Part 13
Eva:
It keeps getting more dark by the minute. It's getting more creepy than ever.
Yeah! A lot of people are saying that!
and It's only gonna get darker and creepier as it goes
Carolyn:
Alex on a motorcycle.......I'd like to see that.
Yeah, I would like to see that too!
Isabel's dreams were heartbreaking.
Yes, they are
There hard for me to write but there harder for me to watch too.
Jim's not doing so good......so Kyle just joins in and has a drink.
No... the Valenti boys are not doing good and in this part, you'll see Kyle sink even lower than his dad.
Eve:
Alex isn't dead
but Liz thinks he is and it's not good, because she is ready for everything! Even the worse...
And these men, certainly alien hunters or even worse...
And Max, well, I don't know what to think about... he is in between and obviously doesn't know what is going on...
You'll see how Liz AND Max deal with investigating into Alex's death. Those men... aren't good people.
A/N: Hello, Everybody! I'm back... but only just to post this part.
Unfortunately, I no longer have a computer to work on my story with. I had a good friend who recently passed away and he allowed me to use his personal computer to write my stories with... but now that he's passed his family has taken back his computer and decided to give it to another family member.
So, I won't be able to post anything new for awhile until I can find a way to get my own computer. I'll try to come back as soon as I can.
The song featured in this part is 'Go First By Rose Cousins play when you see
-/-/-/-/-/-/-
Alex didn’t think it was possible, but Stark was an even smaller town than the one that he had just passed through. The population barely cleared a hundred...and the ‘Welcome to Stark’ post board wouldn’t have made him feel any more welcome if it been written on a chalkboard in big bold letters with different colors for each word...and the town itself had the atmosphere of a place where people with nothing left to lose would came to die. It looked barren, void of any life. He was afraid that if he breathed too hard, it might just crumble into dust and blow away in the humid wind.
He raised his eyebrow over the rim of his sunglasses, licking his lips. It was no wonder that, when he had looked online, all he had been able to find was a blue, red, and white striped postcard with the word “Stark’ stamped on it to send to Tess… because if they had shown what the town had really looked like, nobody in their right mind would ever go there.
He wouldn’t be surprised if a tumbleweed came rolling right past him at this very moment. He almost
expected one to. Sighing, he took off his sunglasses. He didn’t seem to need them anymore. He was pretty sure that the town hadn’t seen the sun in years.
He stuffed them in the front pocket of his denim jacket and continued to stare at the bleak scenery before him. Why he had chosen to come to this wasteland to wait for Tess’ call was beyond the cusp of his mental capacity. He guessed the idea of a place that he had never been to before had had an overwhelmingly appeal to him when he had made his plans to leave. He was kind of glad that Stark looked like the personification of death captured in a tiny box of a town…at least no one would think to search for him—or any other possible living soul for that matter--in a place like this.
He swung a small knapsack over his right shoulder. He had stolen it about four days into his travels when deciding he was going to abandon the small duffel he had originally had with him back in Santa Fe. It had been too much of a hassle to carry it around..and decisions were made in order of what was the best course of action to keep him moving towards the next town. So the duffle bag went...and knapsack became his new travel companion.
He had been walking for about thirty minutes when he came across a ratty, old diner just on the outskirts of the town's Main Street...and like everything else in Stark, the small café was falling apart into nothingness.
The building’s paint had begun to peel off in odd places. Its sign—which was supposed to read
Lulu’s Special Links Café above the entrance—had letters missing, fading away...making it difficult for him to read. But he didn’t need to understand the sign to know that he was in the right place. It was the only place within a hundred miles that had a beaten up payphone installed on the side of the building with the number 541-222-0919 printed on it.
He grinned tiredly. He was finally there. He had found what he had been looking for.
Relieved and a bit excited, he rushed towards the payphone, dropping his knapsack on the ground next to him. It was an old thing… so old that there was an actual electric cord sticking out of the bottom of the receiver instead of the metallic kind that were on payphones nowadays. He kind of admired that He liked the nostalgic feel it evoked in him. It was the only thing that actually stood out in this black and white town.
