"99 dreams I have had / In every one a red balloon.
It's all over, and I'm standin' pretty / In this dust that was a city.
If I could find a souvenir / Just to prove the world was here...
And here is a red balloon / I think of you and let it go."
--99 Red Balloons by Goldfinger
~~Fulton's POV~~
"Ahh! Quit it, you rabid Sumatran rat-monkey!" I yelled as I shoved Portman in the chest, sending him toppling to the floor with an enormous thud. "I told you, my left side's all banged up; you do that again, and I'll bite your nose off!"
He rolled over onto his back, and grinned. "Oooh, I love it when you talk dirty to me. Tell me, Fult, what else would you bite, besides my nose? You know I like it rough."
I sat up on the couch, still rubbing my bruised ribs. "You're drunk."
He looked up at me earnestly, then down at the half-full bottle in his hand. He drained the beer, burped mightily, and with one foot, lazily rolled the empty bottle into the corner of the room, where other such bottles had begun to pile up. "Oh, I've got a long way to go, yet. I wonder if Hall and Conway are having trouble setting up that keg; that's the last of the beer."
As if on cue, Charlie opened the front door and poked his head into the room. "Uh, Portman? The keg's here, but Connie's brothers had to go, and we can't get it up the stairs by ourselves. Can you and Fulton..."
"Have no fear, Portman is here!" he yelled, flipping himself to his feet with a twitch of sleek, well-trained muscles. I shuddered. "Stay here and rest yourself, dear, I'll be right back," he teased, as he ducked out the door.
I lay back on the couch and took a few deep, shaky breaths. Things were unravelling fast, now; I didn't have much time left before I snapped and tried to rape him, or maybe even kill myself. I couldn't keep going like this; it was like I'd swallowed a glassful of acid, like I was being eaten up from the inside out. How did normal people deal with this fucked-up thing called love? Was mine a mutant love, even more so than the sexual deviation factor could account for by itself? Or was this something everybody felt, just part of the broad spectrum of human emotions from which I'd once, foolishly, believed myself chiefly immune?
I was a pretty laid-back guy by nature; my body wasn't used to this kind of internal tug-of-war. For what felt like an eternity, I'd been smothering any hint of sexual desire that arose when I was with Portman. But now, just like during the home stretch of one of my father's beatings, when the pain got so bad I couldn't keep it in any longer, my self-control was waning fast. Portman got all flirty when he was drinking, and even though I knew he didn't mean anything by it, it made things that much harder. When he'd tried to tickle me a few minutes ago, it hadn't been pain that made me push him away, but fear that if he kept touching me any longer, I'd kiss him or get an erection or something else to give myself away.
I looked around for something to distract me from my desperate plight. There wasn't much, unless you counted the voyeuristic thrills of watching a bunch of almost-drunk kids going at it in a variety of places and positions. The music coming from the CD player was some unfortunate ska/reggae meld, and I figured that if I couldn't fix the Portman situation I was in, I could at least do something about the soundtrack of my pathetic life.
The first bedroom I found bore no fruit in the form of CD's, only Connie and Guy sitting side-by-side on the bed, their hands clasped. They looked so much like the lovers you read about in old fairy tales; they were actually gazing into each other's eyes. Now, I'd seen a lot in my seventeen years on Earth, kids in all kinds of compromising positions, but I had never felt so embarrassed as I did right then. I'd walked in on sex before, but never on love. What passed between Connie and Guy that night, I don't know, but from what I saw, love definitely played a role, or at least the beginnings of love, the idea or potential of it. Most of what kids my age believed to be love, I thought was more likely the possibility of love, lying naked and raw and unclaimed by those to whom it was offered, and that it very rarely moved anywhere beyond that.
I tried to extricate myself from the suddenly cramped bedroom without being noticed, but given the size-volume ratio between me and the room, the gesture was futile, and I winced as Connie gasped in surprise, and the two turned toward me.
I smiled uncomfortably, unwilling to let them know how much I'd seen; technically, it had been nothing at all, but we all knew what a crock of shit "technically" could be.
"Sorry... uh, carry on... I was just leaving..." I mumbled awkwardly as I backed out of the room.
"Were you looking for something, Fulton?" Connie asked.
"Uh, no, just your music."
