The minute I step into the hall, the pungent scent of weed smacks me in the face and my thoughts immediately drift to Hudson. A sharp ache of what might have been shoots through my chest, causing my breath to hitch and my entire body to tense. God, what the fuck has happened to my life?
Continuing my path to the laundry room, I casually glance inside Beckham’s room as I pass by, expecting to find him with one of the other Half Pipe waitresses he’s had on rotation. I freeze when my gaze lands on the crystal blue eyes that haunt both my days and my nights. Shockwaves rip through me, tearing me apart at the seams.
Hudson.
She’s here.
In his fucking bed.
I blink, enraged, and then my fists are pounding Beckham’s face over and over again. There’s a roaring sound filling the air. Me? My eyes focus and I realize what I’m doing, but I don’t stop. I can’t. How fucking dare he touch her? He’s not fighting back anymore, but I continue, my arms relentless. I feel nothing, say nothing, just bury my knuckles into his limp body again.
A piece of blond hair drifts across my eyes and I pause, shaking my head furiously. Hudson is clinging to my back with her lips pressed to my ear. I exhale harshly, trying to hear her words through the haze.
“…have to stop. Caleb wouldn’t want this…”
His name. Coming from her sweet voice.
My arm is pulled back, ready to strike again, and I freeze, suspended in indecision.
My eyes race over the scene in front of me.
Blood. Deep, dark red. Everywhere.
Beckham’s face.
The bed.
The floor, where we ended up.
My hands.
Caleb.
His body, his head, floating in a crimson pool of blood.
Dead.
Yanking my arm away, I shrug Hudson off me and stagger backward, my trembling hands raised in surrender, overwhelmed with memories. Tasha rushes past me to Beckham’s side, hyperventilating as she checks on him, and as I retreat into the hallway, my eyes lock firmly on Hudson’s thin frame. Kneeling on the floor, her shoulders hunch with despair as sobs rack through her body. Her focus is neither on me nor Beckham. Instead, she’s staring down at her hands resting on her lap and the shattered cigarette case lying flat in her palm.
“Hey, man. Sorry I had to bail on you the last couple of nights. I had to take care of some things back home.” Rory offers an apologetic smile as I approach the bar, my mind still encased in a dense fog. “Brody said you were looking for me. What’s going on? You look like shit.”
I sit on the stool and stare at him, but say nothing. It’s all I can do to not breakdown right now.
“Crew? You all right man? What happened?” he asks sharply, leaning over the bar toward me.
“I need…I was wondering, uh…” Fumbling over my words, I stop and shake my head, attempting to clear my thoughts before starting over. “I’m looking for a place to stay for a little while, and I was hoping I could crash on your couch. I’ve got a little money saved up, and I don’t want to waste it on a hotel while I try to figure out where I’m going permanently.”
“You plan on sticking around here, man, after everything that’s happened? You’re not going back to Texas?”
I hesitate, opening and closing my mouth. “There’s nothing back there for me,” I finally manage.
“Something for you here?” He cocks his eyebrow with interest.
Hudson’s face flits through my mind and my heart lurches painfully.
“Not anymore.” I grip the hair by my temples with my fists, my head suddenly pounding.
He glances down at my bloody knuckles, which I tried to wipe off with a napkin in my car, and sighs heavily. “Did you do anything that’s gonna land you in jail?”
I shrug. “I guess if he wants to press charges it’s a possibility.”
“Whose blood? Yours?”
I can’t help the smirk that tips the side of my mouth. “Beckham’s. I’ve been staying at Tasha’s.”
Without bothering to hide the scowl on his face, he slams his hands down on the polished wood and releases a string of curses, garnering the attention of the handful of customers in for an early lunch. “Fucking shit, Crew. What did I tell you about messing with that girl?” he roars. “I warned you repeatedly, and yet you still ignored me. I knew…I knew when you left here Monday, something just like this would happen. I wasn’t trying to be a cock-blocking asshole. I was trying to be your friend.”
