here is the deepest secret nobody knows part 1
Masterpost
By the time he was four years old Michael Carden knew that girls would scream if you pulled their hair, that boys would punch back if you punched them first, and that his daycare teachers did not appreciate his ‘attitude problem’. He learned that other children would avoid him if he narrowed his eyes just right, that they’d back away from the toys he wanted if he squared his shoulders and frowned in their direction. He'd learned that the best defense for being shorter than he ought to be and chubbier than he ought to be was a good offense. At four years old, he had, in short, become something of a bully.
But most of all, at four years old, Mike Carden had become cripplingly shy and, worst of all, terribly, terribly lonely.
The Block Center, Mike knew, was to be avoided at all costs, because boys built towers there, working together in an intricate social structure that he did not understand, and laughing together when the towers fell. House Center wasn’t a good place to be either, because the girls set up camp there; rocking their babies and setting out intricate dinners at the play table with plastic strawberries and plastic cookies. Mike had never found any use for the plastic food except for throwing it at the girls and boys who he did not know how to play with. Water Table was chock full of drowning possibilities, and worst of all, it was ruled by an unnaturally tall and slim boy who Mike had hated since he first set eyes on him, William Beckett.
On Mike’s very first day of daycare, a girl tripped Mike on the playground and he skimmed the palms of his hands, and that’s when things had started to go wrong.
William Beckett stood over him with hands on his hips and laughed, a snide and sneering laugh that the other children had echoed, and Mike hated William Beckett with the fire of a thousand suns and all the power of his four-year-old heart.
Book Centre, though, had always been a good choice for Mike, because four-year-olds didn't have much use for books. Neither did Mike, to be honest. But Robert Munsch was terrific to hide behind, and even while his daycare teachers discussed his attitude problem, they gushed over his strange and all-consuming love for picture books.
It was there, curled up behind the protective screen of Alexander and the Horrible, No Good, Terrible, Very Bad Day, that something happened, and everything changed.
After that, Mike was never lonely again.
Something broke and split into two pieces inside his mind, though Mike was too young to understand it or explain it to the panicked caregivers who asked him why he was screaming. All he knew is that one moment, he was daydreaming behind his book, and the next, there was something happening that was wrong and different and terrifying in a way that could not be explained.
Everything was magnified-- scents and sounds and lights and darks and it was like he was suddenly feeling and seeing and smelling everything for the very first time-- only those feelings and sights and smells weren’t of wax crayons and white glue, but other things, too many things to understand.
He wasn’t home and he wasn’t at daycare and he was hardly even Mike anymore, just fragments that had been shattered and shoved back together again. The world had been tipped off its axis and started spinning backwards, the sun was the moon and the moon was the sun and the stars were far, far too bright.
His mother had rushed to the daycare when she got the call that something had happened. She had expected blood and broken bones and instead found her son-- too short for his age and too chubby as well-- curled up on a cot in the daycare office, clutching a ragged stuffed rabbit that was not his and breathing heavily through his nose. His eyes were screwed shut and tears were running down his cheeks.
“He stopped screaming,” said the woman who took care of him at daycare. “But he won’t… stop that.”
He was rocking, just a little, mumbling into his fist, which was clenched around the bunny’s ear. When his mother scooped him up and cradled him against her chest, she could hear his voice-- hoarse from the screaming he had apparently done earlier-- chanting, “Shh, shh, it’s okay, every thing's okay. Please, please, it’s okay.”
The caregiver gently pried the bunny from his death grip, saying quietly, “Sorry… but William needs this for nap time.”
His mother didn’t know where to bring him -- the hospital seemed a good choice but there were no wounds that she could see. She bundled him into his car seat, took him home, and by the time she pulled into the driveway, he was sleeping, dead to the world.
She carried him into his bedroom, tucked him into his toddler bed, she pulled his blanket up to his chin. Smoothing his hair back out of his eyes, she kissed his forehead and before she could pull away, he opened his eyes and smiled sleepily, sweetly.
“Are you okay, baby?” she asked him, worried.
His eyes closed again and he sighed, just a little. “He’s sleeping now,” he murmured, and then went back to sleep again.
~~~
It had been a week or so since Mike stopped being alone and he didn't worry about the other kids too much anymore. He didn't need the Block Center or House Center or William Beckett, because he had his own friend, right inside his head that was his and only his and no one could take that from it. Right now, He wasn't doing much -- Mike had always thought having a friend in his head would be cooler, but this one mostly just sniffled and slept. He was good to talk to, and it was fun to describe all the pictures in the books to Him. So when his friend started crying Mike sighed and started making up a story about the funny looking rabbit in the picture, because He liked being read to and it was the quickest way to put Him to sleep. But it didn't stop. The crying was getting louder and louder and Mike was frantically pawing through the picture books looking for something with cool enough pictures, muttering, "Calm down, come on, it's okay, it's okay" under his breath.
Suddenly William Beckett was there, sneering and saying, "Who are you talking to?"
But Mike couldn't focus on him and his head at the same time and then Beckett shoved him and said, "Mom says that only crazy people talk to themselves." Like he knew everything and the crying just wouldn't stop.
Mike dumped all the books out of the book basket and yelled, "SHUT UP!" the way he’d seen people on the TV do.
But then William was saying, "Mike said a bad word!" And the teachers were coming over and Mike was still crying, but it wasn't him crying, it wasn't him, it was the other person in his head and He just wouldn't stop!
Mike was on the floor, curled up into a ball just like last time. The teachers were giving each other panicked glances over Mike's head and his mom rushed over and Mike spent the whole car ride pleading and begging his friend to just go to sleep. But He just kept screaming and then his mom was carrying him into the house and putting him on his nice warm bed in his, dark quiet room and she brought him half a little pill and some water and told him, "Shh, shh, this for your head, okay?" It made Mike kind of sleepy, but he could feel his friend get kind of sleepy too, so that was all right. And now, at last, all Mike felt was quiet contentment, like he sort of remembered from being a baby. As Mike drifted off he thought that as annoying as his head friend could be, Mike wouldn't trade him for the world.
Unfortunately for Mike, the world had different ideas.
~~~
By the time Mike was six he had been to five different therapists and made his mother cry twice.
The first time was when the first diagnosis had come back, because the doctor had decided that Mike was suffering from dissociative identity disorder. Something so traumatic must have happened to him in his young life, that his brain had split and a new personality had emerged.
That meant, of course, that the family was instantly under intense scrutiny, and Mike was removed from the home for the course of the investigation. All Mike knew was that a strange lady in a suit, with sad eyes and cold hands had lead him out of his house, while another one talked to his parents, voice tight and angry. He had never seen his father look so sad and when he looked back up at the stoop, where his parents were clinging to each other, tears in their eyes, his mother had started to cry.
That had been too much for young Mike, and he'd yanked his hand out of the lady's grip and run as fast his chubby little legs could take him, up the steps and into his mother's arms. He had clung to her knees, trembling, screaming "Mommy! Don't let them take me away mommy! I promise I'll be good! I didn't mean to yell at William. Mommy, please!"
But his parents hadn't had a choice. His mother had leant down, and lifted Mike into her arms.
"Shh, baby, it's okay. You'll be back with us soon - just go with these nice people, okay? Everything's going to be all right." She wiped the tears from his eyes and kissed his forehead, before gently handing him over to the CPS agent. Mike's mother stood for a moment, perfectly rigid, until she collapsed back into Mike's father, who caught her before she could fall. The last thing Mike saw as he was lead into the car was his parents, standing like silent sentinels, in front of their house.
He was only gone a week, but at six years old, a week was forever.
When Mike came home, after a week in a strange house with lots of other kids, that he ignored and who ignored him back, his parents were pale, sitting stiffly at the kitchen table. He wasn't sure what was wrong -- after all, he was home now, wasn't he? So everything was going to be all right just like his mother had promised. But when they dragged him from hospital room to hospital room, put him in big long tube and told him to hold very still while the doctor's scanned his brain, Mike knew that it wasn't over yet, whatever it was.