He ran his finger along the outlines of the wire cord, feeling a small snag in the plastic line. He groaned aloud. He might have found the payphone that he was looking for... but he wasn’t so sure that it would actually work. Even if the snag in the line turned out to be nothing to worry about, it was still an old pay booth.There was still a risk that it might have been disconnected...or had stopped working a long time ago. It looked like people of this town hadn’t used the phone since the late forties.
He groaned again; his plan was beginning to unravel right in front of him.
This couldn’t be happening. He needed this phone to work. He had prayed that this phone would work… his life and of those around him depended on it.
“Admiring that payphone, boy?” an unfamiliar voice asked him, causing every muscle in his body to tense up. His senses began to work overtime as fear gripped him.
It wasn't possible! How did they found him?
He had been so careful to cover his tracks.
He slowly put his left hand back into his jean jacket, reaching for the small gun he had stuffed in the inside pocket. He cocked it, turning around...ready to fire through the fabric of his jacket...but he rolled his eyes at himself instead when he came face to face with the person behind him. It was only a worried patron coming out of the diner.
He wasn’t one of
them.
Get a grip! He put the gun back on safety and turned back towards the payphone.
“You looking to use it?” The man asked politely.
“Does it work?” He asked back, scraping off some of the dirt and grime that had collected over the numbers of the payphone.
The man quirked an eyebrow and reassured him, “Damn, right it does,” he said proudly. “It’s the only phone in all of Stark that gets enough reception that allows us to call outside of town.”
He nodded briefly, satisfied… but there was still a question he needed to ask. “Can it receive calls too?” The man gave him a look of suspicious at his question...and Alex had been sorry he had to ask it. The guy probably didn’t see many outsiders…especially not those who were as young and odd looking as he was...standing there, asking so many questions about a damn payphone.
“Yeah, I guess. If the person knew the number,” the man answered, before asking his own question. “You got a job, boy?”
“No.”
Why did it matter? He won’t be there long enough to work anyway.
The man nodded his head.
“Why don’t you work for me at my convenience store just down the block a piece?” the man asked, smiling at him.
He stopped rubbing the numbers above the telephone and turned to face the man again, his face knitting in confusion.
“Why?” he asked, curious.
He was the one suspicious now. If he had learned anything in his short time of living, it was that nobody offered anything for free. There was always a price to be paid… and he wanted to know what this man’s price was upfront.
“Why not?” The old man gave him a puzzled look, like he was stunned by his caution. He rolled his eyes. Wasn’t he just as the suspicious of
him just a moment ago?
“Because you don’t even know me,” Alex replied, disgruntled. Was everyone so dense this far up north? “I could clock you over the head with a lead pipe and steal all your money from the cash register for all you know.”
The man laughed....actually laughed at him.
Fuck you!He sneered.
“I don’t think so, boy. I can tell you’re not the type,” the man said, laughing even more when he scoffed. “Besides, you seem like a polite enough fellow...and you look like you need the money to save up to get on out of here.”
The guy definitely wasn’t a good judge of character...and he had a fucked up sense of logic…but he was right about one thing. He did
needthe money.
“I’m expecting a call anyway, so I’ll work for you.” He paused, staring at the payphone again. “But only for a month. I don’t stay anywhere longer than a month, understood?”
“I got you,” the man mumbled, offering his hand. “I’m Frank, by the way. What’s your name, kid?” Frank asked, still smiling… at a complete stranger. Alex couldn’t shake the sense that it was more of a leer than a smile. He felt his stomach drop. He had a feeling that there was something deeply wrong with this guy. Something that made him want to politely take back his offer and run the other way, maybe he should have fired his gun anyway.
There was something was wrong here, but he didn’t know what. The man was being too polite to him, offering him a job like he had.
Alex shook his head. He was being paranoid, wary…waiting for the sky to fall. Life on the run did that to him. He was wound up tight. He needed to remember to chill out and relax, not everybody was out to get him.
Besides, what could possibly be wrong with someone willing to offer a good job to a guy who looked like he was strung out on meth... and smelled like he hadn’t showered in days? He was just being a Good Samaritan There should be more people like Frank in the world.
“Alex,” He said after a few moments. The man's smile widened at that...and Alex decided there was no harm in smiling back.
