and took his shoes off to wade out into the water—soaking the calves of his skinny jeans, which he couldn’t manage to roll up—and started rummaging around trying to catch minnows. The sun in his hair looked golden.
 “Your hair’s so blonde,” Athena observed. “You’re like Barbie.”
Kato glanced at her for a split second, then with a flash of mischief in his eyes, dunked his head in the water before standing up again, almost laughing. “No it isn’t,” he insisted, gesturing to his dripping ponytail. “It’s brown.” 

“Well duh it is when you get it wet, dummy,” Athena chided, smiling. “You just like being difficult.”
“Now that part is true,” he replied, still grinning himself, and clambered back up to sit beside her. He shook the water out of his hair, making her lean back to avoid getting either hit with it or too heavily spattered. She still caught some stray droplets and he laughed at her wrinkled nose.
“Sorry.”
“No you’re not.” She flicked him in the face with his ponytail.
“Yeah, you’re right.”

He leaned back and plucked up some innocent strands of grass, his expression growing thoughtful.
“Ya know, I was really blond as a kid,” he said. “Like really blond. Not kinda dirty blond, like now. I was like a fuckin’ highlighter. My mom, a couple times when she was more...lucid…? Called it ‘sunshine blond.’”
He paused and tied a grass stem into a figure-8 knot. “It’s weird. I can’t remember elementary school here, like, at all. But I remember Montana. In spring and summer there would be flowers everywhere…the city just sort of ends: There’s a street with houses, and then there are only fields. Forever. It’s nothing like here.” 
“That sounds pretty,” Athena said, looking curiously at him. His voice always took on a different tone when he talked about Montana. He never said he missed it, but he’d always look more thoughtful behind the eyes and his voice would grow contemplative, like the memories of it he shared had some greater depth that he was still trying to descry. 
“It was pretty. Mom would still get bad back then, but maybe not as bad as now. Not, like, bed-bound. Chair-bound, yeah, but…I dunno. It was different. More like regular depression, maybe. She’d sit and stare out the window really sad. I’d go out and pick her flowers, sometimes, to try and make her better, and get her to, like, look at me and talk to me. Sometimes she was ‘there’ enough to be like, ‘oh thank you, David, that's pretty,’ but…” He looked down at his hands and shredded a clover leaf in his lap.
“They were never pretty enough to keep her attention. Obviously. I kept trying to find the right ones. Like maybe a different color, or bigger ones, or something, would bring her back or make her stay. But when she was deep in the chair they wouldn’t work at all. And when she wasn’t sad like that, she’d just forget them on the counter and my dad would yell at us both about pesticides or bugs or whatever.”

“I’m sorry,” Athena said. What else could she say? She struggled with the impulse to take his hand, but he was in the middle of brushing the leaf and grass pieces off his jeans.
“Don’t be,” he replied. “I just wish I could stop picking flowers, ya know?” He plucked a little white clover flower from beside him and put it on her knee, giving her a small sideways smile and hiding behind his hair like when they first started talking.
She smiled back and tucked it into his ponytail. “Well, you don’t gotta pick ‘em for me. I’m not going anywhere.”

—

June finally rolled around, having taken its time and then some to arrive. The days outside of school were easy, or almost easy, provided they were together. At school, though, end of year exams and quizzes had tested more than their knowledge. Kato had run out of patience with ‘the entire fucking system’ again and was commiserating with Athena about math being hard. She admittedly had it worse, because numbers seemed to jumble up in front of her eyes and skip around over decimal points or somehow not manage to feel like they actually went in order—but he was still scraping low C’s, himself, and with his dad, he might as well have been flunking out—so he still got what she was saying. 
“This is so stupid,” she said, thrusting her hands out in frustration, “They always tell me to ‘try harder,’ like I’m not trying. I am trying! Why can’t that be good enough?”
Kato curled his lip. “Imagine if ‘good enough’ was good enough.” 

He worked himself into more or less a tirade over the concept of ‘trying,’ saying that throughout his school career, too, it had been about ‘not trying;’ that he couldn’t remember, but his grades must have been pretty shit in elementary school because his dad got fed up with it and hauled him off to be assessed, and that’s when he got prescribed adderall, but his dad was of the opinion that medication would obviously have fixed everything, so he should be able to get perfect grades now, and if he didn’t, it must be because he wasn’t ‘trying.’
“There’s no excuse, to my dad,” Kato explained, semi-seething; “He’s a fucking workaholic and he thinks everyone else should be, too. To him, it’s like, a smite-worthy sin to give up on anything if you’re not actively dying. Calling something ‘good enough’ is giving up, to him. It’s perfect or it’s failure. The teachers are the same…The fucking system is the same! You’re a product of what you can’t do. Everything is about your mistakes. And pounding adderall doesn’t make me a divine machine.”

