Chapter 1

A Chapter by sammy gassonit

Chapter one, Intro characters

The moment I looked into your eyes, when I smiled and you smiled back, I felt the grasp of discomfort wrap it's cold thin fingers around my gut. I pretended like it was okay, I laughed at your jokes and I touched your forearm imitating the words whispered to me under those pine trees when I was little. Each message ground small pathways in my mind, manipulating the way I made choices today, the way I view myself in the full length mirror behind the portrait in my grandpa’s hallway. That day you had brown hair, buzzed almost to your skin. Your bright blue eyes didn’t seem to fit your dark complexion and broad build. I hated the way you smiled, but now that I look back I miss that smile more than anything else about you, even more than the way you naturally formed your hand into a fist, bringing your elbow back and preparing your knuckles for skin as soon as someone cracked your eggshell ego. It hadn’t fallen on me that this would be the last time you laughed at something I said, I hadn’t realized that the last time I said goodnight to your lips instead of to my rosary would be the morning of the 5 o’clock bike ride. I dreamt the night before of blood. The smell, the way it felt against my hand… against my knife, against the bullet that found its way through your skull.

I realized my mistake on a wednesday, my black elbow length hair brushed against my back as my tan legs stretched forward pushing me higher into the sky losing contact with the wood chipped ground of the local playground about 1 mile away from my grey shophouse home.

“Akkia!” I whipped my head backwards dragging my feet into the ground coming to a stop before my older brother Bennet. “Let’s go we have hockey practice in half an hour and we still haven’t gotten our stuff into the car yet.” I lifted myself off the swing and started to help round up my siblings. Turning around I grabbed the wrist of my youngest brother Kenn as he ran by, his tan skin matched the same color as mine as he twisted trying to escape my grasp.

We looked nothing like our father, his skin matched our consistency but instead of being stretched over almond shaped eyes and a flat nose, it was formed over a high bridge and piercing green. Out of his 7 kids, none of them ended up looking like him, something that would tremendously disappoint me as a parent. I came to this realization in the 6th grade, when my parents were having their last kid Ruby. I was standing in the bathroom watching my father shave his face with smooth strokes, down his cheeks and carefully around his adams apple. His round green eyes resembled nothing of mine nor any of my siblings making me wonder if it made him sad, to look at his children everyday and never see the arch of his eyebrows in their eyebrows, or the curve of his lips in ours.

“No!” Ken screamed continuously checking over his shoulder presumably in the middle of a game of tag. Racing towards him Ember lunged forwards barreling into us while simultaneously shrieking,

“You’re it! I got you!” She was the closest looking to our father, wrinkled crows feet around her eyes despite only being 11. The crows eyes suited Ember, giving character to her otherwise stereotypical chinese face.

“Not fair!” Ken mumbled in Mandarin “Akkia was holding onto me!” We learned from an early age to fight in languages people couldn’t understand. The different tones of foreign words confused people so they couldn’t allow themselves to intervene. Each of us spent more or less time with one of our parents making each of us more or less fluent in a certain language. We grew up learning French and Mandarin and while my mother had grown up knowing Cantonese as well she gave up on teaching us both as our minds would confuse the grammar and we would sound like tourists reading posters in pinyin.

“Ruby! We’re leaving” I heard Cameron shout as he walked in the direction of our house. Ruby was our parent’s favorite, as well as she’s the best behaved. When we reached our house I ran in anxious to get to hockey practice to sort out an issue earlier in the day. I found the way I ran smoothly across the ice calming.I shared a room with Ember, Ben and Cam, our beds stacked on top of eachother in the largest room in the house. Ruby had her own room, jack and jill styled to Ken and Taedo’s. I lugged my bag into the back of my brother’s SUV and slamming the truck I turned around startled by how my brothers face was inches away from mine and I could smell the mint on his breath.

“Cam, give me space, I already put your stuff in the trunk.” His face was dead serious, long hair brushed against his forehead. He usually drove me to practice, riding with Ben was not in agenda if we wanted to make it on time.

“We can’t go to practice today. I have something important I need you to see. I can’t tell anyone else and you’re the only one who will know what to do.” Something was off, I could tell by the way he was standing, Shoulder hunched over, bent over.

“Hey, what’s the matter with you?” I looked over my shoulder into the large window of our living room. I could see Ruby practicing on our mini grand piano, perfect posture, fingers rapidly playing like she was typing a story into the keys. She was by far the prettiest out of all of us. Her features complemented each other perfectly, large brown eyes straight hair down her back. I started to walk back inside, brushing against Cameron as I went.

