Chapter Five: Chris Taub
Disclaimer: I don't own House, M.D. or the song "The Kids Aren't Alright."
Warnings: Swearing, self-harm, possibly triggering
The oak door slammed shut. The brass lock on the handle clicked. The squeaky faucet turned over, and hot water shot out of the shower head, pounding the ceramic wall it faced. Clothes were roughly yanked over the head and off the legs and slapped onto the tile floor. The pale, stocky body clambered ungracefully into the tub and landed underneath the blistering stream, deciding to stay there.
He hadn't really needed a shower, but Chris Taub had needed to get the fuck away from his parents' vicious fighting. Over the screaming and yelling, his tearless sobs protected him from the heartache that existed outside of his shower. The louder he sobbed and gasped, the quieter his nit-picky mother and laidback father seemed. It was a dance he was introduced to young; it was a game that he would always lose when he had to stop crying and face the reality that his parents hated each other.
Per the usual, he had forgotten how long he'd been on the bath mat covering the white floor of his shower. Maybe it had been ten minutes, maybe it had been ten hours. It was hard to tell, but he sobbed on, for it was his fault his parents were angry with each other. It always was.
Some time later, he had cried himself out. His chest wracked with silent whimpers, but the loss of the constant, steady song of his sobs opened the door that protected him from the sadness that would've plagued him if he stepped out of the shower. In a desperate attempt to drown out the arguing again, the young boy bashed his head on the wall behind him. It worked. Thud. Again. Thud. Again. Thud. In careful rhythm, Chris banged his eight-year-old cranium on the wall over and over again. Not only did it silence his parents, but maybe it would knock him unconscious. He laughed darkly at the idea.
But eventually, all good things must come to an end. His skin resembled an elderly prune and he was hungry and exhausted. Sighing, he rose from his sitting position and turned off the water, which had been running cold for some time now. As the faucet screeched its way to the right, he was met with something peculiar. Silence.
The quiet was peaceful, but almost immediately, something crushingly heavy fell upon his strong shoulders and saddened heart. That same depressed heart sped up in his chest, thumping upon itself how his head thumped upon his shower wall. Anxiously, he dried off his wrinkled skin and slicked-back hair, reaching back just once to touch the spot at the base of his skull he'd abused. Sore to the touch, but somehow satisfying to know he had caused it. With a new sense of calmness instilled in him, he wrapped the fluffy, brown towel around his body and opened the door to the rest of the house.
And then, he wished he hadn't.
His mother sat across the hall, face steady, eyes closed. Silence.
"Where's Dad?" the child asked, afraid of the answer.
From the painstaking way she completed the simple task, it seemed as if his mother's eyelids had weighed a hundred pounds. When her eyes finally popped out, the dark, deep brown was overshadowed by the redness of the normally white sclera. Chris' breathing accelerated slightly, wondering if his mother was crying or drunk. Knowing her, both options meant equally bad fates for the child present. If she was drunk, there was no doubt he'd be screamed at viciously. Her foul, alcohol-scented breath would assault his nose, her bitter words would drip off of her tongue like acid. If she was crying, she wouldn't stop for days. She'd bawl and sob without end, rendering her incapable of taking care of Chris. Instead, he'd be making sure she showered and ate.
No emotion. No tears dripping down her face, only a slight, sweet alcohol breath. Drunk, but no screaming when she finally replied, "I don't know, probably fucking his girlfriend."
"What does that mean?" the wide-eyed child asked, unsure of what the term "fucking" meant when used as a verb.
"That we're getting a divorce."
[Line Break]
It had been six years since that fateful conversation in the hallway of the Taub home. The young, confused boy from then had grown into a bitter teenager. The stoic mother hadn't yet moved on from the disloyalty of her ex-husband. The freed father had remarried and had a little girl, Farrah, with his new wife.
Like any product of divorced parents, Chris rotated, week-by-week, between his parents' homes. At least while at his mom's, living in the house seemed natural. At his father's, he felt like the black sheep in a new family.
School felt no better. Nobody else had divorced parents - their families, what with all their problems, refused to separate due to religion and morals. There was simply nobody to talk to about the despair, the loneliness, and the misunderstanding he felt on a daily basis. As for the children of happily married parents, hearing them talk about family vacations and both parents coming to their sporting events killed him. Every time he overheard a classmate going on about their happy home lives, he desperately wished he could jump straight back into his shower to sob the pain away, but that was never an option. While at school, there was no way out.
His tortured soul made him torture his body.
It had started out with a rubber band constantly around his wrist. Nothing big. A tall, blonde girl would giggle all during class about how her mother and father must have conceived the new baby that was on the way. He snapped the band and felt less jealous. An annoyed boy would complain to his friends about how much of a baby his little sister was because she still slept with both of his parents. He snapped the band and felt less inclined to lunge out and punch the boy.
