Well Beyond Expectation

Chapter Six.

Lena

I can't believe he has the nerve to show his smug face again.

I run from the room, not caring a single but that I'm ditching class or what any of those people I'm leaving behind have to say about me. I don't care anymore. Let them laugh at me. What does it matter? What does anything matter anymore. My brother is dead and that asshole just want to walk into school like nothing happened?

Loved him like my own.
His words make me feel sick. He doesn't get to claim that. Especially when it is so obviously far from the truth.

He wants to claim he loved him? I'd love to know where that love was then. Where the hell was Weston when my brother was being shot to death behind that downtown movie theater? Where was he when Beck's heart stopped beating? Where was he when they lowered my brother's body down into the earth while hundreds of people watched? People who barely even knew Beck came and cried over his casket, meanwhile, his best friend was nowhere to be found.

He was off doing what he does. Drinking, partying, and ruining some other person's life. He ruined mine beyond repair. I'll never have a careless day again. My grades have slipped since I couldn't study for my exams and I'm already in danger of losing my scholarship and school just started.

None of it matters anymore anyway. I'll never be getting out of here. I'll be staying here until the day I die, just like Beckham.

I barely make it into the bathroom before I crash against the first wall and slide down onto the cold tiles and cry into my hands. How can this really be happening?

I've asked myself that every single day since that phone call changed my whole life.

My chest aches and I cling a hand to it but the pressure doesn't subside. I'm beginning to think it never will. I feel like I'm suffocating all the time. Like no matter how many deep breaths I take I can't get air into my useless lungs. My eyes burn and my throat clenches around a sob that I try to keep in but lose the battle.

Why did he have to die?

My mind replays that night all the time. A loop of heartbreak. I know I just blamed Weston, and I'd love to believe it full heartedly, but I can't. How can I pass off my guilt on him? If he's in the wrong, so am I. I had just as much responsibility to keep him safe. I did try to make him stay home that night, and it wasn't Weston that drug him back out but Beck himself. I should have tried harder to keep him home, and Weston should have tried harder to watch out for him. I'm just as much to blame for him being gone.

That phone call changed everything.

I remember trying to shake Uncle Terry awake and not being able to get him coherent enough after his mixture of sleeping pills and Jack. I screamed and screamed until my voice was hoarse. I couldn't get him up. I remember I even tried to call Weston, but he ignored the call.

Eventually I'd had to leave Yasmine with my uncle and make that awful drive alone. I can still smell the stench of too many cleaning products in that cold room where my borther's body laid on a thin sheet of metal, a single hole in his chest. His eyes were closed, but I wished they'd been open. I'll never see his eyes again.

"Is this him?" The old man asked carefully but I couldn't answer him. The way I cried over Beckham, my hot tears running off of his cold body was answer enough.

You would think that was as bad as it could get, but then the autopsy came back and the investigation into his murder was all but called off indefinitely.

He'd taken all kinds of things that night. Oxy, Molly, X, you name it, he had it. The police all but called him a drug addict.

They didn't know him like I did.