“My name’s Alex.” He repeated, shaking the guy’s hand.
-/-/-/-/-/-/-
Breathe in. Inhale.
Breathe out. Exhale.
Breathe! Just breathe!
Isabel felt as though the room was swimming beneath her eyelids. Everything within her line of view had become unfocused...unbalanced. Breathing was no longer involuntary for her; she had to work to keep her lungs full of oxygen to keep herself alive. Nothing significant could register in her brain...colors kept washing in and out of view, flashes of a starry-light sky floated in and out of her head, replacing the darkness of her room.
She was beginning to forgot the ability to distinguish the difference between reality and her dreams anymore. She was in a never ending nightmare…forever crying herself to sleep...and screaming herself awake. She couldn’t do anything but stare at the ceiling above, willing herself to keep on breathing...hoping that she would finally succumb to the darkness slowly creeping up inside of her.
The light of the glow-in-the-dark stars glued to her ceiling slowly began to overwhelm her sight, temporally blinding herl. Its starry yellow glow was coming and going out of her line of sight...before finally making sense to her again. She could still remember the day she had gone out and bought them; this fake star system that now lit her room.
It had been a week after she had stargazing with Alex in Frasier Woods. She couldn’t remember why she had bought them...nor did she understand the need for her purchase. It had been an impulse buy on her part, almost like something beyond her will had caused her to buy those pretty little stars to light her room... didn't even realized what she had done until she'd walked into her room and pulled them out the bag, and two dozen plastic little stars fell into her soft hand.
She guessed it was a part of her that she had wanted to preserve, a feeling to keep for all eternity...her mind forcing her to confront a part of herself that felt indefinable; the feelings she felt for the strange, lanky boy named Alex Whitman, who was quickly becoming her anchor. Her feelings had grown deep, even back then...slowly becoming a seeded longing in her heart that made her stop cold whenever she saw a star in the sky, that had made her realize that the stars on her wall paled in comparison to the feeling she got when she sat out in the cold November air to stare upon the stars filling the Roswell sky. It was the only feeling within her that was constant and pure in her life.
But even that had seemed to have gone rotten, hadn't it? She no longer yearned for that feeling. She resented it now, wishing it to fade away along with that piece of her heart that had once stored it. She no longer became paralyzed by the stars in the sky...no longer prayed for them to shine bright for her to see. She didn't long for a lot of things anymore… except maybe for the boy who had once envoked them....because now the anger was beginning to quickly take over her heart.
Isabel Evans was fading away...and an alien was replacing who she once was.
She shifted in her bed, turning away from the ceiling. The dim yellow disappeared from her field of view, a white sparkle replacing the color in her mind... her left hand twisted the wedding ring that she had slipped onto her middle finger after Alex’s. She could feel the diamond scraping against the edge of her finger. The diamond was small… probably because he couldn’t afford anything bigger… but it still drew enough blood that begun dripping from her hand onto her bed sheets.
But she didn’t care. She’d just get rid of the sheets in the morning. It was just vital to feel something right now…
anything… besides the deep and invisible prodding sting of anger consuming her soul. She needed the pain to fill up her every sense...distract her from the unbearable pain in her heart… even if this pain was pale in comparison… but as she felt the diamond tear into her flesh she began to understand something. The kind of pain that took over the other was keeping her human. It was keeping her from turning any further into the animal she feared she was… the
memory of Vilandra….the person she was afraid she would one day become-- that kind of monster that Maria had thought that they were back in the earlier days of their friendship.
So she kept using the ring as release...as a new anchor. The pain the diamond caused her was the only link left to her human half. She slowly began to breathe on her own again, the chanting in her head dying down. Colors stopped swimming in and out of focus...and she could tell that she was no longer in a dreamland...but back in her life, in a reality that she had worked hard to build...one that she understood. It was crazy that it took a ring that would never fulfill its purpose to make her feel sane again. It was sad that her nights… her life… had came down to staring at her ceiling in a haze, unable to tell what was the dream and what was reality. It was a wedding ring of the boy who might have been her husband… if things had been different, if God had been merciful… that kept her from breaking down completely and going insane.
