The Weigh Down

📅  Winter 2010/2011 ➝ Spring 2011

【ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴇᴀᴛɪɴɢ ᴅɪsᴏʀᴅᴇʀ sʏᴍᴘᴛᴏᴍs/ᴍɪɴᴅsᴇᴛ, ʙᴜʟʟʏɪɴɢ, ʀᴇғᴇʀᴇɴᴄᴇ ᴛᴏ ᴍᴀss ᴍᴜʀᴅᴇʀ, ᴀɴᴅ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴs ᴏғ sᴇʟғ ɪɴᴊᴜʀʏ + ᴇᴍᴏᴛɪᴏɴᴀʟ ᴀʙᴜsᴇ】

Winter ended up blowing in as a lonely season. Kato had been at her house so often since they started playing music together that his presence had almost become ubiquitous. Sure, it wasn’t like he’d been there every day, but his dad working so much had meant his company had always been within reach. Even Savannah and Devon hadn’t been able to hang out as often when they were friends, because they’d have extracurriculars, or other friends, or trips with their families, or…whatever. And back then, Athena had had other stuff going on, too; sports, mostly. Games, practice, just kicking something around for fun, with other people…And Seth had been earlier on in his PhD. Now, he was chronically busy. Not like he’d actually rebuff her if she wanted to see him, but she could see the wear in his face, so she’d feel guilty ringing him up to drive 40 minutes and back out to be in the presence of their obnoxious parents, who weren’t at all helpful.

That had been the thing: With Kato around, her mom would ask them both about their grades, and would scoff at their ripped jeans and make snide sort of comments about his hair, earrings, eyeliner, or all three, but she wouldn’t be outright nasty. Usually.
Kato could lie like a sailor could swear—not that he couldn’t swear like a sailor could either, though—and he always seemed to have something to tell her about what they were theoretically studying. He’d admit to an imperfect grade and then explain, with an appropriately amenable expression, where he’d realized he’d gone wrong and how he intended on fixing it and how it was helpful to have such a perfect place to study in; the house was so nice, and quiet, and had such an impressive library. He was so grateful they let him come over. His house wasn’t nearly as well-stocked with books, nor was it in such a beautiful neighborhood. 
It was almost jarring, to see someone so talented at spitting venom at school be equally skilled at stroking her parents’ egos. 
But it worked, and if Athena got tired of spending four nights in a row having her parents bicker about whether a tutor would be “wasted” on her or not, as it was entirely possible she was simply “hopeless,” she’d been able to get Kato to come by and give her a break.

With him grounded, she was having to go back to house alone, and nearly halfway through the school year, her parents were upping the pressure. Or if not pressure, the commentary. She couldn’t seem to get her grades up, and she wondered if she shouldn’t ask Kato for some of his Adderall after all, because it did seem like she was having trouble focusing. 
The thing was that most classes were outright boring, and plenty of them besides math still involved numbers, which were always difficult to keep in order, so multiple choice questions on history tests which were asking about what year something happened seemed well enough rigged. Math itself was, of course, incomprehensible. 
And then there was the fact that even outside of classes, school just sucked. People were mean. Yeah, Kato was there, still, but not in every class, and maybe some of her unsatisfactory classwork was because people would be hissing slurs or insults under their breath or throwing paper clips at her. Or using a rubber band to actually try and sting her with them. So, yeah, it was a little fucking hard to pay attention.

Her grades hovered around C-level as a rule, occasionally hiccuping up to B’s, and her mom asked her if there was anything she was good at. 

She used to be good at sports. 
Bored, frustrated, lonely—she sucked it up and rejoined the field hockey team, even though most of them were friends with Devon and Savannah—the latter of whom had started dating Trent at some point, so Athena decided she was dead to her—and they all seemed somewhat wary of her, maybe because she’d gotten that reputation for fighting. They generally ignored her and whispered. Maybe some of their passes were harder than they needed to be, but Athena dodged getting any hockey balls to the teeth and just forged forward, seething over all of it. She still didn’t get any gratification other than anger out of it, because her mom followed up with the clarification that she’d been asking about any talents she might possess which were “worthwhile.”

Really, she hated eating dinner with her parents. If it wasn’t her mom telling her that her skills and passions were worthless, it was something else. Anything else. When Sethfire was her age, he was getting his Master’s. Did she have any ambition whatsoever? Wasn’t she thinking about her future at all? What was she going to do about her grades? And why on earth did she have to act so sullen all the time?
Athena decided she was just going to be sullen all the time, and started pointedly sulking away from the dinner table whenever the comments started, and the hunger afterward felt, sort of, like a physical manifestation of her anger: A hard, painful pit in her stomach that she took some sort of vindication from nursing.

