All the characters and events in this story are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people, either living or dead, is entirely unintentional.
The story is copyrighted and may not be reproduced in any way without the express permission of the author who can be contacted at: pjalexander1753@gmail.com
A Very Ordinary Boy (Part 2)
From Chapter 11:
I'd expected there to be tables and chairs but instead there was just a small circle of chairs in the middle of the room and a table with a jug of water and some plastic cups over to one side. Apart from that, and a TV screen fixed on one wall, the room was empty. Getting sat down was awkward. For a start there were no instructions from Ms. Lamar about who should go where. There was some uncomfortable shuffling about and avoiding of eye contact until my mum suggested that the two of us could sit together on one side of the circle, with Tani and Noah doing the same on the other side, with Ms. Lamar in between the two pairs.
Chapter 12:
And we got started. First came the ground rules, you know, like switching phones to silent, not interrupting someone else who was speaking, keeping everything confidential. Then we all said who we were -- Noah said his name so quietly, his face pointing straight down at the floor, that it was difficult to hear him -- then Ms. Lamar said we were there so that me and Noah could talk about what had happened between us and for him to understand how I felt about it and the effect `the incident' had on me. She said that she hoped that the meeting would end with an agreed resolution and some ideas about how me and Noah could move on with our lives. Sounds simple, huh? Well, it was way intense. Ms. Lamar seemed to expect me to dive right in, you know, start straight away with a blow-by-blow account of the rape, no build-up, no gradual working around to it. But I couldn't. I just froze. And there's Ms. Lamar telling me to take my time but obviously not meaning it and definitely not giving me any help, and Noah looks as if he's about to do a runner or throw-up, or maybe both. So it's pretty clear that this meeting is going nowhere even before it has properly got started.
That's when my mum takes over. She's amazing, not aggressive or rude, but she can see how things are with me, and Noah looks to be in an even worse state. It's obvious that Ms. Lamar's idea of mediating' is a million miles from being anywhere near helpful, so my mum just quietly takes charge. The first thing she does is start talking to Tani. That's a surprise cause she's only sposed to be there to be Noah's moral support, but mum asks her how Noah's been, you know, for the last few weeks and Tani explains that he's pretty much fallen apart. He barely goes out, won't talk to anyone, stays in bed for hours. Basically, she says, he's less than half the boy he used to be and that it's breaking her heart. And Tani tells my mum (and me and Noah) that she's so sad cause she's losing her best friend in the world and she doesn't know what, if anything, she can do about it. And me, I'm already tearing up cause it's clear that Tani genuinely loves Noah, not in a boyfriend/girlfriend way like I always imagined they were, but as someone she's always relied on and shared her life with. And now she's left with a shadow of that friend and it's killing her.
But my mum tells Tani what an amazing friend she is and what a brilliant job she's doing, getting Noah to the meeting and helping him to keep it together. Tani sort of nods her head and half smiles, but I can see that she's at the end of her rope and that it won't take much to push her over the edge. Then my mum starts talking to Noah. She speaks in a really soft voice, like you would a lost child or a frightened kitten. She wants to know, she says, if there's anything he'd like to say to Tani. He's heard what she had to say about him and how worried she is, so how does he feel about that? At first he says nothing, doesn't even look up, but my mum keeps quietly talking about what a good friend he's always been to Tani and how much she values that friendship and how scared she is that she's losing him and can't seem to do anything about it. Slowly, so slow that, at first, no-one else in the room realises that it's happening, Noah's lifting his head and turning his face towards Tani. His eyes are full of tears and he takes hold of both of her hands and starts to talk. His voice is so quiet it's almost impossible to hear him and when Ms. Lamar starts telling him to speak louder my mum gives her a look that's like she's firing daggers at her. Ms. Lamar very quickly shuts up and now we can hear Noah telling Tani that he's been such a shit friend and that he's totally sorry and how he knows how patient and kind she's always been but especially the last few weeks and how he doesn't deserve her and that he's gonna try to do better and be better and begging her not to give up on him. It's honestly the most emotional thing I've ever witnessed, and when Tani, in floods of tears, goes down on her knees and wraps Noah in her arms, well, even Ms. (Made of Steel and Totally Heartless) Lamar seems to be quite affected.
For a minute or two (it felt like forever) my mum just gives them a moment, time to let them cry it out and begin to get their shit back together. Then she looks at me and nods her head in the direction of the water jug. Once I've taken round cups of water -- Ms. Lamar declines -- and I'm sitting back down, mum takes me by surprise by asking me to explain to Noah what it was about him that had first got my attention. What a question. Talk about embarrassing. It's like she's expecting me to admit, out loud, that Noah's been my number 1 wank fantasy pretty much from the moment I'd first been aware of him. Surprise, surprise, I don't actually say that, but I do say how beautiful I thought he was and what an amazing person he seemed to be -- so friendly and popular -- and how I used to daydream about us being together. Even though I didn't admit it in so many words, it was obvious from the expression on Noah's face that he definitely got the picture that I'd had a crush on him from day one.