The person she was turning into was holding onto the past...and slowly letting go of her hook on reality. Day by day its grip was inchinb out of her grasp… until there was nothing left but the husk of what she used to be, what she could have been. She realized, with a surreal sense of horror, that she didn’t mind becoming that person too much.
No, she didn’t mind that person at all… not even a little
-/-/-/-/-/-/-
Maria took out her key to Michael’s apartment from her purse and unlocked the door, using her petite body to push it open softly to keep from alerting him to her presence. She was afraid that if he knew that she was sneaking into his apartment after everything that happened earlier, he would tell her to fuck off and never come back.
So she closed the door quietly behind her, slowly creeping through the living room. Her footsteps were muffled by the old shag carpet that the previous owner had laid down in the hallway that led to his bedroom. She was trying to avoid the wood board in the center that always creaked whenever she stepped on it.
She stopped in front of his bedroom, staring at his large and muscular frame. He was sprawled over half of the twin bed...and she vaguely noticed that the bedroom door was left wide open, swinging back and forth softly from the breeze flowing in through the window that he had also left cracked open. It was almost like he had expected her to come over and crawl into bed with him...of this fact, she didn’t have a single doubt.
He snuggled deeper into the bed, probably fantasizing of the ways that she would aplogize to him when she came over. She almost wanted to laugh out loud at that thought, but instead she fidgeted a little in the dress that she had worn to the funeral. She rolled her eyes instead. If he thought that she had come over to apologize for what happened earlier, then he had another thing coming. She hadn’t come over to apologize. She hadn’t even come over to hear him apologize either. She came over because it was time to face reality… to deal with what she had always been happy to ignore...but she couldn’t ignore it any longer, not the tension swirling around them… aeound their group of friends… was unavoidable now. Not when the glue that had always seemed to hold their fragile partnerships together was slowly, and painfully, beginning to come undone.
Things were changing...and it was foolish to deny it any longer. It was like Kyle said. It had really become aliens vs. humans.
"I’m not going to apologize,” Maria whispered into the darkness engulfing his small room...because despite the silence, she could tell that he wasn’t asleep. His breathing was quickening at the sound of her voice...and she could hear him huffing all the way across the room. “There was nothing we could have done…”
Maria could see Michael’s muscles stiffen in anger from where she was standing, his hands balling into fists. She leaned a little against the door frame, waiting to see if he would say anything… but he didn’t acknowledge her presence... and after a few more minutes of uncomfortable silence, Maria continued.
“You had to leave with Max," Maria bit out, trying to sound stronger than she felt in the moment. She felt like she was going to shatter into tiny little pieces at one wrong word, one wrong turn. It was like the
glue that made her a flesh and bone person was beginning to peel away, ready to expose someone that she didn’t even realize had been there beneath her skin. It was almost like she was the alien, not Michael. “And I had to stay with Liz and Kyle.” she breathed, her voice sounding small and foreign even to her own ears.
“Why?” Michael asked suddenly, startling her. His voice was grim and bitter compared to hers. “Why did you have to stay?”
“Because it’s just the way it is,” Maria said, closing her eyes at Michael’s growl, trying to stall the tears threatening to roll down her cheeks. He was still facing the wall, but while his body language had originally been inviting... almost cocky when she first entered the hallway...he now pulled further way from her, silently asking her to leave and not come back.
She sighed, growing frustrated at herself for not being stronger when it came to him...and at Michael for not understanding that he needed to be less stubborn when it came to her. He knew what was coming, what she was going to say...and instead of making it easier on her, he was making it harder… trying to force her hate him.
Maybe he is making it easier.
A deep sadness overtook her. Maybe he knew that if she didn’t hate him by the end of this conversation… then she wouldn’t be able to let him go. Michael was always better at understanding her than she was at understanding herself.
“Just because we have what we have…” she paused, willing herself to go on. “Doesn’t mean that we can just drop what we had before it,” she said desperately, trying to make him understand what needed to happen… trying to make
herself understand what needed to be done.
“All you’ve ever known is Isabel and Max,” Maria reasoned, thankful for the darkness of his apartment. She was pretty sure that she was crying now. “And all I had with A-Alex, Liz, and Kyle,” She could feel her heart tighten painfully at the mention of Alex’s name, her voice breaking a little.
