Kaleb Shatters {major spoilers for One Two Three Shatter}

He glanced around the psychologist's office. There were a ton of bookshelves on the wall all stacked with a million different books it seemed. There were so many different colors for all the books that he was blown away. He was convinced there had to have been just as many subjects lingering behind those colorful covers.1

The desk was ornate but not over-the-top, with a fountain pen sitting in the left corner atop a few more books. A light shone from the right, spilling soft light onto the flat plane where a case file was open and empty except for the sheet he’d filled out – he recognized his scrappy handwriting right off, splayed out on the desk for all to see.2

The psychologist that was sitting at the desk had long red hair pulled back into a half ponytail, tendrils of her hair falling in her face as she looked over and smiled at him, nodding toward the plush maroon seat in front of the desk. He exhaled and shrugged, crossing the room with his casual gait, slightly interrupted by his nerves. He really hated that he was doing this.3

“Hi, Kaleb,” she said with a warm smile, and he merely smirked back at her, cocking his head a little, glancing around and looking for a name tag or something. “Do you mind if I take notes?” Kaleb shrugged and flopped into the seat in front of a rather grandiose desk. He took in a lot of pictures and a nametag that read Dr. Bevan. This would be interesting.4

“I really don’t give a fuck,” he told her succinctly, and if she was surprised by his answer she didn’t show it, only nodded and pulled out a legal pad, settling a small pen on top. The paper was a blinding yellow and he wondered why professionals liked that kind of paper so much. It was annoying and distracting to him. 5

"What brings you here today?" The psychologist’s voice was halfway between curious and something else – like she’d asked these questions a million times and knew the answer already.6

“Fuck, where do I start? Well, the obvious reason is ‘self-destructive behavior’ – drinking, drugs, smoking, etcetera. I’m just a bad habit waiting to happen, I guess you could say.” Kaleb ran his hand through his hair; shifting a little in the chair he’d settled himself in.7

"What would you like to talk about?" The curiosity was a little stronger with this question. Too bad it was way too intrusive for Kaleb and he balked at it almost instantly.8

“Honestly? Nothing. I don’t wanna talk about anything. Nothing. See? I’m repeating myself.” He wasn’t even sure why he was even here at the moment. He felt so uncomfortable opening up to people close to him, let alone complete strangers.9

The psychologist sighed a little, brushing her hair from her face and straightening, bracing herself as if to say – I’ve got a long day ahead of me.10

"How can I help?" Curiosity laced her tone this time.11

Kaleb frowned, though he knew he’d have to think of ways she could help. She seemed to be his best choice for putting his life back on track. They’d told him that he needed to find the root for his issues before they could rehabilitate him completely. “I have no idea.”12

“Come on, just start talking about something that’s bothering you and we can go from there. Do you have any idea why you use drugs or drink?”13

Kaleb scratched idly at his eyebrow and started gnawing on his lip, the uneasiness setting in a little harder this time. “I uh, use drugs because… it’s an escape and the alcohol helps.” He was silent for a moment as he merely shrugged, still chewing on his lip as he stared at the desk, not willing to look at the woman behind it.14

“An escape from what?” she prompted, her voice moving quickly from clinical to compassionate, and he couldn’t help but smirk a little, feeling only slightly more comfortable now, though if she babied him, he swore he’d end up shutting the fuck up right then and there.15

“The thoughts in my head,” Kaleb said, and he wondered if he could have been any more vague. She obviously was wondering the same thing as she frowned a little. “I have the tendency to go into my head a lot, and I don’t like it there so I try and find a way out,” he explained, forcing himself to meet her eyes.16

“What kind of thoughts?” she asked, and surprisingly the rapid-fire questions weren’t getting on his nerves if he kept reminding himself that this was her job, and in essence he did the same thing on a nightly basis at work. He took a deep breath before he answered, the sound shakier than he’d anticipated. The words that came out surprised him with their candor and honesty, though they were harsh.17

“Mostly how much of a fuck-up I am. I mean, I’m a fuckin’ addict, right? I can’t cope with shit, so I turn to drugs to fuckin’ help me out. I can’t even raise a fuckin’ kid right without having to turn to this shit. I’m such a fuckin’ bad example, but I don’t wanna give them the kind of life I grew up with, y’know?”18

