I Don't Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

 

AN - Thank you Sarina and Aleusha for your reviews! They made my day! -Milly

*the book excerpt in this chapter is from The Catcher in The Rye, chapter 13, by J.D. Salinger.

.

I (don't) know why the caged bird sings

chapter ten - day seven

.

It would have been okay if it had been anyone but Tracey Simmonds, sitting next to Seto Kaiba, twirling her hair, batting her eyelashes.

Under other circumstances, her painfully obvious flirting would have been just fine by Joey. Amusing, even!

But not today. Joey Wheeler, still reeling from the emotional chaos caused by his first homosexual experience and from the forces of a horrific-turned-depressing nightmare, would not sit at the back of the classroom. He would not remain helpless in the face of the torture that was Seto Kaiba's fake interest in the famously inane ramblings of Tracey Simmonds. Hypocrite.

"Hey Trace," Joey called out a tad too loud, bee-lining from the classroom door to the pair, too hot-headed and mentally jittery to process the fact that Kaiba was showing up at school today.

Tracey turned to the source of the voice, her ponytail flying dangerously close to Kaiba's face as she did.

"Joey! You totally missed out on Saturday. You totally should've taken the night off, like!"

"Yeah, well, maybe next time," he trailed off noncommittally. His goal wasn't to make a show of his industriousness in front of the financial elites. "Look Trace," he started again, eager to settle this seating business before the bell rang, "thing is like, you're in my seat."

An unexpected wolf-whistle came from behind. Then another. No - cut it out. This is not what you think it is.

"Woo! Macho man," one of the guys called out. "Watching your woman!"

Damn it.

Tracey blushed at the supportive roar of laughter that ensued. "Better late than never I guess," she muttered mock-cynically as she packed her things, the smile on her lips blossoming in time with the imaginary romantic scenario in her head. Joey could see the lovey-dovey wheels spinning. She strategically chose the 'bookworm with the glasses' over 'the geek in the front row' for a desk companion, and kept throwing glances at Joey like it would establish some kind of telepathic link between them. Joey slid in the seat next the the Asshole Supreme, tossing his backpack atop of his desk.

Everyone's attention was now turned to a happily befuddled Tracey, who was 'adamantly' denying any allegations of her and Joey being an item (not yet).

"Shall I bake you a cake," Kaiba slipped discretely to his, and his attention alone.

"Shut up."

The bell rang, quieting the cacophony of the laughter, gossip, and latest speculations as to where Joey would take Tracey out for their first date. Now this wasn't very much of a problem; but having to actually sit next to Kaiba was. Joey wished he'd taken the time to think of a better way to interrupt the one sided flirting session. Now that he thought of it, he simply could've given her a bit of attention. Ah, no use crying over spilled milk. Joey couldn't resist looking in Kaiba's direction to see if he was, well, giving Joey some looks. Which he wasn't. But he looked aware - Kaiba was always aware of his surroundings.

"You were leading her on," Joey muttered so as not to be heard by the English teacher. She probably was, come to think of it, but at the moment she was doing the roll call.

Kaiba was looking straight ahead, his notebook and pens so perfectly aligned on the surface of his desk that Joey wanted to reach in and mess up his whole 'office supply feng shui' so bad Kaiba would have no choice but to give him attention.

His fingers were too steady. His skin too normal. Kaiba's hair was perfectly combed, his uniform always looked like it had been dry-cleaned the day before, and those lips were pressed together not too loosely, not too tight. Joey took solace in knowing that his-

"And you were not, of course," Kaiba said coolly, his voice too even.

Joey opened his mouth to speak. Okay, yeah, he had been - still was leading her on, technically, but that was another story. He hadn't planned everything to turn out that way.

Come to think of it, maybe Kaiba hadn't, either.

"You weren't-"

"Present," Kaiba told the teacher.

