My Friends

Chapter Twenty-Five

TWENTY-FIVE

No one can explain why some fourteen-year-olds want to die. Nature gains nothing from unhappy children, yet they are still walking around everywhere, without the words to describe their anxiety. Because how could you even begin to explain such a feeling to someone who has been happy and secure all their life? Should you say it’s like a monster sleeping heavily on your lungs, so that every breath feels like you’re drowning? That it’s a voice in your head screaming that everything about you is a mistake?

Forget it! No one will understand! the voice in our heads hisses to us. Then it repeats the same lies that all broken children have to listen to: There’s something wrong with you! No one else feels the way you do! People can’t fly!

Ali and Joar and Ted were fragile too, but the artist was like a paper boat heading for a waterfall. Sometimes Joar would tease him that his only facial expression was looking like he’d just found a strand of hair in a cream cake. It was a desperate joke on Joar’s part, because really he was trying to say: You’re not giving us enough oxygen, we’re suffocating without your laughter.

The artist tried to be happy, he really did, but he had been scared all his childhood.

“He gets it from his mom,” his dad sometimes said when he was drunk, in the kitchen with his workmates from the harbor when he thought his son was asleep. They got divorced when the artist was little, he never got to know if his mom’s depression started before or after that, if it was the cause or the effect. Sometimes she was almost like all the other moms, but sometimes she would spend all night cleaning manically, whispering to things that didn’t exist. The son loved his mom, but he only knew her as a shadow of a person, the world is full of them, their hearts beat and their eyes are open, but they live like they’re enclosed in glass bubbles. The son never saw his mother as emotionally cold, just shut off, unreachable. There was food on the table and a roof over his head in his childhood home, but no eye contact and very few words. No “Good night, little man” or “Good morning, darling,” no “Aren’t you clever?” or “You’re so good at drawing!” The only thing she snapped at him desperately when he got beaten or bullied at school was: “Try to be like all the other children! Try to do what all the other children do!” That was probably how she had survived, by never standing out from the crowd, going to work and coming home, watching TV and going to bed. Sometimes she forgot things, sometimes she got lost on the way home from the shops, sometimes she talked to people no one else could see. She had demons in her head, children learn to recognize that at an early age. One doctor prescribed strong medication, she washed the pills down with alcohol, she spent almost all her time sleeping. But if she woke up when the artist crept home from Ted’s in the evenings, she sometimes called out: “Did you have fun?” Because she had heard other moms ask that. Then the artist always said yes, he had. And then she would mumble: “Just be like all the other children. Just try to be normal.”

Then she would fall asleep again, and her son would tuck her in. Sometimes they would eat breakfast together, often just water and dry toast, because his mom was almost always nauseous. She would respond when spoken to, as would her son, but because neither of them initiated conversations, they hardly ever had one. So his childhood passed. When the artist went to his dad’s, not much was said there either, except when his dad was drinking with his workmates, because then the artist could sit on the other side of the kitchen wall and hear the truth. “He isn’t normal, the boy,” his dad said when the alcohol turned his eyes into marbles. “He was an accident,” he went on. “She never wanted to be a mother.” That was the kindest thing the artist could remember his dad saying about him, because at least he never said that he didn’t want to be a dad.

The following morning the artist would clear away all the bottles in the kitchen, first at his dad’s, then at his mom’s. He would never have let anyone say they were bad parents, he understood that it was practically impossible to be a good one, children are so fragile that if you’re the least bit fragile yourself, it’s hopeless right from the start. At least one of you will fall apart.

The artist got beaten up at school when the other children saw he was drawing naked men with wings. He got called terrible things, because children’s brutality knows no limits in its inventiveness. He often wished he had been what his parents wanted, a normal child like all the others, but how was that supposed to happen? No one was like him. His mom and dad never saw him hunched over his sketch pad with his pen darting across the paper. What a treasure to miss out on. They never understood how special it is to be abnormal.

The older he got, the worse school became. His shoulder had started twitching when he was nervous, so the artist started wearing the biggest hoodies he could find, and always pulled the hood over his head. He stopped eating, as if he could make himself invisible if he just got thin enough.

He never knew just how obvious it was to his friends that he was falling apart, and how not being able to stop it tormented them. Alone in their rooms at night, Ali was desperate, Joar furious, while Ted knelt at the side of his bed and prayed. Other children prayed to God, but Ted prayed to the demons, because maybe God decided which people would die, but the demons in children’s heads decided which ones had the strength to live. So Ted prayed loudly into the darkness, for mercy, for the demons to let go of his friend.

The demons didn’t listen. They laughed.

The artist was scared in all his classes at school, because at any moment a teacher could force him to speak, but he was most scared during art lessons. Adults never understand that for a child who uses drawing to escape from reality, being made to do it on command is unbearable. In the eighth grade they got a new art teacher, a hateful little man who hissed that “art isn’t about drawing!” Now theory was going to be as important as practice, and everyone was expected to “give a written account” after every exercise. At the end of the first lesson the teacher glared at the artist’s work and snarled that the boy “didn’t listen to the instructions.” The boy didn’t dare reply or look the teacher in the eye, and some men take that as a declaration of war.

They had been told to draw a flower, but the artist couldn’t explain that he couldn’t draw a flower without first drawing everything around it, he just hadn’t had time to draw the flower yet. The teacher took his silence as a provocation. Joar was sitting next to him, so he tried to protect his friend the only way he knew: by drawing attention to himself.

“Can YOU draw a damn flower, you damn owl?” he yelled at the teacher.

