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Objectively, Stan isn't a very smart guy. He's not dumb, either, just painstakingly average when it comes to anything intellectual. A chronic C student, an underachiever, the only thing he can do and do well football like some stereotype of a stupid jock. Maybe he is a stupid jock; what difference does it make, really, when he's confronted with the situation in front of him? He doesn't know what to do.
"Just try to tell me what you're feeling."
Kyle is standing in front of him with scissors held to his wrist and wide eyes. He's cut his hair himself, the curls misshapen and lumpy, and Stan found him in the bathroom like this. Minutes ago they'd been playing video games on the Marsh couch. Now Kyle is pale and curls of red hair are sticking to his forehead and clogging Stan's sink.
"Fucking crazy," Kyle says.
Looking at the scissors so close to Kyle's wrist makes Stan's own feel funny. His palms are sweating at his side. He doesn't know what to do. Call for help? Call 911? Tackle Kyle to the ground and physically subdue him? "Okay. What do you wan to do?"
"Slit my wrists."
"You can't do that, though."
"Why not?"
Because I love you? What shitty time to confess. "You just can't. Please, Kyle."
Kyle presses the scissors down. It's the same pair of scissors that Stan's dad trims his mustache with and Stan uses to clean under his nails. There's a crude glint off the silver. They're sharp to skin. The most mundane object in Stan's house. "But I want to."
You don't just get everything you want. Stan sighs. He pinches the bridge of his nose, then snaps out of that, because he needs to see Kyle. Desperate, he walks towards Kyle and takes the scissors away from him. Kyle scratches at his face in response; his nails are neat and short and it doesn't hurt.
"Kyle," he pleads, wrapping his arms around Kyle's shoulders.
But Kyle is a slim, squirmy little thing. He slips out of Stan's grip, ducks down to grab the scissors where Stan has dropped them and digs the sharp side into his wrists. Stan swallows a choked noise. He feels like he's just watched somebody kick a puppy.
"Kyle this, Kyle that," Kyle says. He throws the scissors to the floor once more and stares at his wrist. There's a nasty gash, blood beginning to bubble through its lips. "So fucking sick of it! It's all I hear. From you, from my parents, in my own head. Kyle, do this. Kyle, you have to do this. You fucking have to. All the goddamn time. I'm not a machine! I'm just human! I can't do it all! But I have to! I have to!"
Stan honestly has no clue what Kyle is talking about. All he knows is that he should bandage Kyle's wrist and kiss it better, but you can't kiss somebody's mind, so. Instead he says: "I'm not telling you to do anything."
"Yes you are!" Kyle is screaming at him. His body shaking, even his eyeballs are trembling, blood is pouring more vigorously, and he's backing against the wall. "You're asking to me be normal! Well, I'm not fucking normal, Stan."
It's like somebody set Kyle on vibrate and then broke the remote control. He reminds Stan of the frightened baby animals he likes to catch and nurse back to health, skittish and wide-eyed, mistrusting. So Stan takes the same approach to Kyle as he would to them: no talk of future or promises, just slow movements in his direction and reassurances, his voice as gentle as possible. "I know you're not normal. But that's okay. I like you as you are."
"That's sick."
Stan resists the urge to sigh or pinch the bridge of his nose. He wants to touch Kyle again, but that doesn't seem like a good idea at the moment. He reminds himself that it's not about what he wants, but what about what Kyle wants, or more accurately, needs. "Let's get out of the bathroom," Stan suggests. "It's cramped in here."
"I like it. I like it cramped."
"We can stay if you let me bandage your wrist," Stan tries instead.
"No. I want to see it bleed." Reminded by this, Kyle pulls his arm in front of his face again. The blood has dripped down his arm; Kyle's staring at it like it's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen, mesmerized. It's kind of poetic, Stan has to admit, but everything about it is making him sick to his stomach.
"Will you let me see it?" Stan asks. He has some medical knowledge; he took Anatomy last year and interned at his mom's work over the summer. He could tell if Kyle needs to go to the hospital or just disinfect and bandage it. He could make it all better, he could, he swears.
Kyle thrusts his arm out like he's presenting a trophy. He didn't hit any important veins or arteries, luckily enough, but it could get infected an definitely needs pressure and bandages. "Will you let me clean it?" Stan asks.
Kyle just takes his arm back.
Stan considers how to barter for this. Maybe he could bend to Kyle's logic; but would that encourage his behavior? Would it turn out against him in the end? Would it be a cruel guilt trip if Stan fell to his knees and begged Kyle to stop this so Stan could love him in full? Because if he tried that now, it would be warped, just like everything could be warped. Stan's love cannot be honest; Kyle will not let it be so. But Kyle is staring at him, his right eye twitching and the fingers of his other hand drawing circles on his cut, like he's waiting for Stan to say something.