Joey gritted his teeth, resenting that selfish habit Kaiba had, of keeping all the good timing to himself and refusing to share. Now Joey would be well advised to wait until his own name be called out. It was usually a bliss to be the last one on the attendance sheet, since teachers gave him some slack whenever he slipped in after the bell rang - they had a tacit arrangement with him that they wouldn't mark him down as late until his name was called out.

But today Joey cursed at the letter W for being the 23rd of the alphabet, and it seemed like everyone was doing it on purpose to be as sloppy and inefficient as possible in making their presence known to the teacher. 'S' for Simmonds somehow managed to turn the vocalizing of her name into an event, saying 'present' with a slight je-ne-sais-quoi that had the whole class laughing in one of those moments where everyone in the room is just connected, on the same wavelength, thinking about the exact same thing at the same time.

Jo-ey and Tra-cey, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g...

For sakes, even the geek and the bookworm had sappy smiles on their faces.

Fuck that weird ass dream. Fuck feeling vaguely depressed and not motivated at all. Fuck wasting time coming to school. On his way to school, Joey had sort of talked himself into chalking it off to just another instance of his brain stitching together random past life experiences. That's what it always was, and there was no use trying to find out some kind of greater meaning to it.

"...Joseph."

"Huh?"

The class roared in laughter again.

"He is here," one calm voice said coolly. Because it was Kaiba's, the quip was hilarious by default, and the teacher had to raise her voice to get the students to quiet down.

"Well, I see that everyone is awake. We're going to start off with the team readings, so you have two minutes to move in with your partner. Don't bring your backpacks, only your book and your notes. You'll be going back to your usual spots for the other half of the period for the grammar quiz."

Soon the collective whine that erupted upon hearing the word 'quiz' made way to chatter, and the clattering of chair legs against the classroom tiled floor. Kaiba and Joey stayed still amidst the commotion, staring intensely at their respective hands. Joey committed to rout out a bit of ground meat stuck between his molars, stretching his tongue uncomfortably.

"Wow. We're finally going to get some actual teamwork done. Can you believe that?" Deep inside, Joey thought it wiser not to give in his urge to sarcasm at Kaiba, but at this point he didn'T care.

Kaiba merely opened his copy of the book. Joey felt let down. That had been a pretty witty comment.

"Look, I haven't done the thing, I haven't read the book. Like, I can't make shit up, like."

Kaiba flipped some pages, looked for a specific post-it on the edges of his notebook and began underlining things.

"We could at least pretend we're doing something together."

The teacher was at her desk sorting out papers. The other teams had fallen in step, heads and hands at work, joking and laughing on the way. It seemed everyone else was having just a peachy time, while Joey was not only wasting his time pretending to learn, as always, but he was also having an awkward-off with the least pleasant teenage multi-millionaire on the face of the Earth.

"So um, like." Joey was stopped by Kaiba's warning glare.

Hey, relax, man, I wasn't gonna bring 'that' up.

Still, no use pretending they were still on 'fist fight' terms with one another. Not that they were on any other terms. They weren't on any kinds of terms.

"How's everything going along?"

Either Joey's internal monologue had lasted longer than he thought or the teacher was fast on her feet. She stood by Kaiba's desk, dishing out benevolent smiles to the oil and water pair.

"Uh... We're workin' on it." He hadn't meant to bring out his ghetto accent. Now that Joey thought of it he had no idea what this 'reading task thing' was about. "It's uh, Kaiba's telling me which part he picked so that I don't picked the same." Oh gosh he was totally making shit up.

"How far into the book are you, Joey?"

He couldn't help the glazed look in his eyes, the look that said 'oh shit I'm gonna lie but I hate it cause I hate to lie'. Joey's mom was right; her son was not a good liar.

"Uh, like chapter eleven."

"That's good. You'll be able to finish it up in no time," she said not too loud so that the other kids, who had already finished reading their own books, and who had already handed in their papers, wouldn't hear and think he was getting special treatment. Which he was- he totally was, and he hated himself for it. Didn't have the heart to blame it on Kaiba this time.

The teacher had already walked away to the next group. Kaiba resumed 'not caring'.

