“Evening, family,” I chimed, strolling into Gerard’s kitchen on Friday evening.
“Evening, sweetheart,” Sadhbh acknowledged with a smile from her perch at the kitchen table. “How was your week?”
“It was good; yours?” Draping my coat on the back of the kitchen chair, I made a beeline for the homemade pizza on the table. “Oh my God, you put black pudding on it!” I gushed, stealing a slice of cheesy goodness. “You are a queen, Sadhbh Gibson.”
“Sadhbh Allen,” Keith corrected with a chuckle, glancing up from the newspaper he was combing over.
“Allen,” I forced myself to say, offering him what I hoped was a half-decent smile. Because while I had no desire to please this man, I happened to both adore and respect his wife. “Where’s Gerard?”
“In his room,” Sadhbh replied with a worried sigh.
“Oh?” Concern flashed through me. “He didn’t come down for dinner?”
“Apparently, he’s on hunger strike,” Keith filled, flicking the page of his newspaper. “Which would be fine if he wasn’t making such a damn racket.”
“Hm.” Taking one last bite of my slice, I dropped the crust on the table and moved for the door. “I’ll head up now.”
“Be a good girl and tell him not to break anything, will you?”
As soon as I reached the upstairs landing, the familiar sound of R.E.M.’s “Shiny Happy People” echoed loudly from the other side of Gerard’s bedroom door, causing me to groan internally. The upbeat music might lure others into the belief that Gerard was in a good mood.
Not me.
No, because I knew only too well that the more upbeat or outrageously explicit music he played, the worse he was feeling. On the inside, of course. Because Gerard Gibson would rather brush his teeth with glass than admit that he was having a bad day. Problem was that a bad day made for a very erratic impulsive Gerard.
As younger children, Gerard’s bad days resulted in him being grounded at home. Nowadays, it was full-blown suspensions and heartbroken girls in his wake. Yeah, he was a complicated little pocket of sunshine.
His current song choice assured me that he was in his head big time and that I had a job to do. A job I took very seriously.
Blowing out a breath, I rolled my shoulders and reached for the door handle.
When I stepped inside, I was greeted by the sight of the entire contents of his room, bed included, thrust into the middle of the room in a huge, messy pile.
Clothes, DVDs, his TV, his furniture … Everything he owned was piled in a giant heap on the middle of his bed.
All that had been left untouched was his coveted stereo system that rested on the huge bay windowsill, where it continued to play today’s mood list of music at an obnoxious volume. Loud enough to have old Eddie Clancy from next door ringing the doorbell any minute now.
Oh Gerard …
Sighing wearily, I placed my hands on my hips and observed his meltdown.
Oblivious to my presence, and with his back to me, Gerard continued to paint – or at least I presumed that was what he was attempting to do – his bedroom ceiling the most obnoxious canary yellow I’d ever seen. Balancing precariously on a rolling desk chair, he strained his body upwards to reach the ridiculously high ceiling.
When Sum 41’s “Fat Lip” replaced the previous song, I finally found my voice. “Please tell me that’s not what I think it is.”
When he didn’t respond, I shook my head and stomped over to the window. “Gerard!” Lowering the volume of the stereo to a non-deafening decibel, I pushed open the window, worried about the fumes of the paint and lack of fresh air. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Claire-Bear.” When he spun around to face me, his smile was wide and full of mischief. Mischief and humor that didn’t meet his eyes.
It’s an act, my heart reminded me, don’t let him trick you.
All smiles and laughter. Hiding his heartbreak. Hiding his pain. I wanted to save him from his past. I wanted to love him through it all. I just wanted him.
Setting down his paintbrush on top of the open can of paint, Gerard sauntered towards me, body thrumming with energy.
If this was another seventeen-year-old boy, he might be mistaken for being under the influence of narcotics. Not Gerard. Nope. This was his predisposition. His entire makeup was off-center to the point where energy came too easily for him. He had a prescription for his condition, something I knew his mother harped on about on the regular. I wasn’t sure how regular he was with taking his ADHD medication nowadays, but he’d been a disaster as a younger child.