“How long has this been happening, this mindset?” the doctor asked, and Kaleb bit his lip harder this time, his teeth almost splitting the skin.19

“Since I was little. I mean, I can’t remember a time when I… didn’t feel like that,” he admitted, and he couldn’t believe he was saying some of this stuff to someone he didn’t know, but then again maybe that was helping him say these kinds of things, because she didn’t know him and therefore couldn’t judge. He just had this urge to let it all out, just talk to this woman. Maybe she’d understand what was going on with him and help him get over this.20

Maybe he was just so sick of being alone in his own head that he’d be so willing to open up completely to her.21

“When is it better or worse?” He heard the scratching of the pen to the paper and he had to wonder exactly what she was analyzing about him. He was paranoid that she was finding so much wrong with him, but it seemed when he started talking he couldn’t shut the fuck up.22

“It’s… better when I’m around people, because then I don’t go into my head so much, but then again sometimes when people talk to me, I just close up and back away, don’t let them touch me. I don’t like people touching me. It’s a thing I’ve had since I was a kid.” 23

The woman’s voice was a little deadpan when she asked the age-old question. “How does that make you feel?” It seemed she was as bored with the question as anyone else.24

Kaleb had been waiting for that question, and he laughed harshly at it, shaking his head. “Utterly fucking helpless, but I’m not unfamiliar with that feeling, if you know what I mean. I’ve felt helpless for a lot of my life, and yet I still somehow don’t give up even if the odds fuckin’ suck.”25

It took until the third session for the doctor to really start opening Kaleb up. There was the general ‘how was your day’ questioning before she really got down to business, looking seriously at him though it wasn’t intimidating in the slightest. He’d gotten a little more comfortable with her now, and she immediately went back to the question that Kaleb had elected to skip their first session.26

He knew it would be a catalyst for very sensitive and deeply personal subjects, and he wondered if he was ready to open up like that. He also wondered if he even had a choice in the matter. Fuck it; he was sick of keeping this shit inside anyway. If he had to tell anyone, it might as well have been a professional.27

“Do you want to tell me more about you childhood – friends, family, things like that?” Dr. Bevan’s voice was gentle, coaxing, and Kaleb very barely balked against it before he let out another shivering sigh.28

“Yeah, sure, why the fuck not. You’ll find some interesting shit there.” He paused, shutting his eyes. “My uh, my mom left when I was four. Just up and left, all the while telling me she’d come back for me. She promised, y’know? She promised she’d come back for me, but she never did. I knew the instant she walked out that door that she wouldn’t come back for me. Even at such a young age, I knew I wouldn’t see her again. Well, okay, that’s a lie. She came back into my life a few years ago, and I let her in kicking and screaming. We had a five-hour screaming match where I just told her to fuck off repeatedly until I gave up. She still insists on being in my life but every time she tries to intervene, shit goes very wrong. My twin brother got… shipped to a private school the instant he hit kindergarten, leaving me with my dad and my older brother.”29

He could feel her watching him, even as he chewed on his lower lip. He couldn’t help but feel like she was analyzing his body language, and that made him shift his shoulders uncomfortably and let go of his lip with a sigh.30

“I was… six when my dad first… hit me. He pulled me out of bed at like, two in the morning, babbling on about something, and before I could react he slapped me across the face and threw me against the wall. I just… I crumbled, and I didn’t know what to do. I… tried to scream for help, but he slammed me against the wall and smacked me again. It stung, and it was probably what hurt most in my childhood. It hurt even more when I was crying. Fuck, I hate crying.”31

“Why?”32

He swallowed hard and shut his eyes, exhaling sharply through his nose. “They used to laugh at me for it, call me weak or stupid or whatever. They’d find it so funny that I was crying because of what they did.”33

“They?” Dr. Bevan’s voice was curious again, and he smirked. He’d forgotten to tell her about Robert.34

“Yeah, they. My brother, who’s about six or seven years older than me, joined in when I was about eleven. Y’know, one of those you hold, I’ll punch type things. It was pretty uncool. He must have been a pedophile or something, because he…” His voice wavered a little, swallowing hard against the nausea that rose in him. “He started sexually abusing me.” 35

“What did he do to you?” The doctor’s voice was soft, as if she was afraid of the answer, though he was sure she had had worse stories than his own coming through here. He had to wonder how she coped. 36

