Acid Culture

We're sitting in his car. A couple of lights on the dashboard flicker on and off like fairy lights. Outside it rains heavily on the windshield, so hard I think a couple of times the glass is going to give and cover us in a blanket of shards. The way he holds the steering wheel, his hands curled and the knuckles sickly white, makes me think he'd like to yank it off. And from the way he glances to me, his harsh brown eyes reflecting the floating lights of the road, suggests he'd like to do the same thing to my head. He turns on the radio to drown out the silence between us. He moves to roll down the window but hesitates. His hand lands firm on the wheel again. My hair lies on my shoulder, thick and trickling, the ponytail a fat lizard. The back of my neck prickles uncomfortably.
"Rich," I say softly, but he raises his hand tensely, like he does when he wants me to shut the fuck up. So I do.
  This isn't like us. We're not these kind of people. We sit in crowded rooms and count the beads of sweat collecting on our forearms as we get stoned in circles. We go to clubs and dance even though we hate the music and drink until we can't stand up without security guards. We smoke in the street when there's nothing else to do. We play Modest Mouse and Dr Feelgood at obnoxious levels and listen to the couple next door scream at each other. We play cards in the canteen instead of reading up for class. We lie on my bed with our hands touching and say nothing at all for hours on end.
  And we were happy like that. We were.
"Rich," I say again, louder this time. He slams his fist down on the dashboard in reply. I turn my head away, my eyes aching. His are outlined in blotchy red, making him look a hell of a lot older than he is. His stringy arms knot like ropes. I remind myself I'm supposed hate him.
  He made us change. He took my hands and made them feel, made them want, and when they did he would shy away from their touch. He filled my hours with clammy kisses and muffled grunts, nothing but the promise of wasting time together. My skin flushes pleasantly at the memories carved in it, and yet the churn of my guts just gets louder. I bury my fists in my lap and stare hard out of the window, until my vision blurs and the roll of distant cars on the motorway become a stream of blood, the tail lights blinking in the darkness.  A noise bleats over and over in my head and I can't tell if it's the radio or my conscience. My clothes are burning.
  An hour later he stops the car in some wasteland parking lot and slowly turns in his seat to look at me. He drapes a scarily thin arm over the back of my chair, scratching at the crater where his chest should be. There are rings of red around his nostrils. He looks like a nightmarish scarecrow on acid. Reminds me of what he refers to us as. An acid culture.
"So I'm sorry I hit you before," he says without much conviction. He's coming down. He's at his most mean now. I say I don't care and it's alright but the flat of my palm presses against my ribcage. It hurts when it expands with air, so my breath is short and acrid. The car doors click shut and we're locked in, his thumb crushing the master lock. Shadows corner us. Plastic bags bounce in the headlights. Lead rain showers us, bullets on the car roof, rattling the window panes. I don't breathe.
"You got any?" he murmurs, moving a strand of my hair behind my ear. I shiver and shake my head, my hand reaching up and closing around his wrist. It's so thin the bones dig in to my palms like thorns; it'll break it off if I squeeze. I feel like squeezing it tight.
  I want to grind him in to powder, heroin brown, to burn him, to snort his ashes. I want to feel something real inside me. I suddenly feel the stab of tears in my eyes, and I'm clinging to him, his twisted shoulders that flank around me, his hands swimming over my back, he cradles me, seeps in my sweating warmth. I lift my head and bite his mouth, which tastes of copper and solvents. Underneath there's something sweet, something sugary, like warm milkshake, he pushes spit in to my mouth. A dog barks nearby.  
  We struggle in to the back seat, my hand fumbling for cracked leather, I hear the springs moan as our bodies roll over it. He reaches and turns the radio up louder, above me, smiling a little. A girl screams lyrics over the airwaves. I can feel my pulse in my fingertips.
  Slowly his thin fingers weave through my hair, brushing against my scalp. He tugs vaguely at my belt buckle. His heart is beating too quickly, against mine, which gulps and hiccups, out of time to the music. My arms make sucking sounds as they slide across the leather, touching his curved spine, palming the small of his back, picking at his t-shirt. He strokes part of me, through my jeans, watching me all the while. I keep a straight face, but I can feel the heat rise in my cheeks. I turn my head away, swallowing.
"No," he says, taking my chin and swinging it back to face him. His eyes are blistering. "Watch me."
"I don't want to. Stop."
"No-one else wants you except me. Remember that."
He tugs at my waistline and his thumb dips in to my navel. The edges of my vision blur. I pray I'm not crying already.
"You're tripping," he tells me, grinning as he snaps the elastic to my boxer shorts. I flinch every time he does it, my skull pressed against the car door, the vibrations dulling my movements, slowing down my heartbeat.
"I didn't take anything," I reply, and across the parking lot someone flicks on a light. The blazing colour dances in the splitting darkness a moment, and then blinks out of existence. My pulse does the same. His hands move away from my hips and latch around his own belt, yanking it away from his stomach like intestine; the belt slithers and writhes as he drops it to the floor. He takes my hand and slips it between his fleshless thighs and tells me to clench my fist. And I do, gently, to hear him curse.