It seemed like the doctor's didn't know what was wrong either. Mike learned lots of new words that months -- schizophrenia, Autism, brain tumor, but none of them seemed to be right.
Finally, the doctors stopped trying to figure out the cause of his "delusions" and started treating the symptoms instead. Mike was sure they weren't delusions, though, and even if they were his friend wasn't bad or anything, He just got upset sometimes, but the doctor's ignored him. They gave his mom a little plastic box with the days of the week on it, and bottles of pills in all sorts of colors, shapes and sizes that were supposed to return him to normal.
It took six weeks for the anti-psychotics to kick in and correct whatever it was that was supposedly malfunctioning in his brain. All Mike really remembered from those weeks was his mother, patiently sitting by his side through the periods of restlessness, nightmares, violent nausea, and stomach cramping. She nursed him through terrible headaches and rocked him while he cried. Then, finally, the side-effects balanced out, his body adjusted, and he was Normal.
The second time his mother cried was the first morning that Mike got out of bed, got dressed, came down stairs, and didn’t so much as blink or speak when she hugged him. He certainly didn’t hug her back. His eyes were wide and dark and he spoke quietly and calmly when she spoke to him, but he did not laugh or play like he used to. The rages and the crying fits were gone, but so was everything else.
When she cried, Mike did not cling to her knees and beg for anything at all. He just took small bites of his toast and stared at the light spilling through the window and splashing onto the linoleum on the floor.
And he never told anyone that all the medication seemed to do was steal away everything bright and vibrant inside of him. But it hadn’t touched that very dark corner where the other boy was still a warm presence.
~~~
Years passed and Mike was good. He was quiet and careful. He never broke any bones or ate worms or hunted snakes in the long grass behind his house like the other boys did. He never wished he had a dog or pulled girls’ pigtails or learned to ride a bike. He never told his mom he hated her (or that he loved her, either) and he never, ever spoke to people who were not there. If sometimes he ducked his head to hide a secret smile, or felt sad for no reason at all, he never said, and no one ever noticed.
There were things that he liked, like eating sweet things or sitting in the car with his arm out the window, pretending he could fly, or crawling up tall trees and closing his eyes and listening to the leaves. The world was moving on without him in it at all and he didn’t really love anything like the way Cindy loved her drawings or Beckett loved himself.
He was Normal and it was awful.
When he was ten, his therapist decided, in a last ditch attempt to help him develop the ability to interact on a social level with his peers, that Mike should join band. Other students his age were already going through the awkward motions of learning their first instruments, struggling with trombones and clarinets.
Mike obediently stood in front of the sheet stapled to the bulletin board outside the band room, staring up blankly at the other names on the list. He could hear the stumbling, awful music from inside the room where the band students practiced, flat notes and squeaking reeds and after a long, careful moment of thinking things through, he wrote ‘guitar’ in the column for his instrument of choice.
The band teacher had not been impressed. Mike had sat quietly in the room with him a few days later as the teacher had said, again and again, “There is no room for guitar in concert band” and “I don’t know how to play, how am I going to teach him to play?”
But Mike had, for the first time in years, made a choice. He had indicated a preference for something and his parents were determined that he’d get it.
An alternative music elective was offered, breaking from the traditional band curriculum, where students could learn guitar, vocal, violin or piano.
Music was a revelation to Mike. Better than eating the sweetest thing, even better than flying with his arms out the car window.
At first, it was just sound, discordant chords and awkward fingers. Soon though, it changed, becoming a method of communicating that took less effort than words. It was like cutting open his veins and bleeding out everything he felt when he was too tired or to drugged to express it in words.
He never played with anybody though, and his therapist despaired that he'd never really learned to interact with his peers. Even so, his mother was pleased with how dedicated he was to music and how much he clearly enjoyed it. They had begun to worry that he’d never find anything to love at all, that maybe he wasn’t capable of it anymore.
He learned the songs he was supposed to learn and when he grew bored of that, he started picking through the broken, muffled parts of his personality that managed to struggle through the haze of medication. He began to translate that into songs of his own, intricate chord progressions that were as disjointed as he was.
He liked to think that the Voice in the back corner of his mind liked it as well.
He didn’t think anybody else had noticed him at all. He was wrong.
At eleven years old Mike liked sitting in the back of the music room, worn acoustic on his lap. He was in his own little world and usually, as far as he knew, his classmates liked to leave him there.
William Beckett wasn’t quite so content with it, though. In the years since Mike had gone from the spazzy little preschooler screaming in daycare to the quiet, pale, sharp boy hiding behind his guitar, William had watched and wondered about it. He spoke to Mike sometimes and got vague, disinterested replies, not at all the reaction William’s pointed, cruel comments deserved.
Over the years, he’d gotten even crueler, looking for any sort of reaction at all, but Mike wouldn’t give him one.
That day, though, when Mike had been lost in the newest melody he’d created, William had wandered over, flopped down beside him, and said, “You’re kind of crazy, aren’t you?”
Finally, a reaction as Mike’s fingers stuttered over the strings and then stopped as he looked up, eyes wide. “I’m not,” he said, cocking his head. “Am I?”
William smirked. “I don’t know. Are you?”
Mike looked around, as if seeing the world for the first time. He blinked sleepily, rubbed his eyes and said, “I’m being good.” But he was uncertain about it for the first time. What good was the medication if it made everything so much harder, but didn’t make him any less crazy?
“You’re being stupid,” William said, rolling his eyes. “You never play at recess. All you do is sit by yourself, and you never talk to anybody.”
Mike wasn’t used to even acknowledging anyone else's presence. He certainly wasn’t good at interacting with other children. He opened his mouth and said honestly, “That’s not true. I talk to my therapist.”
William blinked at him, eyes wide and incredulous and then he sort of snickered, an uncomfortable stutter of nervous laughter. “What are you, a psycho or something?”
Mike was losing interest, though, and he shrugged, ducking back to his guitar, fingers moving over the strings again, though without playing a sound.
William said other things and tried other things, to get a reaction, but Mike just drifted, quiet and far too calm. William didn’t like it.
He remembered the kid Mike used to be, which was the problem. He remembered racing Mike to the top of the monkey bars. He remembered losing to Mike as Mike screamed about being king of the castle. He remembered tackling Mike to the ground on a snowy day when they were small children and he remembered rubbing Mike’s face in the snow and the bloody nose Mike had given him in return. He remembered opening his lunch at daycare to find that Mike had put dozens of grasshoppers in his sandwich when William had been busy systematically destroying Mike’s art projects.
He had always thought that Mike’s sudden quietness had been some new way for him to win, for him to beat William at their mutual hatred. William had spent all these years thinking that Mike had somehow developed some method of not getting upset when William had tried so hard to affect him in some way.
Now, though, William knew it had nothing to do with him at all, and that pissed him off. It also worried him, just a little.
He didn’t react well. The next day, he shoved Mike down the stairs off the school bus, laughing when Mike skinned his palms and his knees.
Mike frowned faintly at the blood and then got up, wandering away without a word.
William tripped him during gym class; hit him with spit balls during science, cut off a chunk of his hair during social studies. He put a tack on his chair just before math class, and tied his shoelaces together before the final bell rang.
Nothing.
The next day, he stole Mike’s homework and shredded it, carefully placing the pieces back in his desk. He replaced his lunch with an old Tupperware container full of mold. He tossed Mike’s regular clothes in the shower after Mike changed out of them for gym. He locked him in a closet and made him miss the school bus.
After a week of these attacks, Mike would stare at him, looking bewildered, but at least he knew William was there.
Mike started to get mad. Not the way William wanted -- William was fully aware that he deserved to have his face beaten in. But Mike started fighting back, being more aware of himself and his things.
He pushed William back outside the bus on the way home from school on a Monday and William wanted to do a victory dance. It was the most reaction he had gotten out of Mike since preschool.
Then Mike didn’t show up for school for four straight days and when he finally did, he was pale and gray with dark circles around his eyes, and he looked pissed.
After their brawl at recess, William’s nose was bloodied, both eyes blackened, his knuckles cracked and bleeding and his bottom lip swollen. He was also suspended, but so was Mike, whose wounds were just about the same.