She bitched about her parents’ comments to Kato at lunch, of course, and he was as sympathetic as ever, stuck in his hellish household situation himself and subjected to an endless stream of disparaging comments over anything short of 100%—and sometimes even that wasn’t enough, if his dad was aware that there were extra credit opportunities for that specific class. 
“At this point I think I’ve fucked up so bad that he won’t forgive me for anything short of a double-digit GPA,” Kato drawled, passing her his cigarette.
They usually didn’t bother with picking up trays anymore; it was a hassle, anyway, and since their rivals had picked up on the fact that Kato couldn’t retaliate anymore, the best course of action seemed to just be to avoid crossing paths with them to the greatest extent possible. Kato said nicotine killed his appetite and made it easier to skip out on eating, so Athena occasionally bummed a couple drags, even though it made her mouth dry and the things tasted like vaguely minty garbage.
Sometimes confrontation found them even out there. Devon’s footballer boyfriend had recently gotten his license, and today he decided it was as good a day as any to do a drive-by with McDonald’s trash, which narrowly missed hitting Kato in the chest and splashed Athena’s sneakers with watery soda.
Devon at least had the wherewithal to be looking down at her lap during, though she might have just been texting and not ashamed.
As Devon’s boyfriend’s car pulled away, Athena flipped off the reflection in the side-mirror while Kato put his fingers together and mimed shooting the back window out. Athena gave a wry laugh.
“Brainless zombies,” he said bitterly.

She took the hunger-anger from the dinner table and the lunch period to the field with her; pressing into it like a bruise, and it was satisfying somehow, to press, to deepen; hone, even. She felt lighter, icier—unforgiving. She sprinted faster than any of the rest of her teammates, until her chest got tight and the taste of Kato’s cigarettes gave way to the faint huff of copper, and she knew she was maybe overdoing it, because playing a game like that wouldn’t be sustainable—but surrounded by the whispers and the glances and the implication that she was just there to be a weirdo, she took some pride in not looking at anyone else, not interacting with them at all so they couldn’t even ignore her, and outrunning them all so they’d have to choke on her dust and the fact that actually, none of them were even worth a passing glance.

She got sharper around the edges, emotionally and physically. She noticed, but couldn’t quite figure out how she felt about it. She thought she was looking, maybe, a little weaker, with the tendons in her neck sticking out like that…but her slimmer face seemed to look a bit meaner, too, which she preferred. Everybody else was, after all. 
For some reason, the comment her mom made about Kato looking ‘sickly’ the previous spring picked persistently at the back of her brain.

Her mom did eventually have something to say about her—Athena had just gotten out of the shower and was insolently making sure to drip as much water as she could all the way down the hall to her room when her mom walked by, and she expected a scolding about the hardwood floors, but her mother instead commented that her legs were finally looking more ‘womanly.’ She’d always had rather sturdy, muscular legs—from the sports—but now that her mom pointed it out…they had slimmed down significantly.
“You should shave,” her mom simpered; “But perhaps I will eventually end up with a daughter, if that boyish phase is finally over with.” 

Athena stared herself down in her floor mirror afterwards, irate over the comment, yes, but conflicted somewhere, too. Her mom was noticing something. Even her compliments were barbed, but she’d noticed something, something that made her pause and consider, maybe, wanting a daughter. Athena traced the outline of her reflection in the mirror. Seth had had one like it, once. She’d cut her knee kneeling in the remains of it while he bled out on his floor. And afterwards, their mom had fussed and cried and slept bent all up in a hospital chair, still wearing her work clothes, miles from her feather-top mattress, just to be close to him—even sans unblemished wrists or hands with the dexterity fit for a surgeon.
Maybe by the end of this, Athena thought coldly, she could have her mom noticing how grateful she was just to have an imperfect tomboy daughter with a heartbeat.

As winter progressed—lonely, hollow—she could tell Kato, at least, realized what was going on, but she told him she was fine, or having miscellaneous stomach problems, just how he did. They could talk about anything else, but not this. She finally got it—this was different than anything else. This was personal.
 She found herself withdrawing, almost guarding it. Everything was irritating; exhausting. People talked too much and too loud and about things she didn’t care about; she didn’t want to deal with them or their invitations to hang after school and get coffee or fro-yo or whatever. Why did so much socialization revolve around food? After having her decline four invites in a row, Gabe seemed to kind of give up. A lot of people did, actually, which she didn’t mind too much, because she kept finding their expectations of her to have something to say to be annoying, and she’d probably started coming off a bit snippy because of it. Still…it did keep things pretty lonely, with Kato still grounded at home and unable to hang out as much.
She filled her time with other things; sometimes drumming, usually walking or field hockey or basketball, which she also returned to, if only for the exercise. There certainly wasn’t any more camaraderie there than at hockey. 