"Try my brothers' room across the hall."
"Right."
After securing a couple bad-ass bootlegs by the likes of Pennywise and Agnostic Front for auditory purposes, I returned to my seat on the living room couch just in time to see Jesse come tearing into the apartment, waving a bottle above his head in one hand, clutching a couple limes with the other.
"TEQUILA!!" he shouted, shaking his ass to the music. "Who wants tequila?"
From the kitchen, I heard a girl yell, "Tequila time! Get the salt, May!" Tammy Duncan stuck her head out the kitchen doorway, her face flushed. "It's about time, Jesse! Get in here now, and I'll give you the first shot." She giggled as she raised her shirt to expose smooth skin and a bellybutton ring with a butterfly pendant.
Jesse grinned, and followed her back into the kitchen. I turned the music up to drown out the noises they made, and when Averman came up to me with a shot of raw tequila, I drank it eagerly, and didn't turn down the subsequent two he offered, either.
"Looks like we're the only two who've yet to hook up with someone tonight, with the exception of Captain Chastity back there," he joked.
"Yeah."
"You were fucking awesome tonight, you know? You and Portman make a hell of a team. You should--"
But something in my expression stopped him from further postulating on what Portman and I should do. Instead, he coughed, and tried to change the subject.
"Hey, remember the Warped Tour a couple summers ago? I never thanked you for helping me out back there; I thought those guys were going to kill me. Remember how--"
"Don't mention it," I muttered, hoping the kid wouldn't launch into another long anecdote; I wasn't in the mood. I'd never had a drink before in my life, and I had to keep blinking to keep my vision from going blurry.
"...so I guess I'm going to keep getting in shit until I can learn to keep my goddamned mouth shut, huh?"
"Yeah, I know the feeling," I muttered, rubbing my eyes with the balls of my hands until black stars danced before my eyes.
"Really?" Averman asked, incredulity clear in his voice. "Forgive me for finding that a bit hard to believe."
I opened my mouth to say something in return, when someone grabbed me from behind, and I gasped, leaping about a foot into the air, and spinning around to face my attacker.
I met only Portman's smiling face. "Shit, Fult, have a heart attack, why don't ya?"
I only stared at him, my heart pounding in my chest like a kettle drum.
"Uh, I think I'll go see what Karp's up to," Averman muttered after a moment, and took off.
Portman sat down beside me on the couch. "Sorry I took so long; I ran into this chick I used to... know."
"Oh yeah? Jesse have more than one sister out there?"
"I told you, I didn't know she was his sister until afterwards! And no, she's nobody's sister. Do you think he's still mad about that?"
I shrugged. "I doubt it; not if things with Tammy pan out, anyway. If they don't, look out, you may have a fight on your hands."
Portman rolled his eyes. "Great. I hate it when that happens. It's so hard not to hurt them."
"By "them," you're referring to..."
"You know... small people."
"Ah. I see."
"And scrappy ones like Jesse are especially tricky; they don't go down easily... hey! What is this shit? How Can Hell Be Any Worse?"
"Yeah, pretty sweet, huh? Belongs to one of Connie's brothers."
"If we took it, do you think he'd notice?"
"Yes."
And then he kissed me.
And then I died. For one long, beautiful moment.
When I opened my eyes again, he was still there, his face inches from mine, his eyes wide and questioning, teeth gnawing on his lower lip. I thought I read shock in those eyes, and disbelief. The pain was worse than any I'd ever known.
So this was how it ended. How ironic. A wonderful, magical kiss to bring everything crashing down about my ears. Wasn't that supposed to be the happy ending? Here I stood, atop my mountain of misery; I could see the shattered remains of my life lying spread out before me, and I found myself almost relieved that the end had come.
I looked at Portman. Would he yell, or hit me, or just tell me to get lost and never come near him again? I could feel my insides shrivelling up like so many stale mushrooms. Poisonous ones. Deadly ones. I waited for the worst, but when it came, I was completely unprepared.
"I love you."
'There's a fine line between heaven and hell,' was a saying I'd heard before, but at that moment, the true meaning of those words exploded in my mind in a white-hot ball of flames. I felt annihilated, like someone had scooped out my soul with a melon-baller.
Heaven or hell? Heaven or hell? Heaven or hell?
