[King 05.1] Preppy: The Life & Death of Samuel Clearwater PART ONE

by TM Frazier

  He shrugged. “I thought about fucking you too, but I settled for jerking off on you instead. I came all over your stomach.”

  “Fuck you,” I said, only able to muster up enough of my voice to whisper the insult at him.

  “I may have pulled you from that tower, Doc. I may have rescued you from that motel room, but I never saved you. You were never safe.” His phone vibrated and the screen lit up, he looked down and tossed it on the bed that acted as a barrier between us, a bumper for the truth. “Go ahead. Answer it. It’s your dad,” he said, not giving me time to process the new information.

  “How?” I asked as the phone stopped vibrating before starting back up again.

  “He’s been calling for weeks. He wrote you a letter, too. It’s on top of Mirna’s fridge. Blue photo album. He wants you to come home,” he said.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Since the very beginning.”

  “But why?” I asked, but I didn’t know what I was asking. Why he lied? Why he bothered with me?

  Why I let him into my heart?

  Every word he spoke was another bullet being fired at me, but he couldn’t hit every target. His eyelids were red and heavy. His voice was raspy, “Why? Because I needed you to make those documents for me.” He paused. “Or maybe just because I like unconscious pussy.”

  I leapt onto the bed. “You son of a fucking bitch!”

  Preppy moved to the door. “Go the fuck home, Doc. You don’t belong here. You never did.” He didn’t look up when he left, closing the door with such force the cheap plastic blinds fell from the window to the floor.

  He’d slammed the door shut on the room.

  On us.

  On everything.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  PREPPY

  “Where you stomping off to?” Bear asked, catching up to me as I was doing just that, angrily stomping down the shell driveway. He slapped me on the back of my shoulder. “Everything okay back there?” he asked, lighting a cigarette and jerking his chin back toward the garage.

  I was about to snap something back at him, my emotions all bubbling at the surface, a place I hated them to be. My mouth hung open, ready to fire off some sarcastic retort that would have Bear seeing right through me, but I stopped myself and shut my mouth when I saw the concern written all over Bear’s burly face. Or maybe it was pity. Fuck, I’d already caused so much hurt for one lifetime, I could’t stand to see him look that way. So I made a decision right then and there. My shit would be exactly that. My shit. I knew Bear and Grace well enough to know that if they knew how deep things ran with Dre, then they would take it on as their own problem. And for fucks sake, our little family had enough fucking problems to add my shit to the fucking pile.

  I slapped a smile on my face and reached into Bear’s cut, plucking his cigarettes from his pocket and tossing him back the pack after I’d slid one from the pack and lit it. “All is good, man. Just got a call from Patty who runs the GG operation off Sunset Vista,” I lied. “The mister in the grow-room is leaking. Gotta go dry out her hallway runner and fix the leak before her fucking pacemaker stops. Gotta keep the GG’s happy. Keep growing that money.”

  “You sure that’s it?” Bear asked, scratching his head. “I thought that maybe that girl…”

  I cut him off. “That was fucking epic, right? Although, I’m not gonna lie, at one point I think I felt your balls on my fucking leg, dude.”

  “Preppy…” Bear said, still attempting to carry on some sort of serious conversation about my behavior. Wasn’t gonna happen.

  Not then.

  Not fucking ever.

  “At least now I know what to get you for Christmas. A good ball trimmer. Or maybe a wax if you’re into the pain. On second thought, maybe I’ll get waxed, might be something I’d dig.” Bear’s face began to lighten as he shifted his focus from Dre to my ridiculousness. The corners of his mouth turned upward into his signature cocky smile.

  “That’s where you’re really fucked up. You had your fucking cock deep inside a hot chick and you were thinking about my balls? Sounds like that’s your problem, not mine, motherfucker,” Bear teased, punching me playfully in the shoulder. “But hey, any girl who likes to be double stuffed will make a great BBB. She’ll fit in just fine with the brothers.”

