6. Chapter 6
Goosebumps cover my skin as I shiver in the flimsy hospital gown they force us to wear.
It’s humiliating. It’s cold. Always cold.
The nurses—or at least I think they’re nurses—shaved my head.
These nurses are nothing like the ones at the pediatrician’s office with sweet smiles and stickers.
The nurses here are cold and mean. They never smile or have stickers.
Today, they made me watch a video of a man and woman having sex.
It was gross, and each time I tried to look away, someone would force my head to keep my eyes on the screen.
I took sex education in sixth grade, but it was nothing like this.
If I didn’t react to the video, a nurse would rub my dick.
It’s wrong. All wrong. But I do nothing, afraid of making things worse for me.
Obey, smile, agree.
Now, I stand in front of the doctor’s desk. He’s old with rheumy blue eyes and white hair. His face is a mask of wrinkles, and like the others, he never smiles or is kind.
“How was your day today, Sampson?”
“It was good.” It’s a lie, but after being here for four days, I quickly learn to say things that please them.
I wrap my arms around myself to keep warm, but it never helps. My body shivers from the cold and fear.
“Do you know why you’re here?”
I shake my head. No one told me why I was brought here.
My parents lied about taking me shopping for school clothes and instead took me to a place far away.
My parents scare me. They never hurt me physically, but they’re mean and always yelling at me when I do things wrong or won’t listen.
I do listen. It’s just that I forget a lot.
When my parents pulled up to the nondescript concrete building, which had no signs, four days ago, a man in white scrubs helped me out of the car, and my parents drove away without so much as a goodbye or telling me why I was there.
Something had been terribly wrong. I’d cried at their retreating car, knowing something bad was going to happen.
“You need to relearn what it means to be a boy and a growing young man. Your parents brought you here to fix you. Do you understand?”
I shake my head again because I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
“No twelve-year-old boy should have inappropriate and sinful thoughts about being with a man or liking boys.”
No, I never had those thoughts. “W-why do they think that?”
The doctor opens a file and scans the papers with glasses perched on his nose.
“Your parents said you look at boys too often. The last time you had a dental appointment, you asked for Barbie stickers. You’ve been caught playing with your friend’s sister’s dolls, you refuse to play sports, you watch shows that are for girls, and you’re a bad boy in general, never listening to your parents or doing as you’re told. ”
I didn’t know those things were bad. The tears well in my eyes because I want to be good. I tried so hard at home. “I… I’m not into boys.” At least, I don’t think I do because I never wanted a boy for a boyfriend. Then again, I never wanted a girlfriend either. “I want to be good.”
Finally, the doctor smiles, but it doesn’t put me at ease at all. In fact, it scares me even more. My heart rate is beating really hard, and I start to sweat despite being so cold. My mind is blanking out from the fear.
“Excellent. You learn quickly, Sampson. But we need to make sure you never deviate again. For the next four months, you will be set on the righteous path through prayer. We will break you of your sinful ways, but we will lift you back up into God’s good graces.
I trust at the end of our program, you’ll be the perfect example of how a young man should behave.
We’ve had a lot of success here with other boys like yourself. ”
“I… I’ll do my best.”
“That’s what I like to hear.”
When someone walks in, I turn to find one of the orderlies. He’s a big man with acne scars on his face and small eyes. He’s always mean and rough with me.
“Time to get your head zapped, little man.”
I look back at the doctor, and panic fills me. What does ‘ zapped ’ mean? “W-what are you going to do?”
The doctor doesn’t even look at me as the orderly grabs my shaved head with a meaty hand and squeezes it as he leads me out of the office.
As we walk down the hall, my head hurts from his fingers digging into my skull. The sounds of crying coming from the rooms echo through the halls. I don’t like it here, and I want to go home. Living with my parents is better than being in this cold place full of pain.
The nurses and orderlies watch me without expressions on their faces, which suddenly morph into demons with burnt, peeling skin and black eyes. They smile as their teeth turn into sharp points, looking hungry and dripping with poisonous saliva.
They’re going to hurt me.
They want to eat me.
They like to gobble up little boys.
When I walk into the room and see all the demons there surrounding a bed with leather straps, I scream and scream...
My eyes popped open to darkness as my lungs tried to find air. The images of the nightmare dissolved into nothingness as the adrenaline wore off, leaving me with threatening tears. I clawed at my heart because it beat so hard it hurt, and the blood pounding in my ears was too loud.
I didn’t need to remember my dream because I’d had the same sensations over and over as a child at that dreaded facility that changed me forever. No, it hadn’t changed me. It destroyed me and reshaped me into something unrecognizable.
Ruined. Broken. Pathetic. Weak .
It was no wonder I had this nightmare so viscerally tonight after my recent ordeal at the hospital.
My mind flashed images of sterile rooms, being held down, and then the cold went away, replaced with burning and dizziness.
I woke up in my room with white concrete walls, white sheets, and a barred window.
My mind woke up to confusion and pain, not knowing where I was.
Everything was fragmented. My memories shattered into pieces like mixing several jigsaw puzzle sets into one pile. My prison. My hell.
I hated sleeping. Sleeping brought more than the darkness of the evening. It brought the monsters back into my mind.
The movement in my bed helped me catch my breath. Nate . My Atlas. My Polaris, guiding me back on the right path to keep me from getting lost. I was a tiny star in the vast universe, but he was the biggest and brightest star who pulled me in with his gravity—
“I’m here. You’re okay. Go back to sleep.”