After hushing him and glancing around, I give him the short version of what happened. After staring at me in silence—judging me, I know, but I deserve it—he sighs and slides a bottle of water over to me and opens one for himself, swallowing nearly half of it in one gulp.
“I’ve got a spare couch for you, but you’ve gotta get your shit together, Crew. My life here is drama-free, and I really fucking like it that way,” he says more calmly, though his tone is full of conviction. “I know what happened to your brother really fucked you up. I can’t even pretend to imagine how you feel, but you’re spiraling out of control and don’t even realize it. You need to stop being so goddamn selfish and face your demons. What happened was an accident. You could spend the rest of your life playing What If, but the truth is you’ll never know, so stop punishing yourself and the people who love you. Your mom has already lost one of her sons. Do you really want her to lose both? Is that what Caleb would want?”
His last sentence echoes in my head as I choke on the shame thickening in the back of my throat.
Is that what Caleb would want?
Is that what Caleb would want?
Is that what Caleb would want?
I have to get out of here. He’s right; it was past time to man up. “I gotta go, but I’ll be back to take you up on that offer,” I call out over my shoulder, bustling toward the exit with one destination in mind. My family’s apartment.
My confidence shrinks with each passing mile, and by the time I’m fitting the key inside the lock on the front door, I’m moving at a snail’s pace. I don’t know if I can do this.
All of the moisture disappears from my mouth as I let myself in, the stale smell of death lingering in the frigid air. Sluggishly placing one foot in front of the other, I eventually make my way down the hall to Caleb’s bedroom and stop in the doorway, sucking in a deep, agonizing breath as my eyes dart around the small space.
Looking around, I can’t comprehend it’s been almost four weeks since my little brother fell and cracked his skull open during a seizure, which eventually led to him bleeding to death. The autopsy showed therapeutic levels of marijuana in his system, so we’ll never know what went wrong. The autopsy showed he died of blood loss, but the lack of marks on his hands indicate he was unconscious by then. If he’d be clawing his way to the door, there would have been evidence. Mom found comfort in that. I didn’t. I should have been here.
The floor has been scrubbed of the sea of blood and the bed has been remade as if it’s waiting for him to return anytime now. All of his personal things remain on display, and his clothes still hang in the closet.
Robotically, I inch into the room, an onslaught of raw emotions raining down on me with every painful step. Breathing normal is fucking impossible as the tightness in my chest intensifies, the memories associated with everything I see overwhelming. Irrepressible tears fall freely down my face, and I don’t even bother wiping the wetness away.
Bending down next to his beanbag chair, I pick up the video game controller and trace my fingertips over each of the rubber buttons, sobbing as I think about how many hours Caleb spent with this in his hands. It would’ve been at the top of his list for most prized possessions.
After I return the plastic device to where it was, I stand up and walk over to his dresser, where the black Denver Broncos beanie he bought in the airport when we first landed in Colorado sits. Lifting it to my face, the refreshing scent of the shampoo we’ve always shared inundates my nose, and I remember him telling m
e the shampoo was a chick magnet.
“No girl can resist the just-walked-through-a-waterfall smell. They all want to touch it and play with it while they rub their boobs against your arm,” he’d claimed with a shit-eating smirk plastered across his face.
I chuckle lightly at the memory. God, that kid was something else. Everyone loved Caleb. His smile and easygoing attitude were infectious, and more than anything, he was genuine.
Setting the hat down, I open the top drawer of the chest and, not surprisingly, I find two perfectly folded stacks of t-shirts, the way Mom always organized our clothes. I pull a few out and images of him wearing each of them appear in my mind, a big, goofy grin spread across his face every time.
When I go to pull the next one out, something shiny in the back of the drawer catches my eye, and I hurriedly move the rest of the shirts out of the way to see what it is. A loud laugh erupts from me when I find a handheld vaporizer, a small sack of weed, and a lighter. My little brother kept a secret stash that all of the cops and detectives who had been here didn’t even find. After they found no sign of forced entry or foul play, and the autopsy didn’t show anything suspicious, the case was officially closed as an accidental death.