  The rumble of an engine started and we both turned to where Wolf was mounting his bike. He rolled up slowly, and it wasn’t until he stopped right next to where we were standing that I realized Dre was on the back. I almost dropped my cigarette, sending bits of red ash flitting around in the darkness when I caught it before it could hit the ground.

  “You move quickly,” Bear said to Dre with a knowing smile.

  “Just getting a lift,” Dre clipped. “I wanted to thank you for my AUDITION,” she said, stressing the word, “to be one of your club girls, but something came up and I decided to go another route.”

  “Okay to give her a ride?” Wolf asked Bear.

  “Shame, beautiful. Could have had a lot more fun,” Bear said. He nodded to Wolf, who revved his engine in response. The look on Dre’s face said everything and made me feel small.

  I’d broken everything into so many pieces there was no way in fuck it would ever be able to be put back together again. So I guess you could say my plan worked.

  But that didn’t mean it wasn’t tearing my fucking gut in two.

  I stayed the course, shifting on my Preppy mask for Bear. I took a deep drag of my cigarette, casually blowing smoke rings into the air. “Real shame,” I drawled. I grabbed my dick through my jeans. “Guess all this man meat scared her off.” Bear laughed and turned back toward the house.

  I felt Dre’s eyes on me until the bike was well out of sight, the engine nothing but an echo through the trees.

  And then she was gone.

  For good.

  Of course, fate is a nasty evil bitch, because it was in that moment, one of the shittiest of my life, after a confusing, yet fucking hot, unexpected threesome with one of my best friends, that I realized that the girl driving away wasn’t just some girl I was saving from my twisted ass.

  She was the girl I was in love with.

  The girl I would always be in love with.

  Until my very last breath.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  DRE

  Hatred is easy.

  It’s love that’s hard.

  It wasn’t the betrayal that hurt the most. It wasn’t the lies or the deceit. It wasn’t even the way he’d made me feel more used than Conner or Eric ever had.

  The way I felt had nothing to do with the bitterness that settled in my throat, so thick I was practically gagging on it.

  No.

  The thing that hurt the most wasn’t the way things ended at all.

  It was the way it all began.

  It was the love.

  I didn’t want it anymore. It shouldn’t of even been there anymore so I wished it away with everything I had, but no matter how much wishing and praying or meditating I did, nothing worked. Even though betrayal had moved in, love refused to pack its bags and get out.

  Fucking squatter.

  I wanted so badly for anger and rage to be my primary emotions and so I focused on his bitter words that ended us. The way he looked at me with no remorse in his eyes. The way the door echoed as he slammed it shut. But I couldn’t stay in the darkness too long, the light always finding its way inside my thoughts, and soon I was remembering the warmth of his skin against mine the first time he touched me, the way he looked at me before he finally kissed me, the way he made me laugh in a time in my life when not a god damn thing in the world was funny to me anymore. No, love didn’t magically turn into hate just because we want it to, because it’s easier.

  I learned very quickly that it turns into something else. Something much much worse.

  A broken heart.

  Little did I know that the real breaking was yet to come and the greatest lesson of all about love, I would be learning all too
soon.

  Love never dies.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  PREPPY

  Mirna’s house had been sitting vacant since that night it all went to shit. I’d still come by from time to time, although I hadn’t used it as a GG since Dre left. All of the furniture was gone. All of the pictures. It had been over a year since Dre set foot in the place, yet I swore I could still smell her there.

  She was happy. She had to be. That’s what I told myself anyway, in order to go through the motions and pretend like nothing was wrong. Her happiness was what kept one foot in front of the other, and the sometimes-fake smile plastered on my face.

  Real smiles came in the form of King getting out of prison and him actually getting a girl. Or stole a girl. However you wanted to look at it. Doe was her name. She didn’t have a memory but she had a great set of tits and an attitude to boot, and I think that she was my friendship-soulmate in a way, although I never told her about Dre. I never told anyone. I told myself I was fine and the plan was to try to believe my own lie until it became true.