And William never felt so smug.
~~~
Paul Kevin Jonas II was born on November 5th, 1987 to Denise and Paul Kevin Jonas Sr.. He had ten perfect little fingers, and ten perfect little toes. His parents were overjoyed with their darling baby boy. But deep down inside, they knew that something was not quite right.
Kevin, at barely two years old, had dragged over a baby naming book that was almost as big as he was to where his mother was sitting on the couch, and, opening it to somewhere in the middle and said the name, "Mike," pointing to the corresponding entry.
Denise laughed, "No, silly, we decided on Joe remember?"
But Kevin just shook his little head and said, "Not Joe. Mike. Mike lives in my head but he's all fuzzy right now."
Denise's smile faltered, just a little and she asked, "Is that your imaginary friend? Mike?"
But Kevin scrunched up his face and said, "He's not imaginary." His tiny brow furrowed in consternation, "But he is my friend." And with a decisive nod he toddled over to the book basket to grab The Velveteen Rabbit and curled up at his mother's feet. So she shrugged it off. Kevin was just an unusually bright kid; that was all -- only two and already using full sentences, with such a creative imagination.
But, a couple of months after Kevin's third birthday he got violently, wretchedly ill. For six weeks he would shake, and dry heave, and wake up in the middle of the night screaming, "What are you doing? Stop it! You're hurting him!"
But no matter how many doctors they took him to and how many specialists they consulted, no one could figure out what was wrong. None of the treatments were working and finally, as a last ditch attempt they called in the child psychiatrist. She handed Kevin a piece of paper and a box of crayons and said, "Just draw what's inside your head, can you do that for me?" Nodding, he furrowed his little brow and, grabbing a grey crayon, drew a line right down the middle of the paper. On the left side he drew a riot of shapes and scribbles, in greens and reds and blues and browns, the word MIKE barely discernible under all the noise, bleeding into the right side of the paper which was completely white with a large grey ME scribbled on it in childish writing. Then he grabbed the grey crayon and furiously greyed out what he had just drawn, almost obliterating the "MIKE" side, and very purposefully drawing a few grey lines across the "ME" side. It wasn't really right, of course, but Kevin thought that it was a pretty good picture of him and his Mike. The therapist didn't seem to like it though. She told Kevin to stay where he was and gave him more crayons to distract him, but he could hear her talking to his parents through the slightly open door. None of the words really made sense -- "special education", "childhood schizophrenia", "high functioning autism" -- but they sounded really cool, and oddly familiar too. When they left the therapists office his parents were pale, and his mom was gripping his hand so hard, Kevin was sure it was going to fall off.
But a few days after the appointment, Kevin got better. The sweats went away, the shakes stopped and he started sleeping through the night again.
After his long illness however, he was never quite the same. Their bright, vivacious boy was pale, listless and lethargic. He was still very smart and very creative -- he would make up the most peculiar stories and tell them to his baby brothers, all about an imaginary little boy named Mike and his fearsome struggle against the Big Grey Blob that was eating up all his colors. His preschool teacher sat them down one day, shortly after Kevin started first grade and explained that Kevin was unusually intelligent -- using syntax and vocabulary at way above average levels and able to grasp complex thoughts and ideas at a much higher level than most six-year-olds -- but she was also a little worried about how, almost unusually, calm Kevin was. He never made a fuss, or threw a tantrum, or cried, and while it was always nice to have such a well behaved boy in her class, was everything all right at home? And that's when, affronted, but a little concerned themselves -- after all, Joe was only two years younger than Kevin and already much more of a handful -- explained that he had been deathly ill when he was younger and had never quiet shaken off the illness. There was nothing actually wrong with him, he was just a little more fragile than his boisterous younger brothers.
When Kevin was seven and his younger brother Nick was tapping out rhythms with his chubby toddler hands, Kevin started hearing music. Just snatches of it, here and there, little fragments of melody swirling around in his head. And he knew they were from Mike. So he went to his father and said, "I want to play the music that I'm hearing in my head." His father had laughed, but Kevin was such a good boy and he never asked for anything, so what was the harm in indulging him?
That Saturday afternoon Kevin Sr. dragged an excited Kevin Jr. to the local music shop. They set him up in the back room, with his father and the store manager supervising, of course, and let him play with all of the instruments. He tried to play the trumpet, but the sad little squawk that sounded out didn’t sound right to him. The clarinet was wrong and the recorder was wrong. The violin was close, mostly when he plucked at the string but none of them sounded quite right. Until finally, the store manager brought out the smallest guitar they had and Kevin twanged one of the strings and another and another and there - that one and that one and that one - the right notes, the right order, but most essentially, the right sound. Summoning the full force of his puppy eyes and letting his floppy curls fall in his face he looked up beseechingly at his father, who laughed, ruffled his hair and in what was almost the happiest day of Kevin's young life, bought him the guitar.
By the time Kevin was eight, his parents had stopped worrying so much. They had three budding musicians and another on the way, Paul had a good job as the Minister of their town's small church and they had almost forgotten that Kevin had ever been any other way then how he was now. After all, they already had a hellion and a future president to look after; it was a blessing that their oldest was so calm, responsible and intelligent. But then, the lingering fear in the back of his parent’s minds came true.
Kevin got sick.
For four days he was sweating and shaking and vomiting all over the place, just like when he was three. He would cry himself to sleep whispering, "It's okay, it's okay, you can do it. All the colors are coming back, can't you feel it?" They tried traditional cough syrups first, waited with bated breaths and fervent praying that this time, the medicine would actually work. On the second day, the worst of it seemed to be over. With the weight of the world lifted off their shoulders the Jonas’s almost wept in relief.
After that, however, things were never the same again.
Gone was their docile little angel and in his place was a bouncy, talkative eight year old, with just as much imagination as before but even more energy than Joe, if that was possible. It was as if, for the first eight years of his life, he had been holding back and for no discernible reason, suddenly let go.
Oh, there were still a couple of things that worried his parents a little -- like when Kevin was nine and started crying about how his wrist, which was perfectly fine, hurt and that it wasn't his pain, it was Mike's -- but his mood swings and listlessness had practically vanished - and as much as they had loved their steadfast oldest son, the first time Kevin started bawling because Joe had broken his favorite toy, Paul and Denise let out a joint sigh of relief.
However, when Kevin was ten, and all his sentences began with "Mike felt this" or "Mike did this" his Mom gently took him aside and explained that imaginary friends were just that, imaginary and that he was a little too old for that now. Besides, he had his brothers and think of all the friends he was going to make in fifth grade! So Kevin nodded and agreed and the only time he talked about Mike was when he played pretend with his younger brothers.
"And one time, Mike was really, really happy and I don't know why but I know he was having so much fun and there was this swooping feeling like being up in the air, and then bam! He fell and his wrist started hurting so bad but it was okay because it stopped hurting. I think he got a cast and all his friends probably wrote on it and he was really happy again."
~~
Kevin was ten when Mike started to feel weird in his body. Well, no, Kevin's body felt fine but Mike's body felt weird to Mike and Kevin felt that. Kevin woke up one night, sweating and shaking, short of breath and with flushed cheeks but he didn't know why. It wasn't him that was feeling that way, not his body that was reacting but he felt it nevertheless.
When, in health class one day, all the girls were sent out of the room and the teacher played a really embarrassing video, Kevin was relieved. And a little embarrassed because did that mean that every time he woke up in the middle of the night Mike had been... he could feel himself blushing and shook it off. At least this way, he knew what to expect, when it happened to him for real. Later, when his Sunday school teacher talked about how masturbation was sinful and all his friends start whispering about hairy palms and blindness, Kevin, instead of joining in, frowned and furrowed his brows - his teacher said it was wrong, and his preacher said it was wrong, but Mike did it all the time, and Kevin knew Mike and Mike wasn't wrong. Maybe, if Kevin just didn't touch himself, but let Mike do it for him, it wasn't a sin?