"I don't even know what we're supposed to do," he deplored to Kaiba, then to the wall, who at least showed some empathy. "Look, no one's looking or listening, you can stop being a jerk now."

Kaiba scoffed to himself. Yeah right. Well he could do what he wanted, that didn't mean Joey had to be a jerk. Memories of yesterday - before the weird ass blow job thing - came back to Joey.

"So like, how's your little brother doing? He feeling better?" This would be his last attempt at small talk. If Kaiba didn't bother reacting, Joey would stop pretending to give a damn.

Kaiba put down his pen and gave Joey one long, hard look. Okay, maybe that wasn't the best topic.

"Why don't you ask your own sister."

It took Joey a moment to process the retort. Which he couldn't actually process. That was his dead baby sister he'd been talking about.

"That was uncalled for, man. That was uncalled for."

Something inside him stang. Surely - surely giving someone a blow job had to count for something, even between two strangers in the bathroom of a gay club there had to be some kind of affection or tacit understanding going on between the giver and receiver.

"If you weren't so stupid nothing would've happened," Seto seethed so low Joey wasn't sure he'd heard right.

But Joey had heard, and he'd understood right, too. Kaiba was right; he really was stupid for never giving up, like a simple dog falling for the same trick over and over again.

"Alright class," the teacher's voice rang louder than the rest, "time to wrap up. Who wants to go first?"

"I do."

Joey had raised his hand, earning a few disconcerted or questioning looks. This truly went against the natural order of things. "Yeah, I think we'll start," he said confidently.

More like aggressively. He had every intention to fuel his anger into zeal. Anything that involved not giving Kaiba the impression that Joey actually cared about what he'd said. The rest chatter in the rest of the class died down slowly enough to allow Joey to speak to Kaiba without being heard by the teacher.

"Now tell me what I'm supposed to do before I call you on that check," Joey said, sounding dry even to himself, not making eye contact with Kaiba.

"... You're supposed to pick a passage and dissect it."

Joey extended his hand. The book was lain in it. He opened a page at random and let his eyes fall on something salient. They got hooked on the single word: Grand.

"Could you start by reading it out loud, Joseph."

"Sure thing, Ma'am." He stood up and cambered his chest like he was about to duel. "Grand." He paused and looked around him. "Er... that was in italics."

The teacher raised her eyebrows, enjoining him to continue. He cleared his throat, suddenly aware that the whole class had fallen silent and was actually paying attention to him. "If there's one word I hate, it's grand. It's so phony." Joey looked around some more, drinking in some of the attention to chase away the sudden awkward. "For a second, I was tempted to tell her to forget about the matinee. But we chewed the fat for a while. That is, she chewed it. You couldn't get a word in edgewise."

Joey had officially no idea what he was reading, who was 'she' and who the guy in the next lines was, but he remembered as he read that the teacher had said something about teenagehood. By the time he'd finished reading the whole paragraph, he felt absolutely positive that he could churn out some tasteful BS that would impress the teacher.

Unsure how to react, some students clapped a bit. Joey put the book down and started speaking right away. There was no use beating around the bush.

"So um I think this is about teenagers, because the main character's a teenager and the author wanted us to relate to that, because when you're a teenager it's hard to get heard, you're talked down a lot and not taken seriously and all, but I think in the end that's maybe because the adults who don't let young people talk is because they were young people themselves at some point and for them it's just a way to like, get back, or get even or something, but like it doesn't make sense because they're not the ones who told them to shut up in the first place. Pardon my language. So yeah, that's it."

And then he sat down, and there was a moment where everyone was still hanging at Joey's lips, not quite ready to accept that the ending to his rant was abrupt like that, and then the whole class started clapping.

Joey tried not to take the teacher's praise too seriously. He always figured if he didn't let the good stuff get to his head then the bad stuff wouldn't get to his heart. Except that he wasn't super good yet at not letting the bad stuff get to him. Hence his inability to get over anything anyone - especially obnoxious megalomaniac guys with dubious homoerotic tendencies.

