Disclaimer: RENT and its characters, places, etc. are the creations of Jonathan Larson, the late, great son of Mother Earth. I'm just borrowing them and mean him every respect. Also I have no claim to Civil Disobedience or I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, though the latter is a very good read.

MARK

When my grandfather started dying--or perhaps not started. He was sick for a long, long time. All my life, he had cancer. But when his illness reached the point of no return, when I began to tremble around him with the knowledge that this might be our last moment together, I started to lose balance. That's literal. I would stumble, drop things, lose my footing almost constantly. This was because of a dizzy, spinning sensation surrounding me. It was a constant nausea, like being wrapped up in a tornado, turned and turned…

During that period I lost a lot of weight and my grades dropped because I was having trouble reading. Another model report card:

"The math… I understand that, Marcus. I expect that. But English? You have a C in English? What the hell are you scribbling in those notebooks all the time that earns you a C in English?"

The notebooks were my anchor, my escape, but more and more the reality of what I was doing had started to hit, and writing left me with a piercing headache. "I don't know… the words keep blurring." We went to the optometrist, who declared my eyes perfectly sound. My dad accused me of lying to him and grounded me until my grades rose.

After a while, though, there was one place he had to allow me to visit: the hospital. Mark Cohen, Sr., was beginning to die, and the family would visit him, Cindy with a magazine to read, Mom usually just hugging Dad's shoulders, and me, wishing this didn't have to be the last moment. As much as those minutes hurt me, I wished I could prolong them, keep them for eternity to keep my grandfather alive.

That was when I bought the camera, started filming, vision returned, grades rose… and when Mark Cohen, Sr., did die, I ended up in Roger's room, unable to face my family and the knowledge that I was in very little pain because I had detached myself. My tears were so… so fucking selfish…

The tornado had gone shortly after I bought my camera, but it returned in junior year, beginning at lunch one day when Collins and I were holed up in our usual spot, on the stairs to the mathematics classrooms. The vending machines were near the foot of the stairs; Roger approached without noticing us, bought something (I've no idea what) unhealthy enough to shred his gullet, and turned.

I called to him: "Hey, Rog!"

When he turned, I was waving furiously. He gave a little toss of his head that might have meant acknowledgement, raised his hand in an almost-wave, and turned to go. I sank, retreated into myself. Suddenly the bite of sandwich in my mouth tasted like lead. I packed up my lunch.

"Mark, he's mad at me," Collins said. "It's not you."

I shrugged. There are plenty of moments in which I have failed Roger, as a friend. Plenty of times I should have been there, but wasn't.

"I offended him," Collins explained. "He's sulking, he'll get over it."

By the time we arrived in the library, Roger had grabbed a stack of biographies and disappeared into the 921s to shelve them. Our library group had four students, the fourth a shy boy named Jeremy who had yet to speak a word to any of us. That day he was absent. "You do the circulation desk, okay, Mark? You know how to do that?"

I nodded. "It's pretty straightforward," I said.

And by coincidence, just as Collins was returning to take another stack of books to shelve, Roger stalked past us, his head down, his left hand curled loosely. Anyone else might have thought this a vicious gesture, but I knew better. "Roger--" I called his name, and that was all. Just his name, and the word died fighting in my throat. He glanced at me. All I could muster for his sake was one pleading, pathetic expression.

Roger shook his head and left.

"He's just going to the bathroom, probably to smoke," Collins said.

"You don't know!" I snapped. I don't snap often, and Collins, rather than take offense, raised his eyebrows, questioning. "You don't," I repeated, softly, shaking my head. Roger wasn't going to smoke; if he did light up, the cigarette would never touch his lips. He would press the burning end against his arm. He promised he would try to stop. He did promise me that. "It's…" I licked my lips, then shook my head again. Why bother? I couldn't very well tell him. I don't tell other people's secrets.

He just shrugged and walked off, back to shelve a bunch of 329s from a class doing reports on violence and drugs. Watching him walk away, I sighed and covered my face with my hands. I hated having anyone displeased with me. For some, like Roger, it's easy to be shouted at. Some people let that stuff roll right over them, they ignore it. I'm not that kind of strong. I cry when people shout at me.

I glanced behind me. The librarian was on the telephone.

I hopped off my chair and left the circulation desk. Collins was near the back of our pathetic library, shelving with unnecessary violence. "Have they wronged you?" I asked.

"What?"

"The books. It was a joke. Wasn't very good," I admitted.

Collins laughed. "No, that it was not. Still. You tried."

