Adult-FanFiction.org : Celebrity

Minutes	By : NHB Category: My Chemical Romance > General Views: 728 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I do not know the members of My Chemical Romance. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Minutes
- 1
Title: Minutes
Author: Normal Human Being
Notes: In theory, this takes place between parts two and three of My Brother's Blood Machine, but most of the events described take place way before then so it's not vital that you know that story. This is a completely seperate fic.
Disclaimer: I do not know, own, imply anything about or believe I am giving a realistic representation of My Chemical Romance. Legal action would be a waste of everyone's time.

*

“Dude,” Frank said as you knelt to pick up the last box, “you got tattooed.”

“Yeah,” you say simply, and carry the box down the stairs quicker than you’d like to because it feels fucking heavy - far too heavy for something that only contains pencil shavings and broken pens and sketches of your brother’s clavicle – because you suddenly feel like you’re wrapped around with oppressive thunderstorm heat and you need some air.

Outside, you stuff the box into the back of Frank’s beat up car and stand on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette you suddenly need and tapping the soles of your worn out shoes against the kerb. You keep doing that now, playing with your feet, because it reminds you of that bobbing walk she had that made her look like she was trying not step on the cracks in the pavement. And of course that reminds you of the time you watched her shaving her legs in your sink, because the shower in her dorm was “every kind of gross” and there was no way she was going to stand in it. And that makes you think of that stone-faced guy at the funeral, the one with the chiselled features and scruffed-up, bleach-blonde hair who looked disappointingly unlike you as he said a few words you could have said better. (But that wasn’t your place, even if she could only draw his spine and had never got a tattoo for him and had never spent six hours stoned sketching his brother’s clavicle). You can’t help but wonder, did he know she shaved her legs in the sink? Did he know how she studied eyelashes, had she looked to how they joined to the eye and moved as he looked downward? How many hours had she spent drawing pictures of his joints with the stub of a moonmin pencil (what the fuck was a moonmin, anyway?) after getting him drunk on cider with whisky in? Not as many as she did for you, you’re sure. Because she was yours, and he was just borrowing her off you.

“I thought you hated those things.”

You hadn’t heard Frank coming up behind you. He’s a little out of breath, because she – Lyn, Lyn, you will fucking say her name if it kills you – lived of the fifteenth floor of a building with no elevator and he’s been carrying boxes up and down for the past three hours. He stays behind you, but you’d like to think he has a slightly worried expression on his face. You’d like to think he was staring at the small of your back, where, he now knows, a pair of intricately patterned guns are inked onto your skin, the barrels pointing down to the base of your spine. They’re covered in semi-religious images and twirling vines, as if a gang of gun-toting psychopaths had wandered into a crumbling church in deepest darkest Africa and got all inspired. They look like that because she’d had one the same on her ribs in your honour. “If I can’t make you get one,” she’d said, “I figured I may as well get one for you.”

“But why a gun?” you’d asked, although it was an admittedly pretty gun and an admittedly cool tattoo and you were (unadmittedly but overwhelmingly) flattered.

“Because this is the gun I picture you carrying. In my head. Where you have guns.” Each sentence had been separated by a long pause, as if you’d been prising the words out of her.

“You see me with guns?”

She’d sighed, taken you by the arm and led you over to the mirror, the tall oval one that she’d rescued from a skip because one corner was smashed already and so when she broke it she’d get no more bad luck. “You should hide it there,” she’d said, hitching up your shirt. “In the small of your back. And when things start to look heavy you could just slide your hand under your jacket and let it rest like, there, with the thumb in the back of your belt, so everyone knows you have one.”

You’d looked at her sideways. Her face had been completely, hilariously serious. “‘Heavy’?” you teased. “Who the fuck says ‘heavy’ anymore? And since when did I hang around with gangsters?”

“For years! But again, in my head.” She grinned. “Where you’re interesting.”

You’d cuffed her round the head, just playing, still laughing, and told her her tattoos were cool.