“At first… it was just him touching me while my dad restrained me, or the other way around after a while. It was a few weeks… before my twelfth birthday that they actually started… penetrating.” He exhaled sharply, tearing his eyes from her onto the ground. He hated having to relive this so many times. He wasn’t even sure why the words left him so quickly, but maybe he wanted someone else to know. “I mean, they were so good at making me feel… helpless, because I was so little and couldn’t do anything against the two of them.”37

“How do you think that’s affecting you to this day?” she asked, and he could tell that she was trying to keep this strictly clinical, and he appreciated that. He liked that it didn’t feel like she was personally prying, rather that she had to do so because it was her job to get these kinds of things out of him, even though he could tell by the slight waver in her voice that what he’d said emotionally affected her on some level. 38

“Um, it’s left me pretty fucked up. Sometimes I wonder if it hasn’t left me completely fuckin’ ruined. It’s a wonder I’m not completely fuckin’ helpless now. I have a lot of… problems with relationships and people in general. It’s like, I want them to pay attention to me, but the instant they do I try to push them away to see how long it takes them to pull away from me completely. When they leave I’m just… fuckin’ devastated, though, y’know? There are just some times where I just don’t want anyone touching me and it sends me into these fits when people do. It’s like… like a double standard and I can’t help it.” 39

“What about friends? How are your relationships with them?” 40

“They’re pretty stable for the most part, I guess. I don’t really interact much with them except my best friend, Sid – I sort of pseudo-adopted her son because he likes me better than her or something. I met her when I was twelve and ran away from the house to a park.” He smiled a little at the memory, letting his eyes slip shut. “She had the prettiest brown hair I’d ever seen. It was like that really milky chocolate, y’know? That really deep and quality color? Yeah, it was the first thing I noticed about her. We talked for a little and she asked about the bruises on my face. I told her I fell. That was my excuse for everything. She believed me. The next time I saw her, she read me the BFG. It was kinda the first introduction I had to a story I actually enjoyed.” He was silent for a moment before he opened his eyes, seeing that she was watching him curiously once more.41

“Anyone else?”42

“Well, there’s this guy, Trent. He’s pretty much in love with me, but I dunno what to do with that. I mean… I don’t even know what love is, y’know? So I can’t give it back, but he’s been really supportive and all that. I think I owe him more than I want to admit. He’s pretty much backing me all the way through this and I think that’s what I need, someone there to help me cope or whatever since I can’t do it on my own. Then there’s Anna, my ex-girlfriend and my daughter’s mother. She and I have always been an offbeat couple in everything. We disagreed on a lot and that kinda was our downfall. She’s ridiculously loyal and I can’t get rid of her for the life of me even though she’s dating the doctor that delivered the kid. Then there’s my uncles, Nikki and Jer. They’re pretty much the two most important people in my life. They saved me, pretty much. I ran away to their house when I was fifteen after I had enough of my dad and brother and their bullshit.”43

“What about work?”44

“Oh yeah, I fuckin’ love where I work. I work in a bar called Spyder, owned by one of my friends, Jeff. It’s pretty much the coolest place ever and I kind of feel like I can be a different person there, not be myself when I’m chatting it up with people, superficially interested in all their bullshit as I make idle fuckin’ conversation.”45

Dr. Bevan was silent for a moment and Kaleb smirked at her, cocking his head. It seemed what he’d said struck a nerve, and he was willing to bet that didn’t happen very often. 46

“What about school-wise?” 47

“I dropped out when I was sixteen – just recently got my GED because Jeff put my job on the line if I didn’t. I hated the whole damn idea of school. It was so stupid that you could get graded based off a stupid fuckin’ test score, and people could laugh at you for just about anything. I think it’s a bullshit system that really cuts kids down if they’re not in a certain fuckin’ percentile.”48

“I see. And did you ever reunite with your twin?”49

“Yeah, he found me. Turns out he pretty much had a perfect fuckin’ life.”50

“And you resent that?” 51

“Hell fuckin’ yeah! After all that I went through, hearing ‘oh, yeah, I went to this great school and I’ve got a prestigious job’ blah, blah, blah, of course I resent it. He hasn’t had to go through half the bullshit I’ve been through!”52

“And how are you coping with that?” 53

“I pretty much just bite the bullet and interact with him normally, though he seems to really like to confront me about things. We actually haven’t talked in about two years, truthfully. He found out I relapsed and he pretty much left me alone. I’m not sure why, but I think it was the stupidest thing he could have done.”54

