Anatomy. Magnetic stars.

Chapter five - there's a brain in my stomach (and a stomach in my brain)

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The frequency of Mr Iero's name appearing in Gerard's notebooks had been increasing drastically lately. Gerard didn't know why; Gerard didn't like him. He was just interesting. The rain in his eyes, and the stars on his crystalline eyelashes, and the curl of his chocolate hair, soft around the nape of his neck. The way he said Gerard's name, and the curve of his shy mouth when he smiled.

Interesting.

Maybe it was the fact that Mr Iero hadn't immediately branded Gerard as talentless like all his other teachers had because he didn't follow the syllabus. Mr Iero respected and appreciated his work despite its miscorrelation with the system and school's idea of what was going help him learn. Gerard supposed that that was a fairly reasonable explanation. But Gerard didn't really like to suppose. He wanted to understand.

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Mr Iero held the jacket close to his chest, burrowing into its warmth, feeling the painted droplets of stardust in his head filter through the heat and melt and solidify into stars.

He was cold.

The jacket was Gerard's, the one he had given to him the day they had met, and the ice and stalactites in his head were Gerard's too, and so was every other part of him.

He didn't like this surrealism. He wanted the real Gerard present, to hold him and bleed real warmth into him. He wanted to touch, and he wanted to feel, and he wanted to give all the beautiful stars he had made to Gerard, to wear in his hair, and hold safe in his hands.

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Gerard awoke to a blank mind, as usual. The brief despair he felt before he collected himself and consciously acknowledged that he was in his own room was normal. The fear induced by his dream the moment he recalled it was not.

It had not been a nightmare; Gerard liked nightmares. They made him feel real. This had been something else.

He slipped into English by the back door that day, and did not talk to Mr Iero. He did not look up from under the table, he did not listen to the boys on the back desk joking about the substitute chemistry teacher's tits, and he most certainly definitely did not feel like his ribs had turned to cotton at the sight of Mr Iero clutching at the hem of his cardigan, dithering, wondering if Gerard was going to stay behind.

The stars fell in Gerard's throat when he left the classroom.

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Gerard felt like glass. There was a thread tied around his tongue, slipping and catching like silver icicles, and his skin was crystal. A vague numbness crawled in his chest and in the pit of his stomach in cold tendrils.

He wasn't sure how he felt. He wasn't sure how the stars felt.

He felt... disconnected and disassociated, and sort of sick. He wondered, briefly, how his stomach would feel if it knew that he was describing it as sick. How it would feel emotionally. He wondered if it would be hurt, figuratively. He wondered if stomachs could even feel at all. Maybe he was channelling his stomach, and it really was in pain. Maybe it was just the way his nerves and neurons interpreted the chemical balances inside him. (Chemical imbalances, his brain corrected.)

Biology was heart dissection today. Gerard didn't think they were still allowed to do that. It was barbaric. Mrs Evans kept hollowly insisting that the lambs had been killed for the purpose of food produce, and that the heart was just a waste product, really. Gerard tried to point out that the animals had still been killed for human purposes, and that passing off what he considered slaughter as normal would not sway him in any way, but Mrs Evans didn't really seem to understand the fact that sometimes different people have different opinions.

Left petulant and offended at Mrs Evans' dismissal of vegetarianism as a reasonable and intelligent life choice, Gerard spent the majority of the lesson at the back of the classroom, tuned out from everything in the room save for the occasional soft leaps of the F notes. Except he could never tune out, not fully. He just pretended he could like other people to try and persuade his brain that he genuinely had the ability to. Sorta like a placebo. He could never stop his mind reeling though; he was always absently panicking about whether others were looking at him, whether they were thinking about him and judging him.

It was a fear of something that would not scare him. He wasn't going to let himself get preoccupied with things he couldn't change, yet here he was, as usual, contradicting himself, and unconsciously letting his muscles thread together in tense suspension, calm eluding him for sake of the fear.

He poked at one of the specialised cell models tacked up on the wall— made by the younger years, he presumed, by give of the splayed felt tips and sellotape– and a pen lid fell off from where it had been balanced on top of a mitochondria. He glanced up at where it had fallen from in brief bewilderment. A spider was sat exactly where the pen lid had been.

Gerard was guessing that some bored child had thought it would be funny to put a pen lid right on top of a spider with the intention of frightening anyone who tried to remove it. He said hello to the small creature, and watched as its spindly legs flexed a little at the disturbance in the air and the sudden lack of a pen-lid umbrella.

Gerard decided that the spider's name was Larry. It felt like a Larry.

Gerard checked on Larry at regular intervals during the lesson, quietly and subtly, in the hope that no one would ask him what he was doing poking at a ciliated epithelial cell. He did not have very much skill at sneaking though, he found, when Myra Willis marched up to him and demanded to know what he was up to. Actually, perhaps he was brilliant at sneaking, but the pupils of this school were just intrusive little fuckwits. Gerard decided that the latter was probably most likely.

Again, Myra commanded that he tell her what he was doing, and he turned to her with a bored expression. "I'm looking at a spider."

Myra immediately screeched, and her face contorted into a look of absolute horror and disgust, and her blonde, meticulously straightened hair almost stood on end.

Gerard tried to not to scoff a laugh at how frightened she looked at the mere prospect of a spider existing. "What's the worst you think it's gonna do?" he asked. "Walk near you? God fucking forbid."

"Miss!" Myra yelled, shoving her hand straight in the air with a violence that suggested that the air had told her she was fat. (Myra did not appreciate being called anything but skeletal. Gerard had once tried to tell her that weight does not determine your worth as a person, nor does skinny necessarily mean healthy, but she had exploded with rage at such a hideously preposterous concept as someone over eight stone being healthy.

Gerard did not like to 'skinny shame', as someone on tumblr had rightly put it, but if a person was under the impression that starving themself would be a healthy thing to do, he felt it rather necessary that he step in.)

"Miss!" Myra squawked again. "There's a spider, get one of the boys to kill it, please!"

Mrs Evans sighed. "Gerard, dispose of the spider, please."

Gerard felt a little like the chambers of his heart were full of bleach. He was not going to kill Larry.

"Hurry up," Myra whined. She dithered and turned around to her boyfriend. "Jordan, come kill it."

A smug smile appeared on Jordan's face, and he rolled his sleeves up to his forearms and cracked his neck, as if squishing a defenceless creature the size of a pea was some heroic task. He swaggered over to Gerard, and squared his shoulders, like it was some customary display of masculinity that signalled that Gerard should leave now– the boss was in town.

Gerard did not leave. The boss was not in town.

Jordan leaned forward to press his thumb onto the poor little creature's body to crush it, and Gerard hastily ducked under his arm and scooped the spider up, darting over to the lab sink. "I know, let's flush it down the sink!" He turned back to face Myra directly. "That way we won't have to deal with a body," he added, rather darkly, an unpleasant image of tiny body bags in his head.

Myra squirmed at the thought and nodded frantically, and Gerard let Larry wander into the metal bowl of the sink, sending him happy thoughts and safety for his journey. He turned the tap on, and Larry swirled down the drain. Myra squealed victoriously, and Jordan grunted at Gerard– yet another primal signal in his manly masculine language– but Gerard ignored him.

Safe at last from the terrible beast, Myra tottered back to her desk, a smile on her face from knowing the abysmal thing was dead. Gerard smiled too. Sometimes he was glad of the fact that his classmates were so dull in the head. Spiders can swim.