“They’re cool and all,” says Frank, who is now lifting up the hem of your shirt and studying them more closely, “I just never pictured you getting them.” He doesn’t quite pronounce the question mark, but it’s definitely there – the silent why?

You grind out the remains of your cigarette with the toe of your tapping foot and turn to face Frank. Suddenly this conversation should not happen. You should not sit down in the street and explain why you’ve paid to be scarred in this way. This should be some kind of joke in which you reveal nothing. “Which is surprising, given the amount of time you spend picturing my ass.”

Frank seems to realise you cannot tell him now, and gives a mock-bow-turned-shrug. “What can I say, man? I love you. Prison style.”

“Anything else I should know before I move in with you?”

“I ‘accidentally’ broke the lock on the bathroom door yesterday. Oh, and I reserve the right to walk round naked in my own apartment and to force others to do the same.” You pull your best mock-terrified face. “When you start paying rent you can have your clothes back,” he says, laying a hand on your shoulder and looking up at you almost comfortingly.

“Freaked out. Officially. You’ve never kept a straight face for that long before.”

Frank breaks into a shit-eating grin, the kind that never looked natural on him because, well, because he was Frank, and so didn’t look like ‘happy’ should be on his emotional spectrum. “I know, man. Fucking scary, huh?” And before you know it, he’s plucked the cigarette packet out of your hands and lit up a Lucky. Your last fucking Lucky. You consider knocking him down and brutally beating him to death, but then decide that would be an overreaction and besides, you only smoke Luckys because she – Lyn, Lyn, for fuck’s sake, Lyn – smoked them and you were always stealing hers.

“Get off them!” she’d screeched the first time. “You’re an art student! You have to pollute yourself with something more…artistic.”

“Like cocaine?” you’d suggested, one eyebrow raised. In the days when you were both at college, her tutor (who, she later claimed, had fucked her in a store cupboard but you didn’t think you believed that) had found an eightball in the back of her closet. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “I’ll hide it better next time.”

“Nah, they’d only kick you out, too. But you need a more pretentious cigarette.”

You’d smoked roll-ups made with black paper for a month after that, and she must have wanted to get you back on them because a packet of the damn things falls out of the box as you shove it further back into the car. You can just hear her telling you that you’re a rock star and so need a more rebellious cigarette, much in the way that, when you’d told her your band had got signed and reached for a beer, she’d cried, “No! You’re a rock star! Rock stars drink champagne with whisky in.”

“I’m not a rock star yet.”

“Which is why you drink eight dollar sparkling wine with whisky in. Come on, man. Put down the beer and get into role.”

She’d stolen the “man” thing from Frank after a party where she’d calculated that he said it every fourth word. “That’s a serious idiosyncrasy. That’s a speech pattern that’s got its fucking hooks in. I want my habits to be that pronounced and that beautifully cliché,” she’d slurred, and started dropping “man” casually into the middle of her sentences.

It had been funny at the time, mostly because she only ever remembered to do it around Frank, but now that memory makes you want to punch Frank every time he says that word, which he still uses in every sentence as if it means nothing. Does he not realise? Can he not see that now that it has been assimilated into her it can no longer exist alone, that every time he says it now it just sounds hollow and retarded, like something out the kind of Keanu Reeves movie you could never bring yourself to sit through? No, obviously not, because she never studied his eyelids or shaved her legs in his sink or spent six hours stoned drawing his brother’s clavicle with the worn out stub of a moonmin pencil (and what the fuck is a moonmin, anyway?).

“You draw them yourself?” Frank interrupts your reverie, and for a moment you open your mouth to tell him no, you didn’t obsess over Mikey’s clavicle, ever, but then you realise he means the guns.

“Kinda.” You climb into the car and slam the door, hard. In your head, that signals the end of the conversation. In Frank’s, it signals the part where he climbs in next to you, starts up the engine and says something annoyingly perceptive.

“You could’ve just written her a song.”

“She told me to.” You give a half-laugh at that, but you have to keep your eyes on your boots in order to manage it. You keep them there as Frank starts up the engine and pulls out. They’re scuffed down to the steel, and so dirty the black looks brown. “The night I told her we got signed she ran round saying, ‘I want a song! I want a motherfucking album of them!’ So obviously I can’t.”

