Skeletons and Sunshine

I first talked to Skeleton in the janitor’s closet as he scratched his arms with ratty, bitten fingernails that had been dipped in bleach. The irony of finding him there made me laugh beneath my breath…you know…that kind of laughing where it feels more like choking.

He glared at me as I slipped in, poised with blood on his bone arms. He shivered and his teeth chattered like a skeleton I saw in a movie once…and I was scared.

“Hi…” I whispered and my voice shook and trembled. “Hello…”

“Get out… Get out,” he ordered with a voice as soft as a whisper and as ratty as his patchy, balding hair. He sneered at me and I was so afraid I turned and obeyed him, forgetting my attempt to play hide-and-seek and never-be-found with the nurses.

The hallways with the white walls and pale green, baby vomit floors stretched in front of me with nowhere else to hide, like those endless hallways in the nightmares where I’m running from something. The janitor’s closet had not been locked by some miraculous chance and I wouldn’t let the monster from a cheap horror movie be the one to take this gift from me. I returned to the closet with sweaty palms and shaking legs.

Skeleton was now huddled in a corner, clutching onto his cut bone arms. He looked up and rattled and sighed. “Back so soon?”

I nodded, nodded, bit my lip. “I don’t want to take my medication…” I hissed, ducking behind a trashcan and peeking around it to stare at Skeleton. I was sick of the meds. Pills for breakfast and pills before bed and no bedtime story as I was the one to tuck myself in.

We sat in silence for the longest time and I could hear Skeleton’s shallow breathing from his corner. Wheeze, wheeze, and a cough from me. My head ached from the not quite silence and I fidgeted, feeling like I was suffocating. Wheeze, wheeze.

“Why’re you in here?” I asked and the wheezing stopped momentarily before starting up again, quicker now.

“The closet…or…?” He spoke slowly and I leaned forward, leaned forward, almost toppled, waiting for him to finish but he didn’t.

The closet or this building or life or what I didn’t know what I meant myself so I kept it simple so I wouldn’t have to think because thinking made my head feel hazy and heavy. “Closet.”

“They want to stick needles in me…” Skeleton finally muttered. Clack, clack of the teeth.

I inched forward from behind my trashcan, staring at him curiously. “How do they put needles into bone?”

He chuckled a breathless, wheezing chuckle. Clack, clack of the teeth. “Bone?”

“You’re a skeleton…” I scooted some more. “Can they do that?”

He brought up a hand that shook and shoved away his patchy hair from his dull, cloudy eyes. “I don’t know. I guess so. They want to.” His voice was jagged and I moved forward more so I could hear him clearly.

“Why…?” I was enthralled and transfixed. A Skeleton was talking to me, not asking me questions about how I was feeling or what I was thinking or if I’d really swallowed my pills or was just faking it again. It was the closest I had come to a bedtime story since I’d gotten here and I lapped it up.

He leaned forward too and I thought I heard his joints creaking. “Because…they say I’ll die if I don’t…” he whispered it and I shivered, staring at him, my thumb coming up between my lips like it’d always done since I was a tiny little child.

“Do you want to die?” I was now sitting beside him, careful not to touch him as we both sat, huddled and hugging our knees. It seemed like a ridiculous question to ask a Skeleton and once again I choked on laughter that wasn’t quite laughter.

He shrugged, not even raising an eyebrow at my not-laughter. “Sometimes. I see you do too…” He pointed to my arm and I glanced down to see the puckered scar tissue frown that was there, hugging it closer to my chest.

“No…” It came out in a whine. I didn’t want to talk about me. I was sick of talking about me in stuffy rooms and sessions filled with tears and sniffles from my mother. Talking in a janitor’s closet was not any better. To take the attention from me, I pointed to the raised lines on his arms.

“I needed to get my mind off my stomach. It hurts sometimes.”

I glanced at his stomach through his shirt and just saw rib bones poking at the cloth. I reached out and gently touched it, placing my palm over his belly button like I did to my mom when she was pregnant with my little sister. Instead of a bulge, I was greeted with a concave, hollowed belly. He put his hand over mine…just like mom did and instead of smiling like she did, he frowned.

