by J P Barnaby
AARON: Oh no.
Spencer laughed, loud and long, which made Aaron smile.
AARON: How do you know how to laugh if you can’t hear other people laugh?
SPENCER: It is like sneezing, I guess. It just comes out. For a long time when I was a kid, I felt self-conscious about it and about other sounds that I would make because I never knew if they were right. My aunt worked with me for a long time until I felt comfortable with things like laughing, clapping, word pronunciation and dialect, and even belching. Social niceties are learned, and a lot of them are learned through sound. It is amazing what hearing people take for granted.
AARON: You’ve worked really hard to compensate for being deaf.
SPENCER: Which is surprising, since I am totally lazy. ;)
“You are not lazy,” Aaron said through his laughter, and without thinking about it, pushed Spencer’s shoulder. When he caught sight of Spencer’s surprised face, he jerked his hand back. “Sorry.”
Spencer shifted on the couch and pulled his leg up beneath him so he faced Aaron.
SPENCER: Do not be sorry. I do not know why you can touch me without having problems, but I think it is some kind of breakthrough for you.
AARON: I think it’s because I’m doing the touching. When people touch me, it just takes me back to that place. When I touch someone else, it’s under my control. I just never thought about doing it before, and I really never thought I’d like it.
Aaron realized what he’d just admitted, that he wanted to touch Spencer, and his stomach tied in knots. Spencer wasn’t gay, and straight guys didn’t like other guys touching them. While he didn’t think Spencer would beat the crap out of him for it, he couldn’t imagine that Spencer would invite him to just rub on him whenever he wanted. His thoughts were confirmed with Spencer’s next instant message.
SPENCER: I am going to go check on the egg rolls.
He nodded at Spencer because there wasn’t really anything to say. When Spencer came back a few minutes later with a plate full of egg rolls, soy sauce, and a couple of sodas, Aaron didn’t bring up the subject again. Content just to be in Spencer’s company, he ate quietly. Spencer wouldn’t be able to read his lips while he had a mouth full of food anyway.
“Do. You. Want. To. Play. Another. Game.? I. Have. Tons.. Dad. Seems. To. Think. Stuff. Compensates. For. Being. Deaf.,” Spencer told him with a shrug, causing him to look around at all the shiny toys in the rec room with a new perspective. Aaron’s father did well and provided the family with what they needed, but he didn’t think they had the money for all the extravagant stuff sitting around in Spencer’s house. Just in this room alone, Spencer had every gaming console on the market, a state of the art desktop computer, a laptop, two huge flat-panel televisions, an iPad, and his iPhone—and that was just in plain sight. The furniture, lush and expensive, looked practically brand new. Aaron wondered if they had just bought it, or maybe if they never used it. The room had a stiff, unlived-in look, even with all the toys. Even the house itself was an extravagance. Spencer had taken him on a tour the last time he was over, and they had five bedrooms for just the two of them.
“It’s so quiet here. With my brothers, our house is always total chaos,” Aaron mused.
Spencer’s expression turned wistful.
“What?”
“I. Wish. I. Had. Brothers..”
“So, next time, let’s play at my house. My brothers would love to play.” Aaron’s voice swelled with his excitement. His mother would be ecstatic. She liked Spencer, and she’d love for Aaron to have someone over just to hang out. His brothers liked Spencer and had already invited him back to play.
“I. Would. Like. That.. It. Gets. Really. Lonely. Here..”
“Your dad never seems to be home. Is he gone a lot?”
“He. Goes. To. A. Lot. Of. Conferences.. He. Is. Saving. The. World.,” Spencer said with a snort, but something about his demeanor seemed off. Aaron wasn’t sure if Spencer was outright lying or just holding something back, but he decided to let it go. Spencer grabbed his laptop and started typing.
SPENCER: It has been like that for the last year or so since he stopped taking clients. He is gone a couple of weekends a month, and sometimes for a few days around them. That is why he keeps having to schedule out your therapy sessions around his stuff. Like you don’t have a life too.
AARON: I don’t have a life. The stuff he’s teaching me, like the video games and the breathing exercises, they’re helping. I haven’t had a bad trigger lately, but the little stuff I’m able to breathe through.