You finally manage to look up at him, a split-second glance just long enough for you to register that he’s nodding in agreement, his expression just a little too earnest to be believable. “Yes. Yes, giving her what she wanted would just be cruel. Inhu-fucking-mane, I’d call it.” He looks at you. “You’re a sick bastard for even thinking of it and if I even think you’re packing lyrics about her, I swear man, I’ll stop picturing your ass and start kicking it.”

“Kinky.”

Frank sighs at this, starts drumming his thumbs against the top of the steering wheel to the beat of some unknown song. This is probably meant to fill the awkward silence that has seems to be seeping into the car and filling the foot or so of space between you, but all it does is remind you that Lyn had a fetish for drummers and had herded Matt into a store cupboard after your first gig. He’d come round to your apartment the next day and his first words had been: “Fuck, since when did you live with the groupie?”

“What?”

“The albino chick from the show. You’re living with her?”

“Ye-es…” you’d replied nervously, not really knowing where the conversation was going.

“Is she giving you head?”

“No!” The idea in itself was disgusting. She was Lyn, for Christssakes. Sex of any kind with Lyn was a mistake so horrible it could only be excused by a litre or more of Jagermeister.

“Ask her to. Seriously, ask. It’s a thing of fucking beauty.”

He’d taken another swig of his beer, strolled away, and become your worst fucking enemy for at least a week. Just because you wouldn’t touch her (though you’d think about it, when she brought all those tortured types home and you listened to them fucking through the wall, one hand wrapped around your aching cock and the other stuffed in your mouth to stop you screaming), didn’t mean anyone else could. Especially not Matt, who wasn’t even that good a drummer and who looked like a greased rat at the best of times and definitely didn’t deserve to get blow jobs off slim, pale girls with dollish features and a smile that they’d learned from Satan.

The next time she appeared backstage at one of your shows, he slid his arm round her waist, pressed her against one of the sticky, sick-stained walls and leaned in for a kiss. She’d pressed a finger against his lips and said the six words no-one else had dared to yet (“You played fucking shit tonight, Matthew”) before stalking off to find Mikey and draw his elbows while he lay on the floor, too drunk to move or care how many kinds of filth he was getting covered in down there. That was perhaps the last time Mikey was passed out drunk alone, because Lyn’s reappearance reminded you that you were supposed to be drinking champagne with whiskey in because you were touring another country and were therefore, she insisted, every kind of rock star.

Obviously, you shouldn’t be any kind of rock star. That had always been Lyn’s job, because her cousin ran a recording studio in Portland and so, by some obscure logic, was much more qualified to be a star then someone who could hold a note and play guitar. She was weird hot, the way you didn’t notice she was far too white because all of her was, and the lack of individual shades gave her this all-over prettiness where her faults seemed to blend into the better parts. She even walked like a rock star or, rather, like Jessica Rabbit if she’d done ten years of ballet as a kid. The you’re-not-good-enough-and-never-will-be walk that somehow managed to make the fact that she was six foot tall and stick thin sexy. You hated, hated, hated that walk and the way everyone watched it, but you kept finding yourself copying it. Especially when you were on stage and especially in the early days, when you knew your rock star roommate was missing this gig because she was working late in some bar and that just made you feel so good, that she was the one with the shitty job and you were the artiste (her words, her words) that she had always tried to be. Then you felt guilty because when you stumbled home wasted at 3am she would catch you before you passed out, your head lolling against her shoulder and your mouth half pressing into the fabric of her shirt as you told her about just how fucking awesome it was. She’d give you that weird cocktail she made that always tasted like barley sugar and so made you feel about five, and then she’d hold your hair as you sicked it back up and pluck the still-burning cigarette from between your fingers as you fell asleep on the sofa, too sick and comfortable to think of moving.