He opened his pale lips and white teeth to speak, but just as he did, the janitor’s closet door burst open and a nurse ran in.

“There you two are! My God! We looked everywhere for you boys who left this door open Jeremiah what happened to your arms!” Her words made me ears ring and my head sting and I ducked it down between my knees, leaning into Skeleton. I started to cry when another nurse came in and pulled me away from him.

-

Skeleton was sitting at one of the tables in the cafeteria, staring down at his plate of what looked like mush. I stared at him, fidgeted with my tray, stared at him some more and decided to join him.

He did not look up when I sat down, just hunched over even more, his shoulder blades stabbing at the air behind him like jagged, broken remains of wings.

“Hi,” I said and silence ate up my word even though he did not eat his food himself, just sat there with a fork held loosely in those finger bones you always see made into necklaces around the necks of savage Amazonian tribes. He jabbed at his food and hunched over even more and I saw the dots and knots of his spine stabbing, clawing, shooting upward. “Hello, Skeleton.”

His eyes rolled upward till he found me through jagged stalactites of dirtied hair. “What?”

“Hi.” I gave a wave that made my fingers tremble and my scar flash in his face as my elbow upset my tray of food, nearly knocking it to the floor.

“What do you want?” Arms crossed over his chest, he sat up straighter and stared at me. “You got me in trouble the other day in the closet. They thought I did something to you.”

“So did they poke you with needles because of me?” I was genuinely concerned. I figured it would hurt a lot for it to poke through bone. Bone’s thick, isn’t it? It would take a lot to get a needle in. He shook his head while I gnawed at my lip. “Are you going to die?” I replaced my lip with pale, soggy meatloaf.

He shrugged, the ends of his shoulders piercing the silence around his head. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

The meatloaf slid down my throat and I continued chewing on my lip. “Well…then…shouldn’t you eat?” I looked at his untouched food, neatly placed in piles that did not touch.

“I’m not hungry.”

“The potatoes are good.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Well…” I rested my chin in my sweaty palm. “Then can I have your apple crumble?” Another shrug and he handed it over. That’s when I decided that I would call him my friend.

-

In group therapy, Skeleton was propped in a chair, dark eyes watchful like some leftover pirate guarding his treasure even in death. I sat beside him, shuffling my red, plastic chair closer to him. His eyes slid to me and he crossed his arms over his chest.

“What’re you doing?” Clack, clack of the pirate’s teeth. Yo ho yo ho a pirate’s life for me.

I shrugged, hugging myself, my hands sliding up against my arms to feel along the raised bump of dead tissue on my right arm. “Sitting by you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re my friend.” I ran a nail along the scar, searching for tidbits of pain.

His mouth dropped open with a clatter and he took a breath to expel some words that I had the feeling would be sharper than his shoulder blades, but he was cut off before he could even start as group began.

Nancy, Nice Nancy with red hair and cigarette smoke-clogged voice, stared at us all one by one. I had not talked in group before. It scared me. Being the center of attention scared me and Nice Nancy who lost some niceness let her eyes come to a careening stop upon me.

“You’ve never told everyone why you’re here, Sunny,” she said and I glared at her. I was not sunshine. I didn’t want to talk and I didn’t want to be there in that circle, in that room, in that building, in that life, and so I squirmed in my chair.

“My mom sent me,” I whispered, hunching over in my chair like Skeleton did at dinner the night before.

“Why did she send you here, Sunny?” She smiled a yellow-teeth cigarette smoke-stained smile. Nice Nancy… Kind Nancy… Not To Be Trusted Nancy.

I held up my arm and my scar screamed at the room. Rage raised his eyebrows and Depression frowned and nodded, staring at the scratches across her thin, pale wrists. Almost-Skeleton, Skeleton’s less thin, female counterpart, bit her lip as if she was attempting to keep in the vomit she used to let out so freely.

“Can you explain?” Used To Be Nice Nancy urged.

