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There's no good way to realize that you're different, that something is wrong with you. There's no way of realizing that isn't a jolt to your entire body and mind, and someone should have told that to Grantaire. Except even when you say it, even if someone reassures you that it's never that easy, you're not going to be ready for it, and it's still going to hurt.
He's twelve, and he's only paying attention in class because English is actually interesting this year, and he likes the teacher. Still, he can draw and listen at the same time, no matter what people say. He's doodling abstract swirls and spikes in his notebook as the class quiets down from their discussion of Treasure Island. The shapes look to him like the spaces left by ghosts when they disappear.
"Our next activity will include an quick in-class writing exercise. I want you all to close your eyes," Mrs. Duval tells them once everyone is facing forward again. "And think of all the moments in the last few years that you've been happy. I want you to pick the happiest or best moment from all of those. You're going to write about that moment for this assignment. I'll give you all a few minutes to think."
The class goes silent as everyone closes their eyes and begins to sort through their memories. Grantaire tries, but he can't keep his eyes closed, so he frowns down at his desk. The seats have been mixed around and rearranged recently, and this new desk in his usual place has a crack across the middle of it, the wood gone dark with wear and students scratching at the split with their pencils. He runs a thumbnail along the crack and tries to think of something.
The other students around him have little smiles on their faces, secretive and gentle, like the sun is warming their skin. Every so often someone will hum in contentment or remembering. Grantaire looks around and bites his lip. He's coming up empty. It's not that he has no memories-- of course he can remember things from his life. It's that every memory that should be good is only broadcasting back a sense of emptiness, a negative space, air where there should be solid ground, silence where there should be sound.
Something is wrong. Other kids aren't feeling this-- this nothing. And his life is pretty good; his parents are nice and he knows his sister is happy and they have enough money to get by and he should have a memory that makes him smile and sigh like everyone else. But everything is coming up empty, like someone has taken a modern home video and turned it into an old silent film, all action with no sensations, a farcical mime. He digs for something that should be happy-- a birthday, a summer fair, winning a soccer tournament or first place in an art contest-- but it's all blank. He's still thinking when Mrs. Duval tells them to start writing.
In the end, he makes something up.
Charlotte finds him in the backyard when she gets home from orchestra rehearsal, sitting cross-legged in the center of the trampoline with his hands fisted in his hair. She's almost seventeen, he wouldn't be surprised if she just said hello and went back inside, but she doesn't. Instead, she puts her backpack down on the grass and climbs up to sit next to him, and they sway a little bit at the momentum of a new person's weight on the springs. She knocks her shoulder against his.
"Hey, kid. What's up?"
"I don't know." He doesn't look up, squinting as if he's trying to see the lawn through the black mesh of the trampoline, mouth twisted in a confused grimace. "There's something wrong with me."
"You look to be in one piece to me."
He elbows her in the side but doesn't laugh like she expected, even as his hands drop away from his head. "Not like that. In class today we had to think of happy memories or something. I couldn't come up with anything."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean there was nothing. I couldn't think of anything that was happy. Everything I thought of just made me feel like nothing. If it was a bad memory, it make me feel sad, but things that should have been happy were just--empty. That's not right, is it?"
Charlotte bites her lip, worry making her body feel tense. "Maybe you should talk to mom and dad."
"I don't know..."
"They're not going to hurt you, Grantaire. If you feel bad, they're going to want to help you."
It's only later, after he's told them everything, after he's been to a tired-looking blonde psychiatrist who tells his family in a solemn clinical voice of his diagnosis, after he's finally unlocked his bedroom door and walked across the hallway to push his way into Charlotte's bedroom and sprawl across her lap and press his face into her leg, that she tells him there's always been signs. That he never smiled as much as the rest of them. That when he was very small, he would jump between flying into horrible chaotic tantrums and turning into a ghost-child, silent and staring and melancholy. That he was never as eager to talk or to join other kids or to run around. That he didn't like meeting new people or answering questions. That when he was five he used to tell her that nothing mattered, that he didn't matter and that she could have his stuff if he ever disappeared, and she always thought it was just the bizarre and convoluted imagination of a little kid.