Hell. It wasn't real. He didn't mean it. He was drunk, and I was drunk, and now I wasn't even sure if he'd kissed me at all. Maybe I'd imagined it. Wouldn't be the first time.
And his proclamation of love? The result of the night's adrenaline, combined with alcohol and the nostalgia of running into an old girlfriend. Nothing more. And that's why it hurt so much. Knowing how I felt, how much I did love him, made hearing him say the same thing practically unbearable. It was impossible that he felt as I did; he was just fucking with me, in innocence or malice, it didn't matter. I couldn't stay here any more.
I jumped up and ran for the door, but Portman caught me by the shoulders and spun me around. He yelled something, I couldn't hear what, and then I hit him in the face as hard as I could. He went down, and I went out the door, and into the needle-sharp night.
I stopped by my place long enough to pick up a bottle of rum. I drank it all in the alley behind my house, and that worked pretty well, until I threw up all of my stomach contents, and my head began to clear again. Knowing as well as I did the dangers of a clear head, I wiped the puke from my mouth, and headed back home in search of a slightly more permanent solution.
My mother was out of everything useful, so I went down the street a bit till I got to an apartment complex in measurably better repair than my own, which still wasn't saying much. I knocked on the door of apartment 306. A fat guy answered.
"Jamal."
He looked at me, grunted, and called something over his shoulder. Jamal appeared, an obviously underage girl in one arm. She was only half- conscious, and he had to support her so she didn't fall down.
"Hey there, Fulton. Haven't seen you in awhile. Your mom was here today, bought a bunch of crank. Let me guess, she needs some Thorazine to calm her down?" He leaned the wasted girl against me, and disappeared into a room. He came back with a vial of clear liquid. "This what you after?"
"I'll take it, now that you mention it, but..."
He grinned. "But you wanted a little Scooby snack for yourself. Say no more. A couple grams of the same?"
"Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of a little white horse."
Jamal raised an eyebrow, but didn't say anything. "You got it, kid."
I paid him, and he gave me the vial, a syringe, and a tiny red balloon.
"As 99 red balloons go by..." I sang to myself as I walked along, fingering the balloon, the jet plane I'd be leaving on soon. Maybe I should write my own songs; that rhymed. Songs about break-ups, songs about boys, and love... I'd be better off sticking to things I understood. Pain. Drugs. Death. That was what it was all about. Ask Bad Religion.
I went back home, crawling in through the window this time, since I could hear noises coming from inside. Now would not be the time to run into my father; in the state I was in, I'd just as likely slit his throat as look at him. In my bedroom, I got the baggie out of its box, and, after a brief flash of deja-vu, started cooking up a hit. If I could just hold off feeling a little longer, it wouldn't matter any more...
'And what about when you wake up?' It was that fucking voice again, come back to haunt me.
"Shut up," I told the voice forcefully. I wasn't up for a lecture tonight. My life was over, and all I wanted was to rest in peace. It had never been much of a life, anyway, and now there was nothing left to recommend it.
Needle to spoon, needle to skin, poison to blood. Then sigh no more.
Heroin is fun.
Portman who?
I want to die.
***
When I woke up the next morning, he was sitting on the corner of my bed. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his nose was purple and swollen from where I'd hit him. He looked awful, but he was smiling.
"You didn't really think I'd let you get away that easy, did you?"
*Okay, no notes this time, I'm afraid, but thank you to all my reviewers. This chapter is much shorter than average, but it's all I had time for today. I didn't plan on writing, but I had an hour-long break before my Insect Biology lab. I started writing this, and wrote all the way through my lab. Now I'm tired and hungry, with a Genetics midterm tomorrow I haven't studied for yet. This is a first, in that I wrote this chapter as I typed it, instead of in longhand. I'm posting straight away, as well; I always give it at least a day or two to stew, but I like how this thing came out, and I'm pretty sure there are no major changes that need to be made. It's been such a long time since I really wrote anything, at least a month or two, and the process was pretty cathartic. Anyway, sorry it's short and that I have no time for notes, but I guess it's better than nothing. I'll be back as soon as I can; leaving it like this for long would be evil, but I do have a bunch of midterms coming my way in the next couple weeks, so all the more reason to post this now, I figured. Let me know what you think.*
It's all over, and I'm standin' pretty / In this dust that was a city.
