Clandestine

seventeen

-diane-

I hung up the phone right after she said the last words. After I put the phone down, I wish I hadn't. Maybe she would have spared me a few more details. Maybe she would have told me whether I would be able to see my father's body and be able to have a proper funeral. Maybe she would have told me who he was fighting so that I could avenge his killer.

Instead, I just have that he is dead.

I consider calling back, but my pride smashes that idea immediately.

So I just sit down and cry.

And cry.

And cry.

I'm going to kill the man that killed my father. I don't care if it was a fight. I don't care if the man won fairly. I don't care if, at that moment, my father deserved what he got. I am going to kill him. He doesn't deserve to live when my father is dead. He had no right to take away my father's life when I needed him so much.

I don't know what I'm supposed to do. My father takes care of everything. Do I call the staff? Do I tell them that they are released from their duty? Do I call all of my father's friends and tell them what has happened?

And what of this house? This sprawling mansion paid by my father's gambling? Surely I can't keep it. I don't have any income. My father's earnings were way too big to even consider forcing myself to get a job.

I'm an orphan now, right? My mother's been dead since I was a baby. Now that my father is dead...

I am alone.

There's no one here to help me. There's no one here to hug me and wipe away my tears and tell me everything is alright. There's no one to even say those cheesy lines that are supposed to make people feel better after someone dies. No one to tell me that 'he's in a better place' or that 'at least he's no longer suffering'.

Because I am all alone, horribly alone, in this terrifying world.

Maybe Marcia Quintana was right. She is right. I am just a kid.

I cry long into the day. The chair becomes stained with my tears and crusted with my snot. I try to grab myself up near noon to go scavenge some lunch out of the kitchen.

I open a cupboard and see that we are out of mac and cheese. I immediately think of how I will have to tell my father and how he'll pretend to have to throw a fit about going to get it.

But then I remember that he isn't here to get my macaroni and cheese anymore or how he won't throw a fit again.

And I pull some bread out of the cupboard and starting crying again. Thinking about my ridiculous joke about the jail bread being full of sawdust. And how happy it made him that his serious daughter had managed to make a joke. Then he told the story about how he got nearly everyone in the jail to throw away their bread, just in case it did actually have sawdust in it.

Where is he right now?

Lying in some cell, dark and alone in his death. Have they already buried him? His body thrown carelessly into the bottom of some hole, dug up by the other prisoners. Maybe they burned him. Maybe his ashes are in the bread.

I throw up on the floor.

I'm too dizzy to clean it up so I leave it and take a cold shower.

But then I start thinking about how he'll never be able to do anything again, things as simple as taking a shower or brushing his teeth, and I nearly throw up again.

I shut off the water and crawl into my bed. I bury myself beneath my covers and pile as many pillows possible on top of my head.

I try to drown out the world and my thoughts so that I can sleep. Maybe if I sleep, I can escape the horrible aching all over my body.

Instead, I just cry.