She strokes his hair after that, as he clutches at the knee of her pajamas, the fabric bunched in his fist. She expects him to cry, to collapse and break down, but he only breathes shakily and presses his face to her hip and a few tears leak out but not enough for a release, not enough for anything. She scratches her nails against his scalp and tells him it's going to be okay, but knowing what it is seems to make it worse somehow and they're both sure it's not true.
------
Unsurprisingly, puberty makes everything worse. He locks himself away in his room, draws or reads or does nothing at all, and feels like he's drowning. There's an ache in his chest that won't go away, and he wonders why school or living even matters if he's only going to die one day. One moment he's furious, the next he just wants to drop to the floor and cry. He's exhausted but he can't sleep, and sometimes Charlotte traces the dark circles around his eyes with one finger while he lies on her bed in the evening, heaving sighs and fighting back stupid and unexplainable tears.
"I hate being like this." He mutters into her pillow. "Everything feels wrong. It's like I'm not here any more."
"We can get you help. Please." Charlotte rubs circles into his back. "I want you to stop hurting. I want to help you."
"I don't know what you can do. I hardly know what's wrong with me."
"Just tell me what you need, what you want. I don't know if I can do everything, but I want to try, Grantaire."
"I just want to stop feeling this way." He reaches out to clutch at the knee of her pants, a gesture that has become constant and familiar. She leans down and presses her forehead against his shoulder blade, feeling the bone and muscle move under the thin skin. He presses his face into the pillow with a groan.
He's thirteen when the medications they've tried don't seem to be working. The doctor blames his changing hormones. His mother insists that they try again, that maybe this next one will work, that she only wants to see him get better, to see him happy. Charlotte holds him when he's upset, calms him when the meds make him crazy, distracts him and focuses him when they plunge him into a muddy fog. He clings to her and she wraps her love and support around him like a blanket and cradles him. She decides to go to college nearby so she can be there for him. It makes him feel guilty, but she pushes the guilt away with every time she catches him as he stumbles and falls.
"What's it like?" She asks him one night as he stares listlessly out the window. She's sitting next to him on the bed, knitting a beanie.
Grantaire's dull eyes swing to her and he sighs, an anguished whoosh of air, a sound that has become pale and familiar. He presses his palms against his eyes and pushes up to run distressed fingers through his hair. "It's like I'm trapped in a fog. My head doesn't work right and I can't think complete thoughts or do anything. It's like I'm stuck somewhere, or on pause. I'm a ghost in my own body."
"Oh, god, Grantaire," she breathes, dropping her knitting to the floor and tugging him into an embrace, enveloping his thin body. He wraps his arms around her and presses his face into her shoulder, huffing out another heavy sigh.
"Sorry," he mumbles into her shirt.
"Don't. Don't be sorry. It isn't your fault. You don't deserve to feel like this."
"I guess."
Charlotte's arms tighten around him and she presses her cheek against the side of his head.
He's fourteen when his father's company is bought out, and his job is suspended while everything is sorted out, and money is tight and everything is uncertain. There isn't enough extra money for another round of psychiatric sessions, or another bunch of prescriptions. They give up. He lies on Charlotte's empty bed while she's in class and stares up at the ceiling. Scars litter his arms but they don't seem to help so he stops that too. Something heavy and aching sits in his chest and pushes at his throat, like a scream that won't come out. He finds himself lying facedown on his bed, paralysed by the inertia that clings to him. He can't seem to make his mind change course, or pull off this dark curtain that muffles everything. Nothing's right. Nothing's working. Nothing matters.
He locks himself away in his room all the time, to get away from everything. People exhaust him. School exhausts him. He does homework only to get his mind off whatever swirling aches are yelling at him. The self-induced isolation is both painful and comforting. There's a blockage in his head, and he hates not being able to talk to other people, but being alone is better. Being alone makes it easier to concentrate because there's only him there, and not a million other voices and movements and words and feelings clamouring over his own. Being alone is comfortable and simple and not quite as exhausting. So he hides from the world, hermiting away in his bedroom, under the covers in his bed, watching the door as if it holds back some sort of terror.