“I tried to kill myself but I was scared and I sopped halfway through and there was so much blood so I wrapped my arm in my little sister’s Beauty and the Beast sleeping bag until I passed out and someone found me,” I mumbled, trying to shove away the memories that were rushing and racing back, making my head feel ready to explode. I imagined bits of my hair spattering against Skeleton’s, filling in the patches, and blood splashing into Nancy’s already red hair as Rage and Depression clung to each other in fear while Almost-Skeleton threw up in the corner. I wanted it to explode. It would create a diversion.

Nancy nodded and so did the other rejects, Rage looking grossed out and Depression looking resentful. Almost-Skeleton leaned forward in her chair and asked, “Why’d you do it?”

I shook my head hard. Why’d I do it? Why’d I do it? “No.”

“Why not?” She leaned forward even more. “Everyone’s noticed the scar so why not just explain why?”

“No.” I folded up further, shaking and shivering.

“It’s not like it’s a big deal. You’ve heard our stories.”

My knees came up to my chest and I shook some more, hiding my head between my chest and knees.

“Leave him alone.” Bones rattled beside me. Skeleton spoke and Almost-Skeleton backed off, obeying her greater double, growing silent as I continued to shiver and leaned into Skeleton’s side, his ribs curling away from me, but his arm attempting to pull me closer. “Just leave him alone.”

-

I padded out of my room and stole silently down the hall, pausing to peek into doorways. Rage was sleeping in his room, thumb in his mouth, kind and calm in sleep. The next revealed glow-in-the-dark bones in the center of the bed inside.

“Skeleton?” I whispered, stepping in. “Are you awake?” I crept up to his bed, wringing my hands as I stared down at him, as still as if he were in the center of a coffin instead of a bed.

I reached out and placed my fingertips on his forehead, expecting hard coldness to meet me, but touched warm, soft skin instead.

He shifted, rattled, rolled onto his side and his eyes gaped open at me as a yawn leaked from the corner of his mouth. “Am I dreaming?” he wanted to know so I told him he wasn’t, feeling apologetic because a dream’s more welcome than fake sunshine.

“Thanks for the other day…during group…” I whispered. I’d sat there against him till therapy was over and then he’d hurried away from me…and I was thankful.

He rubbed at his eyes with knotty fists and yawned again. “If you get caught in here we’ll both be in trouble,” he said and patted the mattress beside him while lifting up his blanket so I could crawl underneath it.

“You…” I whispered, my knees bumping against his and my arms hugged to myself because I wasn’t sure where they should go. “You make me feel strange things…” He was silent, just the wheezing breath that sent vibrations through the bed and up into me making noise. “I stopped feeling…so I tried to die….and then when I got here I still didn’t feel anything, but you’re making me feel again.”

Still silent we sat until a bone hand pulled one of mine from my chest and just held it, hot and not cold like bones are supposed to be. Time passed and we both laid awake, hands loosely gripping each other’s still he lowly pulled away.

“Go to your room before you get caught in here.”

“Can I come back tomorrow night?” I was hopeful. He shrugged. That was enough for me so I scurried back to my own room and bed, unable to stop myself from smiling.

-

I returned to Skeleton’s room night after night and he was always awake and sitting up in bed when I did, maybe waiting for me. He started telling me bedtime stories when I mentioned that I didn’t like not having them… They were stories of his past coated with magic and sugar sweet simplicities that made them more of bedtime stories than the horror stories they actually were. We held hands or touched toes together or just laid in complete and concrete silence. I started looking forward to nighttimes all because of Skeleton.

“Hi,” I said one night as I walked across the room, joining him in his bed. “Hello.”

He nodded and laid down, his face sharp points and dark shadows in the nearly dark room. I slid closer to him, letting myself touch him, our legs and toes making gentle contact, one of my hands on his pressed in belly beneath his thin shirt and the other between us, holding onto one of his.