"Yeah…"

Girls are lucky. Girls have an excuse to be crybabies once a month; they randomly burst into tears or can punch you, hard, and they aren't in trouble because you don't know what it's like, Mark, can't you try to be a little understanding? Me, I'm a wimp. "Yeah, I try," I muttered, then started to cry, because I do try. I do. I try to earn high grades, I try to make my parents love me, I try to help Roger. It never works, any of it, because I'm just so fucking stupid and invisible and unimportant. And nobody cares, not even Roger, who's my best friend and has always been there and made me feel good about myself, and suddenly he only cares about, well, about himself, and…

I have no idea where this is coming from; I've never consciously thought any of it. It's more something I feel and try to push to the back of my mind, something I try very hard to ignore without thinking of ignoring. Partially this explains why it surprises me to realize this, and doubly why I'm surprised to suddenly be standing in the library, completely exposed, crying softly but very messily.

Collins dealt well with the situation. He walked up to me and hugged me. I didn't move into it, just kept crying, but it felt good not to be alone, to have someone give a damn. Normally that would be Roger hugging me, not making me cry. That knowledge made me cry harder.

"I'm really sorry," I told Collins. He shouldn't have had to cope with my meltdown.

"It's okay, Mark. You're well overdue for a breakdown."

I started laughing and I couldn't stop.

After that, it was just me and Collins. Roger stopped sitting with us in class, so one might say he caused the schism, but whenever I saw him on the tarmac I kept my head down. He got into more and more fights, so many we almost forgot what his face looked like, it was so often disfigured.

"What happened, Roger?" Mr. Townsend, our English teacher, asked one day, shocked by Roger's fresh black eye and split lip. His cheek was still a fading, smudged yellow from the previous fight.

"He called me stupid," Roger answered, his voice fierce.

"I meant to you,"Townsend muttered.

Collins helped me with my math, and the A my father had imagined drew nearer and nearer as my homework papers were returned with full marks. Collins also lent me some of his favorite books. I had never before read anything like this; it was as though my mind was expanding like the pupils of my eyes, new pathways opening.

Previously, the most controversial literature I had ever read was The Lord of the Rings. Collins gave me Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. I read the entire thing in one night, with a flashlight beneath the blankets, and returned it the following morning.

"It's… it's… it's brilliant," I stammered.

"You agree with him?" Collins asked.

I nodded vigorously. "Completely."

"Yeah?"

"Uh-huh."

"I think he's a maniac. Did you understand all of it?" he managed to ask without condescending, and I admitted that at some points I had been confused.

That day at lunch, we sat with our heads together over the book, going over different passages, and I saw completely what Collins meant. Thoreau was a zealot, he was so far gone he had stopped seeing people and saw only concepts. "It's important to keep your mind in the real world," Collins reflected.

"Yeah," I said, blushing, feeling like a hypocrite.

One book was by Hannah Green. When he handed it to me with the same casual gravity with which Collins relinquished all of his books, I wrinkled my nose. "This doesn't really look like… um… a book for guys," I said. The cover was plain, an unadorned brown, but the title, imprinted in shining blue letters on the spine, was I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.

"Get over that," Collins advised, "because it's brilliant. And it's true."

I worried about what my father would say. Even so, I kept the book tucked safely away in my bookbag, near the bottom where no one would notice.

That night, I worked on my play. It was progressing admirably, leading to a climax I already saw in my mind in which Matt comes out of the closet at dinner one night, and Sadie actively stands, leaves the table and returns to the forest, without a single member of the family noticing her absence. In fact, they continue directly addressing her as though she was still there.

By the end, I knew Matt and Alex would break up. Alex was pressuring Matt to tell his parents about their relationship, and when Matt did that, he learned that he had to live his own life regardless of anyone's opinion or dominion, including his father and his boyfriend.

I wrote in the position my body unconsciously adopted: feet curled to rest on bracing supports of the chair, my nose nearly pressed against the page, elbows out. I never remembered getting into this position, but always seemed to re-emerge in it.

My dad knocked on the door and entered the room without awaiting a response. "Mark," he said, "it's ten-thirty. You should be in bed."

"Just five more minutes?" I asked.

"Okay. Five minutes. But I'm coming back here in five minutes, and you had better be asleep by then!" With that, he left me alone.

I flipped to the back of the notebook, where in the pocket I had hidden the picture. It was a silly thing, done in pen and black ink, but surprisingly well-drawn for me, a boy of no discernible artistic talent. I had given him long eyelashes, perhaps a tad longer than in real life, and drawn intricate spiral designs on his fingertips, which in reality are hard as stones.

None of this would have warranted keeping the picture hidden. It could have simply been a sketch done in my spare time, done out of boredom, a practice based on what I saw. The difficulty in this justification was that it was an incredibly erotic image--for me, at least. One aspect over which I agonized in the drawing was circumcision. I know he's not circumcised, but I am and mine is the only one I really have intimate knowledge of. I don't know exactly what one looks like, not circumcised, so I drew him circumcised.