His soothing words did nothing for me tonight.
There would be no sleeping. I hurt everywhere with ghosts haunting in my head, and my mind kept pinging all over the place, unable to focus, flashing between my past and my present.
They were pieces of threads tied up in knots that I struggled to untangle.
And my knee hurt like a bitch.
He lay down next to me and gently tugged on my bare shoulder. Goosebumps spread over me, but the good kind. Not the cold kind. Not the creepy hospital kind.
“I can’t. Not tonight.”
I wish he’d sleep with me every night. Maybe I wouldn’t have so many nightmares, but I wouldn’t dare ask. He must come to me. Otherwise, I’d feel more broken by begging, asking… I’d done it a couple of times, and by the following day, I’d be sick from my weakness.
Still, the relief with Nate here always became overwhelming, so much so that it nearly hurt as much as the nightmares. Was that even possible? How could someone so comforting also hurt? Because he’s not mine . We were only friends—friends through thick and thin, but nothing more.
Nate sighed and sat up with me, my arms wrapped tightly around my folded legs.
His caring and tender fingers combed away my bangs.
I’d just gotten my hair cut recently, but they cut it crookedly because I’d only paid ten dollars for it.
I needed it fixed. Maybe I could get another tattoo while I was at it.
But we were trying to save money, which was impossible, especially when I spent so much.
Then there was the ambulance and hospital bills that were due soon. Shit.
His finger swirled over the mandala pattern on my arm, and I relaxed and focused on Nate’s soothing touch.
God, he was so good at bringing me back.
Nate was so smart, empathetic, and patient.
Cleaning tables in a bar was wasted on him.
He could do such great things if I weren’t around, but I was too selfish to let him go.
He rested his chin on my shoulder as he continued tracing the pattern on my forearm, smelling of sleep, limes, coconut, and all things Nate—my favorite smell in the world.
“Sam, perhaps it’s time. I feel helpless because I can’t help you the way you need and deserve.”
My head shook back and forth frantically, knowing what he was saying. “You’re amazing. My best friend. You help more than you think.”
He sighed again. “You still have nightmares all the time. I can’t help with those. They aren’t going away, even after years, because we aren’t doing enough to help you cope with them. We aren’t… professionals. I’m just not smart enough to help you more than I am.”
My heart and gut clenched at his efforts to hide the word ‘doctor.’
“Stix and Stone use group therapy. It’s with others just like them. They’re doing really well with it. It would be in—”
I scooted away from him. No doctors. Never. It was bad enough I ended up in the hospital. I gripped my hair and shook my head. “No!”
“I know it’s scary, but that one doctor wasn’t normal, if he was even a doctor at all, and those people weren’t real nurses.
They were evil. Most doctors aren’t like that, Sam.
Most doctors are good and really want to help people.
Look at the ones who healed you the other day. They made you better.”
We’d had this conversation before… so many times.
Too many times. Nate would never understand the innate fear—the sweating, the cold, the pain, the indifference to suffering…
Sometimes the memories made me want to just die to silence them.
I knew logically that not all doctors and nurses were bad.
I wasn’t irrational or stupid despite my lack of an education.
That didn’t stop the panic and anxiety. Just the thought had me breathing too hard, and my body broke out in a new sheen of sweat.
Nate swirled his finger again over the tattoo, bringing me back. He was so good at bringing me back. I didn’t need a doctor. I needed my Polaris.
“What about your tattoos?” he asked.
“What about them?”
I reached for a lock of his hair with my other hand as he touched me… More soothing and easy breathing.
“They use needles. That doesn’t scare you.”
“They aren’t shots to change me into something grotesque.
Tattoos are art, and tattoo artists aren’t doctors.
The designs on my skin remind me of when we took the bus to Washington, D.C.
, for the day. We went to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden .
All the pretty designs and modern art were relaxing. I loved it there.”
“That was a fun day.”
“These artists create something beautiful on my skin that isn’t ugly. They take all that’s bad in me and turn me into something beautiful.”
“Jesus…” he whispered. “You’re always beautiful. Inside and out. But this is why you need someone, Sam. Those negative thoughts aren’t… good for you.”
A tear slid down my face. Only his tracing my skin and me playing with a dark curl kept me from slipping back into a panic.
“What if something happens to you again? What if I have to take you to the hospital, and if I don’t, you die?” he asked.
“Then you let me die. I’m not going back. Ever.”
His body stiffened against mine, and he quit tracing my tattoo. “That’s not going to fucking happen, Sam.”
“Some things are worse than death.”
“ Fuck …”
I needed the morning and the sunshine. I always felt better during the day. The day destroyed the darkness. Right now, all I needed was for Nate to hold me for a while. We needed to stop talking about nightmares, doctors, and my lack of self-worth.
After everything I’d been through, I shouldn’t want him. According to those horrible people, loving another man was evil and dark. But they were the monsters, not Nate. Never Nate. Loving him didn’t scare me. Despite all of my fears, loving him was easy. But that would never happen.
Fantasies of kissing him, sucking him… love and lust soon took away my night horrors, and my body unclenched.
“Can we talk about this later?” I asked.
“Sure.”
But we wouldn’t, not until I was hurting again.
We fell back into my bed, tangled around each other as he fell back asleep. I hated ruining his sleep so much. He was always tired.
“We’re going to be okay as long as we’re together,” he whispered sleepily.
I finally smiled. Maybe I could do something fun for Nate soon to pay him back for being so good to me.