“I heard Nancy talking about you earlier…” he whispered into the darkness around us, hiding us from any maybe-monsters that dwelled beneath his bed. “She said you’ve improved a lot since you came here.” He paused and I closed my eyes, willing to let his dead, raspy voice and his whistling breathing lull me into sleep, but what he said made me jolt wide awake. ‘They think you’re ready to go home.”

“No…” I urgently hissed, squeezing his hand tightly. “I don’t want to.”

“It’s just what I heard them say. It could just be speculation,” he calmly said and didn’t try to pull away from me even though I squeezed his fingers so tightly that he had to have been fearing those brittle bones breaking.

“I don’t want to!” I threw a mini-tantrum through clenched teeth with hot tears, thrashing feet, and an aching pain in my chest.

Skeleton didn’t answer, just raised my hand and kissed my scar slowly, first down the whole length of it before doubling back up again to the inside of my arm, an inch or two below the inside of my elbow. I whimpered and watched him watching me as he ran his tongue up and down it once more before pulling my hand to his chest and my body closer to his.

My hand felt his chest, felt his heart beating strongly, felt the wheezing breaths start up in his lungs with shivers and shakes before expelling into the air between us.

“I don’t want to leave you,” I announced, dipping my head down to kiss the tight film of skin over his bones and over his heart. “I don’t want to…”

His hands clamped over my ears and pulled my head from his chest to his face. I stared into those holes of his eyes and he opened his mouth, his jaw clicking. “I’ll let them stick needles in me if it means I’ll get out soon too…”

I tried not to start crying again and he kissed me and it almost hurt but it didn’t because it felt too good and sent chills and thrills through my body that I slid so it was covering his like a second layer of skin and bone and fat that he didn’t have.

I shifted, gasping as his bones stabbed me. His pelvic bones attempted to pierce through my skin and his ribs were rigid and hard against my front. One of his hands clenched onto my shoulder; I thought it’d split through while his other one twisted into my hair as his mouth worked against mine.

I wasn’t sure how I’d never noticed it before, but he actually had full lips that seemed out of place on that skinless bone body. Kissing him felt good, and so did his wandering hands, but he soon turned his head away and sighed, pulling me to his side.

“I’m too tired…” he whispered. “I don’t have much energy…”

I nodded and held him back, closing my eyes halfway so I could keep looking at him while appearing like I was sleeping, and once again I noticed that I was feeling things again.

-

Nice Nancy who immediately became Nasty Nancy told me that she thought I was well enough to go home back to my mother and my little sister and I stared at her, remembering that Skeleton had told me the same thing the night before and that I hated her and that I maybe probably loved him and that I did not want to go home. I told Nasty Nancy that I didn’t want to, but she just looked at me helplessly, smiled, and said that I was being silly.

I ran from her. I searched for Skeleton. He wasn’t around. They found me clawing at the door to the janitor’s closet, back heaving, stomach churning, head aching and eyes leaking tears.

“Where is he?” I screamed. I screamed and I screamed and when I caught my breath I screamed some more. Someone held me down. Someone poked me with a needle. A needle, a needle. Someone calmly explained that they’d taken Skeleton away to be poked by his own needles but they wouldn’t tell me where away was and soon I was whisked away by drug-induced sleep.

-

I left a few days later. My mom greeted me in a sundress and sunglasses and a hug of breast and a chubby tummy left over from my sister’s birth for her Sunny boy darling, as bashful as a schoolgirl, as if I wasn’t her son but some distant relative that she was meeting for the first time after hearing so much about him.

She talked the whole way home and I sat crouched in the passenger seat of the car, folded into myself, trying to block out her nervous babbling.

“Lily wanted to come and pick you up too but I wasn’t sure that it’d be a good thing for her and your therapist tells me that you’ve made drastic improvements in the past few weeks so that’s really great I’m glad for you Sunny yes I really am and when you get home I’ll make you a special dinner what do you want are you hungry is your favorite food still spaghetti because it’s yours if you want it anything you want.”

I thought of Skeleton and I wasn’t hungry.

My sister, Lily, met my mom and I at the door, staring at me like she wasn’t sure what to think or say or do and I stared at her like I wasn’t sure what to think or say or do, so I whispered, “Boo!” into her face and scurried to my room to hide under my bed until mom called me out for dinner.