If I could find a souvenir / Just to prove the world was here...
And here is a red balloon / I think of you and let it go."
--99 Red Balloons by Goldfinger
~~Fulton's POV~~
"Ahh! Quit it, you rabid Sumatran rat-monkey!" I yelled as I shoved Portman in the chest, sending him toppling to the floor with an enormous thud. "I told you, my left side's all banged up; you do that again, and I'll bite your nose off!"
He rolled over onto his back, and grinned. "Oooh, I love it when you talk dirty to me. Tell me, Fult, what else would you bite, besides my nose? You know I like it rough."
I sat up on the couch, still rubbing my bruised ribs. "You're drunk."
He looked up at me earnestly, then down at the half-full bottle in his hand. He drained the beer, burped mightily, and with one foot, lazily rolled the empty bottle into the corner of the room, where other such bottles had begun to pile up. "Oh, I've got a long way to go, yet. I wonder if Hall and Conway are having trouble setting up that keg; that's the last of the beer."
As if on cue, Charlie opened the front door and poked his head into the room. "Uh, Portman? The keg's here, but Connie's brothers had to go, and we can't get it up the stairs by ourselves. Can you and Fulton..."
"Have no fear, Portman is here!" he yelled, flipping himself to his feet with a twitch of sleek, well-trained muscles. I shuddered. "Stay here and rest yourself, dear, I'll be right back," he teased, as he ducked out the door.
I lay back on the couch and took a few deep, shaky breaths. Things were unravelling fast, now; I didn't have much time left before I snapped and tried to rape him, or maybe even kill myself. I couldn't keep going like this; it was like I'd swallowed a glassful of acid, like I was being eaten up from the inside out. How did normal people deal with this fucked-up thing called love? Was mine a mutant love, even more so than the sexual deviation factor could account for by itself? Or was this something everybody felt, just part of the broad spectrum of human emotions from which I'd once, foolishly, believed myself chiefly immune?
I was a pretty laid-back guy by nature; my body wasn't used to this kind of internal tug-of-war. For what felt like an eternity, I'd been smothering any hint of sexual desire that arose when I was with Portman. But now, just like during the home stretch of one of my father's beatings, when the pain got so bad I couldn't keep it in any longer, my self-control was waning fast. Portman got all flirty when he was drinking, and even though I knew he didn't mean anything by it, it made things that much harder. When he'd tried to tickle me a few minutes ago, it hadn't been pain that made me push him away, but fear that if he kept touching me any longer, I'd kiss him or get an erection or something else to give myself away.
I looked around for something to distract me from my desperate plight. There wasn't much, unless you counted the voyeuristic thrills of watching a bunch of almost-drunk kids going at it in a variety of places and positions. The music coming from the CD player was some unfortunate ska/reggae meld, and I figured that if I couldn't fix the Portman situation I was in, I could at least do something about the soundtrack of my pathetic life.
The first bedroom I found bore no fruit in the form of CD's, only Connie and Guy sitting side-by-side on the bed, their hands clasped. They looked so much like the lovers you read about in old fairy tales; they were actually gazing into each other's eyes. Now, I'd seen a lot in my seventeen years on Earth, kids in all kinds of compromising positions, but I had never felt so embarrassed as I did right then. I'd walked in on sex before, but never on love. What passed between Connie and Guy that night, I don't know, but from what I saw, love definitely played a role, or at least the beginnings of love, the idea or potential of it. Most of what kids my age believed to be love, I thought was more likely the possibility of love, lying naked and raw and unclaimed by those to whom it was offered, and that it very rarely moved anywhere beyond that.
I tried to extricate myself from the suddenly cramped bedroom without being noticed, but given the size-volume ratio between me and the room, the gesture was futile, and I winced as Connie gasped in surprise, and the two turned toward me.
I smiled uncomfortably, unwilling to let them know how much I'd seen; technically, it had been nothing at all, but we all knew what a crock of shit "technically" could be.
"Sorry... uh, carry on... I was just leaving..." I mumbled awkwardly as I backed out of the room.
"Were you looking for something, Fulton?" Connie asked.
"Uh, no, just your music."
"Try my brothers' room across the hall."
