Static Electricity | Sam and Colby

Fifteen - LAST CHAPTER

It's like a movie.

Sam can see everything clearly, watches Colby run himself into the ground. He watches his oldest friend fall over and over again because he can't really do anything to break the vicious cycle they all find themselves in. It doesn't help that the other housemates seem oblivious to the tattered conversations between the two Kansas boys.

Brennen doesn't come around again and Colby seems to replace Sam in everything. The blonde can't find it in himself to care. Colby had shut it down, thrown back everything in his face so why should he bother?

But it's hard to sleep at night and Sam often stares at his roof in the dark until the sun checks on him and encourages him to get up and do something. He drifts through each day just watching everything he'd worked to build burn away in front of him.

It dawns on him one night when he tosses and turns in bed, searching for sleep, that he is the broken toy that everyone's outgrown. It's not YouTube, it's not the mansion, it's him and that breaks his heart because if they've outgrown him then he really has nothing and nobody.

When he finally sinks into an exhausted oblivion, he dreams of the past. He dreams of marching bands and Vines and saxophones in shopping malls. When he wakes up a few hours later, his cheeks are damp and his heart is beating so hard he's sure it's going to wake someone up. He curls into his pillow until well past noon and then he stands and stares at himself in the mirror.

He's too skinny, his face is hollow and gaunt. He really is a broken toy and there's no fixing him now.

He's past saving.

God he's tired. It pulls at him, bounces around his head until there's a throbbing headache and he can't think straight. He wants to sleep and sleep and sleep and yeah, maybe he doesn't want to wake up. It's tragic but so is Sam so he guesses that it all balances out.

He trudges back to bed and he stays there until the moon and the sun play tag and it's a new day.

He's been absent from YouTube for too long, vanished from social media and he should do something about that, he knows he should be, but he just can't. He can't bring himself to be Colby, to slap a band-aid on a broken window and say it's fixed. He can't do that. He can't smile for the camera and pretend that his life is sunshine and rainbows.

He can't do it.

And maybe that makes him weak, maybe that labels him a wimp. Maybe he should be more like Colby but he's honestly so far past caring that he just wishes he can't feel a damn thing.

He's angry suddenly, mad that he's forced to live a plastic life full of plastic friends and glass emotions. One wrong move, one sharp word and things fall down around him. He's in a house of cards and he's a gust of wind.

Crash!

He's out of the house before the last shards of his broken mirror touch the floor.

And when Corey goes to check on him a few days later, all he's given is an empty room littered with glass. There's a note taped to the window that Corey doesn't read because he's too busy calling for everybody else.

"When did he leave?" Corey wonders.

"Sam's been gone for a long time," Aaron answers quietly. "We'd been left with a ghost and now that's gone too."

Nobody says anything else when Jake reads the note out loud and nobody comments when Colby stops talking to them because really, Sam had been the one to hold together the facade and nobody had the heart to stick a band-aid on a broken window and say it was fixed.

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