She wanted to punish her mom; she wanted to worry her mom—who was nearly as thin as Kato, herself. Athena had to eat normal at Christmas, when Seth came, in case his Psychology studies and intellect would decipher her secret, but she slipped under the radar with two hoodies on and their parents keeping him preoccupied. Still, it was a setback, so Athena scrolled around on the internet for ways to lose weight faster afterward. She irritably checked her step count for the day, multiple times a day, at least able to grasp that if the number was longer, it was better, but couldn’t hold on to the numbers involved with trying to count calories and just gave up, deciding it was good enough to just not eat very much…and steadily whittled away at her mother’s daughter.

Kato knew—she knew he knew, she could see it in how he looked at her—and he knew, too, that she wasn’t going to talk about it, just how he hadn’t. They were, as always, on the same page. He was looking rather trapped behind the eyes, too, though, not just knowing. He had to behave himself at school so his dad would unground him and return his guitar, but he was openly seething about it all, and the cold rage in his gaze didn’t dissipate even once he was ungrounded, because he was still walking a tightrope and struggling to cope—or maybe not coping—with being controlled. The cuts on his wrists frequently reopened at school and stained his jacket sleeves, and it worried her, but she did feel some morbid gratitude that the way he decided to push back this time wasn’t to go hungry how he had before. Something about it would have felt…not good. He still skipped lunch with her, but he wasn’t getting skeletal-looking again. He did notice that she slowly was, though. 

He seemed more protective of her, when people gave her shit at school, and would positively tremble with fury over the fact that he had to restrain himself and not throw himself back into fights. He seemed a caged animal, almost, eyes ablaze and daring the next person to rattle the bars. She could practically see him straining against the chains. Tethered for the moment, instead, he sat close enough that she could feel his body heat, as though shielding her, and glared daggers at anyone passing who might have had ill intentions.
“They’ll see,” he hissed under his breath after they’d endured getting a filthy chunk of frozen snow thrown at them, which had cut the side of his hand when he smacked out of the air to keep it from hitting her.
“Yeah,” Athena agreed, examining his wound. It was thankfully minor. “We’ll get ‘em back once your dad chills out and stops holding your guitar hostage.”

School didn’t stop sucking, but it was still an enormous relief when Kato was allowed to leave the house and come back over to play again—life almost felt normal those afternoons, and she’d manage to eat something so that she could at least attempt to beat the ever loving shit out of her drums properly. He’d spent his essential prison sentence hard at work, and the first thing he showed her when he came back over was guitar tabs he’d finally finished up with for a few of his songs, which he self-consciously played for her, having not been able to fully hear them out first, what with his guitar confiscated. She found it remarkable how great they came out—especially considering he’d been essentially writing half of them deaf. 
“So, did you make anything for me to go off of?” she asked. 
“I actually thought…you should just go with it,” he said, brushing his hair out of his face and giving her a hopeful smile. “If it’s our band, I mean, I don’t wanna be strong-arming you about everything. Just…listen to it and play what you think sounds best. You’re the drummer here, you’ll know better than I would.” 

Together, they did manage to get a flow down for figuring out her part, and it was…well, awesome. Exhausting, but awesome. They weren’t just playing music, they were making music. 
“We can finally put those endless lyrics to use now, can’t we?” she asked him once they’d gotten comfortable enough with a song he’d tentatively titled “The Rubicon.” Unfortunately, he continued to refuse to attempt singing.
“Kato, come on. You’ve written all these lyrics, you can’t tell me you’ve never even tried singing them,” she pleaded.
“Well duh I have, like, alone! But it’s different. What if I sound really stupid singing and you laugh at me?” he said. 

The first time she finally did hear him sing, she actually did laugh—not because he was bad; he had an amazing voice, and she told him so—but because it was “Cruella De Vil” and her mom had just sauntered out of the garage after telling them maybe they ought to play something more classic, for audiences with “discerning tastes.”
“Sing more,” she told him after she finished cracking up; “Of anything. You’re so dumb for worrying, you sing awesome.”
He flushed but attempted to look stoic. “Something else for your mom?” he asked. “Hm. A classic…” He thought for a moment, pulled out his phone to look something up, positioned his hands on his guitar, and started singing Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, with some tactical name replacements. 
She ended up too giggly to even hit the cymbals on time with the bang! bang! despite him gesturing for her to, a grin across his face.
It was incredible how he could make her laugh: Even when freshly put-down by her insufferable mom, even hungry, even with her grades in the toilet, he could make her laugh. 