It happened so fast that it must have been an act of genius, the way Joar took no more than a second to identify what a person was most ashamed of about their appearance and then stab it with a finely honed comment. Perhaps it was the teacher’s big eyes, or the shape of his head, or his thin lips or small nose, no one had thought of it before, but just hearing the word “owl” once was enough for everyone to see it.

The teacher hesitated for just a moment, that was all Joar needed, like blood in the water. He yelled: “Come on, Owl! Draw a flower so we can see who’s best!”

Ten seconds later the whole class was shouting: “DRAW! DRAW! DRAW!” and the Owl’s face changed color, first from humiliation, then from rage.

Joar grinned: “No, no, now you’ve painted your face as red as a tulip, little Owl, but you’re supposed to paint on the PAPER!”

The whole class roared with laughter and the Owl never stood a chance of regaining control. Obviously Joar already knew that the man at the front of the class would get his revenge, teachers always do, the problem was just that Joar didn’t know who it would be aimed at.

Bullying happens so horribly fast. Soon the whole school was calling the teacher “the Owl,” and it became so common to hear “hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo!” followed by roars of laughter in the hallways every time he walked past that no one even remembered it was Joar who first came up with it. But the teacher never forgot. It became a game among some of the older students to leave dead mice on the Owl’s desk, which might sound harmless, but if it carries on for long enough it does something to a man. Joar might have been hard to hurt, but the artist was easy, so he was the target of the Owl’s revenge.

Drawing meant freedom for the artist, so the Owl turned it into a prison cell. He came up with a thousand rules, and ten thousand ways to fail. That’s how quickly the man regained his authority. The artist wasn’t supposed to be creative, he was supposed to obey, to carry out precise tasks and demonstrate exact results. Obviously he couldn’t do that. If you told him to draw a house, he would draw how the house felt. The Owl was intelligent, you don’t have to be in order to be cruel, but it helps. So one lesson, when the artist had really failed with a task, the teacher made him stand in front of the whole class. The Owl disguised it well, he leaned over the boy’s drawing and pretended to be impressed, which made the other students curious. They called for him to show what the artist had done, chanting his name, and the Owl snatched the drawing with a malicious grin and held it up in mock admiration. The room fell completely silent. Then someone giggled: “Looks like something a three-year-old could have drawn…”

They all laughed except for Joar, who started fighting with the two boys who were laughing loudest. The artist’s face was so red that someone yelled: “Get the fire extinguisher!” and everyone laughed again. That was how easily the teacher proved that Joar was wrong: this boy was mediocre.

It’s so easy to crush a heart, soon the artist was only a shadow of a person. The Owl could have stopped there, backing off when he had already won, but the feeling of power probably felt too good. So the lessons only got worse. The Owl’s criticism became a torment, the artist was banned from having his hood pulled up, he wasn’t allowed to use his own pencils. The Owl defended himself by saying the rules were the same for everyone, the boy really shouldn’t think he was anything special. As if the boy had ever done that.

One day the Owl told the class to draw a box. It wasn’t a difficult task, they were even given rulers, but when the lesson was over, the artist’s paper was still blank, he felt so dizzy he was almost sick. The teacher should have realized then, should have known better, because once in his life even that bastard must have loved something. He should have seen in the boy’s eyes that he couldn’t draw a box without first feeling like he was inside it. The teacher should have asked him to draw the world outside the box instead, all the things he had felt that time when he was released from the storage trunk in preschool: sunshine and oxygen. He should have asked him to draw Joar’s laughter and the feeling of having a best friend for the first time.

But instead the Owl chose cruelty. He mocked him. It doesn’t take any strength at all to crush someone’s self-confidence if you know where to stomp. The artist did what he always did, he pulled his hood up, stood up, and fled for the door. But the Owl stood in the way, grabbed the boy by the arm, and roared: “YOU’RE NOT GOING ANYWHERE!”

The artist tore free with such surprising force that the teacher lost his balance and stumbled into a desk, hitting his head. It was easy to interpret it as aggression, because no one saw that the boy was crying. It was so easy for the teacher to tell the principal afterward that he had been “attacked,” to claim that the artist was one of “a group of hooligans who are like a pack of wild animals,” especially as Joar had picked up a chair and smashed up half the classroom on his way out after his friend. But the teacher never told the principal that Joar also had tears in his eyes then, or what he had said:

“Do you think he needs your fucking help? Do you think he needs help to hate himself? You’re no owl. You’re just a swine.”

Two other teachers came running in, Joar had to fight and claw his way out, but by the time he had reached the schoolyard the artist was already gone, like water through cracks in the floor. He was lost, Joar knew that. A backpack full of pills and a head full of demons, hardly any child would survive that. The most dangerous place on earth is inside us.

But the artist? All he would remember is that he ran. He didn’t even notice where until he collided with something and tumbled to the ground. Ted had prayed to the demons for mercy, the demons had laughed, but maybe Heaven had listened. Because that day the wings grew out.

Joar, Ali, and Ted spent all afternoon looking for their friend. It was pure coincidence that they caught sight of him when he and the janitor were going to the storeroom to get more paint. The friends hardly recognized the artist’s face then, his smile was in the way. When he led them shyly around the corner of the gymnasium to show them what he had painted on the wall, all three of them were so overwhelmed, they had to sit down on the grass.

“Now you know,” Joar said happily.

“Know what?” the artist wondered.

Joar leaned so close to the wall that he got paint on his eyelashes.

“Now you know that you don’t want to die.”