"Could've been worse," Kaiba said before breaking eye contact.

In the background, some random kid in the classroom had raised their hand to share an opinion about what Joey had just said. A few teams around them were whisper-chatting. Joey whispered back to Kaiba.

"Okay, breaking news: you can't treat people like shit and expect everything to be okay after you've dished out some lame ass compliment."

"Don't flatter yourse-"

"Look, I don't care. I don't."

Kaiba didn't insist.

.

Tristan was his childhood friend for a reason. He didn't fall for 'nah I'm alright, I'm just tired from my double shift'. He'd also managed to drag Joey to the burger place after school.

"You gotta not tell anyone okay, cause it's just really weird," Joey warned for the tenth time.

"It's cool man, I'll keep it to the grave." Tristan said jokingly (but he meant it though). He took a small bite out of the cheeseburger that had been ordered just so that Joey would let him take the tab.

Joey still wasn't sure what part of the 'weird' he was ready to reveal. Some of it he didn't even wanna think over by himself. He saw a really short guy about their age enter the diner, a goth from another school who wore jewelry much like Yugi's. Joey sighed.

"I just had the weirdest dream this morning. Look, I told you it was weird-"

"Hey, I didn't say anything. I'm just here to listen."

Joey used the two straws in his water to play with the ice cubes, sending them clinking against the glass. He let his shoulders droop a little, then sighed. There was no other way to do this than to do this.

"So okay, it was this nightmare, right. And um, I had to move, but like, I couldn't. And um," where to go from here? Oh yeah just for the record Kaiba gave me a blowjob the night before, right? And the paycheck actually isn't random either, it actually means something, too. Those were conversations Joey didn't want to be having, and he wasn't sure whether to top that with a 'not yet' or a 'not ever'. So he deemed it simpler to just summarize the rest of the dream. "Basically someone wanted to kill me. Yeah."

Tristan took another sip of his water.

"Yeah, like, that's pretty much it. I know that like, I know it's not real or anything but it just felt damn depressing, like I had done something wrong or whatnot. It's like I was deserving it or something. Like, I know it doesn't make sense right, but it still felt horrible. I woke up and I felt like total crap."

That was weird. Just talking it out for half a minute, Joey was coming up with some explanations for the dream that he hadn't been able to find from thinking it over in his head for about an hour this morning before school.

"I know, man, I get that too sometimes. Like there was this one dream with- er-" Tristan semi-panicked. "With, er, a... a girl."

Joey sighed. "Let it go man, it's been almost a year. I don't think about her everyday anymore. No big deal."

Tristan shook his head meekly. "I'm a shitty friend, man, trying to cheer you up and bringing up your sister instead. Huh, hey um, I'll buy you dessert, how about that. Saw some cheesecake in the display."

"So, my sister for cheesecake. Yep, that seems fair."

"Oh shit- no! That's not what I meant, that's totally not what I meant."

"I know, man, I'm just pulling your leg."

"You're a bastard."

Joey chuckled. "I thought you were supposed to cheer me up."

"Fuck you, man," Tristan said, laughing.

"Fuck you too, man," Joey said, tossing a french fry at Tristan.

"Hey, I'm paying for that food!"

Joey was laughing too hard to muster a reply.

"Hey, keep it down- I have a reputation here!"

Nothing could make Joey care about this in the present moment.

"I'm-" he managed between bouts of laughter- "I'm going to tell that waitress you like redheads."

"No-"

"Oh hey! Scuse me!"

"No, man, don't- fucking-" Tristan hissed, standing to grab Joey's raised hand and pin it to the table.

"She's coming. Your future girlfriend, she's coming."

"I hate you man," Tristan hissed some more.

"You're gonna owe me for this, trust me."

.

Joey the Wingman.

He liked the sound of it.

Tristan kept whining that he could never set foot in that restaurant again. Joey insisted that he be invited to the wedding.

