Angel Colón - No Happy Endings

You gather the books up and put them in your backpack. You should have done that before you left class, but that would have taken too much time and the teacher might have tried to have a conversation with you. Teachers are always trying to engage you in conversation. And when they do that, it makes your stomach hurt. And your stomach hurts right now. It hurts bad. It always hurts bad before you have to see Mrs. Hamby. And you do not think that you can endure both the meeting and the pain at the same time. You need to ease the hurt.

The hall has emptied, and you have ten minutes before your meeting with the school psychologist. You head for the boys bathroom.

You take the last stall, the handicapped one. This is your favorite not because it is the biggest, but because the lock on it still works and because it is directly under the overhead ventilation fan.

You unroll a handful of toilet paper from the dispenser. You already know the perfect amount. You wad it up into a ball about the size of a rodent brain with a bit angling off from it like a brainstem. You will hold it from the brainstem.

From your jeans pocket you extract a yellow Bic lighter, stolen from your stepfather, Harvey Peruro. You set the toilet paper rodent brain afire. The trick is to get a clean burn so that there is no smoke. Regardless of the ventilation fan, if there is smoke, it will permeate the bathroom and give you away. You watch the flame take hold, and as soon as it does, the pain in your stomach vanishes. You do not know if it is simply that you forget about the pain, or if fire acts as a painkiller. It doesn’t matter. The flame is beautiful, calming. It pulsates like an orange rose. A burning blossom. A fire flower.

And then, still standing over the toilet, you use your other hand to unbuckle and drop your pants, push down your underwear, and it feels good to have your genitals exposed to the air. No shame. No self-consciousnesses.

You know your cock is kind of small. From gym class and the mandatory showers. Most of the boys your age have bodies of substance. Bodies thick with bulk and muscle or lean with speed and innate strength. Pendulous penises that sway with weighty arrogance from strange dense growths of dark pubic hair as they walk around the locker room.

Your pubic hair only just started to come in last summer. Harvey seems to enjoy referring to you as a late bloomer, and the few times that a drinking buddy of his comes to the house, Harvey inevitably points out that you are a late bloomer so as to explain your skinny pale body and voice that has only a hint of masculine timbre. It all seemed to start around the same time all the stuff with your mother happened. You just kind of stopped growing. The doctor called it delayed puberty. They are supposed to start giving you hormone shots, but then the doctor said that could exacerbate the conduct disorder. And you’ve been held back a couple of grades. Learning disability stemming from emotional trauma. Again, the stuff with your mom. You kind of have a lot of problems.

And so you have only a little bit of pubic hair that has sprung up in two modest patches, each about the size of a quarter, around the base of your dick. The hair is so fine that the light has to hit it just right in order to be seen. In the locker room you keep your back to the other boys because you do not want them to point out the smooth hairless contrast of your boyish body to the sprouting mannishness of theirs.

And in fear and embarrassment and shame your scrotum shrivels, your testicles attempt to crawl up into your groin, and your penis shrinks down and draws itself into nothing more than a tiny cap. And as often as you can, you will busy yourself at your locker. Unlacing your shoes as slowly as possible. Pulling your socks off so that you have to stop and turn them right side out. And as the other boys emerge from the showers and discard their towels into the wire hamper, you grab one and pretend to clean a spot from your shoe and then you pretend that you have already been through the shower and you are drying your body with the gray towel and you have not had to endure the humiliation of the shower, the degrading walk across the locker room. But often you do. You do have to face it.

But now, in the handicapped stall, with fire in your right hand, you look down and your cock is rock hard. So hard it is pointing straight up, almost touching your belly. And it doesn’t look so small now. Now it looks big. And your balls are hanging pendulums underneath. They feel as though they have weight. Substance. That they are there . And they therefore give you weight and substance. You are here .

And all it takes is two strokes. Two strokes and it explodes. Your cum is watery, like pee, but it is there. Before this past summer, when you did this nothing came out. But now you can cum. Ejaculate. And you see droplets of thin semen jump higher than the burning paper which has burned itself down to the brainstem. You have left the end of the brainstem unraveled, flat, a sort of neural net, and you let the flame touch your fingers before you drop it. You have timed it right. The flame consumes the last of the paper during its lazy drop to the toilet bowl. No smoke. A clean burn. Perfect.

You pull your pants and underwear back up, buckle your belt. You use toilet paper to clean the spilled body fluid from the rim of the toilet, and you flush everything away. You watch the ash and your semen swirl together and then disappear.

You take a minute and lean against the stall door. And you think the thought that you always think after you do this. From your favorite book. The book you have read probably seventy times. You will never forget picking that book from the returns cart at the school library. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. An illustration of a paper man engulfed by flames was on the cover. And you opened the book. And you read the first line.

It was a pleasure to burn .

And your body just kind of went into a state of numb ecstasy. Because it was true. It was the truest sentence that had ever been written. That ever will be written.

It was a pleasure to burn.

The hall in the administrative wing is quiet. You don’t like the loudness of students, but you also do not like the unnatural absence of sound you find here. It reminds you of doctors’ offices. You are missing Ms. Wiggins’s English class to be here, and that is the one class you kind of like. She has you reading Stephen Crane. The Red Badge of Courage . And also some poetry by him. There is a poem about a guy who eats his own heart and hates the way it tastes, and another one about bastard mushrooms that grow in polluted blood. It’s pretty badass stuff. Hardcore. You stop at a door with the word Counselor stenciled on it.

Inside is a small waiting room. You still have a few minutes, so you sit and wait. After a minute, the counselor’s door opens and a girl steps out. Beth Andrews. A cutter. You are not privy to gossip or inside information, but the knowledge that Beth Andrews is a cutter is so widespread that it has filtered down to even the lowest rungs of the social ladder, so you know what Beth Andrews is. Just as she knows what you are. Just as everybody in the school knows what you are.

Mrs. Hamby is all right. She looks nice. Poofy hair. Her perfume smells like bug spray. Raid. You are not here voluntarily. This is not a free choice. You are here as a result of other choices you have made in the past. This is a reaction to your actions. A consequence.

“How’s it going, Billy?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“Great. No problems?”

You shrug your shoulders and shake your head.

It always starts this way. Mrs. Hamby doesn’t really want there to be any problems. Not because she cares about you, but because if there are problems, then she will have to do something about it. In the end, it is better for both of you if you pretend that your life is all Little House on the Prairie and shit and she pretends that she doesn’t know you’re lying.