"It's just that you can get infected. It could be bad. You could have your arm amputated."
Kyle looks down at his arm. "But the blood won't stop."
Stan is so very tired. "No. That only happens when you put pressure on it."
Kyle looks up at Stan. He bites his lip; a small miracle, that doesn't draw blood, either. Kyle's blood is already on his shirt, on the floor, probably about to be somewhere on Stan as well, and it doesn't need to spread. "Okay," Kyle says.
Kyle seems to go limp as Stan directs him to sit on the toilet while Stan sits on the bathtub across from him. He breaks out the medical supplies, disinfectant and gauze and bandages, thinking of how his mother used to treat his scraped knees when he was a clumsy child. It's strange, how you pretty much stop having accidents that involve small cuts and scraped knees as you grow up. Stan arranges the supplies on the rim of the bathtub and wets a washcloth, all the while watching Kyle out of the corner of his eye. Spotting the scissors, he kicks them under the sink, not wanting to look at them.
"I'm going to clean it, now," Stan says, sitting on the bath tub. Kyle makes no movement. Stan takes Kyle's arm and wipes away the blood with the washcloth, then uses another to disinfect it. Kyle does not hiss at the pain. Stan repeats the process. Kyle still makes no sound. It's so disconcerting, looking at this open, carved hole into Kyle. Into his flesh, the stuff that makes him tick; it feels so intimate, more intimate than any sex Stan has ever had.
There is also no protestation when Stan wraps gauze around Kyle's arm and bandages it. Kyle seems to have crashed, at least for the time being; Stan helps him up and escorts him to his room.
Slowly, Kyle comes to back to life.
Until:
"I'm better now. Really. You can let me go. I'm not going to kill myself."
Kyle is sitting on Stan's bed. Stan has kept him under close surveillance, happy he'd convinced him to get out of that fucking bathroom. For the past hour they've been sitting and staring at one another, occasionally talking. It's a pretty normal Saturday for them, but, well. It's been warped.
"How am I supposed to believe you?"
Kyle gapes at him.
"I'm serious, Kyle. You cut yourself and you cut your hair like, two hours ago. Then you coma'd out on me. Now you're saying you're better. How do I know you're not going to run out in traffic on the way home?"
"One, I live next door. Two, there's no traffic in South Park."
"You know what I mean."
There's a few beats of silence. Stan can hear his watch twitching; he twists it around his wrist, a nervous habit. It's a very nice watch, an eighteenth birthday gift from his parents. Kyle doesn't wear a watch. He claims his wrists, which are now ringed with scars instead, are too thin. But Stan likes Kyle's thin wrists; likes that they fit between his thumb and index fingers. Likes that Kyle's heartbeat is so strong at his pulse point; likes that Kyle has such a strong heart, if not a strong mind.
"Do you get off on this?" Kyle asks, suddenly.
"What?"
"I said, do you get off on this? On me being, like, this weak Ophelia thing you can keep in your bed and protect? Poor, damaged, pretty Kyle with his poor, damaged, pretty mind? This isn't an episode of Skins, you know. I'm pretty ugly."
Stan is so fucking tired. He cannot even begin to process the speech that Kyle has just made. He wants to sit on the couch with some beer, wants to watch a football game on DVR with his dad, wants Kyle gone for even half an hour. The thought makes him feel immensely guilty. He gives in. He pinches the bridge of his nose. "Goddammit, Kyle. No." is all he can manage to say.
"Well, I'll be going now. I'll try not to step out in the nonexistent traffic on the five second walk home. It'll be hard, but I'll manage." He flips Stan off before departing.
Stan texts Kyle's mother, whose number he has for occasions like this, and asks her to text him when/if Kyle makes it home safely. When she does in five minutes, asking why he wouldn't, Stan shoots her the details and lets her deal with it. He leaves the phone on his bedside table to charge and head downstairs.
First stop: the bathroom. It appears to be undisturbed, Stan's mother out grocery shopping, Stan's father in the backyard doing lawn work. Stan puts away the antiseptic, wipes down the bathtub, cleans the blood from the floor. He doesn't want to face the scissors, though he knows he has to, because his own parents will worry. He rinses them up and then fills the sink with hot water, trying to boil the germs from the metal. Trying to erase what has happened.
After all that is done, Stan goes outside to collect his father. It's chilly out, snow on the ground, and Stan looks to Kyle's house. His own father, who had been shovelling snow and talking over the fence with Stan's, has gone inside. Stan sighs and calls to Randy.
