"This is what happens to boys who don't do what they're told"
"NO!" I shout as I sit up straight in my bed. I'm drenched in sweat and struggling to breathe, but I realize that it was just a dream. He wasn't actually here, it wasn't actually happening again, I was safe, and I was alone.
"Grayson, honey are you okay?" My mom asked as she ran into my bedroom, my dad right on her heels. They were used to this by now, it was almost a nightly routine.
"Y-yeah Mom, bad dream." I smiled to reassure them that I was, in fact, totally fine and they could go back to bed. I can tell they're not convinced, but Mom nods and begins to shut the door.
"I love you," she whispers.
"Love you too," I say as I settle back down into bed. I look over at the clock on my nightstand and the blue LED light informed me that it was just after three a.m., as it always was when I had these nightmares. Superstitious people would try to tell me some bullshit about the witching hour or whatever, but more practical minds would just say it's how sleep cycles work.
I tried to push the nightmare out of my mind, to think about something, anything else but the horror I was just forced to relive. No matter what I tried, the thoughts got worse, and I could feel my chest tighten and breath catch in my throat. I got up from my bed and made my way to my bathroom, quickly finding what I was looking for. I added new marks to the ones that were already healing on my wrist, breathing a sigh of relief when I felt the familiar stinging sensation. This was the only thing that worked to calm my panic attacks, to silence my thoughts. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get rid of my demons. They always came back to haunt me in the middle of the night, while I was peacefully dreaming of a life where I'm actually happy. Once I felt more calm, I cleaned up, got back into bed and tried to fall asleep again for another few hours.
Sometimes I'm not even sure if it really happened. Like, I just think that it's something I've made up in my dreams, and it scared me enough that I keep dreaming about it night after night. That's totally something that happens right? Kids just convince themselves that something happened to them that didn't all the time. That really must be it, because nothing like that could have ever happened to me. My parents wouldn't have let that happen to me.
After hours of staring at my ceiling, trying desperately to clear my thoughts and go back to sleep, my alarm rang. That meant it was six a.m. and time for me to get up for school, or as I liked to call it, hell on Earth. I forced myself out of bed and to my bathroom to shower and get ready for the day. I put on a pair of skinny jeans and an oversized chunky sweater and put some gel in the longer sections of my dirty blonde hair, so they fell in a messy on purpose kind of way. Leaving my bathroom, I found my Mickey Mouse Vans and put them on before grabbing my backpack and running down the stairs to leave for school.
"Grayson, can we talk to you for a moment?" I heard my dad call from the kitchen as I was about to head out the door. I sighed dramatically and dragged my feet into the kitchen.
"What's up?" I asked, though I knew exactly what they were going to talk about.
"Honey, we're worried," Mom said as she clutched at the heart necklace she always wore around her neck.
"Mom, I'm fine," I tried to convince her.
"You have nightmares every night that you wake up screaming from. How can you tell me that you're okay?"
"Because they're just bad dreams! People have bad dreams all the time."
"Not every night, son. Not like the ones you have, this is really disturbing," Dad chimed in.
"What are the dreams about, why won't you tell us?" Mom asked.
"I don't want to talk about them."
"Will you talk to a therapist again then?"
"No, I won't talk to anyone about it, I'm totally fine," I said and ran out the door before either of them could stop me. I made sure to slam the door behind me for dramatic effect and then I began the walk to school. As I walked, I reached for the rubber band that I always kept around my wrist and snapped it against it the whole way to school.
When I got to school, I anxiously walked up the steps to the entrance, taking each step as slowly as possible to delay having to enter the building. As I walked inside, I scanned the hallways ahead of me, looking for my usual tormentors. When it looked like the coast was clear I quickly made my way through the halls to my first period class. The class was all way in the back corner of the school, down a near empty hallway. As I rounded the corner to that hallway, I was extra cautious, peeking around to see if anyone was there. Of course, I found Kyle and his gang of followers. I quickly turned and tried to go around the other way, as the hallway where my class was connected two other main hallways, giving me another way to get to class. I thought that they hadn't seen me, but then I felt my backpack being pulled backward. I was thrown up against the wall and put face to face with Kyle Johnson, the guy who has bullied me since middle school. You know, you'd really think people would be over physical bullying like this by high school, it's really just so immature that this is still going on.
"Hey faggot!" He spat as he shoved me against the wall again. I didn't say anything back, as usual. I was too busy trying to keep my breathing at a normal pace and hide the panic in my face. After my nightmares last night, and with the lack of sleep, it was especially hard to do that, and I could tell the anxiety was evident in my face. "Aw, poor baby looks like he's going to cry," Kyle mocked in a baby voice. He drew his fist back and I braced myself for the impact of his fist with my stomach. I collapsed to the floor, all air leaving my lungs. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I brought my arms up to cover my face in preparation for the blows that were sure to come. All of Kyle's lackies were laughing behind him and getting ready to join in on the torture.