He tried to ask his priest but there was scandalized whispering and a talk with his parents about "sinful influences" so he nodded his head and agreed with whatever they said and as soon as he had free time, wandered over to the library instead. Not the church one, the public one. He didn't have a card there, because Dad didn't approve of some of the books, but if he curled up in the aisles to read, no one cared. The librarian was surprisingly helpful -- she lead him to all sorts of books about his changing body and hormones and all that puberty stuff that made Mike grouchy and elated.
And that was how Kevin learned that sometimes, the church was wrong. Because if the church was right then Mike was wrong and Kevin knew, like he knew that Nick was a musical genius and Joe was a brat, that Mike wasn't wrong. And if Mike wasn't wrong, then Kevin wasn't wrong either, which was always nice to know.
Kevin's first kiss was when he was twelve. All the other boys were starting to talk about girls, but Kevin -- Kevin kept thinking about Billy Wilson in his math class, who Joe said, “was creepy looking" but Kevin thought was pretty cute. The thought wasn't from Mike, and Kevin never had any problems sorting his feelings from Mike's and Mike liked girls. At least, Kevin thought it had been a girl -- all he really got from Mike was that familiar tingly feeling in his lips but not in his lips and a soaring sense of happiness that probably meant that Mike had just gotten his first kiss.
Which meant that Kevin had gotten his first kiss too.
And while he wished it had been with Billy Wilson, it was more than most of the kids in his class could say. He sort of felt like bragging, but the only people who didn't think he was crazy when he talked about Mike were his brother's and they just thought it was gross.
Kevin was thirteen when it started to become a problem. Because, he'd gotten used to Mike and that part of his brain that got all fuzzy and excited whenever Mike did something Kevin wasn't supposed to do. But the thing was, after that first year of waking up in the middle of the night, flushed and sweaty and content, it sort of bottomed out. And then one night Kevin woke up and it felt a little like Mike but it was actually him and there was a mess all over his sheets and he couldn't help freaking out a little bit inside.
It was Mike that calmed him down.
That sense of peace and calm and reassurance that he knew, he just knew, was from Mike. It gave him the courage to bundle up his sheets, and do his own laundry, and when his mother caught him sneaking down to the laundry room in the middle of the night he managed to get through the incredibly awkward and deeply uncomfortable conversation without stammering all that much. But suddenly, it was like his body wasn't his anymore. He'd be in the locker room and Billy Wilson would take his shirt off and... it had become so embarrassing he'd taken to changing in the bathroom because it wasn't normal, right? But the thing is, it was so much harder to not...do stuff...to himself when he was alone, when it was actually his body and not just Mike's because when it was his body the feeling was so much stronger. And every time Mike got flustered, Kevin's body still reacted anyway, so he spent pretty much all of 7th grade with an incredible hard on and it was the most embarrassing and shameful thing to ever happen to him.
Until the day that Mike lost his virginity.
Kevin was fourteen, sitting in church, and the preacher was talking about how homosexuality was a sin and Kevin still thought Billy Wilson was cuter then Martha Jones. Nick was too young and too busy for girls anyway, because his little brother was on Broadway, how cool was that? Joe was definitely into girls though, if he and Mandy were any indication. But Kevin, he knew how wrong it was to "lust in your heart" especially when you were lusting after boys. But the thing is, Kevin had been listening, okay. He'd been reading and there was a loop hole. As long as he didn't act on his urges he was fine, right? Because everyone was a sinner in spirit, but until you became a sinner in action, Jesus still loved you.
Which was why he was so, so thankful for Mike.
And if sometimes he wished he knew what kissing felt like for real and if he could experience firsthand what made Mike so happy sometimes, well, it was close enough.
Then Mike lost his virginity while Kevin was sitting in church, at midnight mass. He had gotten that fuzzy feeling that meant that Mike was probably drunk or something, which was uncomfortable but manageable, and then it was just a frantic mess of feeling and color that was so much stronger than it had ever been before. He was squirming in his seat, and his mother glared at him because it was time for silent prayer and it's not like Kevin could just sneak out -- he was sitting in the middle of the pew in the front row. If he got up, everyone would know. So Kevin was determined to hold out until everyone got up for singing, because if it was an emergency, it was okay to discretely slip out the side when everyone was distracted.
His father's sermons had never felt so long and his body and mind just wouldn't listen to reason. It felt so good because it was Mike, but it was Kevin as well and he was hard; and squirming and he could feel pressure building up behind his eyes. He bent his head, folded his body in half and squeezed his eyes shut. His mother looked at him askance but hopefully she'd just think he was really into his prayers. And then the world whited out a little. He was shaking and he'd practically bitten through his lip, but he was so glad his fancy church jacket hung loose because there was a horrible wet spot on his pants and he felt shameful, and disgusting and elated all in turns. The minute everyone stood up for the psalms he was out of there, and when he was safely locked in the men's room he maybe broke down and cried. Just a little. By that time Mike was in that quiet content spot in his head that meant he was relaxed and sleeping. But Kevin was the one who had to sit through the rest of Mass, and dinner with his family afterwards in a ruined pair of pants and a cloak of shame.
But that didn't stop him from imagining what it must have been like, in vivid detailed color when he went to bed that night, after he accidentally spilled pasta sauce all over his dress pants and volunteered to do all the laundry as penance for being so twitchy in church. Kevin had always had a very vivid imagination, except instead of his fuzzy shape impression of Mike and some random girl it was Billy Wilson and Kevin, and he was kissing him on the little strip of skin that showed when his t-shirt would ride up. Kevin was running his hands through Billy's hair and he could feel his own hand sneak towards his cock so he rested it right in the waistband of his boxers and gripped the elastic so hard his nails were digging into his palms through the elastic.
The images kept coming, and then it was just a blur of feeling and emotion and the last thing he thought about before he came was 'Mike'. He wondered why he had even bothered to change his boxers in the first place and why was he always such a disappointment. He was a bad son and a bad Christian, and if he could just be a bit more like Mike... but Kevin knew that Mike had done worse stuff then Kevin had ever done. So it didn't make sense, even to him, that it was only bad when Kevin did it. But that's how he felt and he just wanted it to stop.
It took two years and lots of silent reassurance from Mike before he felt comfortable with his sexuality. The public library helped too. A week after the 'church incident', as Kevin had taken to calling it in his head, he had gone back to the public library. You didn't need a parent to get a library card, which was a relief, because Kevin didn't know what he would have done otherwise, as his father still didn't approve of the books there. But the librarian he had talked to when he was thirteen was just as helpful as she had been back then, and with her help he pored over all the relevant books he could find. It also helped to have an unmonitored internet connection (with heavy search filters on -- Kevin wasn't going to make that mistake twice).
The thing was, Kevin still believed in God, he just didn't believe in the God his father believed in, the one that only loved a portion of his flock and turned his back on the rest. Sixteen was also when Kevin started straightening his hair and skateboarding. He started hanging out with the guys who wanted to hang out with the guys who cut class and smoked up behind the school. It was his way of rebelling without actually upsetting his parents too much, or being a bad influence on his brothers. He liked to think that this is what high school was like for Mike (who was obviously so much cooler then Kevin, it was unreal).
But most importantly, sixteen was when Kevin discovered music. Oh, he'd been tooling around on the guitar for years and he still heard snatches of music from Mike's guitar -- a couple of notes, here and there, a sudden chord progression or a snippet of melody -- but for most of his life it had been Christian rock and Elvis Costello, all the bands his parents liked and Nick was obsessed with. But when he was sixteen his friends introduced him to Green Day and it was all downhill, at least from his parent's perspective, from there.
He started hanging out at the town's small record store, flipping through the local bands section and walking around with his ear buds in whenever he could manage it. He had finally managed to convince his parents to get him an iPod for Christmas, after studying hard all year, and doing all his chores and all of mother's chores, and babysitting Nick and Joe and Frankie without even complaining. It had taken months and months of hard work and begging, until, that Christmas morning after all the other presents had been unwrapped, and Kevin was sure he wasn't going to get his wish, his father had pulled a small, rectangular present from under the couch cushion he had been sitting on and made it the best Christmas Kevin could ever remember.
