At least I have my Dad. My Dad who is a complete wanker half of the time, and the rest of the time I honestly don’t know what planet he is on.
I look just like him. Well, I did until this morning when I locked myself in the disabled toilets at school and dyed my hair black. I just thought it would be a good idea. It made sense in my head, kind of like changing my hair colour would make all the fucking school problems disappear. Like I can pretend it isn’t me that has to go and sit in a classroom after hours and listen to my mentor teacher spill all my failures to my Dad. My Dad who will be sitting there pulling his fingers through his mop of hair and sighing loudly, wondering what the hell has happened to the idea of his perfect textbook son.
Well, tough, Dad. He doesn’t exist. Instead, you are stuck with me, Dad. A tall, skinny kid with bad skin and a brain that is broken. Because I am that kid. The kid who just doesn’t fit the mould. If I was normal, I would be hanging out with all my great friends right now, chatting about nonsense and being stupid. Instead, I am hiding at an empty table at the back of the cafeteria, pretending to do homework, hoping that nobody will come anywhere near me.
I am riddled with anxieties to the point I can barely function. I am fucked in the head. Fact. And I am failing my three main subjects at school. Hip hip fucking hooray.
Anyway, I can’t go back to Drama, because he is there. Him. The boy with the most amazing smile. The gorgeous eyes. The tightest arse in the history of tight arses. Yup. That’s the kind of things I notice. Boys. With all the freaking problems I have stacked up against me, a mother who didn’t want her kid, a dad who is a complete twat, a diagnosis of Anxiety Disorder, and on top of that, I am ugly as hell, too tall, too skinny, covered in acne, and hey, yup, I’m gay. Not bi, not confused, not pan, not anything else. I am into dick, and dick only. I’ve never even looked at straight porn, have never had a girl look twice at me anyway and never been kissed. Not that any boys have looked at me either, I’m just not like that. I’m the kid who flies under the radar. Silent. Quiet. A bit of attitude to keep people from getting too close.
Not that anyone knows, because that is not the kind of person I am. I don’t speak up, don’t tell anyone anything about myself. Until that bloody Drama lesson. I messed up, okay? Got caught up in the moment, in the thrill of the game we were playing. I blame fucking damn idiotic shit-eating pot-smoking Simon. Bloody overgrown hippie.
We were supposed to write a character description of someone in a play. Use ourselves as a guide to what we would be portrayed as on stage, along with the deepest darkest secret of the character we would create. Something our character would never have told anyone. Then, we would use all these roles for our next production and make something that was honest. A realistic play about kids our age. The stuff going on in our heads that people didn’t see on the outside. Fucking pompous piece of shit idea.
Then, Simon stood there with this look of awe on his face, reading out our secrets to the room with him sat right there. Him. My crush. The man of my dreams. My dream prince. God. I have fucked him really good in my head. Dreamt of every possible scenario where he would become mine. I have crazy-jizzed all over my sheets, with hazy images of him moaning underneath me, enough times that I can barely stand sleeping in my own mess of a bed, because to be honest, my bed is disgusting. Filthy. I’m filthy in my head too. Messed up. I doubt normal people fantasise over the stuff that goes on in my daydreams. Because that’s where I tend to hang out. In my head. I have messed up most of my other school subjects as well, because I am just so behind that there is no point in catching up.
I had another episode of soul-destroying shit-eating depression after the Drama class disaster. I can’t believe I did it. Oh, fucking hell. I am such an idiot. I can’t quite control that shit, when my head goes into a tailspin. When my thoughts just won’t slow down. It could be because I messed around with my meds. It could be because I wasn’t paying attention to shit. But mostly it was because I wrote down the stuff I shouldn’t have told anyone. I made shit real, and I lost the plot. Completely. And then I didn’t go to school for weeks and now I’m so deep in shit I can barely get up in the morning. See? I’m just stuck in this never-ending circle of disaster.
I almost fold in on myself with the self-inflicted embarrassment of even thinking back to that moment in drama class. Not that anyone notices me here, sitting on the plastic chair in the corner of the cafeteria where I usually hide out when I don’t have to be in class.
At least I haven’t had a panic attack today. I feel surprisingly calm about the whole idea of Dad coming in and all my failings being laid out on the table. In a way, it will be good. I don’t have to carry around all these secrets on my own if Dad knows everything. Then, they won’t be secrets anymore. And to be honest, Lukas, my mentor, is pretty cool. He might even have some kind of idea how I can get away with it. How I can do something. Not to fix it, because I have learnt that I can’t fix anything. But maybe there is something that will help. A plan we can adopt to make life a little easier. Which my Dad will no doubt overthink and turn it into something massive and we will end up screaming at each other in front of Lukas. Yeah, that will probably happen no matter what. Today will not end well.
Dad’s standing outside the school entrance right on time, his winter coat tightly wrapped around himself and an almost burnt out cigarette butt hanging between his lips.
“You need to stop smoking,” I hiss at him in greeting. As we do. All casual as he takes the butt out of his mouth and hands it to me, so I can take the last dying drag out of the damn thing. Another thing we do. He’s a crap Dad. We have smoked together since the day he caught me stealing one of his cigarettes after a particularly bad day. Neither of us had the energy to fight anymore, so instead of giving me shit about not smoking and bad habits and my health, he just lit one for me and we sat in silence watching the fading light over the trees behind the house. It’s the only time we don’t hate each other. When we are killing ourselves with nicotine and tar.
He takes the steps up to the second floor in wide strides, two steps at a time, as I hang back hoping to become invisible as soon as we step through the door to the classroom. The classroom where Lukas has already put four desks together to form a little table where we can sit and have our ‘informal chat’ as he prefers to call it. Instead of calling it the ‘final warning of failure’ which is more likely. We know the drill here, since we did this whole charade at my last senior school. The sighs and disappointments and realisation that there was no way I would graduate. That there was no way I would even finish Year 2, after what I had done. Or hadn’t. I was basically fucked. As I am now.
“Hi! I’m Lukas, Max’s Mentor...” Lukas starts, standing up and reaching out his hand to shake Dad’s.
Yet Dad seems to be frozen in place. And Lukas stands there staring at Dad like he has seen a fucking ghost.
TOM
“Dad!” Max pants from behind, his footfall sharp and loud against the pavement.
Tom is half running down Karlavägen with his coat open like a cape behind him. Like some escaping Batmanesque lunatic running away from his son’s teacher. Like he isn’t a complete coward. Because he is. He is behaving like he is eighteen all over again. It has just taken that, a few steps inside that damn building and all the shit he has spent his entire adult life trying to forget has come crashing back in an instant. Fucking fucking fucking shit on a twit stick.