She never told you how to make that drink, which is strange because she told everyone everything instantly. The first time you met her you were eighteen and hiding at the back of some dumb Freshman mixer, nursing a paper cup full of vodka that looked like punch and trying to melt into the slippery plastic seating, just filter yourself through its atoms and reform somewhere else where you weren’t drunk or chainsmoking or being forced to listen to the godawful trance music the DJ seemed so hooked on. She’d just sashayed up to you, sat down at the other side of the empty table and said: “Hi. My name’s Lynott because my dad’s retarded. Your name’s Gerard because Luke told me, and if Luke lies I kidnap his sister and mail back tiny, mutilated pieces of her preserved in formaldehyde three times a week.”

Something intelligent flitted through the back of your mind, briefly, eel-like, but you weren’t quick enough to catch it. Instead you settled for looking at those weird, too blue eyes and noticing she wasn’t wearing any makeup before answering with, “Don’t. His sister’s nice.”

“Nuh-uh,” Lyn corrected. “His sister’s a fucking bitch who I’d dearly love to carve. What you mean is, she’s stacked.”

“And standing behind you.”

“Wha?” She spun round then, eyes darting and mouth stretched into a thin line, exaggeratedly taut, and stared at the empty space behind her.

You giggled into your not-quite-punch before realising that, not only had you just pulled one of the most immature jokes in the book, you’d followed it up by giggling into your drink like a fucking schoolgirl. You were beginning to see why no-one else was talking to you. Lyn, being Lyn, had simply turned back to you, grinning. “Cunt.” The way she said it, so casual, the same way other people would say – oh, for example – “man”, that shocked you. Perhaps more than you realised, because it gave her time to scoop up your drink, drain it and announce that “we need more.”

“It’s over – ”

She grabbed you by the wrist and frogmarched you to the punch bowl, positioning you exactly in front of her as she slid a bottle of vodka from the back pocket of her jeans – men’s jeans that seemed to swallow her slender legs that she would later shave in your sink – and emptied it into the bowl. Grinning, you dunked the cup into the mix and raised it to your lips. She watched you with that smile she had, the one where her eyes crinkled at the edges and the teeth on one side of her mouth tugged at her bottom lip. It always made her lips look chapped, and you always wanted to kiss them better, which is exactly what you pronounced the new punch to be.

“Of course it’s better. We have touched it.”

You almost asked, Since when are we ‘we’? And maybe you did, because she rolled her eyes and sighed like she was stating the obvious. “Firstly, I own a version of that T-shirt,” a vague gesture towards your outfit, the girls’ jeans and the Joy Division tee that was practically see through, “and also refuse to wear my gender’s jeans. Clearly neither of us belong here. Secondly, my roommate’s fucking yours and wants me to persuade you to switch rooms and not tell anyone.” That smile again, and you think that maybe you’re being led on, that at any moment Luke will come and rescue you from this motormouth psycho and tell you the look on your face was priceless, you should have seen it, fuck why was there never a camera?

“I guessed you’d pull that face. My plan, therefore, is to get you fucking hammered and make you sign things. Oooh, almost missed it….” and she tipped the last bit of vodka straight into your cup. “By the way, you have really strange eyelashes. And you walk crooked. Have you been raped? Recently?” Again with the inappropriately casual tone.

“No. Not ever, no.” You were officially confused, and answered because you were so taken aback rather than out of any need to share.

“Oh,” she sounds surprised, and for a bizarre moment you feel flattered but then scared because, fuck, what kind of girl opens with questions about anal rape? “It’s just you do this thing, when you walk, it’s like with your hips, and it makes you look kind of off-balance. Like you don’t want to put any weight anywhere. Do it again.”

“What?”

“Walk. Like round the table. I gotta work this out.”

And so you walked, in the middle of the party you walked in circles round the punch table with a hot albino chick following you, occasionally lunging at your knees or picking up your feet mid-step and making you stumble.