Part 2
By the time he was four years old Michael Carden knew that girls would scream if you pulled their hair, that boys would punch back if you punched them first, and that his daycare teachers did not appreciate his ‘attitude problem’. He learned that other children would avoid him if he narrowed his eyes just right, that they’d back away from the toys he wanted if he squared his shoulders and frowned in their direction. He'd learned that the best defense for being shorter than he ought to be and chubbier than he ought to be was a good offense. At four years old, he had, in short, become something of a bully.
But most of all, at four years old, Mike Carden had become cripplingly shy and, worst of all, terribly, terribly lonely.
The Block Center, Mike knew, was to be avoided at all costs, because boys built towers there, working together in an intricate social structure that he did not understand, and laughing together when the towers fell. House Center wasn’t a good place to be either, because the girls set up camp there; rocking their babies and setting out intricate dinners at the play table with plastic strawberries and plastic cookies. Mike had never found any use for the plastic food except for throwing it at the girls and boys who he did not know how to play with. Water Table was chock full of drowning possibilities, and worst of all, it was ruled by an unnaturally tall and slim boy who Mike had hated since he first set eyes on him, William Beckett.
On Mike’s very first day of daycare, a girl tripped Mike on the playground and he skimmed the palms of his hands, and that’s when things had started to go wrong.
William Beckett stood over him with hands on his hips and laughed, a snide and sneering laugh that the other children had echoed, and Mike hated William Beckett with the fire of a thousand suns and all the power of his four-year-old heart.
Book Centre, though, had always been a good choice for Mike, because four-year-olds didn't have much use for books. Neither did Mike, to be honest. But Robert Munsch was terrific to hide behind, and even while his daycare teachers discussed his attitude problem, they gushed over his strange and all-consuming love for picture books.
It was there, curled up behind the protective screen of Alexander and the Horrible, No Good, Terrible, Very Bad Day, that something happened, and everything changed.
After that, Mike was never lonely again.
Something broke and split into two pieces inside his mind, though Mike was too young to understand it or explain it to the panicked caregivers who asked him why he was screaming. All he knew is that one moment, he was daydreaming behind his book, and the next, there was something happening that was wrong and different and terrifying in a way that could not be explained.
Everything was magnified-- scents and sounds and lights and darks and it was like he was suddenly feeling and seeing and smelling everything for the very first time-- only those feelings and sights and smells weren’t of wax crayons and white glue, but other things, too many things to understand.
He wasn’t home and he wasn’t at daycare and he was hardly even Mike anymore, just fragments that had been shattered and shoved back together again. The world had been tipped off its axis and started spinning backwards, the sun was the moon and the moon was the sun and the stars were far, far too bright.
His mother had rushed to the daycare when she got the call that something had happened. She had expected blood and broken bones and instead found her son-- too short for his age and too chubby as well-- curled up on a cot in the daycare office, clutching a ragged stuffed rabbit that was not his and breathing heavily through his nose. His eyes were screwed shut and tears were running down his cheeks.
“He stopped screaming,” said the woman who took care of him at daycare. “But he won’t… stop that.”
He was rocking, just a little, mumbling into his fist, which was clenched around the bunny’s ear. When his mother scooped him up and cradled him against her chest, she could hear his voice-- hoarse from the screaming he had apparently done earlier-- chanting, “Shh, shh, it’s okay, every thing's okay. Please, please, it’s okay.”
The caregiver gently pried the bunny from his death grip, saying quietly, “Sorry… but William needs this for nap time.”
His mother didn’t know where to bring him -- the hospital seemed a good choice but there were no wounds that she could see. She bundled him into his car seat, took him home, and by the time she pulled into the driveway, he was sleeping, dead to the world.
She carried him into his bedroom, tucked him into his toddler bed, she pulled his blanket up to his chin. Smoothing his hair back out of his eyes, she kissed his forehead and before she could pull away, he opened his eyes and smiled sleepily, sweetly.
“Are you okay, baby?” she asked him, worried.
His eyes closed again and he sighed, just a little. “He’s sleeping now,” he murmured, and then went back to sleep again.
~~~
It had been a week or so since Mike stopped being alone and he didn't worry about the other kids too much anymore. He didn't need the Block Center or House Center or William Beckett, because he had his own friend, right inside his head that was his and only his and no one could take that from it. Right now, He wasn't doing much -- Mike had always thought having a friend in his head would be cooler, but this one mostly just sniffled and slept. He was good to talk to, and it was fun to describe all the pictures in the books to Him. So when his friend started crying Mike sighed and started making up a story about the funny looking rabbit in the picture, because He liked being read to and it was the quickest way to put Him to sleep. But it didn't stop. The crying was getting louder and louder and Mike was frantically pawing through the picture books looking for something with cool enough pictures, muttering, "Calm down, come on, it's okay, it's okay" under his breath.
Suddenly William Beckett was there, sneering and saying, "Who are you talking to?"
But Mike couldn't focus on him and his head at the same time and then Beckett shoved him and said, "Mom says that only crazy people talk to themselves." Like he knew everything and the crying just wouldn't stop.
Mike dumped all the books out of the book basket and yelled, "SHUT UP!" the way he’d seen people on the TV do.
But then William was saying, "Mike said a bad word!" And the teachers were coming over and Mike was still crying, but it wasn't him crying, it wasn't him, it was the other person in his head and He just wouldn't stop!
Mike was on the floor, curled up into a ball just like last time. The teachers were giving each other panicked glances over Mike's head and his mom rushed over and Mike spent the whole car ride pleading and begging his friend to just go to sleep. But He just kept screaming and then his mom was carrying him into the house and putting him on his nice warm bed in his, dark quiet room and she brought him half a little pill and some water and told him, "Shh, shh, this for your head, okay?" It made Mike kind of sleepy, but he could feel his friend get kind of sleepy too, so that was all right. And now, at last, all Mike felt was quiet contentment, like he sort of remembered from being a baby. As Mike drifted off he thought that as annoying as his head friend could be, Mike wouldn't trade him for the world.
Unfortunately for Mike, the world had different ideas.
~~~
By the time Mike was six he had been to five different therapists and made his mother cry twice.
The first time was when the first diagnosis had come back, because the doctor had decided that Mike was suffering from dissociative identity disorder. Something so traumatic must have happened to him in his young life, that his brain had split and a new personality had emerged.
That meant, of course, that the family was instantly under intense scrutiny, and Mike was removed from the home for the course of the investigation. All Mike knew was that a strange lady in a suit, with sad eyes and cold hands had lead him out of his house, while another one talked to his parents, voice tight and angry. He had never seen his father look so sad and when he looked back up at the stoop, where his parents were clinging to each other, tears in their eyes, his mother had started to cry.
That had been too much for young Mike, and he'd yanked his hand out of the lady's grip and run as fast his chubby little legs could take him, up the steps and into his mother's arms. He had clung to her knees, trembling, screaming "Mommy! Don't let them take me away mommy! I promise I'll be good! I didn't mean to yell at William. Mommy, please!"
But his parents hadn't had a choice. His mother had leant down, and lifted Mike into her arms.
"Shh, baby, it's okay. You'll be back with us soon - just go with these nice people, okay? Everything's going to be all right." She wiped the tears from his eyes and kissed his forehead, before gently handing him over to the CPS agent. Mike's mother stood for a moment, perfectly rigid, until she collapsed back into Mike's father, who caught her before she could fall. The last thing Mike saw as he was lead into the car was his parents, standing like silent sentinels, in front of their house.
He was only gone a week, but at six years old, a week was forever.
When Mike came home, after a week in a strange house with lots of other kids, that he ignored and who ignored him back, his parents were pale, sitting stiffly at the kitchen table. He wasn't sure what was wrong -- after all, he was home now, wasn't he? So everything was going to be all right just like his mother had promised. But when they dragged him from hospital room to hospital room, put him in big long tube and told him to hold very still while the doctor's scanned his brain, Mike knew that it wasn't over yet, whatever it was.
