A few things you should know about me: I have cancer. I’m seventeen, and I’m also going mad. Why not have a read? Who knows? It might even be a laugh.
Despite the Shakespearian ring to his name, my boyfriend Prospero Taylor is no Romeo. At least, he wasn’t very romantic for the first fourteen years of my life that I knew him. God, it felt like a whole lifetime’s energy was spent just hanging out with him for a day. He knew stuff, he wanted stuff and he was stuff. One of those people, you know? Paint on his skin, various interesting scars and an endless sense of humour, with words and things spilling out of his pockets.
We were neighbours until Junior High, when his Mother needed to be moved closer to the hospital. She has MS, but that doesn’t stop her painting these amazing works of art. Abstract, thunderous creatures of tempestuous oceans and stinging fires intertwined. They really take your breath away, especially when you consider the fact that she’s almost permanently in her wheelchair and in pain. Her last one went for something like three thousand bucks. They’re good, don’t get me wrong, but I still think her best masterpiece to date is her son.
Call me a wacko, but he might just be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. You’d never think to look at him that he comes from a smelly suburban town in the mid-west. He’s tall, and yes, in a geeky kind of way in that there’s not a lot to him, but it’s the way he holds himself that catches people’s attention. At a slant. At a sway. Like he’s reclining back, wondering why an earth the rest of us are hunched over, trying to get through the day. His hair’s always a bit like feathers, freshly washed, an unidentifiable mix of brown and blonde. But then there’s the eyes. You know yourself when you really like someone and when your eyes meet, even for a few moments, it feels like a second or two in heaven. His are like that. Like sweetness is emanating from him to you in one, loving glance.
Of course, I hadn’t always seen him like that. I was a cynic, God love me, for much too longer than was polite when it came to boys. I had been a tom-boy myself, feeling sick at the sight of the girls in the houses surrounding me crouched in their bedrooms moving a piece of plastic across the carpet, small, high pitched voices shooting through their lips. I preferred notching up bruises and rabbits.
But as I began to notice myself, in the mirror in the mornings, when I could see the arch of my eyebrows curving and my stomach flattening along with my thighs and upper arms, I realised I was one of those girls. You’re going to laugh know when I realised who I was to Prospero. No, not his bitch. I was the girl-next-door. It was simple Math really. It would work.
So of course, when my fourteenth birthday rolled around I expected him to realise this too. He didn’t. Instead, he opted for a rather over-weight girl in my Chemistry class. Diana Kay. I almost cracked my test tube when this news reached me. How on earth, how in the name of all that’s good in Jerry Springer had he failed to work out that I was the one he should be pining over? I should have been mad. But it didn’t get angry. I suppose that’s where I can pinpoint the slow digression of my sanity (if it was ever there) happened. I became obsessed by this girl. Or rather, a certain aspect of her.
‘I love the way I can wrap my arms around you so tightly,’ he told me a year or so later, when we were lying on his sofa, watching T.V. I know it’s odd, but inside, I was dancing.
Prospero got his act together the fall following his relationship with Diana. We were all out at the Halloween dance, and I’d spent most of the night stuffing toilet roll into my dress and underwear to stop the comments I’d been getting from, not even enemies, close friends about my weight. Although I’d got an euphoric thrill out of it, I needed something to do, anything to do, to take my mind of it. I’d just stepped outside to go and sit on my own somewhere in a tragic, adolescent sort of fashion and maybe have a smoke when I bumped into him in a dark corner of the parking lot.
There he was, artistic as always in a paisley shirt that must have belonged to his Dad in the sixties and those jeans. He smiled at me and went on smoking this cigarette, drawing on it hard, as if daring life to come and kill him.
‘I’ve made a mistake,’ he said seriously, flicking specks of ember playfully close to my feet. I could smell something infectious off him. A good kind of infectious though. Like he was suffering from some fever you wouldn’t mind having.
‘Yeah?’ I wasn’t a very nonchalant sixteen year old. I’ve got better though. I just barked that word at him and ran three fingers through my hair, looking out onto the distance. I can still remember the roars of kids dancing instead, all hot and sweaty, having the time of their lives. It seemed right for us to be out here together, above and outside their joy. After all, there were better things in life than being happy.
‘Yeah Meggie,’ he said, and he threw his butt down on the ground and stepped onto it, his silhouette on the brick wall looming over my five foot six figure ‘I broke up with the cow,’ he added, as an afterthought.
I never made an answer. He didn’t deserve it. He seemed to know that, despite the shift if tension in our friendship that had doused the last year or two. Tainting what once was.
‘You’re something else, did you know that?’
I laughed
‘And who the fuck are you to tell me?’
‘Someone who’s very informed on the topic of discussion,’ he rhymed, smiling like a spoon full of honey ‘Every guy knows it. Diana told me all the gals are jealous. What’s not to love? Look at you, for Christ sake. And you’re smarter than the rest of them. Don’t take the same shit from the jerks. Hold your own.’
I went to laugh, but then the whole world went kind of wrong and the night was spinning into confusion. No, don’t be such a sap. I hadn’t fainted because Prospero had proclaimed he loved me. Far from it. He was approaching the entire thing like I was some kind of business deal he’d missed out on.
I’d collapsed because I hadn’t eaten anything in five days and even then I’d been throwing up most of my meals. When the haze finally cleared I was lying on the floor of the dance hall, a nurse looking me up and down in that face like she’d seen a thousand girls like me and wasn’t my Mother going to hear about it. Prospero, on the other hand, was being congratulated by all the guys in our class
‘Got to hand it to you, lank(that’s what they all called him on account of his height) you’re the first guy to melt that hot bitch.’
I hadn’t even enough strength to get up from my humiliation and give their balls a good twisting. But when Diana and Amber Bretagne ran past spurting out rumours of me polishing off a bottle of whiskey I’d stole from my Grandpa in the old folks home, I made such a mess of her ugly face that it was a night to remember. Still, the best thing that had came out of it was Prospero.
I suppose I was in love with the idea of him, and now, he was in love with me. My plan was working, something which I had devised when I first heard about my Mom’s mental illness. “Megan’s becoming increasingly susceptible” they called it. I’d go cuckoo by the time I was in my late teens. I figured even if I was a wayward train, if I could fix myself onto steel tracks, I’d go the distance.
Each of his words he said to me were the food I needed. Pretty. Smart. Funny. Each of his kisses, hugs, and more slowly fell down the empty well, bouncing off childhood promises and gifts from Grandparents. Truth was, I’d never be normal. Something inside was set to destroy me, and I couldn’t stop it. First I thought I’d go mad. Then I got cancer. There had to be a reason for all this shitty luck. There just had to be.
And there was.
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