The Bad Boy and the Brainiac

Chapter 10: A Day in the Past

I remember when I was six and my dad would read my brother and me to sleep. Blake and I shared a room when we were younger, but when my dad would read to us, Blake would also crawl into my bed. My dad would pull up a chair next to my bed, and he would pick one the books on our bookshelf and read it to us. He was the best storyteller. Then, there were the times when he wouldn't read a story but instead would tell us one he came up with. My father always had a way of talking that captured people's interest, and would have them hanging on his every word. I think it was his natural charm and warm-hearted personality that attracted others to himself, including my mother.

I remember some nights, I would sneak out of my room at night and see my parents in the kitchen playing music softly and dancing. I have never seen two people who loved each other so much. You could see the love in their eyes when they would look at each other, slowly swaying back and forth in the dim lighting.

I can remember the day clearly when the police officer knocked on our door. My mom invited him inside and he told us to sit down. And then he said the phrase that will be ingrained into my head for as long as I live to my mother: "I'm sorry Mrs. Case. Your husband was shot while on duty by a drunk man shooting into the crowd. He's in critical condition at the moment." That's when I saw my father, once so full of life, so lifeless as his limp body lay in a hospital bed, hooked up to a heart monitor, tubes attached to his body. I remember seeing his heart beat go flat and doctors trying to restart his heart. I then remember hearing them say, "Vincent Case, time of death 9:34pm on the seventeenth of November."

I also remember when Blake and I were eight, Daniel started playing soccer, so some days after school, we would go to the park and play together. It was obvious even at a very young age that Daniel was going to make it far in the soccer world. Although we would play often together, I never played soccer on a team. I learned later that the sport I preferred was swimming. I began to swim in seventh grade because Daniel encouraged me to. He believed in me and always encouraged me. While I was swimming, he was getting far in his soccer playing. When we started high school, he tried out for the soccer team at our school and was placed on the varsity team as a freshman. By the end of our junior year, he already had colleges scouting him, and he was offered to play on a club team for the summer. That's where he was until now because the program doesn't end till October first, which was yesterday. While he progressed in his soccer career, I had to stop swimming last year because I could no longer go in the water; I was terrified at first to be even within sight of a pool.

Meanwhile while Daniel was playing soccer and I was swimming, Blake had been playing football. He was a natural at it from the start, which is why he has been the quarterback since last year, which is especially unusual because typically, the quarterback is a senior. He funneled his grief into football, which was a source of relief I couldn't get from my sport because of the plane crash. Instead, I learned to funnel my grief into music.

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I remember the day our friendship ended vividly. He had dragged me to a party and had forced me to wear a dress. I don't even know how he had been able to convince me to wear one, but somehow he won. Then again, Daniel always had the ability to convince me to do anything, even if I was completely opposed to doing it. Don't get the wrong idea though, I was very annoyed with him because of it. He just had a way of coaxing me to do dumb things with him. We got into his car and he drove to someone's house, although to this day I don't know whose party it was.

We walked into the house and I followed close behind him as he made his way through the throng of people. We made it to a group of his friends, his soccer friends that is, and he had forgotten all about me. I went to sit outside to get some air because the whole house was packed with people. For an introvert like me, the experience was stressful and exhausting.

Eventually, I ventured back inside the house to find Daniel because I was getting bored and it was getting late. Like I had predicted before leaving, he had ditched me once he had been reunited with his popular friends. Popularity is a stupid concept in my opinion as the second you graduate from high school, it all disappears anyways. Being known as the nerd or as the jock is pointless as no one will remember or care by the time we all enter the real world.

I was scanning through the many people in the packed room, when the main cause of what ruined our friendship came next. He spotted me first and grabbed my wrist as he said, his speech slurred, "Hey babe, wanna come upstairs with me?"

That's when he leaned forward and he kissed me. I pushed him away but he caged me against the wall, both arms next to me and he tried to kiss me again. I ducked under him and ran through the house, far from him. I found a couch on the opposite side of the house in a less crowded part of the house which was a miracle of its own, and sat there for a while. I was replaying what had just happened in my head when a guy came up to me and interrupted my reflective state when he said, "Alex, come quick. It's Daniel."

I followed him into a bathroom where Daniel was laying there. I could tell he had drunken a significant amount of alcohol before when he had kissed me, but he had drunken more since then because my best friend at the time, who was lying on the bathroom floor, had alcohol poisoning. I turned him over on his side so that if he began to vomit, he wouldn't choke.

My fingers shaking, I dialed 9-1-1. I can still remember hearing the ambulance sirens. As they carried him out on the stretched, I asked one of the medics if I could ride in the ambulance with them. The person I asked said no as I wasn't a relative of his, but another medic heard and told him to let me ride since he knew my father as ambulance drivers and medics work often with police officers.

So I watched as his heart stopped beating for a few seconds in the ambulance and that they had to use an automated external defibrillator to restart his heart. I saw them wheel him into the hospital on a stretcher through the emergency wing of the hospital, and tell me to stay in the waiting room. When I was finally able to go see him, the next day after staying at the hospital overnight, he was still unconscious.

That was the day that ended a long friendship. And the worst part of this is, he doesn't really know why we aren't friends anymore. He doesn't understand why we can't be friends anymore, and I think that's what hurt me the most.

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Hi everyone! I hope you had a great thanksgiving. What did you guys think of this chapter? Any thoughts on how things will go between Daniel and Alex? If you enjoyed this chapter, please vote and comment. Thank you, and stay brilliant!