It seemed like the doctor's didn't know what was wrong either. Mike learned lots of new words that months -- schizophrenia, Autism, brain tumor, but none of them seemed to be right.
Finally, the doctors stopped trying to figure out the cause of his "delusions" and started treating the symptoms instead. Mike was sure they weren't delusions, though, and even if they were his friend wasn't bad or anything, He just got upset sometimes, but the doctor's ignored him. They gave his mom a little plastic box with the days of the week on it, and bottles of pills in all sorts of colors, shapes and sizes that were supposed to return him to normal.
It took six weeks for the anti-psychotics to kick in and correct whatever it was that was supposedly malfunctioning in his brain. All Mike really remembered from those weeks was his mother, patiently sitting by his side through the periods of restlessness, nightmares, violent nausea, and stomach cramping. She nursed him through terrible headaches and rocked him while he cried. Then, finally, the side-effects balanced out, his body adjusted, and he was Normal.
The second time his mother cried was the first morning that Mike got out of bed, got dressed, came down stairs, and didn’t so much as blink or speak when she hugged him. He certainly didn’t hug her back. His eyes were wide and dark and he spoke quietly and calmly when she spoke to him, but he did not laugh or play like he used to. The rages and the crying fits were gone, but so was everything else.
When she cried, Mike did not cling to her knees and beg for anything at all. He just took small bites of his toast and stared at the light spilling through the window and splashing onto the linoleum on the floor.
And he never told anyone that all the medication seemed to do was steal away everything bright and vibrant inside of him. But it hadn’t touched that very dark corner where the other boy was still a warm presence.
~~~
Years passed and Mike was good. He was quiet and careful. He never broke any bones or ate worms or hunted snakes in the long grass behind his house like the other boys did. He never wished he had a dog or pulled girls’ pigtails or learned to ride a bike. He never told his mom he hated her (or that he loved her, either) and he never, ever spoke to people who were not there. If sometimes he ducked his head to hide a secret smile, or felt sad for no reason at all, he never said, and no one ever noticed.
There were things that he liked, like eating sweet things or sitting in the car with his arm out the window, pretending he could fly, or crawling up tall trees and closing his eyes and listening to the leaves. The world was moving on without him in it at all and he didn’t really love anything like the way Cindy loved her drawings or Beckett loved himself.
He was Normal and it was awful.
When he was ten, his therapist decided, in a last ditch attempt to help him develop the ability to interact on a social level with his peers, that Mike should join band. Other students his age were already going through the awkward motions of learning their first instruments, struggling with trombones and clarinets.
Mike obediently stood in front of the sheet stapled to the bulletin board outside the band room, staring up blankly at the other names on the list. He could hear the stumbling, awful music from inside the room where the band students practiced, flat notes and squeaking reeds and after a long, careful moment of thinking things through, he wrote ‘guitar’ in the column for his instrument of choice.
The band teacher had not been impressed. Mike had sat quietly in the room with him a few days later as the teacher had said, again and again, “There is no room for guitar in concert band” and “I don’t know how to play, how am I going to teach him to play?”
But Mike had, for the first time in years, made a choice. He had indicated a preference for something and his parents were determined that he’d get it.
An alternative music elective was offered, breaking from the traditional band curriculum, where students could learn guitar, vocal, violin or piano.
Music was a revelation to Mike. Better than eating the sweetest thing, even better than flying with his arms out the car window.
At first, it was just sound, discordant chords and awkward fingers. Soon though, it changed, becoming a method of communicating that took less effort than words. It was like cutting open his veins and bleeding out everything he felt when he was too tired or to drugged to express it in words.
He never played with anybody though, and his therapist despaired that he'd never really learned to interact with his peers. Even so, his mother was pleased with how dedicated he was to music and how much he clearly enjoyed it. They had begun to worry that he’d never find anything to love at all, that maybe he wasn’t capable of it anymore.
He learned the songs he was supposed to learn and when he grew bored of that, he started picking through the broken, muffled parts of his personality that managed to struggle through the haze of medication. He began to translate that into songs of his own, intricate chord progressions that were as disjointed as he was.
He liked to think that the Voice in the back corner of his mind liked it as well.
He didn’t think anybody else had noticed him at all. He was wrong.
At eleven years old Mike liked sitting in the back of the music room, worn acoustic on his lap. He was in his own little world and usually, as far as he knew, his classmates liked to leave him there.
William Beckett wasn’t quite so content with it, though. In the years since Mike had gone from the spazzy little preschooler screaming in daycare to the quiet, pale, sharp boy hiding behind his guitar, William had watched and wondered about it. He spoke to Mike sometimes and got vague, disinterested replies, not at all the reaction William’s pointed, cruel comments deserved.
Over the years, he’d gotten even crueler, looking for any sort of reaction at all, but Mike wouldn’t give him one.
That day, though, when Mike had been lost in the newest melody he’d created, William had wandered over, flopped down beside him, and said, “You’re kind of crazy, aren’t you?”
Finally, a reaction as Mike’s fingers stuttered over the strings and then stopped as he looked up, eyes wide. “I’m not,” he said, cocking his head. “Am I?”
William smirked. “I don’t know. Are you?”
Mike looked around, as if seeing the world for the first time. He blinked sleepily, rubbed his eyes and said, “I’m being good.” But he was uncertain about it for the first time. What good was the medication if it made everything so much harder, but didn’t make him any less crazy?
“You’re being stupid,” William said, rolling his eyes. “You never play at recess. All you do is sit by yourself, and you never talk to anybody.”
Mike wasn’t used to even acknowledging anyone else's presence. He certainly wasn’t good at interacting with other children. He opened his mouth and said honestly, “That’s not true. I talk to my therapist.”
William blinked at him, eyes wide and incredulous and then he sort of snickered, an uncomfortable stutter of nervous laughter. “What are you, a psycho or something?”
Mike was losing interest, though, and he shrugged, ducking back to his guitar, fingers moving over the strings again, though without playing a sound.
William said other things and tried other things, to get a reaction, but Mike just drifted, quiet and far too calm. William didn’t like it.
He remembered the kid Mike used to be, which was the problem. He remembered racing Mike to the top of the monkey bars. He remembered losing to Mike as Mike screamed about being king of the castle. He remembered tackling Mike to the ground on a snowy day when they were small children and he remembered rubbing Mike’s face in the snow and the bloody nose Mike had given him in return. He remembered opening his lunch at daycare to find that Mike had put dozens of grasshoppers in his sandwich when William had been busy systematically destroying Mike’s art projects.
He had always thought that Mike’s sudden quietness had been some new way for him to win, for him to beat William at their mutual hatred. William had spent all these years thinking that Mike had somehow developed some method of not getting upset when William had tried so hard to affect him in some way.
Now, though, William knew it had nothing to do with him at all, and that pissed him off. It also worried him, just a little.
He didn’t react well. The next day, he shoved Mike down the stairs off the school bus, laughing when Mike skinned his palms and his knees.
Mike frowned faintly at the blood and then got up, wandering away without a word.
William tripped him during gym class; hit him with spit balls during science, cut off a chunk of his hair during social studies. He put a tack on his chair just before math class, and tied his shoelaces together before the final bell rang.
Nothing.
The next day, he stole Mike’s homework and shredded it, carefully placing the pieces back in his desk. He replaced his lunch with an old Tupperware container full of mold. He tossed Mike’s regular clothes in the shower after Mike changed out of them for gym. He locked him in a closet and made him miss the school bus.
After a week of these attacks, Mike would stare at him, looking bewildered, but at least he knew William was there.
Mike started to get mad. Not the way William wanted -- William was fully aware that he deserved to have his face beaten in. But Mike started fighting back, being more aware of himself and his things.
He pushed William back outside the bus on the way home from school on a Monday and William wanted to do a victory dance. It was the most reaction he had gotten out of Mike since preschool.
Then Mike didn’t show up for school for four straight days and when he finally did, he was pale and gray with dark circles around his eyes, and he looked pissed.
After their brawl at recess, William’s nose was bloodied, both eyes blackened, his knuckles cracked and bleeding and his bottom lip swollen. He was also suspended, but so was Mike, whose wounds were just about the same.