Sometimes he was less funny, though. He’d always had a penchant for dark humor—which she obviously could get behind, what with them goofing together a song about bludgeoning her mom—but occasionally the dark started to outweigh the humor. The serial killer fixation he’d adopted had evolved at some point during his internment at home into a newfound obsession with school shootings, most specifically the Columbine massacre. He really seized onto it, and like with his other interests, he wanted to share it with her, even if she couldn’t “get it.” 
They watched the movies “Zero Day” and “Elephant” together, and some niche Estonian film called Klass. He showed her an episode from the documentary series Zero Hour and rambled animatedly about a book, No Easy Answers, which he seemed to treat as some sort of personal bible, not least because it was pretty critical of the school’s culture and the role that played in the whole thing, as opposed to it just being that a couple of evil weirdos lost their shit from playing DOOM too much. 

Athena could understand why the event spoke to him, but it was honestly a little fucked up how into it he got. He started saying “godlike” as a catchphrase and wearing a backwards black baseball cap sometimes; she rolled her eyes often, flipped the hat off his head when she felt he was leaning into the bit too hard, and told him not to get a black duster because he’d look fucking stupid. He laughed, at least.
“Yeah, probably. Even they ended up taking the coats off anyway.” 

He got a pleather jacket that he studded with spikes instead. Still, he wasn’t really to be truly deterred: He took to quoting some video or videos the shooters made in school like they were memes, and some of it was a little funny, yeah, the coughing-up-dandruff line, but it was also kind of disturbing that he’d memorized it. 
Then again, he memorized a lot of shit about Rome, too, and they’d rip people apart with horses or lions or something.

Still kept on a leash by his dad’s intermittent repossession of his guitar and unable to start any real shit, he pierced his own eyebrow with a safety pin instead and tattooed a slightly crooked house shape framing a crossed-out E on his ankle with India ink. 
“‘Home does not exist,’” he explained. 
He cut the word “FUCK” into his arm and was still, despite his lack of in-school-suspensions, fanning the flames of the whackjob rumors by early spring, sometime during which he decided that the ‘code red’ drill prep they were having to sit through was too boring to tolerate and started making snide remarks instead.

“Okay, settle down, please, everyone. This is important stuff,” their teacher chided, too ineffectually to actually get all the sidebars around the classroom to actually quiet. Athena herself kept her phone on under her desk, seeing if she could raise her step counter by shaking her leg enough. “I know you guys are all already aware of lockdown procedures. But just to go over them—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Kato interrupted, leaning back in his chair and draping one arm over the metal bar of his desk; “We all pretend statistics are bullshit and the nutjob with a gun isn't a student and will be easily tricked by the damn lights being off. Are active shooters just supposed to be stupid?”
“David—” their teacher started, a long-suffering expression behind her glasses.
Kato ignored her chagrin and twisted around to grin at the kid sitting behind him. “Hey, d’ya think a couple shotgun blasts would fuck up that slab of particle board we’re calling a door or what?” he asked with mock concern, before turning back around and smiling pleasantly at their teacher, waving his hands. “Just saying! Go ahead, we get under the desks or whatever. Or y’all can. I’ll be moving my ass; you never know if SWAT is gonna drag theirs.”

“You’re gonna get the cops called on you,” Athena told him after class.
“What? I just said I’d run,” he replied. “She rolled her eyes.”
Athena rolled her eyes, too. “Someone’s gonna take you the wrong way, I’m just warning you.”
He huffed a laugh. “Nah: No one here thinks I’m capable of anything real…Just a troublemaker trying to get attention. They’ve got my number.” He mouthed the words “.22 caliber” and mimed shooting himself in the head. She sighed. The icy, self-destructive bravado weighed on her; it wasn’t the same as their shared fire. But maybe her flame was flickering.
“I think you’re capable of things,” Athena muttered. “Not, like, in that way. But they’re wrong about you, they always have been.” She leaned against him. She was abruptly, entirely, exhausted—and he wrapped her in his arms without hesitation, dropping his smirk and letting his hair fall into his face.
“...They’re wrong about you, too,” he murmured, and the sarcasm had left his voice. He sounded gentle instead.
“Think your dad will let you come over and play today?” she asked tiredly. “I know it’s unplanned. But…”
“I got a 100 on a history test the other day. I’ll just pull that out if he bitches,” Kato replied. “He’ll yell anyway, but it’s worth it.”
“I just don’t want you grounded again, Jules. I need you right now.”
“I’ll handle it,” he said softly. 

She didn’t press; she wanted someone else to handle it. God knew at this point, she couldn’t.