“Do you miss him?” 55

“Sometimes. I mean, the guy said ‘I love you, flaws and all’ a few years ago, and then he turns around and pulls this shit? I think that’s kinda fucked, and I don’t have a normal train of thought when it comes to a lot of things.”56

“Do you think there would be an easy way to solve this problem?”57

“I should probably talk to him and let him know I’m trying to get clean and maybe he’ll get his head out of his ass, but past that I have no idea. I’m not much of a problem solver. I dunno how to fix any of this shit… hence why I’m here. ‘Cause I can’t do it for myself, because believe me, if I knew how to fix this shit myself, I wouldn’t be sitting here in front of you boring you with my bullshit.”58

The psychologist sighed at Kaleb’s cynical attitude, shaking her head with a little smile. Maybe it made her day a little more interesting and that was why she’d smiled, but Kaleb on the other hand felt incredibly exposed, absolutely amazed that he’d bared himself that much on the third day. He crossed his arms over his chest and went back to chewing his bottom lip.59

“How are you in terms of your mother?”60

“She’s a total fuckin’ bitch, and I wonder how the fuck I ever looked up to her. I wonder how the hell she’s the same woman I used to have dreams about, wishing she’d come back into my life. I just resent her now, because she left me when I most needed her, and she left me to fuckin’ die with those motherfuckers.”61

There was a moment of resounding silence before Dr. Bevan nodded and sighed, writing a few notes down.62

“Have you had any other conflicts with people important to you recently?” she continued with the questions. He was tempted to ask what she was writing, but he refrained, sighing out heavily. This kind of felt good, but he felt like he was stripping himself bare, and he’d never do that. For one, he had too many scars that he was ashamed of, despite the fact that most of them were tattooed over.63

“I broke up with Anna about a year and a half ago and she and I barely talk now, and I’m pretty sure she’s pretty much raising our daughter to believe that James, her new boyfriend, is her father. Which is fine by me. I know I’d be a shitty dad. Hell, for the six months after she was born that Anna and I were still together, I did such a bad job of being a father. I don’t think I should be trusted with kids because of my childhood, y’know? They say abuse is genetic, and I give a lot of verbal abuse. I hurt Sid once, too, when she tried to touch me."64

“Why don’t you like being touched?" 65

“Because, sometimes when people touch me it’s like I feel dirty all over again, like they’re touching me again through them or something, even though I chucked their asses into jail a few years ago by testifying in court. Still, it feels like they’re touching me, and it makes me feel so fuckin’ dirty and wrong and I just… I don’t like that feeling, at all. It makes me feel sick.”66

“How did the court case feel?”67

Kaleb paused before he sighed out, shutting his eyes and letting his head fall back. “It was… one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It was so hard to stand up in front of so many people and tell a bunch of random strangers what they did to me. I just started talking and it all just came out, one long mind-vomit and I’m surprised people understood me through my sobbing.” His voice had gotten quiet until he went silent again, his head falling forward into his hands, fingers threading through his hair. His lip was bleeding by this time, and still he chewed at the broken skin. 68

“How do you think this helped you, getting all of it out in a public arena?”69

“It made me feel really, really exposed, like people were staring at me, looking at me so differently because of what I’d been through. It was like they were watching me with pity. I don’t wa"nt pity, damn it. I just… I don’t wanna be alone anymore.70

The doctor seemed to be working something over in her mind, a curious look on her face. “So you do drugs to make yourself not feel so alone?" 71

Kaleb opened his mouth, about to say ‘no’ but he paused and looked up at her, surprised by her rationale, shutting his mouth again. He’d never thought of it that way, really, but now that the doctor had mentioned it, yeah, that was kind of exactly why he’d started doing drugs. It made him feel not so alone in some strange way.72

“I guess, yeah. I dunno how that works, but maybe it’s just that I don’t… think so much about being alone when I’m high? I mean, it doesn’t occur to me when I’m not thinking about it, and if I’m drugged up I don’t think about much of anything. At least for the first few minutes. Lately my mind has been kinda crazy and I think even more when I do it. It’s like the wiring in my brain got all fucked up and convoluted and it’s doing the opposite of what I want it to do but I can’t fuckin’ stop it. I dunno what to do.”73