It was obvious, from the meek tone his voice took when he called his parents to let them know he wouldn't be home for supper, that Tristan had some kind of chore he had to go home to at that moment. He hid it well enough, though, that Joey let him lie to his face. As for himself, well, there really was no need giving his dad a call. What for? He probably wouldn't be home anyway. Nothing wrong in making a good thing last, right? Joey hadn't had that much fun in ages. Just laughing himself stupid with his best friend. Technically though, Yugi was his best friend, but he wasn't around, and frankly Joey could only let loose to that level of silly in Tristan's presence.

They were in a park now, their hips uncomfortably squeezed in swings designed to accommodate humans half their weight.

"Remember when we used to talk Yugi into riding a swing sideways-"

"And then twist it all the way up and let him spin? Yeah. Man, we were fucking idiots," Joey said, a smile in his voice.

"We were dumbasses."

"Yeah."

"But it was funny, too though."

Joey allowed himself to laugh a bit. Yeah, they'd been mean to Yugi. It hadn't always necessary been violent, either. There were sometimes where they were just baiting the little guy, like, pressuring him into doing dumb things. Not that playing it down made it okay or anything.

At this moment he wished Yugi was here, just so they could sort of talk about it, iron out the gaps in their friendship, and say 'now's your turn, have at us, too, make me spin until I'm ready to puke'. Yugi wouldn't be the kind to retaliate, though, even if only in a friendly way. He kind of was like that, patient and forgiving. As if though his mind was like, 'violence? what's that?'

"Man, I miss him."

"Yeah. Me too."

Joey kicked some sand with the tip of his shoe. "You're not doing a very good job of keeping me happy. I'm getting all nostalgic and all."

"I'm not your girlfriend."

Joey laughed at that. Tristan really had no idea. He'd probably get over it quickly if Joey told him about 'things'. But this was something he needed to sort out by himself.

"Yeah, your boobs are too small."

"Hey, shut up! They're pecs, okay? I'm workin' out for these, you know."

"Shut up yourself, man." Joey found that hilariously funny for some reason. Maybe it was the cheesecake. Man, that shit was sweet.

"You shut up."

"No, you shaddup," Joey slurred, unable to stop laughing. Maybe it was the ice cream they'd had after the cheesecake.

Tristan got up and rotated Joey's swing 180 degrees, making the chain links cross right above Joey's head.

"Yo if you do that, I'm gonna puke all over your fancy shmancy shoes."

Tristan made a face. "I paid for that food so I'mma do what I want with it." He flipped Joey another 180. And then another; at that point it was easier, it spun like in butter for a while. Joey was holding his head back, laughing like a madman, powerless in the face of his fate. The metallic structure creaked a little, but gave no sign that it would give under Joey's weight.

"It's not fucking fair," Joey told his abs cramping from the laughter. The chain links were starting to twirl and shrink upwards. Joey's eyes were now level with Tristan's.

"Okay, any last words?"

"You're-" Joey held onto the metal braid with one arm, wiping off a laughter tear with the other. "It's not fair cause I don't get my revenge after that 'cause you're too fat-"

"You are so dead, man." Rather than let him go and gain gradual speed Tristan gave Joey's body extra momentum by swinging him full force (no, man, don't do that, man) before leaping backwards to enjoy the show.

.

So Joey's digestive tract was still working on that ice cream after all.

Tristan sort of really needed to be back home before a certain time to do that thing that 'really wasn't a problem'. Joey ended up walking him home just to stretch the evening a little.

But man, did Tristan live in the middle of nowhere. Well not quite. More like they each lived on opposite sides of town. But Joey didn't mind. He'd done so much long distance walking over the last week that he could take any amount of intra-city mileage now; he was even jogging through some portions of it, whenever there wasn't a traffic light to hold him back.