"At least your parents still sleep in the same bed," Chris thought bitterly to himself, then added, "shit, they didn't even do that when they were married."
The rubber band took away the emotional pain for as long as the sting of the snap lasted.
As they grew older and into curious junior high schoolers, kids would ask him questions like "which house do you like better?" and "whose side were you on?"
Chris would always tell them he had never picked a side because he didn't think it was fair. Bored with his answer, the other young teenagers would leave him alone with the question. By avoiding answering them, Chris had to answer all of their probing questions to himself.
Some days, that was just too much.
He'd just started shaving the stubble off his neck and face and realized that a nick from the razor stung similarly to his trusted rubber band.
So, one day in January, when a kid at lunch bravely asked him how it felt when he found out there was going to be a divorce, he looked at the nosy boy with hard eyes and gave his response.
"Like getting thumped in the back of the head a thousand times, then getting one hard, resounding blow that would knock you down and leave you there."
Shocking the other boy and himself with his answer, Chris took off down the hall to get away, snapping his rubber band the whole time. It just wasn't working today, though, and nothing was able to take his mind off of what he had just said. Now, rumors would start and kids would talk and he'd be an even bigger outcast than before. The pace of his breathing picked up and he could feel an anxiety attack setting in as he furiously, violently popped the rubber band against his wrist but found no relief. A very familiar shaking began and he knew if he didn't get himself under control soon, a teacher or student would come down the row of lockers and find him on the floor.
Through his clouded and muddy thoughts, something called to him. Maybe it was the devil, maybe it was an angel, but something called his name. It wanted to help.
He first heard his name as a whisper, so faint it must have come from a very delicate, sweet creature. As he picked his head up, it got louder and clearer and it lured him back to his locker. Inside the blue metal encasing rested his overnight bag to take as he transitioned from his mother's to his father's that night, and inside the green backpack rested his shaving razor.
The voice that seemed to be emanating off his razor begged him to pick it up. He did so, and slid it in his hoodie's pocket.
Without another thought, he slammed his locker door shut and bolted towards the boy's bathroom, locking himself in a stall and yanking down his pants to expose the creamy, pale flesh of his thigh. He popped off the plastic cover to see the fresh blade.
"One touch, one gentle, delicate touch of my cold metal to your unmarked thigh will make it all okay," he imagined the razor telling him, but that was all he needed.
He positioned the razor at a sideways angle and dragged it from his hip down to mid-thigh, allowing himself to feel his skin rip and blood burst out. When he lifted the razor, his head slumped back and he let out a breath he didn't know he had been holding.
Hurting himself was so much less painful than being hurt by others.
[Line Break]
"Hi, Chris. It's nice to meet you. I'm Dr. Olesen. Today, we're just going to build up a little background information."
Chris Taub was more than unhappy that his mother had sent him to a psychiatrist to "talk out his issues." Oh, he was straight pissed that he was here. He was sixteen years old, and the last thing he wanted was to have to talk about feelings with some strange man he'd never met.
You see, he wasn't here because his mother cared that he was still upset about the divorce. He wasn't here because she discovered he was cutting himself. No, he was here because he was just as much of a piece of shit as his father. He had cheated on his first girlfriend.
Rationalizations didn't convince his mother. No matter how many times he tried to tell her, Chris just couldn't get her to believe that he didn't mean to do it. He hadn't wanted to cheat on her, but another girl just came by and swept him away for a night.
He'd known it was wrong, he just didn't think his girlfriend would find out. It was only going to be a one-time deal, never to happen again. With this thought in his mind, he took his new girl back to his mother's house, where his mom should have been sleeping. They snuck into the cool basement of the house and snuggled together on the couch. Within moments, talking bored the two hormonal teenagers and Chris' tongue landed in the girl's mouth; his hands roamed her back down to her butt. She was just as into it as him and wrapped her tan arms around his neck, leaning in deeper to the kiss.
Suddenly, a light flipped on and Chris no longer was afraid of his girlfriend finding him out. His mother already had realized this dark-haired girl was certainly not the strawberry blonde who had been over for dinner several times.
Snarkily, she looked at her son's surprised face and asked, "oh, so you and Jasmine must have broken up, correct?"
Going from awkward due to the intrusion to infuriated by the information, the girl looked at Chris and quickly removed herself from the couch. "You have a girlfriend? And you invited me here?" she questioned him angrily.
"Well, yeah, but, it wasn't gonna happen again. And she wasn't gonna know," the teenage boy sputtered out.
"Oh, so that makes it perfectly okay! I'm going home," she tossed bitterly back at him, picking up her pink jacket and stomping out of the home.
As she left his basement, Chris glared at his mother. His mother stared back at him, eyes full of disappointment that her son had turned out to be a dirty cheater and liar, just like his father.