I still wasn’t hungry, but I pretended to eat anyway. Mom still talked and Lily still stared and I thought of Skeleton, wondering where he was and what he was doing and how he was doing. Did the needles hurt him? Did he miss me? Was he thinking of me? Did they tell him I’d left? I didn’t know and it made me panicky.

After dinner the three of us sat in the living room, watching a Disney movie because Disney movies are sunny and good and the good guy always wins in the end. Mom was still nervous and avoiding looking at me, lest she see the failed suicide attempt scar and that hurt me, and Lily was still staring through the corner of her eye, her gaze picking at my scar, making it hurt me, and I still worried, pinching the skin near my armpits because it hurt me and I could still feel even though Skeleton wasn’t around me.

While the ending credits rolled down the black screen in front of us, I turned to mom, stretching my arms in front of me, insides up to reveal the sealed gash. Her eyes caught it and flickered away, suddenly going blank like deadened light bulbs. Lily’s stayed glued there.

“I made a friend while I was there,” I told mom and she turned her head. “They’re sticking him with needles right now as we speak…”

“Sunny, I don’t…” She took a deep breath and glanced at me. “I can’t hear about it… Not yet…”

I leaned forward, my arms going out farther. Look at them, mom. Look at me. They’re a part of me now. “His name’s Skeleton. I started talking to him in a janitor’s closet and we were friends,” I continue, thinking of his bones in a pile in the corner of the janitor’s closet.

“Sunny, please…”

“He protected me from Nasty Nancy and Almost-Skeleton during group once and he told me bedtime stories.”

“I don’t want to hear about it yet, Sunny… Please…” She hung her head and Lily turned from staring to glaring. Yes, good idea. Pretend that I’m the bad one but at the same time we need to pretend that nothing bad happened and I didn’t do what I did-oh wait, I didn’t do anything, I suppose, did I mom?

I got up and silently scuttled to my bedroom, back under the bed once more, mumbling mutterings to Skeleton and pretending and hoping that he heard me.

-

A month or so went by. The days blurred together and I started to lose the warmth that Skeleton had put into me, pulling it from somewhere deep in his frame just to hand it over to me.

One night I got up and shuffled to the bathroom, stubbing my toe on the way, but it didn’t hurt. I hugged myself, elbows sharp but not as sharp as Skeleton’s held in opposite hands, but it didn’t warn me up.

I stopped in front of the mirror and stared at myself, avoiding my eyes. I’d been losing weight and my cheeks were hollowing out, my skin pale. Blinking and making my eyes water, I morphed myself into Skeleton and was brought to tears.

Without even stopping to think about it, my hand reached for my mom’s pink razor at the edge of the tub. My hands didn’t shake as I snapped off the plastic and pulled out the blades. My stomach didn’t clench as I stared down at my scarless inner arm. I didn’t feel faint as the corner of one of the small, thin razors snagged at my skin. I didn’t cry when I dragged it down. No…because without Skeleton there was no way for me to feel.

And so I dropped the razor into the sink, wrapped my bleeding arm in a towel, walked to the phone in the kitchen, and calmly dialed 911.

-

I stared at a friend turned slight-stranger who sat hunched over a lunch tray. He lifted potatoes to his mouth, shaking. Shaking myself, I stepped to him and sat down.

“Hi,” I whispered and Skeleton raised his head, cheeks fuller now, eyes less empty and dull. His jaw fell open, not clacking too loudly and I gripped his hand under the table as I smiled. “Hello…”

I like my boys. I was going to make this into a longer story of their life after they got out together and what not, but decided to hack that idea to pieces and just made this instead, but I didn't know how to end it... So I did Sunny's "hi...hello..." thing just to tie it all together?

This kept me awake at school the past few days… SEHR GUT! BUT! I was half asleep while typing it out everyday... XD So if there were really odd mistakes...that's most likely why...

Any tense mistakes? ;-; Past tense confuses me...

Thanks for reading. :D