"Right."
After securing a couple bad-ass bootlegs by the likes of Pennywise and Agnostic Front for auditory purposes, I returned to my seat on the living room couch just in time to see Jesse come tearing into the apartment, waving a bottle above his head in one hand, clutching a couple limes with the other.
"TEQUILA!!" he shouted, shaking his ass to the music. "Who wants tequila?"
From the kitchen, I heard a girl yell, "Tequila time! Get the salt, May!" Tammy Duncan stuck her head out the kitchen doorway, her face flushed. "It's about time, Jesse! Get in here now, and I'll give you the first shot." She giggled as she raised her shirt to expose smooth skin and a bellybutton ring with a butterfly pendant.
Jesse grinned, and followed her back into the kitchen. I turned the music up to drown out the noises they made, and when Averman came up to me with a shot of raw tequila, I drank it eagerly, and didn't turn down the subsequent two he offered, either.
"Looks like we're the only two who've yet to hook up with someone tonight, with the exception of Captain Chastity back there," he joked.
"Yeah."
"You were fucking awesome tonight, you know? You and Portman make a hell of a team. You should--"
But something in my expression stopped him from further postulating on what Portman and I should do. Instead, he coughed, and tried to change the subject.
"Hey, remember the Warped Tour a couple summers ago? I never thanked you for helping me out back there; I thought those guys were going to kill me. Remember how--"
"Don't mention it," I muttered, hoping the kid wouldn't launch into another long anecdote; I wasn't in the mood. I'd never had a drink before in my life, and I had to keep blinking to keep my vision from going blurry.
"...so I guess I'm going to keep getting in shit until I can learn to keep my goddamned mouth shut, huh?"
"Yeah, I know the feeling," I muttered, rubbing my eyes with the balls of my hands until black stars danced before my eyes.
"Really?" Averman asked, incredulity clear in his voice. "Forgive me for finding that a bit hard to believe."
I opened my mouth to say something in return, when someone grabbed me from behind, and I gasped, leaping about a foot into the air, and spinning around to face my attacker.
I met only Portman's smiling face. "Shit, Fult, have a heart attack, why don't ya?"
I only stared at him, my heart pounding in my chest like a kettle drum.
"Uh, I think I'll go see what Karp's up to," Averman muttered after a moment, and took off.
Portman sat down beside me on the couch. "Sorry I took so long; I ran into this chick I used to... know."
"Oh yeah? Jesse have more than one sister out there?"
"I told you, I didn't know she was his sister until afterwards! And no, she's nobody's sister. Do you think he's still mad about that?"
I shrugged. "I doubt it; not if things with Tammy pan out, anyway. If they don't, look out, you may have a fight on your hands."
Portman rolled his eyes. "Great. I hate it when that happens. It's so hard not to hurt them."
"By "them," you're referring to..."
"You know... small people."
"Ah. I see."
"And scrappy ones like Jesse are especially tricky; they don't go down easily... hey! What is this shit? How Can Hell Be Any Worse?"
"Yeah, pretty sweet, huh? Belongs to one of Connie's brothers."
"If we took it, do you think he'd notice?"
"Yes."
And then he kissed me.
And then I died. For one long, beautiful moment.
When I opened my eyes again, he was still there, his face inches from mine, his eyes wide and questioning, teeth gnawing on his lower lip. I thought I read shock in those eyes, and disbelief. The pain was worse than any I'd ever known.
So this was how it ended. How ironic. A wonderful, magical kiss to bring everything crashing down about my ears. Wasn't that supposed to be the happy ending? Here I stood, atop my mountain of misery; I could see the shattered remains of my life lying spread out before me, and I found myself almost relieved that the end had come.
I looked at Portman. Would he yell, or hit me, or just tell me to get lost and never come near him again? I could feel my insides shrivelling up like so many stale mushrooms. Poisonous ones. Deadly ones. I waited for the worst, but when it came, I was completely unprepared.
"I love you."
'There's a fine line between heaven and hell,' was a saying I'd heard before, but at that moment, the true meaning of those words exploded in my mind in a white-hot ball of flames. I felt annihilated, like someone had scooped out my soul with a melon-baller.
Heaven or hell? Heaven or hell? Heaven or hell?