“I’ve got it!” she shouted finally, after following you round the table on her knees (people had started watching now. They were too drunk to care and so were you, but still, you were being watched and remembered as the guy who had that girl crawling at that party and you weren’t sure how you felt about that). “It’s your feet,” she said, lifting up the hem of your jeans and examining your shoes. “Not your hips, not in the hips at all, definitely the feet. You’re like tiptoeing constantly, except it’s on the balls of your feet and down the left side. Makes you look kinda crooked. Come on.” Still holding the hem of your jeans, she stood up and began walking far faster than you’d like towards the fire exit as you hobbled and hopped behind her, bouncing off tables and bad dancers, all the while shouting for her to let go or slow down or something, but she didn’t, not until you were both outside sitting in the front seat of her car with all the doors open (“I’m not fucking cheap, you’re being rescued”), music blaring out of her car stereo, the sound crackling through beat up speakers and drifting out into the darkness in waves.

“If you don’t like this next one, I’m going to gouge out your testicles with a rusty ladle.”

“Are you always this aggressive?”

“Only until you hear the opening of ‘Handsome Devil’, melt quietly inside and start babbling on about how many kinds of genius The Smiths are. Then I decide that you’re lovely and very nearly normal and agree to move in with you, since you asked so nicely.”

“This song? All kinds of genius.”

*

You’re still not sure why you did it, let her move into your room. When you did it, even. But there she was, and there was her stuff, neatly hidden behind some things Luke left behind so that, should anyone with any authority look in, it was just possible to believe that there were still two guys living here. And it was okay, you liked it, except for when she sat on the bed opposite you with one of her girly-girl friends with half-finished hair and snorted lines of cocaine off mirror tile they’d prised off someone’s wall. Then that was okay, because you slowly became included in this (again, because you’d done it before) and realised that Lyn knew every cokehead on campus and had a knack for bumming lines. She could get wasted quicker than most people could manage to get a cigarette. It was a gift.

You liked her.

You liked the way she drew with a variety of pens gripped between her fingers, flicking between them like some rotary machine without ever putting any of them down. You liked the way she’d come off all mature and sophisticated and artistic with strangers, then sit making kissy faces at the naked guy in life drawing class. You liked the cartoonish gruesomeness of her threats. You liked the way she really knew nothing about music, nothing at all, yet could go on for hours about the bassline in ‘Rubber Ring’ or the drum fills in Who songs. You liked the way she came in at four in the morning, pulled the covers off your bed and started drawing on your arms in black marker. “I’m designing you a tattoo,” she said, and drew a sleeve made up of the edges of wings and glass towers and black sky with white dotted stars. You liked the way she pouted when you washed it off then drew a different one the next night.

You just liked her, y’know? Not as in you wanted to bang her or anything (well, sometimes, but only because you felt obligated), just that you could stand her company. The weirdness never went away, although with time you became immune to it. Everyone did. People let her get away with it because she was Lyn and Lyn did that kind of thing. Besides, she was charming. It was a gift, and you found that you acquired it. Six weeks into the semester you discovered that you no longer had to pay for drinks and that no-one would raise an eyebrow if you turned up in their room jittery-stoned and spray painted bats on their ceiling because you were with Lyn, and that was how Lyn’s friends were expected to behave.

“I’ve been got,” they’d tell people the next day, as they complained about the mess you’d made. But – and it was Lyn who pointed this out to you – they never cleaned it up. They’d just eye you as you passed them in the corridor, their expressions half fear, half hope.

It was cool. So you kept bumming lines off her skinny friends with their manicured nails (how the fuck did she fit in with girls like that?) and you put up with her bad accents and funny walks (there was this one guy, Perry, she followed him round for hours imitating his walk exactly) because they were funny and she was cool, even when she decided that you needed to be “a more original-looking art student” and so dyed a load of your clothes yellow.

There’s a yellow stripe on your t-shirt today, a concession to Mikey’s plea that you at least own something that’s not entirely black because it’s too cliché for him to stand. When he said that, you had the overwhelming urge to whine “but I’m an art student,” even though you’re not and haven’t been for some time. Then, because it just can, that makes you think of the time when you brought her home, brought her home the day she was kicked out because there’d been an eightball in her closet and even if she was fucking her tutor she obviously wasn’t fucking him well enough to have him overlook that much coke.

