Today’s writing
“I’m not going home.” Caleb said.
“Got a new girl? That was fast,” teased Greg.
Caleb shot him a look of disgust. “I think it’s comments like these that kept us from being friends lately.”
“Ah, come on. Can’t you take a little joke?” Greg raised his opened palms up to his shoulder.
“That wasn’t funny, Not the least bit.” Caleb turned away from Greg and headed toward his locker.
”Sorry!” Greg called out after Caleb.
Caleb wasn’t sure he meant it. Greg had said far too many similar comments since Espri’s death. He knew a lot of the other kids were talking about him, unsure of his innocence, gauging the possibility that he could have murdered his girlfriend. He had heard them whispering, “How mad would you be if you caught your girlfriend with another guy? Having sex, no less.” He laid awake at night wondering if he would be one of the guys making pot shots at someone else if he were not the suspect. It gave him a little more patience with his fellow students, but he knew he’d done nothing wrong. How could all the evidence point at him? Obviously, someone else had been with Espri. Why weren’t they looking for that guy? The so-called consensual sex partner? Bitter tears burned in Caleb’s eyes. It was bad enough that he hadn’t had her, but that she had betrayed him, all the while he was saving himself for her out of his love and devotion to her, well, it was nearly too much to think of most of the time. She had been giving herself to someone else behind his back. It forced his flicking, ticking heart to falter and flub. The thrumming, strumming constant beat to skip and whirl, flip and twirl. ‘Is this fatal?’ he wondered. The inconsistent pulse took away his breath, drove his brain syntaxes to misfire and a weakness, darkness to spread throughout him. At those moments, and they were far too frequent, Caleb always wondered about, wished for, dreaded and dreamily considered his own death. After much thought he decided that the death part itself wasn’t the worry. It was the dying. Drowning, burning, being tortured-now those types of dying would be awful. But he didn’t think that dying instantly would really be so bad, Especially if you didn’t see it coming. No expectations, just one second living your life and the next, BAM! You’re gone. A car hits you, a blood clot explodes, a gun goes off, you fall asleep one night… It’s the not getting up, waking up, it’s the crumpling on the ground and the onlookers, the friends, the parents, the ones who adore you that know you won’t get up again, now there’s the pain. Caleb wished he’d been shot. That was the easy way, though. Would he have wanted to cause so much pain to his mother? To Espri? Come to think of it, it would have completely freed up Espri. She could have fallen into the arms of her lover and no one would have ever had to worry about her. She would never have been a suspect of Caleb’s murder. Not with her daddy’s position and she being a girl and all. It would have been better for everyone, except his mom, had it been him that died. And there were plenty of times he wished it for himself. All he could see down the road was life without Espri, the girl who betrayed him, and jail. His entire life was over and he hadn’t done anything wrong. Not a thing. Talk about fatal.