Hell. It wasn't real. He didn't mean it. He was drunk, and I was drunk, and now I wasn't even sure if he'd kissed me at all. Maybe I'd imagined it. Wouldn't be the first time.
And his proclamation of love? The result of the night's adrenaline, combined with alcohol and the nostalgia of running into an old girlfriend. Nothing more. And that's why it hurt so much. Knowing how I felt, how much I did love him, made hearing him say the same thing practically unbearable. It was impossible that he felt as I did; he was just fucking with me, in innocence or malice, it didn't matter. I couldn't stay here any more.
I jumped up and ran for the door, but Portman caught me by the shoulders and spun me around. He yelled something, I couldn't hear what, and then I hit him in the face as hard as I could. He went down, and I went out the door, and into the needle-sharp night.
I stopped by my place long enough to pick up a bottle of rum. I drank it all in the alley behind my house, and that worked pretty well, until I threw up all of my stomach contents, and my head began to clear again. Knowing as well as I did the dangers of a clear head, I wiped the puke from my mouth, and headed back home in search of a slightly more permanent solution.
My mother was out of everything useful, so I went down the street a bit till I got to an apartment complex in measurably better repair than my own, which still wasn't saying much. I knocked on the door of apartment 306. A fat guy answered.
"Jamal."
He looked at me, grunted, and called something over his shoulder. Jamal appeared, an obviously underage girl in one arm. She was only half- conscious, and he had to support her so she didn't fall down.
"Hey there, Fulton. Haven't seen you in awhile. Your mom was here today, bought a bunch of crank. Let me guess, she needs some Thorazine to calm her down?" He leaned the wasted girl against me, and disappeared into a room. He came back with a vial of clear liquid. "This what you after?"
"I'll take it, now that you mention it, but..."
He grinned. "But you wanted a little Scooby snack for yourself. Say no more. A couple grams of the same?"
"Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of a little white horse."
Jamal raised an eyebrow, but didn't say anything. "You got it, kid."
I paid him, and he gave me the vial, a syringe, and a tiny red balloon.
"As 99 red balloons go by..." I sang to myself as I walked along, fingering the balloon, the jet plane I'd be leaving on soon. Maybe I should write my own songs; that rhymed. Songs about break-ups, songs about boys, and love... I'd be better off sticking to things I understood. Pain. Drugs. Death. That was what it was all about. Ask Bad Religion.
I went back home, crawling in through the window this time, since I could hear noises coming from inside. Now would not be the time to run into my father; in the state I was in, I'd just as likely slit his throat as look at him. In my bedroom, I got the baggie out of its box, and, after a brief flash of deja-vu, started cooking up a hit. If I could just hold off feeling a little longer, it wouldn't matter any more...
'And what about when you wake up?' It was that fucking voice again, come back to haunt me.
"Shut up," I told the voice forcefully. I wasn't up for a lecture tonight. My life was over, and all I wanted was to rest in peace. It had never been much of a life, anyway, and now there was nothing left to recommend it.
Needle to spoon, needle to skin, poison to blood. Then sigh no more.
Heroin is fun.
Portman who?
I want to die.
***
When I woke up the next morning, he was sitting on the corner of my bed. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his nose was purple and swollen from where I'd hit him. He looked awful, but he was smiling.
"You didn't really think I'd let you get away that easy, did you?"
*Okay, no notes this time, I'm afraid, but thank you to all my reviewers. This chapter is much shorter than average, but it's all I had time for today. I didn't plan on writing, but I had an hour-long break before my Insect Biology lab. I started writing this, and wrote all the way through my lab. Now I'm tired and hungry, with a Genetics midterm tomorrow I haven't studied for yet. This is a first, in that I wrote this chapter as I typed it, instead of in longhand. I'm posting straight away, as well; I always give it at least a day or two to stew, but I like how this thing came out, and I'm pretty sure there are no major changes that need to be made. It's been such a long time since I really wrote anything, at least a month or two, and the process was pretty cathartic. Anyway, sorry it's short and that I have no time for notes, but I guess it's better than nothing. I'll be back as soon as I can; leaving it like this for long would be evil, but I do have a bunch of midterms coming my way in the next couple weeks, so all the more reason to post this now, I figured. Let me know what you think.*