“I don’t want to be a part of this.” I stumbled on my words as if they twisted themselves on the way out. “it’s probably not worth my time.” I said this as bait, knowing that by shrugging off his issues my opinion and actions would be worth more when I agreed.

“Wait, this is important, I need to talk to you.” He grabbed my arm, quickly yanking me towards him so I could faintly smell his cologne from this morning. “Let’s go to [insert place] we can talk it out there. [insert explanation of why place is important to Cameron and Akkia.]

I had fallen into what I had thought would be a safety net, something not necessarily sturdy and comfortable, but something at least saving me from falling into rock solid pavement. Instead what I had landed in was far worse than anything I could yet encounter. Cam drove us past the cemetary, my stomach turned when we reached the drive in movie theater. It was still early in the day so no one was there but I could already smell all the bad memories from last summer. Cameron turned to me, shifting the car into park, suddenly he was crying into his palms, salty tears pouring into his open hands. I had never seen him cry before, even when he broke his arm during hockey after someone skated over it.

“I killed someone.” He slammed his fist into the steering wheel and the car screamed in response. “Oh god, I don’t know how it happened, I can’t even remember who it was or when it was but I did it. It was me.”

“What? How can you not remember if you killed someone? That just seems like something that sticks with you.” I gave a weak smile, something he couldn’t see, I couldn’t help being sarcastic. Part of me felt like it was a joke, like some kind of prank to get me to do something or react in a certain way.

“I-- I don’t know, please don’t tell anyone, at least not right now, this is real. I was here with Jake and Evan and they brought weed… we were already drinking so I took some of it.” Something seemed off, of course I had seen Cameron drink, almost every one on the guys team did during the off season, but Cameron wouldn’t smoke pot, that wasn’t like him. “When I got home I found myself asleep in Ben’s bed instead of my own, he told me my car was dented up and there was blood on my rims. He said the night before he cleaned it up for me.” Calming down he took a few deep breaths, I didn’t know what to do, it was hard to believe.

“When, did this happen?” I didn't want to be a part of this. I knew we were going to get caught, the smart move would be to tell someone, so we looked less guilty than if we tried to do anything to the… body. “We should tell someone. Anyone, it looks better than trying to cover it up.” Cam slammed his hand into the dash again, startling me or a second time. I suddenly felt uncomfortable, like someone had taken of an invisible layer of security off of me. I find myself a very passive person, easily persuaded, I find it hard to say no to people, of course you already know this.

I can still remember confessing this to you months ago, I gave you the key to manipulating me, something you never used, I guess you just never had the opportunity to use it. We were laying in my truck bed at the drive in movie theater just out of town, the area of town where you lived. It was warm, we were in the middle of a heat wave that week, the heat made your voice deep scratching the bottom of the ocean every time you spoke. I lay close to your side calmed by the way your chest rose up and down with each breath you took.

“If you could change anything about yourself, what would you change?” This was a cliche question, something I knew you asked the other girls but I answered with the truth nevertheless.

“Physically… Almost everything, I would want to look like Constance Wu. Below the surface I would care less, I would try to let go of everything pushing me towards what I don’t want and everything stopping me from getting where I want.”

“Why can’t you do that now?” you sat up on his hands. We had turned down the radio so we could only watch the picture. We both hated scary movies and yet here we were at another one.

“Because” I tried to explain to the sky, “I feel like the things I hang on to, are what I control and once I try to let go and be myself, i’m not myself.

“Control freak” You laughed and nudged me with your leg trying to lighten the mood. You regretted making the conversation deep so you slowly turned up the volume in the cab and we continued to watch the movie.

“We Can’t tell anyone” Cam said as he shook his head “I can’t, we can’t please.”

“Cam- we have to, what else could we do?”

“Well, I mean, no one has noticed yet, maybe this guy wasn’t very well known…. Maybe no one will miss him. We could try to find the body and maybe burn it or something.” I hoped he could see the concern in my eyes, I was not excited for this.

“Okay, but if it starts to turn south I’m turning us in immediately.” To be honest I craved adventure. My life had been extremely uneventful up until this point. Maybe it would have been better to disagree knowing the outcome of this choice. Together we got out of the SUV, it was warm and school had just gotten done, this wasn’t an ideal first day of summer activity “Where did you run them over?”

“God, I can’t remember, I was so-- I wasn’t in the right…” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye, seeking validation that I wasn’t going to tell our parents about his weed. Rolling my eyes I replied

“Right now we have bigger things to worry about.” Hopping the fence we followed line of trees, we searched the field and the line of woods, the giant white screen reminding me of everything you told me.