SPENCER: Good. You know if there is anything we can work on together, all you have to do is ask, right? I want to help.
AARON: You are helping. I honestly feel better since we became friends. I’m getting out of the house. I’m living, even just a little bit. It’s been so long since I had something to think about other than what happened.
SPENCER: Think your brothers would be up for a bit of play this weekend?
AARON: I’ll ask them, but I know I would.
“THIS APP is fantastic, boys,” Dr. Mayer told Spencer and Aaron as they all stood huddled around Spencer’s laptop, playing with the new interface. “The Twitter API isn’t all that user-friendly, but you’ve even worked in their native security module. You’re definitely getting an A, but what are you going to do with it now? I haven’t seen anything like this on the free download sites.”
“We’ve been talking about putting up a download site and then linking to it from all the major free download services. At least it will be something for Spencer to put on his resume. Especially if it takes off and becomes kind of popular,” Aaron commented as he flipped to the next screen to show Dr. Mayer the interfaces he’d built for pulling random songs or files worked on for tweeting.
“What about your resume, Aaron?” Dr. Mayer asked, his voice quiet but kind. Aaron didn’t look up immediately, but his fingers stalled on the touchpad of Spencer’s laptop. Spencer looked between them with confusion clear in his face. He hadn’t seen what Dr. Mayer said because he’d been watching the screen.
“I’m not capable of working, Dr. Mayer,” Aaron said, and then let his voice drop to a whisper. “I can’t be around people.”
“What if you didn’t have to be around people? I was thinking about asking you to TA for me next semester. I could e-mail you the stuff you need to grade or set up. You wouldn’t need—” He stopped abruptly as Aaron began to back away from the small table where they all stood. A look of hopeless fear crossed the instructor’s face, and Aaron could only imagine the expression on his own. The room had started to get smaller at the very mention of the job, but as Dr. Mayer tried to coax Aaron into accepting, something pulled the air from it as well. He couldn’t breathe and it was hard to think with the blood pounding in his ears.
“Aaron?” Spencer asked, but Aaron just shook his head.
“Ask Spencer, I can’t… I just… I….” He turned around and smacked headfirst into a tiny Asian boy coming into the room for the next class. Aaron screamed, and the other boy’s face went from angry to frightened in an instant. He knelt quickly to grab his fallen books as Aaron’s legs gave out and he fell to his knees. Spencer knelt right beside him on the classroom floor. Reaching for Aaron, his hand froze in midair when his friend cringed away like Spencer would hurt him.
“D…. Don’t…. Don’t touch….” Aaron stammered, and Spencer, whether because he could read Aaron’s lips or just assumed, moved back several inches to give his friend space. Aaron stayed in the room enough to see the hurt flicker through Spencer’s eyes before everything changed and he was in the garage.
“What a freak,” a voice said somewhere outside the perimeter of the echoing, empty garage. The voice, however, didn’t echo, and neither did the next voice.
“Clear the room, right now. Everyone out.”
“Aaron. It. Is. Okay..” Another voice said, and that voice took the edge off the blinding fear. He was scared. So scared. But the feel
ing seemed to warble, like an out of tune radio.
“What. Do. You. See.? Aaron., Tell. Me. What. Is. In. The. Room..” Some part of Aaron’s mind recognized that Spencer was trying to ground him, but he could see nothing but the garage. Insulation peeled and hung down from the ceiling in ragged sheets above his head. Water damage stained the brick walls which had once been painted white. The blue trim had faded long before he and Juliette lay helpless beneath it. His body ached, and the concrete under his mostly naked body chilled him bone-deep. He tried to look around, to answer the voice’s question, but the shoe on the back of his neck made that impossible, so he answered the only way he could.
“Blood. All I can see is the blood.”