We sit in the cafeteria with our shoulders only brushing and I know this means nothing to the dull-eyed boys surrounding me but between us, that brush of fabric and press of warmth, that is him saying everything he won't say to my face. I don't look at him while he eats, I'm scared to, in case I give the game away. My hands are shaking as I push the gristly cafeteria stew around my plate, staring up at me like a swamp bed, hunks of meat floating like bloated corpses. I feel sick to my stomach. After taking a shallow breath I pin a strand of hair behind my head and spoon a mouthful of warm, salty gush. My tongue quivers in disgust, but the heat is comforting as it slides down, warming me from the inside. He sits beside me, his bony shoulders rounded, pouring sachet after sachet of sugar in to his coffee. He's talking fast, too quickly for me to understand, and then suddenly the table erupts in laughter. I dart glances around, bewildered, and only grin. My stomach lurches and I remind myself painfully not to take LSD before lunch period again.
  Later I'm standing in the hall waiting for him to come meet me, so we can walk to Sociology together. I see someone else walking up the empty corridor, his dyed black fringe ironed against his cheek, his eyes murky, smudged with greasy black, half-hidden behind his thick-rimmed reading glasses. The boy smiles thinly at me, and stops to talk a while. He is much shorter than me, so I stand with my shoulder against the locker, tilted down, so he doesn't have to look up. He asks if I want a ride home, and I nod and grin and ask about how his gig was last night. The boy says great. I feel the fist in the back of my ribs before I hear the voice.
"You, gay boy. Fuck off."
I turn, startled, but I'm silenced by the kneading of his knuckles in my back. Tenderly he rubs at the base of my spine, his thumb flesh and swept along the crooked notches; I melt, revelling in the touch. The dyed-haired boy tells him to go fuck himself and walks away, not saying goodbye to me. I feel bad but do not move, staring at him with eyes that feel like dribbling out of my head. He flashes a smile at me, an awkward, public grin, and tells me to hurry the fuck up, or we'll be late. We walk together, his ghost hand still on my hip.

The song changes on the radio as his fingers grind in to pulpy flesh. Someone with a voice in their chest talks of rape and kills a guitar and he grins and tells me he loves this song. I flinch and wonder privately whether music is supposed to sound like a screwdriver to the ear. The nape of my neck nips at the clammy leather and screams when it is wrenched away; my back arches, my palms slip desperately over the seats. A rotting taste lingers in the back of my throat, collapsing softly, imploding slowly in to frothy fetid mush. I gasp repeatedly, hyperventilating, and the air con mocks me with its breezy slurs of recycled oxygen. Both my legs have gone dead, pinned by the weight of him straddling me. My zipper is chaffing at the tender flesh of my inner thigh, my jeans yanked half-way down them. I'm shivering from the cold, not from the way he stares at me, those eyes looking out under a curtain of inky dark, not even the reflection of distant city lights surmised within them. He takes his shirt off and tosses it on to the wheel, adjacent to where his suede jacket lays folded. His slim silhouette jumps from place to place while I blink rapidly, making him a stop-motion figurine. Plasticine hands reach out and mould to my skin. My innards feud with delight.
  His ribcage is a broken jaw. The teeth grin lop-sided, all crippled and out of place, pallid beneath the cling-film of his skin. In the grooves between them bruised flowers swell, burst purple and crimson and black, bleed and drain in to shadows, leaving the wasted concrete guttering of bones. He leans down with his breath hot on my neck and our mouths messily sew together, squirming and tugging. He strips my legs of their jeans, the sudden cold seizing them, raising goose flesh. They fall apart like doll limbs and from above me he grins, his mouth wet and dark.
  Here it comes. He laughs softly. Open wide.