------
Grantaire is fourteen when he discovers that alcohol does what the medications never did. He's fourteen when he realizes that the drinks dampen the voices in his head, drown the anxiety, change the sadness and the emptiness into something strange but bearable.
His parents are at a party a few hours away, and Charlotte is on a weekend trip with her college friends, and he has the house to himself. He spends most of the evening lying on the couch with the television on, eating leftover takeout and watching the screen without taking anything in, the buzzing in his head too loud and muffling for anything to get through, like he's lying underwater.
He watches the character onscreen sit down at a bar and pull a glass of something toward him, tossing it back and slamming the tumbler back down on the counter for more, and something clicks inside him. He feels distant and mechanical when he stands, like he's watching someone else move, and his fingers are almost numb when they reach for the door of the little cabinet that he finds himself in front of. The bottle he wants is in the back, and the glass bottles he pushes to the side are cool against the backs of his hands, little kisses of ice beckoning him to reach further in. The bottle he retrieves is full of glinting amber, and its glass hits the rim of the tumbler he pulls from the shelf with a sound that's almost musical. There's a dark, faraway siren's song echoing in the high pitched sound. Grantaire's breath catches at the sharp scent, at the feeling of the fumes of ache and hurt fogging his lungs and singeing his nose.
His heartbeats are heavy as he stares down at the glass. He's plunging into something, his fingers shake as if trying to hang on to some fragment of himself that he cannot name. Only the murmur of the television is audible now, and he pinches his eyes shut and lifts the glass.
The whiskey stings the back of his throat and burns all the way down when he swallows it, and he feels a fire in his stomach when before there was only nothingness. The bittersweet flavour is heavy on his tongue. It crowds the back of his mouth and clings to his teeth when he swallows around it. He coughs against the flames, but the leftover burn feels good, like it fits there in his chest, like it fills some space that was empty. So he drinks again, and more, and drowns his feeling of drowning.
After only a little while, he realizes it's stupid to sit here and drink small amounts when he can drink a lot more at once. He fills the glass nearly to the brim before pushing the bottle to the back of the cupboard where he found it. The remote is too far away, so he throws a book at the television to turn it off as he passes in the walk to his room. He sits on his bed and sips at the whiskey. It burns, the coals it brings are scraping at his insides, but it's better than the emptiness that usually sits there and gnaws at him, so he welcomes it. He stares out the window for a while between sips, trying to catalogue the sensations within him. The spaces between his organs that freeze him and ache are thawed and filled instead with the warm sting of alcohol, the pleasant dizzy buzz that sings in his head and in his chest.
He manages to drink the entire glass, probably far too quickly than he should. But being full of something other than cold emptiness is amazing, and he craves the burn and hum, the way it makes his brain wobble dangerously inside his head and think fast, strange thoughts. He sits for a while, enjoying the way it makes him feel, smiling a little at the sensation of muffled whispers that have been shoved down by the fire. Everything is fuzzy and hidden behind a layer of blur and finally, finally his head has stopped telling him terrible things. When he stands to go back to the cupboard, the floor reels, rolling up to meet him, and he tips himself backward onto his bed. His body feels sluggish and heavy, and he drops his head to his chest, closing his eyes as he stands again. The air has suddenly become thick, and he pushes through it with one eye closed, hands on the wall as he makes his way down the hall. The bumpy texture of the wall feels interesting on his cheek, and he slides his face along the surface as he walks. The hallway seems ten times longer than usual when his head and his feet disagree and the world is cheerfully unfocused.
He changes direction halfway through when the room spins dizzyingly, curling himself round the doorframe of the bathroom and stumbling over his own feet before landing hard on his knees on the tile to vomit into the toilet. It burns twice as much coming up, and he weeps a little at the acrid smell that stings his nose and sticks to the back of his tongue. He coughs roughly and spits into the toilet and flushes it all down, wiping his eyes and mouth with the back of his hand.