And from then on I don't stop talking. From explaining about constantly looking out for him at school it's straight on to the day he knocked me flat on my back at FfT. I explain that, once I got the job, I always made sure that I had a direct line of sight to his favourite window seat and about how I looked forward to his visits to the book area and how much I resented it every time Tani came to drag him away. (I don't dare look at her in case she gets angry or feels bad or upset or something.) Then it's an easy slide into talking about all those pictures of beautiful Italian Renaissance boys we used to look at together and how Noah's interest in them and his knowledge about them made me wonder about his sexuality. And suddenly I'm admitting to being gay and fantasising about me and Noah as a couple and how that made me so excited about the camping trip when he suggested it `cause it would mean we'd be sending time together, just the two of us, and how I didn't even admit to myself, not then or for a long time after, that I'd been secretly hoping that something might happen between us that weekend.
By now I'm looking directly at him, but he won't look me in the eye, especially as I start describing exactly what happened in the back of his van. How I'd been literally blown away when he sucked me off and had found it weird but exciting to be finger-fucked for the first time. Shit knows how I had the balls to say any of this stuff, especially with my mum sitting right there next to me. I guess I was on some sort of autopilot and, thinking about it later, I realised that, somewhere deep down inside myself, there was an understanding that I had to say all this stuff, had to get it out in the open, had to `own my experience'. (That's a Doctor Hipless line.) Somehow I knew that I was never gonna be able to get past what happened that weekend if I didn't hear myself telling Noah exactly what he'd done to me. Of course, my mum knew all about that sort of stuff (more of that professional training and experience I spose), it's why she'd got me talking about it in the first place.
So I'm describing the rape, especially the part about being pushed down into the mattress and not being able to tell him to stop and how frightened I was and how totally unready for what he did to me. And I'm telling him -- it's as if there's just the two of us in the room -- how hurt I was physically, especially my butt hole, but how the emotional hurt was worse, the way he finished doing what he wanted to do to me then rolled over and went to sleep, leaving me feeling totally confused and sad and lonely. So very lonely.
But, of course, I don't stop there. Now I'm remembering the ride home and I'm telling him how I couldn't understand how, all the way back, we didn't talk about what had happened, something that was totally huge to me but which didn't get so much as a mention from him. And I know I'm near the end of my story now but I can't finish without talking about the text and being dismissed as `kiddo' and how he'd decided that it was time to move on and how, yeah, that might have been okay for him but how it left me feeling like something that had to be put out with the garbage.
Somehow, and I totally don't have any awareness of doing it, I've moved from my place in the circle so that now I'm kneeling on the floor right in front of him, close enough to reach out and touch him if I want to. But I don't. But I do tell him to look at me, to look at me while I tell him how the whole sad fucking story ended, ended with me feeling so worthless and so like a lump of shit that I picked up a knife and used it to draw patterns on my wrists, wanting to fall asleep and never wake up. You'd think I would be shouting by now, screaming at him to pay attention, demanding that he say something. But I'm not. I'm talking really quietly, so quietly that it must be hard for anyone except Noah to hear me. And I know he can hear me `cause he's lifted his face and he's nearly got his eyes level with mine and it looks as if he's about to say something to me when, without any warning, and believe me, it takes us all by surprise, his body seems to fold in on itself and he sort of collapses sideways off his chair and onto the floor. Suddenly the room, and it's not a big room, is filled with this inhuman shrieking, wailing sound, as if someone is having their insides ripped out of their body. I've never heard anything like it and I 100% never want to hear anything like it again.
So, Noah's on the floor, curled up and sobbing and sort of moaning. And there are sounds coming out of his mouth, mad incoherent noises, definitely not proper words. For what seemed like hours, though it was probably only seconds, the rest of us in the room are frozen. I'm the one nearest to Noah, still kneeling on the floor, while the other three - Tani, my mum and Ms. Lamar -- are sitting on their chairs. No-one moves and we're all thinking (at least, I was), "What the fuck?" It's like the room is full of, not just the noises that Noah is making, but a kind of electricity that's bouncing around but not settling anywhere. Yeah, I know it sounds totally weird and believe me it was, like an episode of that old TV programme, The X Files. Then it's as if the electricity has decided where it's gonna settle -- on my mum. Suddenly she's off her chair and on the floor beside Noah. She's got her arms around him and is pulling the top half of his body upwards, not an easy thing to do when you're as small as she is and trying to move a dead weight that's way bigger than you are. She's got him into a sort of half kneeling position and that's when I come back to life and start to help her get him properly onto his knees. For maybe half a second it occurs to me that this is the first time I've touched him since that night in the van but I toss the thought right out of my head and reach my arms around him from behind. Then Tani is there too and she's doing what she can to help, until finally, between the three of us (Ms. Lamar still hasn't moved) we've got Noah onto his knees and more or less stable, so that he's not gonna topple over onto the floor again. The sobbing is less now but he's still making the strange sounds, though it's beginning to be possible to make sense of some of what he's saying'. There's something that sounds like my name and something else that is definitely sorry' but there's a lot of other stuff which still makes no sense. I'm suddenly aware that my mum is gently rubbing Noah's back and quietly shushing him and telling him, over and over, that everything's gonna be okay and that he needs to stop thinking all the bad thoughts. And I join in and so does Tani, till it's like one of those chants that monks used to make in the olden days or that you get when the Hari Krishna people are in town.