“Yo, did you say adderall? Bro, you got some?” 
Athena and Kato looked up at the unfamiliar voice to find that one of the older kids passing by—a junior or a senior, maybe—had shuffled over to them. Kato looked bemused to have been approached at all, and even moreso, have been referred to as ‘bro’ by an older member of the school population, most of whom largely seemed to find freshmen invisible. 
“...I take it,” he replied warily.
“Dude. I'll buy some off you, man. I gotta take the SATs on Monday.”
Athena pressed her lips tight and shot a sideways look at Kato. He was too focused on apparently scrutinizing the guy in front of them to notice her shallow head-shake. This kind of thing seemed like a bad idea.
“How much you paying?” Kato asked, then maybe deciding he was coming off too lenient; like a potential sucker—straightened up and blew his hair out of his eyes, adding, “It’s 30mg. Make it worth it.” 
The older kid sucked his teeth, then offered, “$30, 3 pills.”
“$45, 3 pills, and if you try to jump me for it tomorrow you’ll regret it,” Kato haggled.
“...Okay, man. Deal, deal.”

Athena didn’t like it at all—drug dealing seemed to be crossing some sort of line different than just fighting. When they were mixing it up with the jocks, they were just meeting the energy they were having forced on them: It didn’t feel like really breaking any rules, especially not the law kind of rule, because hell…it was practically self defense! Even if the teachers didn’t see it that way and their rivals spun it different. But this was something else, it was capital-I Illegal. With how on the outs Kato already was, it seemed kind of risky to become known for something that could get him into actual deep shit.
“Guess we’ll see,” was all he said.
“Julian! Come on. You don’t want your mom only finally paying attention because the cops raid your house or something,” Athena tried. 
“Don’t worry. She still wouldn’t.” 

Despite her reservations, it became a thing for him, selling his meds. It seemed to go okay enough. He’d not taken them regularly, and not at all during his stint throwing up his food, and so had a small stockpile. He didn’t get jumped, and at least amongst the juniors and seniors, he was assigned some kind of ‘value.’ She tried to cope with it by hoping that maybe his little hustle would lessen his social stigma, but since for the moment it was mostly older kids buying, who didn’t necessarily want to hang or be seen in too close quarters in case anyone did get ‘busted,’ Kato’s opportunities for finding further camaraderie remained rather sparse. If those frail chances presented themselves at all, though, he was too wary to seize them. 
“I’m keeping it professional,” he told Athena, after turning down a half-invitation to some sort of party. “They only want me there to bring the shit, anyway, and I’m not gonna walk into an ambush with my pockets full of addy.”

He wasn’t the same flower-picking, soft smiling boy at school as he was beside the bay, and in a way Athena was glad, because they’d gut that version of him like a rabbit…but it was still a loss to see the way the world forced him to–more often than not–be hard, battle-ready, and bitter. She looked forward to the reprieve of summer.
“If only not being here all day didn’t mean being home all day,” Kato replied. 
She frowned. “I’ll just have you over more. I gotta do remedial math, and we’re going on vacation in July, but…the rest of it, you can just hang at my place.”
“If my dad will let me, yeah…okay.” He gave her a tilted half-smile. “You know, somehow your mom’s backhanded comments aren’t as bad as my dad’s whole shit. For me, at least. I know she treats you shittier when I’m not there.”
“It’s ‘cause you’re not her kid, but I get it anyway,” Athena said. “My mom’s deal is like running an obstacle course; at least you can dodge an insult and laugh about it being goofy later.”
“Like when she told me to cut my hair because I looked homeless?”
“I think she said ‘shaggy’ and homeless. But yeah. Your dad’s not like that. With him it’s like sprinting into a wall. Just come over and be ‘unkempt,’ instead of…” she trailed off.
“Instead of ‘stupid on purpose’? Sounds good. I’ll make sure to not wash my jeans. Direct the attention away from you, ya know.”
She snorted. “Thanks, Jules. You’ve always got my back. You can take my final report card home to show your dad how good he’s got it.”
“Hmm…can you tell your teachers you cheated or something and make it actually bad?” he asked, his expression brighter; his eyes losing their broodiness and looking laugh-ready when they met hers; “Then I’ll just tell him it’s mine and see if I can give him an aneurysm.”
“Ha! Maybe. But you’ll have to trade me yours. Then my mom will think we actually have been studying history.”
“Awesome, awesome. What’s the plan if they catch on?”
“We steal someone’s sailboat and run away to Hart Island to live in the abandoned asylum,” Athena said, confidently straightening her back and closing her eyes, her pointer finger up.
Kato snorted. “That sounds perfect for us.”