"The best songs are about coming. That's all pop music comes down to."
I remember the night it happened. The first time we lay down and inhaled the fibres of my sheets as if we were twelve again, huffing glue in empty corridors while strobe lights buzzed above our heads. The carpet I'm sprawled on smells like cigarette ash and spilt vodka, sweaty clothes and neglect. Only the TV is on in this room, static flashing across the writhing screen, having an fit, while I watch black shadows of mushroom clouds and rounds of bullets echo from behind it. Right now I'm alone; he'll come later. Right now I can hear someone vomiting over and over again in the bathroom across the hall. The door is only ajar but the person is moaning, probably a girl, and sobbing between heaves. Her retches echo off the toilet bowl and reach me, in this room, with square grey walls and an epileptic television set. A beer bottle warms in the hilt of my palm, and my cold white fingers are wrapped around its skinny brown neck. I came up here because the music they were playing was giving me a headache. Now the music is in my feet, the vibrations raising through the carpet, making my legs numb. I feel sick, but I drink the beer anyway. My head feels like a balloon.
"No, really. Listen to any popular band from the eighties. Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Madonna."
To the far right is a window that overlooks the estate that the house faces. The estate is built on a flood plane. My stomach tightens when I think about all those houses sinking in to the dirt at the first drop of rain. A pale moon shines from behind white candy floss clouds and illuminates the scared Perspex windows of those new houses. I imagine the perfect doll families living in those perfect, doomed house. I want it to rain. I want it to rain sulphur.
The girl who was puking in the bathroom is gone. The room is filled with static and silence and the regular sips of my beer. The blood vessels in my eyes are popping, one after the other, and my vision sprays with spatters of spectrum. I glare in to the half-light and wait for him to come. The voices downstairs are drowned out by the pad of feet. His voice calls out to me. And I wait.
  And wait.

My voice is drowned out by the pounding of rain. Tears land on the grubby carpet, dark inkblots spreading mysterious shapes beneath the upholstery. He bleeds from inside me, running streaks of red and white down the swooping tendons of my legs. We're lying, still attached, and my chest swells and burns from the gasoline-laced air, death close on the horizon. I wonder if I'll ever be this happy again, caged by his splintery arms, the cusp of his chin sheltered under a sheaf of our mingled, damp hair. Then he gets up, untangles himself from me, and yanks up his jeans. His shirt glides over the spires of bone and flesh, and he climbs in to the front seat, turning the radio up. He lights a crumpled cigarette, silent, his expression drawn blank, like a screen of static, flickering infrequently as thoughts posses him. I dress, filthy, and scoop my hair back in a lank ponytail. The tears won't stop until I place my thumb in my mouth and bite down hard, the flux of pain fresh, delicious. It distracts me enough for me to forget that he's watching me, his head turned a fraction, the cigarette hovering before a sprawled mouth, wet with my saliva. Stiffly, I lay on my stomach until the burning ache in my pelvis subsides; an infinite amount of time passes. He smokes, I count the teeth marks in my shoulder.
"I love you," I hear from the front, but when my gaze darts toward him, my heart in my throat, he isn't facing me, his trembling fingers wrapped around the radio dial, switching stations. The anti-noise of dead air crackles through the car, tastes the humidity and the smog of poignant cigarette smoke. Then the most beautiful song I've ever heard spills out in to the empty waves. I say nothing, my eyes wet, and extend my hand to brush at his shoulder. His hands twitch, as if to capture my hand, but resists, and my palm falls from him, defeated. He crushes the cigarette butt in his fingers.
"Let's go. We'll be late."
He puts the car in gear. I stay in the back seat, still, head cushioned in my forearms. My breath is shallow as the car slides away, half-drowned, the beaming headlights stabbing through the abyss, chalk-white arms reaching in to nothingness. And it rains.
  This is how it always ends.