“If you were given some kind of alternative, a natural one like working out, would you do that instead of drugs?”74

Kaleb sighed. “I used to work out a lot and it did cut down on my drug use, but lately I’ve been too frantic and shit to even think of doing that. Sex does it too sometimes, but I can’t without freaking out because of what my dad and brother did to me. It makes me feel like they’re right. They used to call me a fag all the time when they’d do that shit to me…” He paused as he saw the look of disgust on the doctor’s face, and he laughed harshly. “I know, hypocrites, right? Anyway, the only person I’d be having sex with is Trent, and I dunno, it’s just weird. If I fuck him, it’s like I’m just like them, but if I let him fuck me it just triggers the memories of when they’d violate me, and I don’t wanna even think about that, especially with Trent, though he really understands. He really just gets it, y’know?”75

“You’re not like them if you’re intimate with him, though. It’s a natural thing, and there’s no violence behind the act, right?”76

“No, never. He’s ridiculously gentle, really, most of the time. Sometimes it gets pretty…” He cleared his throat and ran his hand through his hair, smirking a little to himself as he looked over to the left. “Pretty rough and passionate, but it’s never violent, even though he’s kind of a rough and tumble kinda guy. He likes fighting, like physical fighting, and he works out a lot. Sometimes we’ll just spend the day working out, him doing bench presses and stuff and me just beating the hell out of a punching bag. It’s really helped a lot, doing that, but lately he’s been working a lot so it’s gotten harder. But uh, no, he’s never been violent with me. Firm? Yeah, but never violent. He knows what happened to me. Well, an abridged version anyway.”77

“So you’ve told other people about your past, aside from the court case?”78

“Yeah. Three people: Trent, Anna and Stevie, my twin. They were all relatively abridged and short, but yeah, they know what happened. How could they not? I mean, it’s not like they didn’t leave scars and shit.”79

“How do you feel when you see the scars?”80

“Disgusted. It reminds me of the weakness I felt when they were inflicting the damage on me. I couldn’t fight them back. Unless you’re talking about ones not inflicted by them, then it’s not so bad.”81

”Do you self-injure?” The question was neutral, but the curiosity in Dr. Bevan’s perked brows made him shift uncomfortably as he licked over his lips, tasting the drying blood as he did so.82

“I used to. Haven’t done it in a while.”83

“Why?”84

Kaleb didn’t hesitate to explain because he didn’t want to be judged as a juvenile cutter – he’d seen those around, cutting for attention and whatnot, and he wasn’t like that. “Because it’s a pain I can harness, y’know? I can control it. It’s not like something out of my control that I can’t stop. It’s something that I inflicted and therefore it’s my scar, not theirs. Make sense?”85

The psychologist nodded a little, seeming to refrain from giving her own personal opinion on it. He just shook his head and looked down with a sigh. Psychologists would seem so much more real if they related to their patients on some level, he believed, but who was he to judge?86

“You feel like you have some kind of control when you hurt yourself as opposed to other people hurting you, right?” she asked, and he nodded a little. “Why is that?”87

“Because… when I was little I had no control over anything. I was used and abused as they saw fit, so I couldn’t do anything about it. I was too little to fight back and too scared to stand up to them, so I just let helplessness take over until I was big enough to fight them. They still took advantage of me when I was old enough, because there were two of them. I fought them a hell of a lot, though. I wouldn’t let them take me without a fight anymore.88

“Why did you fight back?" 89

“Because, isn’t that some kind of like, human survival trick or something? Only the strong survive or something. But anyway, yeah, that’s why I fought back. I wasn’t gonna let them take my life just because they were a bunch of sick fucks who liked playing with me when I was younger, too young to understand. I wouldn’t let them get away with that shit.”90

Their conversation turned toward less deep questions, more superficial. He’d noticed the doctor liked to wind down their sessions this way, letting him down easy, he supposed.91

“How do you think it went today?” she asked him. This was a staple as well, but maybe she was trying to establish some stability into the chaos of his reliving of what had happened to him in the past.92

“Okay, I guess,” he replied. It was the same reply she’d gotten the first and second time, but there was a bit more conviction behind the first word than there had been before. He actually kind of felt like maybe they’d accomplished something during this session. He honestly felt a little lighter as he bid her goodbye and stood, walking out with a promise of an appointment the week after.