And William never felt so smug.
~~~
Paul Kevin Jonas II was born on November 5th, 1987 to Denise and Paul Kevin Jonas Sr.. He had ten perfect little fingers, and ten perfect little toes. His parents were overjoyed with their darling baby boy. But deep down inside, they knew that something was not quite right.
Kevin, at barely two years old, had dragged over a baby naming book that was almost as big as he was to where his mother was sitting on the couch, and, opening it to somewhere in the middle and said the name, "Mike," pointing to the corresponding entry.
Denise laughed, "No, silly, we decided on Joe remember?"
But Kevin just shook his little head and said, "Not Joe. Mike. Mike lives in my head but he's all fuzzy right now."
Denise's smile faltered, just a little and she asked, "Is that your imaginary friend? Mike?"
But Kevin scrunched up his face and said, "He's not imaginary." His tiny brow furrowed in consternation, "But he is my friend." And with a decisive nod he toddled over to the book basket to grab The Velveteen Rabbit and curled up at his mother's feet. So she shrugged it off. Kevin was just an unusually bright kid; that was all -- only two and already using full sentences, with such a creative imagination.
But, a couple of months after Kevin's third birthday he got violently, wretchedly ill. For six weeks he would shake, and dry heave, and wake up in the middle of the night screaming, "What are you doing? Stop it! You're hurting him!"
But no matter how many doctors they took him to and how many specialists they consulted, no one could figure out what was wrong. None of the treatments were working and finally, as a last ditch attempt they called in the child psychiatrist. She handed Kevin a piece of paper and a box of crayons and said, "Just draw what's inside your head, can you do that for me?" Nodding, he furrowed his little brow and, grabbing a grey crayon, drew a line right down the middle of the paper. On the left side he drew a riot of shapes and scribbles, in greens and reds and blues and browns, the word MIKE barely discernible under all the noise, bleeding into the right side of the paper which was completely white with a large grey ME scribbled on it in childish writing. Then he grabbed the grey crayon and furiously greyed out what he had just drawn, almost obliterating the "MIKE" side, and very purposefully drawing a few grey lines across the "ME" side. It wasn't really right, of course, but Kevin thought that it was a pretty good picture of him and his Mike. The therapist didn't seem to like it though. She told Kevin to stay where he was and gave him more crayons to distract him, but he could hear her talking to his parents through the slightly open door. None of the words really made sense -- "special education", "childhood schizophrenia", "high functioning autism" -- but they sounded really cool, and oddly familiar too. When they left the therapists office his parents were pale, and his mom was gripping his hand so hard, Kevin was sure it was going to fall off.
But a few days after the appointment, Kevin got better. The sweats went away, the shakes stopped and he started sleeping through the night again.
After his long illness however, he was never quite the same. Their bright, vivacious boy was pale, listless and lethargic. He was still very smart and very creative -- he would make up the most peculiar stories and tell them to his baby brothers, all about an imaginary little boy named Mike and his fearsome struggle against the Big Grey Blob that was eating up all his colors. His preschool teacher sat them down one day, shortly after Kevin started first grade and explained that Kevin was unusually intelligent -- using syntax and vocabulary at way above average levels and able to grasp complex thoughts and ideas at a much higher level than most six-year-olds -- but she was also a little worried about how, almost unusually, calm Kevin was. He never made a fuss, or threw a tantrum, or cried, and while it was always nice to have such a well behaved boy in her class, was everything all right at home? And that's when, affronted, but a little concerned themselves -- after all, Joe was only two years younger than Kevin and already much more of a handful -- explained that he had been deathly ill when he was younger and had never quiet shaken off the illness. There was nothing actually wrong with him, he was just a little more fragile than his boisterous younger brothers.
When Kevin was seven and his younger brother Nick was tapping out rhythms with his chubby toddler hands, Kevin started hearing music. Just snatches of it, here and there, little fragments of melody swirling around in his head. And he knew they were from Mike. So he went to his father and said, "I want to play the music that I'm hearing in my head." His father had laughed, but Kevin was such a good boy and he never asked for anything, so what was the harm in indulging him?
That Saturday afternoon Kevin Sr. dragged an excited Kevin Jr. to the local music shop. They set him up in the back room, with his father and the store manager supervising, of course, and let him play with all of the instruments. He tried to play the trumpet, but the sad little squawk that sounded out didn’t sound right to him. The clarinet was wrong and the recorder was wrong. The violin was close, mostly when he plucked at the string but none of them sounded quite right. Until finally, the store manager brought out the smallest guitar they had and Kevin twanged one of the strings and another and another and there - that one and that one and that one - the right notes, the right order, but most essentially, the right sound. Summoning the full force of his puppy eyes and letting his floppy curls fall in his face he looked up beseechingly at his father, who laughed, ruffled his hair and in what was almost the happiest day of Kevin's young life, bought him the guitar.
By the time Kevin was eight, his parents had stopped worrying so much. They had three budding musicians and another on the way, Paul had a good job as the Minister of their town's small church and they had almost forgotten that Kevin had ever been any other way then how he was now. After all, they already had a hellion and a future president to look after; it was a blessing that their oldest was so calm, responsible and intelligent. But then, the lingering fear in the back of his parent’s minds came true.
Kevin got sick.
For four days he was sweating and shaking and vomiting all over the place, just like when he was three. He would cry himself to sleep whispering, "It's okay, it's okay, you can do it. All the colors are coming back, can't you feel it?" They tried traditional cough syrups first, waited with bated breaths and fervent praying that this time, the medicine would actually work. On the second day, the worst of it seemed to be over. With the weight of the world lifted off their shoulders the Jonas’s almost wept in relief.
After that, however, things were never the same again.
Gone was their docile little angel and in his place was a bouncy, talkative eight year old, with just as much imagination as before but even more energy than Joe, if that was possible. It was as if, for the first eight years of his life, he had been holding back and for no discernible reason, suddenly let go.
Oh, there were still a couple of things that worried his parents a little -- like when Kevin was nine and started crying about how his wrist, which was perfectly fine, hurt and that it wasn't his pain, it was Mike's -- but his mood swings and listlessness had practically vanished - and as much as they had loved their steadfast oldest son, the first time Kevin started bawling because Joe had broken his favorite toy, Paul and Denise let out a joint sigh of relief.
However, when Kevin was ten, and all his sentences began with "Mike felt this" or "Mike did this" his Mom gently took him aside and explained that imaginary friends were just that, imaginary and that he was a little too old for that now. Besides, he had his brothers and think of all the friends he was going to make in fifth grade! So Kevin nodded and agreed and the only time he talked about Mike was when he played pretend with his younger brothers.
"And one time, Mike was really, really happy and I don't know why but I know he was having so much fun and there was this swooping feeling like being up in the air, and then bam! He fell and his wrist started hurting so bad but it was okay because it stopped hurting. I think he got a cast and all his friends probably wrote on it and he was really happy again."
~~
Kevin was ten when Mike started to feel weird in his body. Well, no, Kevin's body felt fine but Mike's body felt weird to Mike and Kevin felt that. Kevin woke up one night, sweating and shaking, short of breath and with flushed cheeks but he didn't know why. It wasn't him that was feeling that way, not his body that was reacting but he felt it nevertheless.
When, in health class one day, all the girls were sent out of the room and the teacher played a really embarrassing video, Kevin was relieved. And a little embarrassed because did that mean that every time he woke up in the middle of the night Mike had been... he could feel himself blushing and shook it off. At least this way, he knew what to expect, when it happened to him for real. Later, when his Sunday school teacher talked about how masturbation was sinful and all his friends start whispering about hairy palms and blindness, Kevin, instead of joining in, frowned and furrowed his brows - his teacher said it was wrong, and his preacher said it was wrong, but Mike did it all the time, and Kevin knew Mike and Mike wasn't wrong. Maybe, if Kevin just didn't touch himself, but let Mike do it for him, it wasn't a sin?