  After Dre left town I’d come for my plants. There on the counter was my folder. She’d done it. She’d forged every single document I needed, but it was all for nothing. The judge assigned to the case denied my petition before a hearing was even called. Before I could utter a single fucking word. When the lawyer I was using told me the judge’s name who wouldn’t even grant me a hearing, it all became clear. I actually knew him. Well, I knew his sister. All I did was fuck her in a pool. A public one. With people around, but apparently word had gotten back to him and the cock sucker must not like voyeurism because the gavel crashed down on my case, crushing any hope I had left of saving Max from the system.

  I was high as a kite when I got in my car, and filed the fake docs with the clerk’s office. It wasn’t necessary. It wouldn’t change a damn thing. But I did it, anyway. Maybe because it made her work not for nothing. Maybe because filing the documents made her more than just a memory, it made her real because her time with me seemed more and more like a fading dream.

  But it was all too late.

  In the movies the end of a person’s life is slow moving, each fraction of a second drawn out, seeming more like hours as they take their last breaths and watch the highlight reel of their lives play out before their eyes while some kind of Titanic-esque violin music plays in the background.

  It’s all bullshit.

  Death is quick.

  Too fucking quick.

  I remember walking with my friends to go into the meet with Isaac. On the way I saw this dark haired girl with innocent cheeks, and for a second I thought she was Dre. She was staring at me too, but when Dre’s face faded it was replaced by the wide eyed look of another girl. One I was pretty sure had been on the sharp end of a Preppy/Bear fuck session a time or two.

  The reality of my own death was a searing pain ripping through my gut, followed by a sense of doom as I bled out onto the concrete.

  I didn’t fade away, I dropped out of consciousness with lightening speed. I barely had time to register the horror on my friends’ faces, who all seemed to be floating around above me like they were above the surface, while I was being dragged down to the dark depths below.

  I reached out, wanting to grab them, wanting to hold on to this life.

  But it was too fucking late.

  For most people death was the end.

  For me, it was only the beginning.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  DRE

  Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap…

  Mindlessly, I bounced my pen on top of my open text book in such quick succession the pages vibrated, lifting at the corners. I shuffled my feet, crossing and uncrossing my ankles, wishing away the constant feeling of restlessness that only seemed to intensify with each passing day.

  My desk was pushed up sideways against the only window in the classroom, although there was no view to speak of. Nothing but a brick wall. The small space between buildings was just large enough to allow in the rain that had just started to fall, beading up and sliding down the thick glass. The clouds overhead shifted, casting the already muted light of the room in a wash of gray. With the new lighting the image in the window shifted, and suddenly I was no longer staring at the brick wall but at the reflection of a girl.

  A girl whose hair had begun to shine again, although her ponytail could’ve used a smoothing, the humidity of the day sending every little hair not long enough to be tied in the elastic standing on their tiny curly ends. She wore glasses, simple dark-blue frames. Her complexion was pale, but not sallow. Her eyes tired, but not lost.

  I knew the girl was me, but beyond the clean clothes and classroom setting I saw another girl, just beyond her shoulders. One who was slumped against a wall with a needle in her arm and cum in her hair.

  A girl who was trapped both physically and mentally.

  I shook my head, willing away the image of someone I never wanted to see again. I closed my eyes tightly and when I opened them again, both girls were gone. The clouds cleared and soon my reflection was gone as well, and I was again staring at nothing but an empty brick wall.

  Without thinking, I raised my hand to scratch at an itch that didn’t really exist, with fingernails that weren’t long enough yet to actually do any real scratching. The scabs and pock marks were all gone, but in their place were the raised red scars just starting to take on their shapes, some of them were already turning their permanent shade of white, others lingering at bright red.