“What’s that?” I asked when the folded-up piece of paper hanging out from the edge of his bed caught my eye. “Gerard Gibson.” I feigned hurt. “Are you hiding love letters from other girls under your mattress?”
“No love letters,” he replied with a chuckle, quickly shoving the note back underneath. “I promise.”
“Whatever.” I rolled my eyes and looked around the room. “Care to explain why you’re painting your ceiling?”
“I fucking hate that ceiling,” he explained, pointing to the part that he had redesigned. The part right over where his bed was situated. “It depresses me.”
“The ceiling depresses you?” I arched a brow. “Make it make sense, please.”
He grinned back at me, another wolfish smile that didn’t meet his eyes. Oh boy. “You know I don’t sleep well.”
“Yeah,” I agreed slowly, waiting for the penny to drop.
He shrugged. “At least I’ll have something to look at now.”
“But it’s just a giant yellow smiley face,” I replied, confused by the rest of the untouched white ceiling.
“I know.”
“That’s strange.”
“I know,” was all he replied, entirely unaffected by the thought that people might think it strange that he had a giant circle painted over the part of the ceiling where his bed usually resided beneath.
“Are you redesigning the whole room?”
“I haven’t decided yet – here—” he paused to hand me a paintbrush. “Make me something.”
“Make you something?”
He nodded. “Something to make me smile.”
“I know your game.” I narrowed my eyes in suspicion. “You want to rope me into another one of your haywire plans, so when it backfires on you with your mam later, and it will backfire, you’ll have a partner in crime to take the heat off you.”
“You think I’d let you get in trouble for me?” He threw his head back and laughed. “Never, Claire-Bear.”
“Hah,” I shot back. “Liar. You’ve roped me into some seriously questionable scenarios down through the years, Gerard Gibson.”
Len’s “Steal My Sunshine” wafted from the stereo then and he waggled his brows before tapping my nose with a healthy dollop of yellow paint. “Give it up, Biggs.”
“You’re an eejit,” I laughed, unable to avoid his onslaught.
Laughing to himself, he sang along to the song, shoulders relaxing with every passing minute that we spent together.
Good job, I mentally praised myself, you’re grounding him.
The affection my heart stored for this particular boy was borderline unhealthy, and my need to soothe his bad days was almost as strong as it was to soothe my own. I suppose that was what happened when two people spent a huge portion of their lives together.
Pondering mischief, and with my playful mood activated, I moved to inspect the giant smiley face on his ceiling, the one Gerard was currently adding a joint to with permanent black marker.
“Oh, your mam is going to freak when she sees it,” I laughed, when he continued to draw little cloud bubbles of smoke around the face. “You know she hates it when you smoke.”
“It’s art,” he shot back. “Art is … what’s the word?”
“Subjective?” I offered with a frown.
“That’s it, Brains,” he praised, as he balanced dangerously on the moving chair. “Now, come on and help me. Put your own stamp on my ceiling.”
Kind of like the stamp you’ve put on my heart?
“If you think for one minute that I’m breaking an ankle participating in your skullduggery antics – ahh!”
“Skullduggery,” he chuckled, pushing his head between my thighs from behind and hoisting me onto his shoulders without breaking a sweat. “And you call me strange.”
“You are getting ridiculously strong,” I admired, cupping his stubbly chin with my free hand as he stood up with me on his shoulders, and hoisted me towards the ceiling.
Paintbrush still in hand, I tilted my head to one side, studying his artwork, before considering the first stroke of my brush. “He looks lonely.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Smiley Face.”
“I can see that,” he agreed, hands settling on my calves.
“He needs Mrs. Smiley Face.”
“He definitely does.”
And that was how I spent the rest of the evening, on Gerard Gibson’s shoulders, painting his world just a little bit brighter.