"Obviously, this unfaithfulness is an issue that runs in the Taub blood. You're going to visit a psychiatrist, maybe they can do you some good," his mother told him.
Events leading up to sitting in this stupid, plain office having played through his mind, he looked back at the man, apparently Dr. Olesen.
With an unwavering smile, Dr. Olesen looked at the silent teenager sitting in front of him and reassured the boy. "Don't worry, I understand that having to come into an environment where you have to talk about yourself feels... different. I'm just here to talk to you and to make sure you feel safe and comfortable."
Chris nodded curtly back at the psychiatrist. "Why do you think I'm here?"
"I think you're here because you need to talk."
"I think I'm here because my mother called you to resolve my 'cheating issues.'"
"I think you're here because you want to talk about what made that happen."
At a stalemate, Chris observed the doctor. He was seated in a padded chair with his legs crossed, notebook resting on his lap, end of a ballpoint pen in his mouth.
Annoyed, Chris asked plainly, "seriously, what do you want to know? I'm ready to leave."
"I want to know what you want to talk about," he replied calmly, ignoring the second, rude part of the boy's question.
"Why would I want to talk about anything serious with a stranger?"
"For some people, it's easier to talk with a stranger than a close friend or family member. Have you ever tried to speak seriously with someone you were close to?"
Chris thought about his attempted conversation with his father at different times. After the divorce, when his new half-sister had been born, and when he'd picked up the cutting habit were the three times he'd tried to have a serious talk with his father. The man was just too carefree and goofy, though, to have a real conversation with. Afraid he'd lose it on the prying therapist and without a blade, he snapped his rubber band against his wrist as he popped out a "nope."
"You hesitated. You're lying. Tell me about it."
"No."
"Why not?"
"It's irrelevant."
"Nothing is irrelevant. In a similar way, everything is relevant."
"What an arrogant and annoying jackass," Chris thought to himself, preferring to stay quiet than respond to the man in front of him. Clearly, he'd only wanted to run circles around Chris' brain.
Dr. Olesen, drawn to the badly-hidden pent-up emotion in the teenager, quietly thought of what to say next. Out of sheer curiosity and to serve his own agenda to see how his new patient would respond, he inquired, "so, when did you start hurting yourself?"
Chris' neck cracked like a bullet as his head shot up, glaring into Dr. Olesen's eyes. "I don't," he challenged.
"Then why do you have that rubber band around your wrist?"
He pulled the band off his wrist and stretched it back. Then, he let it fly, nearly hitting Dr. Olesen's forehead but settling for letting it whiz slightly above his head, making him flinch.
"So I could do that," he replied sarcastically.
Not tripped up by his actions, Dr. Olesen continued his attempts at speaking with Chris. "You know, I'm not here to bully you. I didn't even ask that question because I wanted to know the answer. I already know. What I didn't know, and was trying to find out, was how you'd react," he told his young patient. When Chris just glared back at him, he continued.
"I know you're a self-harmer. I knew as soon as you trudged into this office and I saw that rubber band around your wrist. You only confirmed my suspicions by snapping it when I first started to put you under the tiniest amount of stress. By these observations, I can infer that when put under greater stress, you depend on your cutting or burning habit, whichever suits your fancy, to get you through it. Now that we've cleared that up, what's putting you under so much stress?" he finally finished.
Shocked by the psychiatrist's very clear understanding of how he was able to function, Chris' mouth hung slightly agape, exposing his pink tongue and white teeth. He shook his head and let down his guard slightly. "How did you know all that?"
"Years in the business. Also, I just told you. So, seriously, what's bugging you?"
A little unprofessional, Chris had thought, but he opened up slightly. "I don't know, my mom, my dad?
"How so? Putting too much stress on you to make stellar grades, fighting around you?"
Chris re-thought his previous answer. "Well, not really my dad. Mainly my mom, but it's not her fault. They're divorced. She's still all broken up about it, eight years later."
"And so are you, huh?"
"I guess."
"Earlier when I'd wondered if you'd ever talked to anyone about anything, you've tried to, haven't you? And it just didn't go the right direction?"
"You're right about that."
"How does that make you feel?" Dr. Olesen asked, finally giving an open-ended question to the adolescent.
"Think about something like that third grade science experiment where the teacher would fill a bottle with water and take your class to the school kitchen. Then, she'd put it in the freezer and tell you to guess what would happen when your class went back the next day. Do you have that in your head?"
Dr. Olesen pictured the scene, then responded, "yes, I do."
"When the class of kids comes back the next day and opens the freezer, I'm the bottle."
A/N: Was feeling a little angsty over my parent's own recent divorce and their will to continue fighting even after the separation, and out popped this. Hope you enjoyed, please review! Your comments make me smile so much.