  The teacher was a man in his sixties. He stood with his back straight and his head down at the podium. His voice was monotone, with zero inflection, as he read off his lesson plan.

  I took a deep breath and tried paying attention but everything he was covering, about the founding of our country and the Declaration of Independence, I’d learned in the fifth grade. Leaning back in the chair I cross my arms over my chest and since my feet didn’t touch the floor I swung my legs back and forth, accidentally kicking the chair of the boy in front of me.

  “I’m…” I started, but then the kid turned around and the wind was knocked out of my chest when my eyes landed on the familiar, beautiful big smile and the tattoos covering his neck. I gasped, covering my mouth with my hand.

  Impossible.

  “Hey, watch it,” he said, his unfamiliar high-pitched voice bringing me back to reality, where he was just a dark-haired boy with olive skin who didn’t look anything at all like the man I mistook him for.

  “Sorry,” I whispered. The boy turned back around to face the teacher who’d turned off the lights so we could follow his slides on the overhead projector, which was blurry at best. The Sons of Liberty’s heads were all large and skewed, distorted pictures of a probably already distorted tale of American history.

  It wasn’t the first time his face appeared on someone else’s, just like it wasn’t the first time my stomach dropped with my disappointment when I realized it wasn’t him.

  It would never be him.

  Later on that day, I sat in the small cramped office space of Edna Elinberry, my counselor who my dad insisted I see three times a week. One of the many terms of my return home, and one I didn’t really mind all that much. Edna was quirky and kind of funny. Being a recovering addict herself, she could relate to me in a way not a lot of other mental heath professionals could.

  “I saw him again today,” I told her, staring at the books and other knick-knacks on the overstuffed bookcase in the corner. Lord of the Flies was on the top shelf dangling over the edge, one heavy footed passer-by could send it crashing to the floor.

  “Brandon?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. Brandon was someone who’d recently started working with my dad. He’d asked me out a few times and, even though he was good looking and seemed nice enough, I just wasn’t ready to complicate my life in a way it didn’t need to be complicated. “Not Brandon. HIM,” I said, still finding it hard to utter his name without feeling a sense of sickness wash over me. />
  “That happens when we lose somebody we cared about,” Edna said, watering each of the thirty some odd plants in her little windowsill. She wore loose, light-faded jeans with a long, white, ribbed sweater. Her bright red hair was something from the eighties, permed in tight curls and cut longer in the back and short on the top. She had pink lipstick on her teeth at all times. “Especially, one who’d had such a huge impact on your life. It will fade with time.”

  “But…but what if I don’t want it to fade?” I asked, realizing by asking the question it meant that I wasn’t entirely sure that moving on was what I really wanted.

  Edna put down her watering can on the floor and side stepped one of the seven coffee tables in the cramped space, plopping down on the denim sofa and motioning for me to do the same on the one across from her. We both kicked off our shoes and sat Indian style across. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and I copied. When she opened her eyes she asked, “You cared for him a great deal, right?”

  I nodded. “I…he saved my life.” Immediately the words felt wrong. “I think I…no, I KNOW that I LOVED him,” I corrected. “And I just don’t see him when I sleep. I hear him, too. In my head, chatting away and making jokes and being ridiculous…” I trailed off, biting back tears.

  Edna smiled and reached across the coffee table to give me a reassuring pat on my knee. I watched her hand but didn’t jump away, her smile grew brighter. “Dre, when you love someone it’s very common to carry that person around with you until you’re ready to let go. You hear their voice, you think you see them on the street, you dream about them at night. It’s all very normal and a very healthy part of grief. It will fade with time. But only when you’re ready.”

  I bit my lip. “I don’t want him to leave,” I said, surprising myself when the tears welled up in my eyes. Edna side stepped the coffee table and sat down next to me, pulling me in and holding me tight against her ample breasts. Everything about her was comforting, and in a way she reminded me of a younger version of Mirna.