Moving from the dresser to his bed, I lean against the mattress as I pick up the framed picture from his nightstand of him, me, and our mom from South Padre Island two summers ago. Three tanned, smiling faces stare up at me, standing in front of our beachfront hotel, and even though we were already dealing with Caleb’s diagnosis, we were blessed to have each other.
Is that what Caleb would want?
I hear the question again in my head, and the answer is now resoundingly clear. Caleb would want us to be happy, like he was every single day of his life, no matter what he had to deal with. He’d want us to not hold back from life, to give it our all. And he’d want us to remain a family and always be there for each other.
No matter what.
Especially now, when we need each other the most.
Holding tight to the photo, I pull my phone out and text my mom, asking her to meet me here when she gets off work. Thankfully, she replies in less than thirty seconds, agreeing to show up after her shift, and I blow out a relieved breath. Glancing at the clock, I realize she won’t be home for several hours, so I pull the beanie on my head, grab the pot, and plop down on his beanbag chair, where I smoke and play video games, feeling closer to Caleb than I have since he died.
I fail the history final. I fail the history class. And after one semester in college, I’m officially on academic probation. Too bad I don’t care.
My organized, well put-together life, where all I needed were my plants, my family, and overindulgent Sunday dinners to be happy, is a thing of the past. None of it seems to matter anymore.
When Caleb and Crew walked into my life, colors changed from light pastels to bright and bold. Now that they’re both gone, I didn’t simply return to where I was before, but I’m even worse off, trapped in the flat world of black, white, and grayscale. It’s almost as if the universe played some cruel, sick joke on me, somehow knowing exactly how attached I’d get to them, only to watch and laugh as they were ripped away.
Fuck the universe.
Fuck stupid history classes that have no relevance in my life.
Fuck that skank Tasha and her stupid fire crotch.
Fuck Beckham and his conniving ass, who knew what he was inviting me over to witness.
Fuck Crew for making me fall for him and then for leaving me a shattered mess.
And if whoever is knocking on my bedroom door doesn’t stop soon, fuck them too.
“Hudson, come on. We’re all waiting on you to open presents,” Brighton calls out from the hallway, jiggling the locked knob. “Denver’s about to lose his mind, and Grams is almost as bad.”
Christmas morning. The best morning of the year, without a doubt. I’m usually the first one awake and waiting in the living room, not even needing any caffeine to be bouncing off the walls with anticipation and excitement.
But not today.
It’s seven-fifteen and I’m still in my bed, under the covers, groaning at the thought of getting up and pretending I’m happy for the holiday. For the last couple years, I’ve been the one in charge of planning the day-long festivities, but with finals and everything that happened with the Elliott brothers this year, I didn’t have it in me.
Fuck the festivities.
The last eight days were spent either stoned and sad or sober and angry. Someone else must be doing my chores, ‘cause I haven’t. Life is moving on around me, but I’m just in the corner, watching it all pass me by, uncaring. My family checks on me, bringing me food and water like I’m a pet who needs taking care of—and maybe right now I do. I’m just numb.
“It’s time to get up, sweet pea. Enough is enough.” My dad raps his knuckle against the door and the unusually stern tone in his voice tells me not to ignore him.
I swing my legs over the side of the mattress and shuffle over to the door, unlocking and opening it to a smile spread across his face that contradicts the impatience I just heard.
“Merry Christmas, Hudson,” he booms, leaning in to kiss my forehead. “We’ll give you a few minutes to wash your face and brush your teeth, but we need to start opening gifts. Mom and Grams need to get over to the lodge to cook breakfast for the guests, and the rest of us all have jobs today. Yours are listed on the board in the kitchen.”
Nodding, I continue on to the bathroom without a word, and as soon as I close the door behind me, I cringe at the sight of my own reflection. Shit, I look rough. My unwashed hair is stringy and tangled, dry skin clings to my high cheek bones, more noticeable now than ever, and the purple-tinted half-moons under each eye make me look like I haven’t slept in a week, only the truth is I haven’t hardly gotten out of bed in that long. If I didn’t know better, I’d think I had the flu. But I’m not sick.