“My dad lost his job,” she told your mom, glancing nervously at her feet. “So we can’t afford the fees anymore and they wouldn’t upgrade my scholarship. So…y’know…”

Mommy dearest had sighed sympathetically and gone on about how, oh, wasn’t it awful? So unfair! You shuffled uncertainly, nervous as hell – jealous as hell, too, because her nerves were entirely faked while you felt like a fucking criminal doing this – and muttered something about Lyn crashing on the couch for a couple of nights. “Just til she can get back to Portland and all.” In the end, a couple of nights turned into three weeks and the train to Portland became a tiny studio apartment ten blocks away, with unreliable electricity and no hot water (hence all those times she shaved her legs in your sink).

You’d seen her struggling out of your door with a holdall in one hand and a bin liner full of clothes in the other. “Do you want a hand?” you’d asked. “Y’know…moving your stuff in?”

“Sure,” she laughed. And you wondered why it was so funny but then you got to the apartment and realised that was all her stuff, every bit of it, but you carried it up for her and then sat on the clothes heap together, eating take out food. You’d forgotten that til now, the way the plastic rustled when you moved and how the egg foo yung felt wet and wrinkled between your fingers, like soaked skin. Suddenly that moment seems infinitely important.

“You don’t even have cutlery? You’re moving into an apartment of your own and you don’t even have a fork?”

“You know all those Enquirer stories where celebrities talk about “my cocaine hell”? Well, what you never hear about is “my ramen purgatory”. Seriously, after you get caught you have to spend six months sleeping on bare boards and living off raw eggs stolen from the local grocery store. It’s kind of punishment for, I dunno, enjoying your time as a crackwhore too much or whatever. Besides, I’m planning on turning this place into a drug den anyway, so I figure all I need is a mattress, a lighter and a spoon.”

“And some drugs.”

“All taken care of. You want?”

She’d pulled it out of her pocket then, a baggie full of white powder, and squeezed it between her fingers. You remember the way her nails cut into the plastic. (You want to remember that they were shaking, but they didn’t then. This was before all that and you suddenly wonder, how wreaked was she when she died?)

“Sure,” you’d said, because doing drugs with Lyn wasn’t Doing Drugs, it wasn’t a bad thing, it just happened. Like breathing. No one ever says they’re addicted to oxygen.

“Twenty bucks.”

“What?” You were outraged. A large part of the reason why Lyn’s drugs didn’t count was because they were free.

“I’m running a drug den here, not a registered charity. You want free shit, you go see CARA.”

“Who the fuck is Cara?”

“Celebrity Addicts Relapsing Anonymously. Except you have to become a celebrity first and, hello, you’re an art student, that’s never going to happen. So, twenty bucks. Go on, buy a broke bitch a blanket.”

“Fuck off.”

You never did find out what she spent that money on.

Frank fishes his cigarettes out of his pocket at a stoplight, and you punch his arm.

“Fucker. You steal my last one when you have a fucking pack?”

“Driver’s fee,” he said. “What’s all this shit for anyway? Shouldn’t that guy she was with be picking it up?”

The guy, whose name may or may not be Andrew, had given you Lyn’s address and warned her landlord you were coming but refused to meet you there. Possibly because you were sitting in the passenger side of the car when it went off the road and, while you came away with a few tasty looking gashes and a concussion, his girlfriend went clear through the windscreen. One of her fucking arms came off. And Maybe-Andrew’s head is probably full of questions about that incident, but your answers (which start with “She was high as fuck”, “Because I can’t drive” and “There was a lot of screaming” and only get worse from there) are not the ones he wants to hear. He wants people with solemn voices using words like ‘tragic’ and ‘instantaneous’.

“He’s got most of it over at his apartment. This is mostly stuff he was going to throw out…” You want to add, “But he missed a lot that mattered, so I had to save it,” but you’re pretty sure Frank knows that already.

Sometimes you think Frank knows far too much.
- 1
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Minutes