It still hurt too much to say his name. She guessed that it would always be now.
“What are you saying, Maria?” Michael asked. His voice was softer than it had been before. He sounded almost like he was pleading with her for something that she couldn’t give him...that she didn’t know how to.
He stirred in his bed, kicking the sheets off. He started to move a little in her direction, like he'd decided that he'd whether get up and hold her then stay in bed, cold and distant. She wished he'd stayed in the bed.
She put a hand up to warn him off. “What I am saying is…” Maria started again, trying to find the words that she needed. It was like there suddenly were no words to explain what needed to be done… or was it that she just couldn't ’t say them out loud. It was like she was purposely making them float away in her mind so that things could just stay the way they have been between them. “That when it comes down to it, when this war between us all really starts... and lines become drawn in the sand... you will go with Max,” Maria finally explained, her voice hitching. Her lungs gasping for air. “And I will go with Liz." she finished.
She was crying a little harder, unable to hold back. Her body was shaking violently with her barely concealed sobs. “And when this war
reallybegins,” Michael said ambivalently, ignoring the small hitches of dry heaving that filled the air in his bedroom, a fact she was grateful for, “Does that mean that we are over?”
Michael waited.
She moved a little further into his room.
“Yes, Michael,” Maria said between sobs. She was unable to hold herself together anymore. She could feel the tears rolling down her face with abandon. “Yes, I think it does.”
-/-/-/-/-/-/-
Tess was a little ashamed that she was so fascinated by the amber flames blazing before her-- the snap, crackling, and popping ringing in her eardrums was a pleasant sort of white noise. The twigs she had picked up around Frasier Woods...and the firewood she had stolen from the local hardware store on her way out there...were beginning to cave in on themselves in the small pit as the flames continued to eat up the postcard she had thrown into it a while ago. She could feel the heat of the blaze bouncing, reflecting in her eyes.
Her dark blue irises were almost a stark black in the pale moonlight.The warmth of the flames were sending tingles through her body, making her face and her hands fuzzy and hot to the touch. She swore that she felt like she was one step away from catching on fire herself… and she thought she would eagerly welcome it. Welcome the feeling of something tangible, textural....something that she could almost taste, feel roll over her body in chronic waves of relief.
She would finally be able to get what she longed for, a departure from being completely numb… immobile.
She picked up one of the remaining twigs in her stock pile and poked the flame with it, rearranging some of the wood before deciding to throw the twig itself in there as well. She briefly looked up at the sky above her, seeing hints of pink and yellow shining softly down from the sky and onto her face. The cold breeze rustled her hair a bit... cooling her cheeks and making the flame flicker a in the declining moonlight.
It’s nearing dawn. She sighed. It was time to let the flames die down and go.
She needed to head home soon. She was already in enough trouble with Jim Valenti as it was.
Tess had been avoiding having to deal with him when she had snuck out of the house early the other day. She hadn’t wanted to deal with Mr. Valenti’s scolding. She'd barely tolerated his attempts to parent her on her good days. She was grateful to him for a place to stay, but he wasn’t her father... and she couldn’t deal with his acting like he was… not now. It was one of the reasons she hadn’t gone home when she had stormed out of Alex’s room, opting instead to take a long walk deep into the woods and make a fire. She needed to burn the postcard anyway… but it wasn’t the main reason.
No, the main reason was Kyle. She had a feeling that, after what had happened in Alex’s room yesterday, she wouldn’t be quite so welcome back home in Kyle’s eyes. She felt that her presence in the Valenti home would invoke a righteous rage... resentment and judgment in Kyle's eyes, especially considering all the other burdens in his life. She was no longer welcome in Kyle’s heart…or in his life. She had felt when he bore holes into her back with his angry gaze as she walked out of the room with Max and Isabel. She could feel it vibrating off him, ready to weigh her down.