I’m heartbroken.
Somehow, I manage to make it through the morning round of presents from my family and Santa, saying thank you and smiling appreciatively at all the proper times. I don’t even recall what I got. Clothes, maybe? A CD? Nothing of importance. Nothing that can compare to what I’ve lost. Nothing can fill the empty void.
Breakfast with the resort guests is a fuzzy collage of different faces and names, none of which I’ve previously met since I’ve been holed up in my room. As one of my responsibilities for the day, I’m on clean-up duty in the kitchen afterwards, and I honestly don’t mind much as long as I don’t have to stay out in the dining room with the others, pretending to be having a good time.
“You feel up to helping me do the side dishes for dinner tonight?” my mom asks warily when she comes in to check on my progress with the dishes.
I glance up at her from the skillet I’m spraying down and give her a brief nod, instantly berating myself for the nervousness she feels around me. Now that I’ve tempered my hatred for the world with half a joint, my mood has shifted to dejected and desolate. I never knew it was possible to feel so alone and empty, all while being surrounded by people who love you.
“Yeah, I’d like that,” I clip out, trying hard not to be a complete asshole of a daughter. It’s not my family’s fault I feel the way I do, and I know everyone’s been pulling my slack around here lately. “What time do you want to get started?”
Her mouth tilts up in a small smile as the corners of her honey-colored eyes crinkle with delight. The elephant of despair raises one of its feet off my chest, relieving a small amount of the tension threatening to crush me at any given moment.
“Let’s see,” she checks her watch, then looks back up at me, “it’s almost eleven-thirty now, and everyone’s supposed to arrive at the house around six. How about three-thirty?”
Again, I nod. “I’ll run over to the greenhouse and grab some fresh produce and herbs beforehand.”
“Sounds good. Maybe I can even corral Cheyenne and Brighton in to join us.” Clapping her hands together
and bouncing on her toes as if getting me to agree was a huge accomplishment, she spins around to leave, but right before she walks out of the kitchen, she stops and calls out over her shoulder. “Don’t forget to plan for fourteen or fifteen when you’re measuring portions.”
“Fourteen or fifteen? Who all is coming?” I drop the sponge and stare at her, confused. Christmas dinner has always been something we do as just a family.
“Uncle Danny stayed in town this year instead of his usual beach vacation, and he’s bringing a lady friend.” As her eyes then fall to the floor, so does the unease in my gut. I already know I’m not going to like her answer to my next question.
“So that makes twelve. Who are the others?”
The long pause slams into me, stealing my breath as I wait for her confirmation.
“Mary and Luke are coming too. Neither of them has any family here,” she replies, biting her worried lip.
“And?” That single word whispered from my mouth overflows with equal parts desperation and hope, and I hate myself for even asking. But I have to know.
Pity washes over her face as her shoulders sag forward. “Mary said he may show up. She wasn’t sure, but seemed hopeful.”
My throat constricts with an onslaught of sobs, but I force them back, refusing to breakdown right here. “I’ll plan accordingly,” I respond curtly, and then press my lips in a tight line as I return to what I was doing.
Twenty-seven minutes later, once I’m back in the secure solitary of my own room, I cry my own Colorado River as I smoke the other half of my morning joint, unable to decide if I’ll kill him or kiss him if he shows up.
Trying not to try too hard is the hardest fucking thing I’ve ever tried to do.
I’ve pulled damn near every article of clothing out of my closet, torn as to whether or not to fix myself up—to look great and show him what he’s missing out on, or to come out in mismatched pajamas and be honest about what a disaster my life is after losing Caleb and him. Finally, I settle on a solid red, V-neck sweater and a pair of new skinny jeans I’d received from my parents this morning, hoping, if nothing else, they’ll know I'm appreciative of their gift. My hair goes in double braids and my makeup is light, just enough to bring a little life back into my face.