He scrapes his tongue against the back of his teeth, and it tastes gross, but he feels better, and he still floats towards the cupboard again. He runs his hands over his face; they're cold, but his face is warm, and he wonders absently if it's red or normal-coloured. He read somewhere that drunk people get red-faced. Or something. He's not sure what time it is any more, but there's a good chance his parents aren't going to come home for a good long while. He pours more of the whiskey into another glass, hands shaking. He spills a little onto his wrist and brings it up to his mouth to suck it off his skin, scrunching up his face at the burn. The walk back to his bedroom is tilted as he walks with one shoulder against the wall to keep from wobbling.
Sitting back down on the bed with a heavy thump, he raises the glass to his lips. The buzz has turned into a sort of tingling, unfocused numbness, and suddenly his mind is slippery and his issues slide away from him as if on ice or oil. It's comfortable and soft and so much better than feeling everything all at once, feeling everything so much that it all turns into white noise until he can't feel anything at all. He's outside of himself, or maybe he's someone else for a little while. He's so unfocused that he can finally focus. He likes this cushion of coals that fills his empty insides and warms his head until his thoughts melt and reform into a block he can manage. It's a good feeling, something he hasn't had in years now, and he wants to keep it in his pocket, in his chest, and leave it there in place of a pulse or a heart.
He drinks, lies back, stares at the ceiling as the world bends and spins around him, enjoys the strange sort of pseudo-happiness that has filled him, and chews thoughtfully on the collar of his shirt until he falls asleep. For once, he doesn't wake up in the night, and for once, he doesn't dream.
The hangover he has the next morning is terrible. At his parents' questioning, he claims food poisoning from takeout, then promptly takes up residence on the cool tile floor of the bathroom. With the lights off, it's a dim, cool cave where he can let the world spin sickeningly without having to move more than half a foot to vomit away the dizziness and nausea. Drums beat in his head to the time of his pulse, and it feels like something is squeezing his skull, like his eyes are going to pop out of their sockets. The throbbing clings to his whole body, a blanket of ache, and it hurts but still, it takes away the thought of the empty ache in his chest. And last night-- last night was the best he'd felt in a long time, and he wants that back. He wants to hold fast to it and never let it go, he wants to claim it for always. If only he could transform his chest into that basin of fire and keep it burning to drive away the snow and nails that have taken up residence there in his belly.
It's not like he needs it, at first. It's not like a sheer cliff-face drop from innocent child to addiction. At first, he just slips sips of spirits on particularly shitty days. There's a bottle of Maker's Mark in the back of his dad's liquor cabinet that he knows has been at three-quarters full for ages. His dad never looks that far back; anyway, his parents seem to prefer wine or beer. He shoves one of his parents' beers to the very back of the fridge until they forget about it, then he drinks it when he has an anxiety attack, or when his thoughts spiral down into blackness and sharp hurt.
But everyone is thinking about high school, and his parents are talking to him about maybe taking honors or AP classes since he's been doing so well in his English and history and art classes. Only a few months until summer, and the future is rushing at him, a black hole trying to eat him. No one else seems to dread it like he does. He tries not to have a panic attack anytime someone mentions high school. It's not just high school, or moving schools, or change. It's everything, the idea of time moving forward at all, of having to be alive at all, of having to pilot his body and his brain for some unforeseeable amount of time. He's too fucking young to be thinking like this, he thinks. He's too fucking young to be incapable of getting out of bed every morning, so his parents have to threaten him or physically pull him out. He's too young to sit in class an absently think very seriously about dying while the teacher goes over a new equation from last night's homework. He desperately needs a crutch or he's not going to make it to the end of the school year.
With that, a cycle begins. He steals bottles from the store, or gets someone else to buy them for him. He drinks, at night, in the day, before school or after, always alone. Because that's what he has, that's the only escape he can find. He drinks until the alcohol yanks him out of his body and out of his mind and flings him away into the air, bringing him sensations he doesn't get otherwise, fullness where it's so often empty, comfort so he doesn't care much about anything anymore. Except the next drink.