Tess knew that he was angry with her for choosing Max’s side, for putting up with Max’s whole ‘King’ act... for belittling Alex’s life by saying that he killed himself...and she couldn’t fault him for that. He had every right to be angry. She was even a little angry with herself for having done it, for putting so little weight on Alex’s life when it had meant so much to her too but… it was her job. It was what she had to do, what she
needed to do for the plan to work. It was all part of the plan… and she needed to stick with it. And if that included her having to constantly act like a back-stabbing, careless and selfish bitch...then so be it. She was going to get the job done. No matter what she had to do. She owed that much to her friend… and she owed that much to herself.
She breathed deeply, inhaling the fresh air of the wilderness. The pine needles and old sap kindled in the air, the scent wafting up her nose along with the mixture of wood smoke and the morning dew that began to dampen her shoes. She watched, mesmerized, as the fire slowly began to die down to a black and sooty stain in the dirt...the white puffs of smoke evaporating into nothingness, blending into the morning sky.
Sighing with content interlaced into her every bone and muscle, Tess stood up and rubbed her converses against the wet grass of the forest. She couldn’t hide out in Frasier Woods forever. She had to go back...and as the sun slowly began to peek out beautifully over the horizon, beating down softly over the desert dunes and cliffs lining the outskirts of the small woods… she figured it was as good a time as any.
-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-
Michael couldn’t stand it anymore. He could swear he still heard Maria’s violent sobs as she walked out of the room… walked out of his life. Everything that was said, every unsaid emotion still echoing off the walls of his room, filled up the dark spaces of his mind to be replayed over and over again – existing for the sole purpose of torturing him. He couldn’t take it anymore. He was going crazy in his apartment all alone with nothing but his thoughts as his company. It was like he was imprisoned, bound by all the things that he should have said to keep her from walking out his front door… the things that he had needed to say to her, but hadn’t. He was glad now that he hadn’t … because if he had, he was afraid he would truly have nothing left to hold onto.
What was he so afraid of? Why hadn’t he been able to say all the things that he had wanted to say? What had made her so much stronger than he was in that department? For such a powerful creature, he was pretty weak… and he hated it. And he hated her for making him feel that way. She had always made him feel weak…
The sun was beginning to rise, shining in streams through the blinds of his room. He wanted the new day to go away, to stop and turn back to a day where everything made sense to him...back when he didn’t feel like he had died right along with Alex Whitman, back to when he still had Maria as his girlfriend. He wanted to be clueless again. He wanted to go back to being alone, to being blind to the burdens that his life had brought her and all their human friends...because maybe than she would have stayed. If they could just pretend again… be a group again....everything would make sense. He wanted to blame Max for what was happening… but he knew he was just as much to blame in the dysfunction. It often felt like he was more culpable than Max or Tess… and much more than Isabel. But he didn’t want to think about that… he didn’t want to think about anything.
He didn’t want to feel anymore. He just didn’t want--fuck Maria! She was nothing without him. She’d be back… she always came back.
And another thing--fuck Max! He needed to grow a set of balls and deal with the mess that he was creating with Liz. And, most of all, fuck Alex! Fuck him for dying, that lanky bastard! He had to turn the world upside down by killing himself, didn’t he?! Why?! Was his life so fucking miserable that he had to pull a chicken game and get his head severed by a windshield?!
Had it all really been so bad? He shook his head. Did he think about any of us in the end? Were we the last thing he had hought about before he got his brainpan splattered against the interior of his piece of shit car? Did he think about Isabel? Maria… or Liz?
Did he think about any of them?
He sneered. Nobody would think about an alien before they died… not even Maria. He almost wanted to be ashamed for not being more of a man, for not being strong… for not being human. But it didn’t matter anymore. She didn’t matter anymore.
Maybe Alex had the right idea. Maybe he was really that genius that he always proclaimed to be. He'd must have known that everybody dies alone… that we all must be alone to prevent the hurt that would come from being held while taking that last breath. Maybe that was why he didn’t tell anybody that he was in pain… why he drove so far away, so far into the dark of that deserted highway? Why Alex decided to kill himself the way that he did.
He must have known it… because everybody we love leaves eventually. It was the only thing that made sense. It was the only thing that Michael could be sure about. So why prolong the inevitable? Michael was just as alone as Alex… if not more. He was alone in the world as much as the one he had come from. He should be like Whitman, not care about anything anymore. He didn’t think he had it in his heart to. Not after what had happened.
