Yellow, Blue, Red, Green, and Grey

Samuel Jonesing

Sam wasn’t very close to his family. Sam wasn’t very close to anything, to be honest. Not since his brother had left him. And by left, Sam didn’t mean his sibling had packed up and gone to live in New York. No. By left he meant dead. Gone forever, cold underground. God, it wasn’t right. His brother was everything Sam wasn’t. Funny, smart, kind, interesting. People had looked to him for leadership, gravitated to him. Sam couldn’t do that, but he hadn’t cared. As long as he was by his brother’s side, maybe one day he’d be like him. He never told Greg any of that though, he’d thought brothers weren’t supposed to say how much they loved each other. God knows his father supported that thought.

It had been a dark night and Greg was driving, his new car that he loved more than anything. Sam remembered, Greg had called it Roxanne. It always used to make Sam laugh, but he wasn’t laughing that night. Greg was taking his little brother home from soccer practice and Sam had started an argument. He couldn’t even remember what it was about now, but he knew it hadn’t been important. Just some stupid argument. He’d distracted Greg, shouting and spitting. It was only a split-second, but it was enough for that truck to ruin Sam’s life forever. He had been in the backseat, besides some cuts on his forehead and arms, he was fine. His brother was a different story. He still remembered the blur of ambulance lights against a black sky and the stricken face of that truck driver but that was all. His therapist said he’d blocked the night out, or at least she had before he started ditching their appointments. How sad was that, Sam’s mind was so weak he couldn’t even remember his last time seeing his brother.

Greg had died two hours after reaching the hospital. Internal bleeding, they said, caused by impact, but Sam knew better. Internal bleeding, caused by him.

He should have died, not his brother. That much was clear. To everyone. His family, his brother’s friends, and himself. And now he was stuck in the same school. Haunted by hallways Greg had walked down, smiling and laughing, not a goddamn care in the world. Pitied by Greg’s old teachers, whispered about by Greg’s old friends. It was enough to drive someone insane, or outsane, as Sam called it. He didn’t talk in class, he didn’t join clubs, he didn’t sit with the rich kids at lunch. He didn’t do any of the things he used to. He couldn’t even be in a car after the accident and now he could only get around on motorcycle. It was the only thing he liked to do, the feeling of flying. Greg would have liked to have a motorcycle.

He thought that in time he would’ve faded out of the school’s social spectrum, but his reclusiveness only made him all the more noticeable. It was almost like a game, who can get Samuel Jonesing into their group first? What they hadn’t expected was that he’d brush them off every time. He was the wonder of every girl who thought he was the typical bad boy and one by one he batted them all away. Well, all but the newest girl, Keely. She didn’t make any kind of flirting attempt, not even when they were paired together in science. Sam was grateful for that, he thought maybe they understood each other somehow. He hoped she wasn’t too hard on good old Moren.

Moren Foxel. Probably the only person Sam would talk to willingly these days. Not his mother, not any girls, definitely not his father. Just Moren. If it wasn’t for the sort of duty he felt towards Greg and Moren, Sam would have hopped his motorcycle and driven across the country months ago. Sometimes Moren tried to get him to talk about his brother, but Sam would always shrug it off. He just couldn’t, he just… Couldn’t. Greg was gone and it was his fault, and the weight of that crushed Sam’s chest. Sometimes he couldn’t breathe, late at night, when he heard the whirring of ambulances and police cars in the night. Or even just in the silence, the suffocating silence of his blank memory.

He joined a gang, in town, for something to do and, because of his status, he soon rose to be their top member. They drove around, causing havoc but Sam kept them on a leash. Moren didn’t approve but sometimes he just needed to do something. Something distracting. And the adrenaline rush of those nights in town was definitely distracting. Those were his hobbies, doing what delinquents did and spending time with Moren. And Boxly-watching. That was definitely interesting.

He wasn’t entirely all that interested in Clarice Framon, Boxly’s friend. She was just another girl who sighed and drooled over Sam in class. She seemed like a nice girl but the way she giggled and tried to catch his eye constantly got under Sam’s skin, not matter that she was the granddaughter of his father’s biggest investor. Boxly, however, was a completely different story. Something about his stoic blue eyes, flicking over to Clarice worriedly every few seconds, intrigued Sam. Moren thought he was strange, as he was probably the only kid in the entire school who hadn’t had a conversation with the curly-haired gamer. And Moren had tried, believe him. He was so small, so thin, and yet everyone gave him a wide berth in the hallways.

In the beginning of the year, when both Clarice and Boxly had enrolled in the school, Sam’s fellow bored-rich-teenager-in-the-town-gang Fredsien had attempted to give Boxly the traditional school greeting. But when he had the kid cornered in the school-yard and everyone had gathered to see the fight go down, it didn’t. Boxly just stood straight, cracked his fingers with a wince, and in the blink of an eye Fredsien was on the ground, moaning and curling into his side. Despite his fragile figure, Boxly was stronger than the most feared bully in the school. Of course, he never actually got into trouble because Fredsien was much too embarrassed to report him, but that was the day the Boxly-watching had begun. The staring in class, trying to figure out what Boxly was, because he certainly wasn’t normal. Moren called it creepy, Sam called it simply another hobby.

But now a year of minor crimes and Boxly-watching was over. Moren’s yearbook was covered in phone numbers that he was to pass onto Sam- Sam never bought a yearbook, not since the edition that featured a picture of his brother on the first page. His father was off on a business trip that would most likely take up the Summer, with possible breaks here and there. His motorcycle was sitting in his garage, waiting to be ridden. This awful year was over and Sam was just looking for a bit of summer distraction.