chant of “Faggot! Faggot!”
That was why he had begun waking up half an hour earlier to walk to the next bus route. But they were all the same, as was evidenced by this afternoon’s rock episode.
Life had become insufferable. There was no joy to be found in even the most remote corner of his existence. He lived to sleep, knowing that was the only time when the torment stopped, and fearing every day that he would wake up to find that nothing had changed, as he did every morning.
He couldn’t comprehend how it had gotten to this point. What could he have done differently?
And that had been more than a year ago.
Every day was better than the next.
There was a sudden, sharp stinging in the back of his head. Matt felt his body become weightless, tumbling forward towards the ground. Red flashed behind his closed eyelids as he slammed into the curb at the base of his hill. His right hand trembling, he opened his eyes and dabbed at the immediate swelling beneath his left eye. It was already puffy and resonated with pain from his cheekbone through his nose. He could feel his eye slowly closing, the swelling pressing the lids together.
He rubbed the back of his head, from where the rock had struck him right at the base of his skull. His hair was matted damply together. Patting at it, he pulled his hand around to where he could see it, staring at the crimson fluid that covered his fingertips.
This time, he did look back over his shoulder. John and Devin were standing side by side laughing riotously. Devin made a fake falling down gesture, and the two laughed even harder, if that were even possible.
Matt just stared at them, his jaw falling slack.
“What are you going to do about it, Faggot?” John shouted, throwing his arms out to his sides.
Slowly closing his eyes, Matt turned and began his trek up the steep hill to his house, hoping that they weren’t going to follow him any further. There was something like this every day, maybe not to this extreme, but the emotional havoc had taken its toll. His whole body seemed to function in slow motion, his breathing slow and deliberate, his mind only capable of normal functioning when he was alone in his room, away from the judgmental stares and taunts.
The laughter faded behind him, but there would always be tomorrow and the day after that…
Glancing to his right, he crossed the snow-blown street at the top of the hill and turned down his culdesac. Large, rounded pines lined the sides of the street, the houses hidden from the road behind them. He walked right down the middle of the road. The majority of the houses on the street were owned by older retirees, a well-rounded mixture of those who spent their springs tending to their immaculate gardens surrounded by electric fences to keep the deer out, and those who peered out from behind barely-drawn drapes, watching the world deteriorate around them. Unfortunately, neither type particularly cared for him, the long-haired representation of the irresponsibility of an undisciplined youth. Sure, he got along with his next door neighbors, his retired pediatrician and a nice young family with two kids in elementary school. But the rest merely stared down their noses at him, shuffling back into their houses and slamming the door, somehow amplifying the sound of the engaging deadbolt to let him know where he stood.
Turning left into his driveway at the end of the circle, he made the first tracks in the pristine snow that had accumulated since they had all left in the morning. His mother taught social studies at the junior high level, his father an engineer for a large computer magnate based out of California. He could remember asking his father what exactly he did for a living, but the technical jargon had twisted his little mind into a knot, and he didn’t want to let on that he didn’t understand. All he knew was his old man seemed to like the job less and less with each passing year. His mother, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy her job most of the time. She was one of those who chose to teach, who felt as though she could make a difference in the lives of those who entered her classroom.
His father, Greg Parker, was a very analytical man. His mind functioned in logical rhythms, taking him from point A to point B to point C, diagramming itself on a small chalkboard in his brain. He was highly driven, and had an overdeveloped sense of accountability, assuming responsibility for everything around him, regardless of whether or not he had any control over the situation at all. A poster boy for a bygone age, he was a short-haired hunter, full- time provider, and preached education as the cure to the ails of society. Dinner was on the table when he came home at night, and then he went straight up to the computer room to check on his stocks.
His mother was more nurturing, more emotional. Like his father, she recalled an older era, tending to the house as though it was her sole mission, but at the same time a modern woman, working full-time trying to exert her influence on the world.
But neither of them were home right now, nor would they be for quite a while.
Flipping up the small plastic cover on the keypad mounted on the side of the garage door, he typed in his four-digit code and the garage opened right up for him. Ducking his head, he slipped under the rising door and crossed the empty garage to the door leading into the house. He stepped up onto the sole step leading into the family room and pressed the button on the opener, closing the door behind him, and stepped into the house.
Striding across the family room, he scaled the stairs and turned into the foyer, taking another right, cruising up the stairs, and into his bedroom to the right. Grabbing a piece of paper from inside the desk in his room, he scrawled a quick note:
Mom-
Studying. Don’t disturb.
-Matt.
Tearing a small piece of tape from the dispenser, he stuck it to the outside of his bedroom door and closed it, locking it from the inside. He tossed his backpack onto the bottom level of his unmade bunk bed. Grabbing onto the rail of the top bunk, he climbed up the side and knelt atop the mattress. Looking at the ceiling, he reached up with both hands and pressed up on the small square opening into the attic, sliding back the small white square of drywall, and ducking his head under the hole. Standing up, he braced his elbows on the wooden rafters and climbed up, sliding the cover back over the hole.
Small lines of light filtered into the dusty attic from the seams around the vents through the roof, allowing him just enough visibility to find the box of matches he kept right next to the entrance. Sliding back the top of the box, he pulled out one of the light-anywhere matches, striking it with the tip of his thumbnail. It flared brightly, and he touched the flame to the wicks of the numerous candles melted into their holders in all four corners of the room. He blew out the match just as the searing heat of the fire hit his fingertips. A small corner of the attic had been unprofessionally finished. This had been his project over the last summer as he had all sorts of time to work with, what with having no friends or a girlfriend and all.
He had dragged the pieces of plywood up there, one at a time, laying them over the ceiling joists. Using old orange- and brown-striped paneling, he paneled the angled ceiling and blocked off a portion of the crawlspace from the rest of the house, making it his own private little room. He had found some foam padding and laid it beneath patchwork remnants of carpet. There was even a small lawn chair in either corner of the room, and a beanbag in the middle. Every available inch of the walls had been covered with posters and pictures cut from magazines of all of his favorite bands, and, of course, the obligatory pictures of bikini-clad women finding some way to get themselves wet. In the center of the room, right next to the bright blue beanbag, was a small stack of hardbound books, tattered strips of paper protruding from a hundred different locations within each tome.
Grabbing the closest candle, he carried it with him as he crawled beneath the low lying ceiling to the beanbag, setting it down right next to him on the white shag carpet and grabbing the book from the top of the stack. He stared down at the cover of the book; the black leather cover embossed in gold with a pentagram over the face of a bull. The corners of the cover were bent back, exposing the cardboard beneath, and the pages were yellowed, reeking of age. The title had faded from the cover and the embossing peeled readily back.
It still had the original press date of 1968 stamped inside the front cover. All of the type was so tiny that he had to strain beside the candlelight to read it. There were old pictures every twenty pages or so, depicting the numerous faces of evil and the acts and rituals involved with those rites. Finding the latest of the numerous bookmarks dangling from the spine, he opened the book and held it close to his face.
It had been a natural progression for him. Even before his life had begun to fall to shambles around him, he hadn’t been completely sold on his parents’ religion. He had far too many questions that no one could seem to answer without justifying it with the word “faith.” He envied those people who could just buy into the whole thing without doubts. The kind of people who stood around their piano as a family at the end of the night singing praise to Jesus, the kind of people who walked the neighborhood caroling every Christmas. The kind of people who always