The first kicked knocked the wind right out of me, and I struggled to regain breath as they continued to kick my shaking body. The beating lasted until the warning bell, where they all ran off before teachers entered the hallway to usher students into their classrooms. I sat up for a moment and tried to catch my breath again. I watched as students walked past me, ignoring me on the floor in tears. I did lock eyes with one boy, as he walked down the hall, a cheerleader in her uniform on his arm. He looked down at me as he walked by and then quickly looked back up. His name was Trent Rodriguez, remember that name, it comes up a lot.
I pushed myself up off the ground and headed to class, where I just put my head on my desk and tried to shut out the world. I went through my day in a fog, but it was no different from any day before that. I went through my life mostly invisible, with the exception of Kyle, who somehow always noticed my presence. It also never ceased to offend him that I was alive. Ever since I came out in middle school, he has never let me forget that my existence is repulsive to him.
The physical beatings were the least of my worries, it was the closeness, the contact. No one, except for my parents, was allowed within a foot of me. When Kyle and his posse attacked me, it was just the fact that they were putting their hands on me that sent me into a panic. I could deal with pain; pain was normal for me. I couldn't deal with the panic attacks and the flashbacks; the flashbacks were the worst. Every time they touched me, it felt like him. I was back in my room as a child, being babysat while my parents went on a date. I was being scolded for not putting on my pajamas fast enough. I was being... I was being raped by Adam over and over again.
I've never said what happened out loud. Like I said, some days I wasn't even sure if it actually happened. I was 10, I could have imagined it, dreamt it, just completely made it up. Stuff that like didn't happen often, right? And definitely not to boys, and definitely not by their parents' best friend. That was something that monsters did, that happened to people who didn't have a loving family to look out for them. Right?
"Grayson, are you okay?" My best friend Natalia, or Nat, asked as she sat down at our lunch table.
"Just a lot on my mind." I told her and continued to push my pasta around on my tray.
"Do you want a distraction?" She asked excitedly.
"Sure, what do you got?"
"I added Brayden on Snapchat this morning," she squealed.
"Brayden?"
"Brayden Turner! He hangs around with Trent Rodriguez," she said as if it should be obvious.
"So, what happened?"
"He accepted!" Nat has had a crush on Brayden since we started high school. Which was weird, because most girls were in love with Trent. But not Nat, she had a thing for his blonde haired, blue eyed best friend. She has never spoken with him, just stalked his social media and liked all of his Instagram photos.
"Have you snapped him?"
"I'm too scared to! What should I say? Should I send a selfie?"
"Send him a goofy selfie with like, a caption about how awful school is or something," I suggested. I was getting super involved in Nat's boy drama, letting the subject of her Snapchat become the most important dilemma in my life at the moment. I smiled at Nat as she took her selfies and then retook them trying to get the perfect angle, lighting, and pose to send to Brayden.
"What about this one?" She asked excitedly as she shoved her phone in my face. Nat was winking with her tongue out, and the caption read 'is it time to go home yet?' with the winking emoji.
"It's perfect!" I reassured as I handed the phone back to her. She anxiously sent the Snapchat and spent the rest of lunch staring at her phone, awaiting a reply. She left the cafeteria with a frown when she never received her response.
I tried to cheer her up on our walk to class but it was no use. In my attempts at making her laugh I wasn't looking where I was going and wound up colliding with another person. My breathing was already growing uneasy as I prepared to see who I had bumped into. My worst fear was that it was Kyle, I couldn't handle another beating today. I tried to mumble an apology as I looked up to see who I had collided with, but the words couldn't, or wouldn't, come out. I was met with a pair of shocking green eyes, and the enraged face of Trent Rodriguez. The blonde on his arm looked offended as she twirled her hair around her finger. My eyes widened as I saw the anger in his face, but his features instantly softened, and his tense body relaxed.
"I'm sorry," he smiled as he moved around me and continued walking, his latest fuck buddy following closely at his side. I stood in the middle of the hall for a moment, trying to regain my composure as I processed the fact that I didn't get beat up just now. Trent was not usually the type to apologize, or to forgive people, or to just let something like that slide. Whatever the cause for his mercy, I thanked the powers that be and made my way to class.
"That was so weird," Nat said as we sat down in English class.
"I saw my life flash before my eyes," I admitted.
"I don't know what you did to that boy, but I have never seen someone change their mind about murder so quickly," she laughed.
"What do you mean, what I did to him?" I asked.
"It was like, the minute he saw you he calmed down. Before he saw who he bumped into he was eyes set to kill. Then he looked like, I don't even know, but he changed."
"You're looking way too into it. I think he just didn't feel like putting in the effort to kill me, but if I caught him at a different time, he would have." There was no way there was any credibility to what Natalia was saying. I was nobody, Trent probably just didn't want to waste his time on nobody.