“Oh cut the shit, Em! It’s goddamn marijuana, it’s completely harmless and you know it!”
Emily’s eyes darkened and we were both silent. I softened my tone before continuing. “You know I wouldn’t even bother with the stuff under normal circumstances… but things have changed.”
“Do you really think that stuff will help you?”
“I wouldn’t believe it if it did. I’m just hoping that it can make things easier. Come on, pot is probably the least dangerous thing I could put in my system these days and the government banning it is one of the most retarded things in the history mankind. It’s a fucking plant that makes people feel good. Besides, let’s say the anti-pot propaganda is true and it is bad for me, do you honestly think that I’ll live long enough to face the consequences?”
“Marcus, you’re not going to die,” she said softly, getting up from her bed and walking over to me.
“Emily, I’m already on borrowed time. The movie is over, the credits are rolling, and Rotten Tomatoes gave it all negative reviews. I’m going to die soon, I know it, so just be a good sister and let me be a little selfish before I kick the bucket.”
Emily sighed. “Mike Broflovski, you can find him under the football bleachers at school. I don’t know anything else about him.”
I was lying in bed, staring at her longingly on another school morning. With my eyes fixed upon her hallucinatory figure, the fires of agony within my body were silent, nearly making me sob tears of joy. It had been almost a minute since I had woken up and saw her open her eyes before falling back to sleep, but for once, I managed to overcome my desire to try and touch her, and instead was letting the delusion continue, or whatever it could be called. She was sleeping, this girl who’s name I did not know, this beautiful angel conjured up by my demented soul. She was sleeping so peacefully that I wasn’t sure I could ever overcome my guilt if I disturbed her.
I could have lied in that warm bed for the rest of my life, just staring at her. With each breath she took, I could see her chest rising with the expansion of her lungs, and the flickering strands of her blood-colored hair. The blanket of my bed was barely wrapped around her beautiful frame, letting me look upon almost her entire body. Piercing this real-world dream, my alarm clock began to beep. Knowing that it would mean her disappearance, I reluctantly reached out over her to turn it off. Even with the deactivation button pressed, the girl remained with my arm stretched out over her like a bridge. She had never stayed this long before, was the hallucination just growing in depth? Would I finally be able to touch her? Humming in bliss, she opened her eyes and stared at me with a small but sweet smile on her lips.
She spoke.
Her voice was inaudible, but her lips parted and shaped the words with incomprehensible care, like a master artisan sculpting a spinning clay pot with her hands. I had never been one for reading lips, the ability completely eluded me, but once, just this one time, I was able to read the formation of the words like a bright neon sign, and hear them whispered in the center of my mind.
“I love you.”
Three words, three simple words, but the weight they carried pushed me over the edge. Unable to hold the tears of joy back any longer, I desperately reached out to embrace her, only for her to disappear before I could be blessed with her touch.
I stepped into the locker room of the school. It was time for gym class but I wouldn’t be participating. My constant pain was my permanent excuse. Why couldn’t this cancer have kicked in when I was a Freshman? I stuffed my backpack in one of the lockers and grabbed my pills.
“Why do you always cry when you fall down?”
I already knew who it was and I was trying to keep my blood from boiling. His name was Tom, and he was nothing but a punk and bully. He had tormented me all throughout middle and high school, an extra force driving me into depression. He was probably one of the largest reasons as to why I wanted to die.
“Tom, leave him alone, he has cancer,” another student warned.
“So? Its not like I would cry if I had that,” Tom grunted before shoving me.
I turned to him, the pudgy psychopath.
“You’re just a pathetic little bitch.”
In my mind, something snapped. The anger, which had always been suppressed by the fear of consequences, finally broke free. Tom was larger than I was, but I didn’t care. Practically foaming at the mouth, I reached out with both hands and grabbed him by the throat, slamming him against the lockers. I was strangling him with all the strength I could gather in my sick body, using adrenaline to increase the power of my muscles. I had my thumbs pressed against the main arteries in the side of his neck, halting the flow of blood to his brain while robbing him of the ability to breathe. He couldn’t focus enough to use his arms to free himself. I would normally never retaliate like this, as I had learned early in life that the bullies always got off without a single slap on the wrist but the victims who defended themselves basically got the chair. There was nothing that could be done but take the pain and hope your tormenter would eventually get bored. For what I was doing, I could easily get expelled, but not a single part of me cared. If I was going to live a life of agony and die an early death, I might as well do whatever the fuck I wanted and drag some bastards down with me.
“How about I correct some of the bullshit spewing out of that deformed pile of gray matter you call a brain? First of all, I don’t fall down. I have goddamn seizures. Second, the tumors in my head are strangling my limbic system just like I’m strangling you, meaning that my brain is now incapable of producing chemicals that let me feel anything other than misery and anger. Last but not least, when I have a seizure, all of my senses are so overwhelmed with the pain that I collapse as I am bombarded by waves of agony. I suffer every second, but when I have a seizure, it makes being lit on fire seem like a massage! Have you ever been in so much pain and wanted to die so bad that you almost used your own fingernails to slash your wrists? I think anyone would shed some tears if they experienced that.”
Tom was turning blue from the strangulation and I had to fight with everything I had to keep from murdering him right then and there in front of everyone. Instead of ending his life, I threw him down at the ground, inadvertently smashing his face against the corner of one of the locker room benches. The impact completely shattered his eye socket and fractured his skull. Another few centimeters and his eye would have been permanently lost. After he fell to the ground, I finished with a kick to the jaw, busting up almost half of his teeth. Tom was passed out on the floor and pouring blood with everyone staring at me in fear.
I opened my bottle of pain meds and took one out. “That is just a sample of what I live with constantly.”
Tom was rushed to the hospital and I was suspended for the rest of the month. Under normal circumstances, I would have been suspended for a full month or even expelled, but the punishment was light for several reasons. Tom had been the school bully ever since 6th grade and was nothing but a worthless punk. He treated everyone like shit and teasing someone with cancer was the worst thing anyone had ever seen. Everyone in the locker room testified against him and said that I had done what needed to be done long ago. I silently disagreed with them on that. What should have been done long ago was Tom being lined up in front of a firing squad and shot. I knew in the back of my mind that everyone was testifying for me because of my cancer, because everyone hated Tom, or because everyone now feared me. My sentence was also so light because of the recent trauma of learning of my disease.