I'm not gay. Really, I'm not, I look at girls. Well, sometimes. I can't stand those soft girls, who are thin as wisps and giggle quietly, who listen and remember every word a boy says. I can't be around them; I'm terrified I'll hurt them. I'm all right with slightly dominating girls, though. That's why I didn't mind having Rose in our mini-production of Act 3 from La Boheme: she's hardly a girl at all, won't develop a crush, won't be needy. I can work with girls like her.

Thus, I'm not gay. From a logical standpoint, this is probably just an extension of friendship. I, often a lonely boy especially in formative years, develop a friendship and desire an extension thereof. I want to be closer to someone and instead of simply accepting friendship as closeness, my over-analytical brain has resolved that the logical progression of intimacies is romantic love.

Put simply, I was a horny teenager and I didn't have emotional bonds with many people.

Three of my five minutes were up. I folded the picture and tucked it carefully away, closed my notebook and got in bed.

My eyes itched. Every time I closed them, I saw the picture. My mind raced, trying to trick me into thinking of it, into masturbating to the thought. Unable to help myself, I flung back the covers and sought a distraction. That was why I opened the book Collins had leant me.

I immediately identified with the characters of the parents, watching their young daughter, Deborah,lose her mind, having watched my best friend lose his will after so many years. Their fragile buoyancy, how they tried so hard to comfort themselves that what they did was right as they knew it helped nothing, paralleled my own struggles with Roger.

But as I read, I stopped seeing through their eyes. The further I progressed into the story, the more I knew that I was the protagonist, the girl who created a world of her own when life became too difficult, the isolated, bright youth. The madwoman, I realized, was me.

A few of her defining features happened to be mine also: blond hair, Jewish, teenage. So what if she was a girl? I was Deborah, regardless of gender. And her problem of dangerous escapism was mine, also. Roger was severely depressed, no question, but I was the one whose madness threatened destruction.

When Deborah sliced open her arm, I climbed out of bed, trembling. I left the room, glanced carefully up and down the hall. My father was fast asleep. I heard him snoring. As for my mother, she was breathing deeply enough to indicate a similar state. I bolted down the stairs.

"Hello?"

The voice was tired and a little surprised. I glanced at the clock. Oops. It was nearly midnight. "Sorry--"

"Mark?"

"I--yeah," I admitted, blushing. I sat beneath the kitchen table with my legs drawn up to my chest, one arm wrapped tightly around them. "I'm sorry--"

"No, no, it's okay." Collins sounded more awake by the second. He sighed. "I… what's up? Did you read it?"

I nodded. Oops. He couldn't see me nodding, of course. "Yeah," I whispered. "I read it. And you gotta know…" I licked my lips. "I would never do anything like that. Ever." As though I could affirm it by telling him.

"I know," he said. "I know that, Mark."

"I… isn't that why you gave it to me? As a warning?" Was this what he wanted, this fear, this wariness?

But Collins claimed otherwise. "No, man, it's not. I gave it to you because I think it's an important book. It's beautiful, it's true."

"It's… true?"

"Uh-huh."

For a long moment we sat silently. I listened to the sounds of the house at rest: my father's snoring, the ticking of the clock. "Thomas?" I asked quietly. My voice emerged like a sob.

"I'm here."

"I'm really scared," I admitted. My throat had gone tight; I squeezed my eyes shut. "I'm terrified," I whispered. "I can't… I don't… I don't want to give it up. While I was reading, I…" I took a deep breath. "I realized that in… in the screenplay I'm writing, one of the characters is going through what Deborah went through. She has this… imaginary friend and she doesn't know if he's real or not," I explained. "What if I don't know?"

"You do know, Mark. This is real. This."

"Sometimes I feel like my throat's closing up and I can't breathe or hear very well, like there's wind in my ears," I said. "My heart hurts and… I…" I didn't know what else to say.

Collins paused, maybe waiting to see if I was going to finish that sentence. "Mark," he said, "that's panic. Look, I don't think you're mad, like she was, but you're… in pain. It's not fair, what you have to deal with."

"It's not!" To hear it said by someone else! That validified my feeling, made it true rather than self-pitying.

"And you do it without complaint and without help. And that's really tough. Mark?"

"Yeah?"

"If you're scared of losing yourself… don't be. I won't let that happen, Mark, to either of you."

There was no reason for me to believe him. How could he possibly keep my mind from slipping? But when he said those words with such confidence and ferocity, I don't know why, but I believed him. I swallowed the lump of tears in my throat and nodded. "Thank you."

We said good-bye and good morning, since it was past midnight, and hung up. I crept back to bed, and it was only then that I realized what Collins had said. To either of you. Where was Roger? What was he doing? Or who was doing what to him?

I bit my lip. I never could do anything to protect him, I, scrawny, polite, powerless little Mark. Collins could. He would. He promised.

I pushed my face into my pillow and slept.

TO BE CONTINUED!

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