-/-/-/-/-/-/-/
Kyle continued to sing the words to some stupid song that had been nestled in his head for the last week. His voice was lazy, clumsy...every word coming out in half jumbled sentences or incoherent ramblings that were once lyrics to a song. He continued to slur through the chorus, his voice botching the melody around the living room of his house. His words seemed loud to his ears, roaring, almost reaching a deafening scream of a mash pit. He was almost tempted to cover his ears and sing even louder, yelling insane nonsense at the top of his lungs. He drunkenly thanked God that his father was passed out in the other room and couldn’t hear him acting like a fucking jackass. He continued to scream, cuss and be a general stupid ass just for the sake of being able to… just to remind himself that he wasn’t going completely out of his ever loving mind.
Yes, he felt like thanking God endlessly that his father didn’t have to see him like this. His father had enough to worry about...and an equally drunken and idiotic son didn’t need to be one of them right now. Kyle took another swig of the rest of the Jack Daniels he had lapped up the moment his father had slammed the door behind him and passed out. He leaned his head further back in the recliner that Tess had demanded they buy after the whole Christmas fiasco, wishing that his head would stop hurting so much. He hadn’t been able to get rid of the pulsing headache that begun earlier when he was talking to Maria out at the quarry. The alcohol didn’t help things any. He could practically feel his head drowning in the liquor that he had drunk since he got home… but he couldn’t seem to stop consuming it.
He banged his head against the soft fabric of the recliner, to keep his mind off of his headache… but maybe he did it to make his head hurt more, to feel what was in his heart… to feel the pain that he hadn’t known was lurking there until then-- or maybe, most likely, it was just that he had nothing better to do than hurt himself. But something was telling him that none of those theories were right. It was like something was gnawing at his brain, telling him to think harder… to think clearer for longer. He was almost there… he was so close to knowing all the answers. It was like the feeling was instinctively a part of him, as natural as breathing. The answers that he was seeking were a base coat to his whole being.
Kyle shook his head, taking another drink. He didn’t know. It didn’t really matter much anyway. The knowledge that such a dawning realization wasn’t going to change a thing about his life… it wasn’t going to change the fact that he was still yearning for something so simple yet so beyond him. Something he could hold in his hands. A wider understanding of something---
“Fuck that,” he huffed out suddenly, banging the glass bottle against his hip. “Take another drink, Valenti.”
And after a few seconds, he did. There wasn’t any sense thinking on things like that. He'd had enough deep thoughts to last one lifetime. He needed to stick to things he knew and understood– drinking and playing sports. The liquor in his hands was something he knew, that he understood… not some unfathomable thought that seemed to turn to thick puffs of smoke every time he felt like he was close to approaching it. He knew those things didn’t matter…not in the long run. He was still going to be sitting in the same chair, fruitlessly waiting for a girl that would probably never return home if Max Evans had anything to say about it. He still be sitting in a chair, drunk and waiting. It was better to know nothing except what was in front of him, what was in his hands...what he could easily touch. He didn’t need to know the matters of the universe. He just didn’t need to know.
“You shouldn’t go and feel so sorry for yourself, Kyle.” A familiar voice spoke, chuckling good naturedly. Kyle leaned forward abruptly. The glass bottle fell from his lap and onto the floor with a loud thud, breaking into a million pieces...and spilling the rest of the alcohol inside onto the hardwood floor.
That couldn’t have been Tess. That wasn’t her voice; he knew the sound of her hypnotic vocal tones from just about anywhere. He’d be able to stand in the middle of a crowded room and walk toward it without a doubt in his mind… but this voice. This voice was one that was far more instinctive to him, almost like knowing what to do if someone had put a basketball...or a football in his hand after years of not playing the game. This voice was one he had been introduced to on the first day of third grade, when a small and smiley kid had asked him to play on the swing set of the West Roswell Elementary school playground. The voice didn’t belonged to Tess, it belonged to…
“Alex…”
TBC...
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Is a shape-shifter in Roswell again?
Not only the story is dark, but outside too! At least, in Europe...