“I. Do. Not. Know. What. To. Do..” Spencer’s voice sounded helpless, just like Aaron. Soon, the knife would slice across his neck, and the end would come. Juliette’s agonized screams echoed though his memory and broke his heart all over again. “Please., Aaron., Just. Breathe..” The sound of exaggerated breathing reached him, even in the garage, but he couldn’t feel the breaths on the back of his neck. Throughout the whole horrible ordeal, he could feel their breath on the back of his neck when they were on top of him. He always felt their hands as they held him down; he couldn’t feel them now. As he took deep breaths, matching the ones he could hear from Spencer, the flashback started to recede back into the darkness.
It took several minutes before he understood with absolute certainty that he was in a classroom.
Humiliation burned in his face when he saw not only Spencer, but Dr. Mayer sitting on the floor with him. If he reached out with his right hand, he could touch Spencer. Dr. Mayer sat a little farther away against the wall near the door. Thank fucking Christ it was Friday, and he wouldn’t have to face either of them again until Monday. He wanted his mother with the fiery need of a five-year-old lost at Disneyland.
“Careful,” Dr. Mayer said as Aaron sat up and put both hands on his throbbing head. The look his professor gave him in that moment slid down the scale from concerned to pitying, the longer Aaron sat there. He couldn’t stand their pity—especially Spencer’s. The look on his friend’s face made hot coals fire up in his stomach. Bracing most of his weight on the wall, he slid up into a standing position.
“Maybe. You. Should…,” Spencer started, but before he could finish, Aaron had burst through the door and taken off down the hall toward the parking lot where his mother would be waiting for him.
He just wanted to go home.
Sixteen
“WHY DO you think the grounding didn’t work?” Dr. Thomas asked him as he sat curled in a tight ball in the supple overstuffed armchair in the rec room. The chocolate leather almost swallowed his tiny frame, but it made him comfortable. He couldn’t say he felt safe, exactly, but usually he felt content. He couldn’t quite muster contentment right then, because Spencer had been extraordinarily quiet throughout class, on the ride to his house, and as he sat on the floor in Aaron’s therapy session. He couldn’t help but feel that Spencer was angry with him for some reason, or maybe he just didn’t want to hang around with the freak anymore. Aaron could certainly understand that. It had taken every ounce of self-determination to overcome the humiliation of what happened on Friday and walk back into the classroom. He hated facing Spencer and facing Dr. Mayer feeling so fucking weak, so inferior to every other person on the planet.
“I don’t know,” Aaron said automatically, shrugging and pulling his arms closer around his body. If he pulled in on himself tight enough, maybe he would disappear. He wanted to disappear—especially if it meant he could be away from Spencer’s gaze. He lived in a huge spotlight, and the bright intensity of it highlighted his every flaw.
“Today I want to work on identifying some of your triggers. If you can learn to avoid those triggers or at least control your reaction to them, you’ll have less of these debilitating episodes,” Spencer’s father said as he sat back on the couch and wrote something down in his little notebook. The tape recorder, ever present, sat in the middle of the table in front of Aaron. It pointed at him accusingly. “Now, walk me through what happened just before the event.”
Aaron sighed. He’d tried so hard all weekend not to fucking think about it, and now Dr. Thomas wanted a play-by-play. Every time he thought about what happened, he only saw Spencer’s frightened face.
“Dr. Mayer had just told me he wanted me to TA for him.” He couldn’t look up at them, the shame of his setback burning in his stomach. “He kept hounding me about it. The room got really small, and I had to get out of there. I didn’t know what else to do. When I turned around to leave, I ran into someone. I felt the pain as we collided. A pain shot through my head, and it started. All of a sudden the classroom kind of melted away and I was back in the garage. Juliette was screaming. The men were there.” Aaron closed his eyes, trying to block out the images he saw in his head.
“Okay, stop there. What do you think triggered the flashback? Was it the pain, or running into the person? What are some other factors? Were you tired or stressed at all?” Dr. Thomas asked as he scribbled furiously on his little pad.
Aaron tried to think back to that moment and remember with perfect clarity the classroom where he and Spencer showed Dr. Mayer their project. Things had been going so well until Dr. Mayer brought up the subject of being a TA.
“I think it started with the stress and humiliation of the conversation,” Aaron reasoned. “A normal person could have talked to their professor about working for him, but all I could think about was how horribly I would fail. I couldn’t be trusted, couldn’t be counted on. Rainy days leave me incapacitated in bed, and then what would he do?”