My brain's been pretty much asleep for the last few minutes but it gradually comes back to life and the first thing it asks is, "What the fuck just happened?" but before I can come up with any sort of answer all hell breaks loose. Suddenly the door of meeting room 3 bursts open and two guys in green uniforms come piling in. They're carrying a sort of fold-up wheelchair and they take hold of Noah, not roughly or anything like that, more sort of like they know exactly what to do and how to do it, and lift him into the chair. One of them, I see now that it's a young woman (she can't be more that her mid-twenties) carefully but very firmly straps him in while the other one starts talking to Ms. Lamar, asking about Noah, like his name and address and stuff like that. She hasn't a clue about any of that so it's Tani who comes up with that information and she also says she'll go with him in the ambulance and wait at the hospital until his dad shows up. Noah's stopped making any noise now apart from the sobbing, and even that's not much anymore. The two paramedics leave the room, wheeling Noah. He looks to be totally out of it, as if he's spaced out on some sort of happy pill, but Tani's holding his hand and telling him that he's safe and that everything's gonna get sorted out.
That leaves just me, my mum and Ms. Lamar in the room. Ms. Lamar is already moving the chairs, stacking them in one corner, it's as if nothing unusual has been happening for the last hour or so, as if some random kid having a breakdown is all part of a normal day to her. She says something to my mum, something about signing out at reception before we leave, and then she's gone. It's then that I realise that I'm shaking all over and I can't seem to do anything about it. Even my teeth are chattering and is as if the noise of it is filling the room. Then my mum pulls me into the biggest hug and starts saying something about me being in shock and needing to have a warm, sweet drink.
Later, as I'm drinking a large hot chocolate -- marshmallows but no squirty cream -- in the community canteen, my mum tells me how proud she is of me and how it's not my fault, you know, how Noah reacted to what I said to him, and how I'm not to blame myself. Honestly, I didn't know what to think then and I still don't. Mum says it'll take time to process everything that's happened and that it'll probably be good to have some professional support -- no, not from her, she says, she's just gonna be a supportive mum -- but that we can sort all that stuff later. But she does ask me how I feel and that's a question I can answer `cause I know exactly how I feel.
"I'm totally, fucking relieved," I said (she didn't even raise an eyebrow). "It's like I've had a great big stone lifted off my back, and it feels good."
Naturally I was feeling really bad for Noah -- I can't even begin to imagine what he's going through, though I guess it's gotta be the worst -- but I know he's in the best place to get the help he needs (maybe from Doctor You Know Who. That's a laugh!) and I think I might even go and visit him sometime, to tell him that I'm getting better now, that I've put that night in his van in a box where it deserves to be, somewhere that it can't hurt me anymore. Yeah, I am sure that I want to do that. In fact, I think I need to. No, don't look at me like that. I told my mum that I want to do it and she said it would be good for both of us, "An aid to the healing process," she called it. But I won't do it any time soon, not before we're both ready and definitely not without professional advice and support.
So that was my day! How was yours? Oh, you want to know about my idea for how I might make it up to you for being so shitty to you earlier in the week. Well, it was that amazing dance you did for me that gave me the idea. I looked on line and found one of those tutorial sites. What? Yeah, really, a tutorial on how to do a lap dance. I've been practicing, and I thought it would be good to give you a bit of a taster now -- yeah, maybe I do mean `taster' with a capital T! -- and then I could practice some more, ready for when you sleepover at the weekend. That's if you'd like to sleepover. I'd like it if you did and I totally promise it won't be like last time and that you totally won't regret it. Yeah? Okay, you sit down here while I line up the right track on the speaker. Right, here we go. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.
As an author, it's REALLY encouraging to know that there are people out there who are taking the time to read what I've written, and then bothering to send a response. So please, do feel free to write to me at the email address given at the top of the chapter. I welcome all comments and guarantee to write back. PJ
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