Circulation was slow on the large artery that traversed his neighbourhood, even for a Monday evening. It was this eerie time of the day where it was light enough to see, but dark enough so that cars had to turn their headlights on. The sky and the air around him was drenched in a thick, blue-grey light, the odd gas station signs throwing disorganized bright reds and whites into the mix. There wasn't one concrete slab that wasn't fissured one way or another, and Joey eventually gave up on not stepping on the sidewalk cracks. He stopped when he reached the main side street that would lead him to his apartment park.

A darker, wet stripe of asphalt went alongside the sidewalk where the street cleaner had passed. Joey let his eyes trail to them until they were too narrow to make out in the waning light. At the end of the boulevard was an elevated highway, its endless supply of cars running fast across one another. They wouldn't stop for him. And more would keep coming. And coming and coming and coming.

Joey looked away.

He had a life to go back to.

.

There was a faint odor of excrement lurking in the hallway. The next door neighbour had a new puppy; she had probably hadn't come back home since this morning and hadn't been there to clean up. If only she could place the training pad in the bathroom or something and not next to her front door. It wasn't normally something Joey'd let himself be annoyed with, but normally the smell didn't reach as far as inside his own apartment. Joey hastily closed the door behind him to cut off the smell.

Lights were out. His father wasn't back home yet. Joey went straight for the kitchen sink, splashed some water on his face to wash the sticky mix of sweat and outdoor dust off his skin. He pinch-rubbed his nose to get rid of the poop smell and took off his t-shirt. Because he was thirsty from his jog-walk he poured himself a glass of water, not waiting for the tap to cool down. Lukewarm would do.

The hamburger helper pot lay exactly where it was this morning, next to the crusty wooden spoon, at the bottom of the sink. Joey threw in the remaining half of his third glass of water so that the bits of pasta would soak. His father should've done that last night; now it'd take forever until anyone could scrub it and use it again. Maybe he hadn't wanted to wake Joey up; the pipes could get really loud at a certain pressure, and the walls were so thin that any sound resonated through the apartment. Television was another thing altogether; it became a soothing, steady stream of indistinguishable sounds from behind Joey's bedroom door, and he'd grown accustomed to falling asleep to it. The kind of lullaby he could afford.

It then occurred to him that the smell was actually just as strong inside the apartment. Joey's first reflex was to check the soles of his shoes for any kind of dog poop he might've stepped on outside. They were pretty clean. He took them off and tossed them toward the mat near the door, hoping that they land close enough to his father's own pair. Then he went for the bathroom.

It didn't look like there had been any kind of overflow or anything in the bath or toilet. Didn't smell that much in here, either. Maybe it was his nose playing a trick and that it was a food smell - come to think of it it wasn't exactly an excrement smell. There was nothing in the pantry of fridge that had gone bad or anything. So Joey looked everywhere, just so that he could clean the damn whatever-happened before he could set off to try and do some homework in front of the TV. The laundry basket was another sensible possibility. Soon anything that had a door, any compartment, became a possibility. And then - why not- his father's bedroom. The man hated for Joey to be peeking in there, but he had a valid excuse.

From the meager light - the blinds were closed, which should have alerted him - Joey found that the heap of fabric on the bed looked like his father's sleeping form. The room really smelled like feces. And urine. And a faint something else; not something powerful enough to make him gag, but something strange, something he'd never encountered before.

It didn't smell good; it didn't smell right.

A rush of something flashed through Joey's brain - something was off. "Dad?" He called out, feeling stupid for allowing himself to panic a little. It made as little sense as being afraid of the dark. Joey stepped closer. His father was lying on his back, his mouth open unnaturally wide. Joey kneeled by his side, taking a limp, cool hand in his, taking slow, shallow breaths to fight the powerful stench.

"Dad," he called, his voice louder and commanding. "Dad," he repeated to the void. The whole room felt completely still, every object purposeful and interconnected; a morbid still life, a slab of time that had congealed forever ago.

.

Added Author's Note (in response to stuk's lovely review): 

Fortunately this is not the end of the story! A terrible cliffhanger if you will, but this story is still active. You can expect an update in September... In the meantime, I thank you wholeheartedly for your reviews! -Milly