He tried to ask his priest but there was scandalized whispering and a talk with his parents about "sinful influences" so he nodded his head and agreed with whatever they said and as soon as he had free time, wandered over to the library instead. Not the church one, the public one. He didn't have a card there, because Dad didn't approve of some of the books, but if he curled up in the aisles to read, no one cared. The librarian was surprisingly helpful -- she lead him to all sorts of books about his changing body and hormones and all that puberty stuff that made Mike grouchy and elated.
And that was how Kevin learned that sometimes, the church was wrong. Because if the church was right then Mike was wrong and Kevin knew, like he knew that Nick was a musical genius and Joe was a brat, that Mike wasn't wrong. And if Mike wasn't wrong, then Kevin wasn't wrong either, which was always nice to know.
Kevin's first kiss was when he was twelve. All the other boys were starting to talk about girls, but Kevin -- Kevin kept thinking about Billy Wilson in his math class, who Joe said, “was creepy looking" but Kevin thought was pretty cute. The thought wasn't from Mike, and Kevin never had any problems sorting his feelings from Mike's and Mike liked girls. At least, Kevin thought it had been a girl -- all he really got from Mike was that familiar tingly feeling in his lips but not in his lips and a soaring sense of happiness that probably meant that Mike had just gotten his first kiss.
Which meant that Kevin had gotten his first kiss too.
And while he wished it had been with Billy Wilson, it was more than most of the kids in his class could say. He sort of felt like bragging, but the only people who didn't think he was crazy when he talked about Mike were his brother's and they just thought it was gross.
Kevin was thirteen when it started to become a problem. Because, he'd gotten used to Mike and that part of his brain that got all fuzzy and excited whenever Mike did something Kevin wasn't supposed to do. But the thing was, after that first year of waking up in the middle of the night, flushed and sweaty and content, it sort of bottomed out. And then one night Kevin woke up and it felt a little like Mike but it was actually him and there was a mess all over his sheets and he couldn't help freaking out a little bit inside.
It was Mike that calmed him down.
That sense of peace and calm and reassurance that he knew, he just knew, was from Mike. It gave him the courage to bundle up his sheets, and do his own laundry, and when his mother caught him sneaking down to the laundry room in the middle of the night he managed to get through the incredibly awkward and deeply uncomfortable conversation without stammering all that much. But suddenly, it was like his body wasn't his anymore. He'd be in the locker room and Billy Wilson would take his shirt off and... it had become so embarrassing he'd taken to changing in the bathroom because it wasn't normal, right? But the thing is, it was so much harder to not...do stuff...to himself when he was alone, when it was actually his body and not just Mike's because when it was his body the feeling was so much stronger. And every time Mike got flustered, Kevin's body still reacted anyway, so he spent pretty much all of 7th grade with an incredible hard on and it was the most embarrassing and shameful thing to ever happen to him.
Until the day that Mike lost his virginity.
Kevin was fourteen, sitting in church, and the preacher was talking about how homosexuality was a sin and Kevin still thought Billy Wilson was cuter then Martha Jones. Nick was too young and too busy for girls anyway, because his little brother was on Broadway, how cool was that? Joe was definitely into girls though, if he and Mandy were any indication. But Kevin, he knew how wrong it was to "lust in your heart" especially when you were lusting after boys. But the thing is, Kevin had been listening, okay. He'd been reading and there was a loop hole. As long as he didn't act on his urges he was fine, right? Because everyone was a sinner in spirit, but until you became a sinner in action, Jesus still loved you.
Which was why he was so, so thankful for Mike.
And if sometimes he wished he knew what kissing felt like for real and if he could experience firsthand what made Mike so happy sometimes, well, it was close enough.
Then Mike lost his virginity while Kevin was sitting in church, at midnight mass. He had gotten that fuzzy feeling that meant that Mike was probably drunk or something, which was uncomfortable but manageable, and then it was just a frantic mess of feeling and color that was so much stronger than it had ever been before. He was squirming in his seat, and his mother glared at him because it was time for silent prayer and it's not like Kevin could just sneak out -- he was sitting in the middle of the pew in the front row. If he got up, everyone would know. So Kevin was determined to hold out until everyone got up for singing, because if it was an emergency, it was okay to discretely slip out the side when everyone was distracted.
His father's sermons had never felt so long and his body and mind just wouldn't listen to reason. It felt so good because it was Mike, but it was Kevin as well and he was hard; and squirming and he could feel pressure building up behind his eyes. He bent his head, folded his body in half and squeezed his eyes shut. His mother looked at him askance but hopefully she'd just think he was really into his prayers. And then the world whited out a little. He was shaking and he'd practically bitten through his lip, but he was so glad his fancy church jacket hung loose because there was a horrible wet spot on his pants and he felt shameful, and disgusting and elated all in turns. The minute everyone stood up for the psalms he was out of there, and when he was safely locked in the men's room he maybe broke down and cried. Just a little. By that time Mike was in that quiet content spot in his head that meant he was relaxed and sleeping. But Kevin was the one who had to sit through the rest of Mass, and dinner with his family afterwards in a ruined pair of pants and a cloak of shame.
But that didn't stop him from imagining what it must have been like, in vivid detailed color when he went to bed that night, after he accidentally spilled pasta sauce all over his dress pants and volunteered to do all the laundry as penance for being so twitchy in church. Kevin had always had a very vivid imagination, except instead of his fuzzy shape impression of Mike and some random girl it was Billy Wilson and Kevin, and he was kissing him on the little strip of skin that showed when his t-shirt would ride up. Kevin was running his hands through Billy's hair and he could feel his own hand sneak towards his cock so he rested it right in the waistband of his boxers and gripped the elastic so hard his nails were digging into his palms through the elastic.
The images kept coming, and then it was just a blur of feeling and emotion and the last thing he thought about before he came was 'Mike'. He wondered why he had even bothered to change his boxers in the first place and why was he always such a disappointment. He was a bad son and a bad Christian, and if he could just be a bit more like Mike... but Kevin knew that Mike had done worse stuff then Kevin had ever done. So it didn't make sense, even to him, that it was only bad when Kevin did it. But that's how he felt and he just wanted it to stop.
It took two years and lots of silent reassurance from Mike before he felt comfortable with his sexuality. The public library helped too. A week after the 'church incident', as Kevin had taken to calling it in his head, he had gone back to the public library. You didn't need a parent to get a library card, which was a relief, because Kevin didn't know what he would have done otherwise, as his father still didn't approve of the books there. But the librarian he had talked to when he was thirteen was just as helpful as she had been back then, and with her help he pored over all the relevant books he could find. It also helped to have an unmonitored internet connection (with heavy search filters on -- Kevin wasn't going to make that mistake twice).
The thing was, Kevin still believed in God, he just didn't believe in the God his father believed in, the one that only loved a portion of his flock and turned his back on the rest. Sixteen was also when Kevin started straightening his hair and skateboarding. He started hanging out with the guys who wanted to hang out with the guys who cut class and smoked up behind the school. It was his way of rebelling without actually upsetting his parents too much, or being a bad influence on his brothers. He liked to think that this is what high school was like for Mike (who was obviously so much cooler then Kevin, it was unreal).
But most importantly, sixteen was when Kevin discovered music. Oh, he'd been tooling around on the guitar for years and he still heard snatches of music from Mike's guitar -- a couple of notes, here and there, a sudden chord progression or a snippet of melody -- but for most of his life it had been Christian rock and Elvis Costello, all the bands his parents liked and Nick was obsessed with. But when he was sixteen his friends introduced him to Green Day and it was all downhill, at least from his parent's perspective, from there.
He started hanging out at the town's small record store, flipping through the local bands section and walking around with his ear buds in whenever he could manage it. He had finally managed to convince his parents to get him an iPod for Christmas, after studying hard all year, and doing all his chores and all of mother's chores, and babysitting Nick and Joe and Frankie without even complaining. It had taken months and months of hard work and begging, until, that Christmas morning after all the other presents had been unwrapped, and Kevin was sure he wasn't going to get his wish, his father had pulled a small, rectangular present from under the couch cushion he had been sitting on and made it the best Christmas Kevin could ever remember.
Part 2