“So, it started with a fear of failure.”
“It started with me being a coward,” Aaron argued and sunk deeper into the chair, trying to get lost in its depths.
“You. Are. Not. A Coward.!” Spencer cried, and Aaron looked over at him, startled. He noticed that Dr. Thomas was also watching his son. “You. Are. So. Brave. Just. For. Living.. I. Do. Not. Know. If. I. Could..”
“That isn’t bravery, Spencer. I don’t have any other choice,” Aaron clarified. Spencer rocked back and forth slightly in his position on the floor but didn’t make any move to get up or move closer to Aaron.
“Have you had thoughts of suicide?” Dr. Thomas asked, and Aaron hesitated. He had—many of them, but he didn’t trust the good doctor enough to voice these episodes aloud. He knew that if Dr. Thomas thought him a danger to himself, he’d have no choice but to lock Aaron up somewhere. He’d be in a cell away from his family, away from Spencer. His throat constricted around the answer, but he couldn’t lie.
“Doesn’t everyone from time to time?” Aaron answered evasively.
“That. Is. Not. An. Answer.,” Spencer said quietly, and Aaron saw the desperate sadness in his friend’s face. Aaron traced the creases in the arm of the leather chair with his fingers, staring intently at his progress. He didn’t have an answer they wanted to hear, so he decided on the truth.
“Sometimes,” he whispered. A long line in the leather near the edge of the chair took an inordinately long time to draw with his finger while silence stretched in the rec room. All Aaron heard was the ticking of a clock somewhere in the room. He counted along with the seconds, trying to distract his mind from the dark thoughts that threatened to invade it.
1… 2… 3… 4….
“Have you ever tried?” Dr. Thomas asked.
8… 9… 10… 11….
“No.”
“Do you have a plan of how you would do it? A time? A place?”
15… 16… 17… 18….
“I’ve thought about hanging myself in the garage, but I can’t stand the thought of one of my little brothers finding me, or my mom, or really anyone in my family. I’ve put them through so fucking much. They don’t need that in their heads forever. I have enough in my head for all of us.” Aaron’s voice cracked with the weight of just exactly what was in his head.
&
nbsp; 24… 25… 26… 27….
“Aaron, while I don’t think it’s healthy for you to have these thoughts, it’s not unreasonable given what you’ve been through. You don’t have a concrete plan. You don’t have a history of suicide attempts. You’re starting to form a support network. You’re working through your emotions in therapy. I’m concerned, but not to the point where I would have any legal basis to admit you for observation. That scares you, doesn’t it?”
Dr. Thomas dropped his notepad on the couch and sat forward with his elbows on his knees. His hazel eyes, so like his son’s, were intent on Aaron’s. Aaron nodded. Glancing over, he saw the concern and fear in Spencer’s eyes and for a moment forgot about counting the seconds with the clock to distract him. An overpowering need to hug Spencer took hold of Aaron’s heart. He couldn’t think of anything else.
In the next second, it was gone.
“Let’s get back to your triggers. Your flashback at the school appeared to be caused by a combination of stress and bumping into the other student,” Dr. Thomas said as he picked up his notebook again and began writing. “What about a flashback you’ve had before that. Do you remember your last one?”
Aaron thought back. The subject made his skin crawl with unpleasant anxiety. He remembered seeing Allen standing in the living room with his date. He remembered with horrifying accuracy the look of rage on his brother’s face as he lost control. God, he hated ruining Allen’s first date, one of his first real chances at normalcy since Aaron had fucked up his life.
“What is it?” Dr. Thomas asked, no doubt having read the flickering emotions on his face.
Aaron took a deep breath.
“Whatever it is, you’re safe from it here. Nothing is going to hurt you.”
He snorted. The good doctor didn’t understand that Aaron wasn’t safe anywhere, not from the men who had stolen his life because they were still roaming free, not from the screaming in his head, and certainly not from the crash he’d experience if Spencer decided Aaron wasn’t worth the effort. Aaron blinked, unsure where the last thought came from. Trying not to revisit that idea, he answered Dr. Thomas.