"'Sup?" his dad asks.
"Wanna drink a beer and watch the game we have on the DVR?" Stan asks.
Stan's father leans on the snow shovel and grins. "Sure thing."
Shovel in the shed, beer in the hands, game on the television and asses on the couch, Stan forgets about Kyle. He forgets that he loves Kyle. He forgets Kyle's illness. He forgets that Kyle exists.
Until:
"Thanks, Stan. I got the biggest fucking lecture of my life. There were tears. I have to see a specialist."
It's two in the morning and they're on Skype, though they could look out of their windows and see each other that way. It reminds Stan of that one Taylor Swift music video, You Belong With Me, and he'd reenact it in a second if Kyle didn't find Taylor Swift fake and trite. But Stan takes it to heart because Kyle does belong with him, and if Kyle would just fucking listen, he'd send him all sorts of messages via whiteboard. Things like you are perfect and you are worth it and i love you so much and please just fucking believe me and stop goddammit kyle just fucking stop.
Stan yawns. He's been sleeping since eleven; the call from his computer woke him up. He has a sixth sense when it comes to Kyle, knew he had to take it. "She would've saw the bandages on your wrist. Also, you cut your hair."
"I could have lied."
Stan doesn't bothering pointing out that it would've been the most transparent lie in existence. Kyle has a long history of self-harm and dangerous decisions and the scars to prove it."I just don't understand," he confesses. "Help me understand."
Kyle's connection goes a little wonky; his face gets stuck with his mouth pinched and his eyebrows furrowed. When it unfreezes he's saying, "It's like, I don't know, uncontrollable. I can't just turn it off. It's like breathing. It just happens. It's like being possessed. I feel like a different person. Everything is bright and neon, I can do anything, and I want to do it all. It's like a science experiment, except I am what I am experimenting on. I'm reacting to the world, and the world's fucking insane, it's some Alice in Wonderland shit. You wouldn't get it unless you lived it."
The thing is, Stan understands some of it. Stan understands when Kyle can't drag himself out of bed for weeks on end, when he degenerates into a wisp of a thing, when he gets stuck in the doldrums of sadness. Stan understand that because Stan's been there, too, and sometimes Stan is still there. What he doesn't get is this, this weirdness, this Kyle that cuts into himself and talks forty miles a minute, this Kyle with the crazed look in his eyes and his bottom lip sucked between his teeth. This Kyle in wonderland. That isn't the Kyle on the screen in front of him. The Kyle on the screen in front of him is the normal Kyle, his hair fixed up (probably by his mom), his posture relaxed, wearing the same pajamas he's always and will probably always wear, but this Kyle is the one that haunts Stan. The one with skin like soap, always eluding Stan's grasp in all interpretations, just a short time until he runs out for good.
"Anyway," Kyle says. "Mean Girls was on tonight. Did you catch it?"
"No, I was hanging out with my dad."
"I still don't find it funny. I understand why it's supposed to be funny, but it's been quoted to death, you know? I knew all the jokes before I saw the movie. It kind of let me down."
Stan fades in and out of sleep while Kyle dissects the academic phenomena of how he doesn't find Mean Girls funny. He keeps dreaming that he confesses to Kyle that he loves him, as if this would fix Kyle's broken mind, and keeps jerking awake afraid that he had. But he hasn't, and Kyle seems to be almost ignoring him, talking on and on like he's verbally writing an essay with his eyes fixated somewhere else. It makes Stan sad to realize that Kyle's that he's gotten locked on, that he's once again entering a state of mania, and they're probably going to be on Skype until the sun rises.
Oh, well, Stan supposes. He'll always be there for the sunrises and the sunsets as far as Kyle is concerned. Maybe one day they'll ride off into one. For now, Stan cradles his cheek in his hand and stares at the way Kyle's mouth moves, trying to memorize the motion so he can pull it up when things go south again. He loves Kyle so much it hurts his head, that one Brand New song, he does let the bad parts in, they were set apart when they were made, he would love to take Kyle back to his bed. But unless he could catch Kyle in that tiny window between states of mania and depression, it would feel so wrong, and every day those windows seem to be getting shorter. One day they will disappear; Stan will still be here.
Stan only wishes the best for Kyle, and that Kyle wished the best for himself, too. He tries not to get his hopes up about the possibility of Kyle seeing a specialist. The windows are disappearing on the house that Kyle's soul resides in and a small, selfish part of Stan believes that if Stan can't cure him, nobody can. Then again, Stan is not a smart man. The whole thing is making his head and his heart hurt, so he goes back to watching Kyle's mouth move, to trying his best to simply, unconditionally and un-complicatedly love the thing in front of him.