Brutally Beautiful

by Christine Zolendz

  “You’re adorable when you’re angry,” he whispered, breathing heavily.

  “Oh, really? Then get the hell off me, because I’m about to get gorgeous all over your ass.”

  His sudden kiss stunned me, and the heavy thundering of his heart against my chest made my lips open to him. Breathing in each other, lips drinking thirstily from each other, I couldn’t stop. My body wanted him too much.

  His arms slid around me, hands slipping over my stomach, closing over my breasts. Cupping me tightly through my shirt, catching my nipples between his fingers, he squeezed gently, making my breathing uneven. “You want to know it all, Samantha, I’ll give it all to you,” he whispered against my lips.

  The pressure of his fingers tightened; the pinch bringing tears to my eyes as the little tease of pain surged though my chest and pooled as thick hot need in my belly. “Do you know what it’s like to HAVE to continue breathing, dreaming, thinking, living, hating, needing, while the friends you once had are rotting deep below the dirt?

  What happened to me that day shattered my trust in the world; my belief in goodness and innocence. It was my introduction to what is truly evil. I didn’t understand it at sixteen how I could have had a best mate, like a brother, do something so…so…heinous. It was NOT clear to me. He joked about it… I didn’t know the right way to feel and the remorse, the guilt, the shame paralyzed me. IT. STILL. DOES. It wasn’t like I got a bloody email from God that pleasantly said: ‘Kade Grayson, I have looked over the situation with your best mate Thomas and his complete annihilation of innocent youth, and I’m just dropping a line to let you know I consider your knowledge of the subject, and your continued love for your childhood friend to show no guilt of association for the murders and I hereby drop all judgment against you. You’re free to live with no regrets. You’re hereby off the hook. You have a guaranteed full paid ticket into heaven when your time comes. Signed, God. Cheers.’” The scruff of his unshaven face scraped sharply against my skin as he pulled away from me. A small moment of silence sliced through the air and the only sound that reached my ears was the heavy breaths we both took.

  I wanted to cry for him. Brushing my knuckles past his cheek, I said, “That guilt and shame you have for surviving is going to destroy you, it is destroying you. It’s like a lethal injection that you’ve given to yourself. You’re fucking drowning in it. Guilt is like a fucking cancer, Kade. If you don’t stop, it will creep and crawl into every crack and crevice of your soul and kill you.”

  “I’m not guilty for surviving. I’m guilty because I knew he was going to do it. He joked about it. For fucking months, I didn’t take him seriously, and I could have stopped it. Lainey, he went for me first, shooting both my fucking legs so I couldn’t run, then picked off every single person in that room and made me watch and told me I should have listened to him. I could have stopped him. Then he blew a hole in my chest, and finished off anyone else that moved. I wasn’t supposed to live.”

  “Kade,” I whimpered, struggling to get up.

  “No. No. No. Listen to me. You wanted to hear everything, know everything. I’m going to fucking give you everything,” he hissed, hands gripped my face. “There will be no excuse for you not to trust in me. I’m giving you everything I am, right fucking now.”

  I tried to hold back my tears, but the words, the expression on his face, and God, the grip of his fingers just hurt so much.

  “Their lives were over. Over. All of them. None of them would feel the warmth of the sunshine against their skin or get to look upon the shining stars in a midnight sky again. They wouldn’t be graduating with me that next year, learning to drive or fall in love and marry. They would never have those things. Never. They would NEVER.”

  He pressed his lips softly against my bruised cheek, causing a small lick of pain. “School shootings are so breathtakingly evil. They carry such suffering that is so far beyond the imagination, so fucking inconceivable to any ordinary human thoughts that no one can ever understand. No one can understand why, and no one can understand me. Everybody thinks they could figure out why, but they can’t, they never will. Thomas wasn’t someone you could ever think would do such violence. He was popular and everybody loved him…He wasn’t clamoring for acceptance or attention. He wasn’t bullied, or gay, or too short, too fat, too dumb or awkward, not a juvenile delinquent, not a depressed or disgruntled teen, not anything they claimed his reasons might be. He was a fucking psychopath, sly and clever. Thomas was the most charming and well-mannered little psychopath you could have ever met. I have spent years, years, trying to put reasons to what he did. And there are none.

  What he did in front of me re-wired my brain. I resorted to violence - lavish in it now, so I stay away from everything and everyone so it doesn’t completely overthrow me. It’s like I feel as if I can become him. Redemption for me is unthinkable, because I still grieve for my best friend, and the fact that I still miss him…is sick. Nobody ever understood me after. And everyone blamed me, accused me of planning it with him, encouraging him, creating a suicide pact with him. He left diaries and video journals telling whomever would listen that it was my fault for not stopping him. And he was right. I should have stopped him. And I shouldn’t miss him.”

  I heard him swallow, felt it against my skin. He tangled his fingers through mine and tightened his grip. I think he was using me for strength. “I mean, I didn’t understand any of it. School was supposed to be a safe place. My girlfriend, we had just started dating, she…she was shot with a sawed off shotgun which blew a hole in her chest the size of a baseball. It blew her fucking shirt right off her body. That was the first time I’d seen her without a shirt on. Do you know what that’s like? To get to see the tits you been trying to see for two months with a bloody gaping hole between them. It was horrific.

  Bodies were all around me. All I saw were limp bodies. Some moved sluggishly trying to escape, gasping for their lasts breath. I can still see them, in front of me, as if it was happening all over again. The sounds were inhuman. Cries. Pleas. Gasping rattles of blood through lungs. The sounds of boots sloshing through the thick puddles of the blood coated floor.”

  Kade laughed darkly, a choking sound that made my chest ache and I needed a break, a pause. A moment to help me deal with how fucked up everything was that he was saying, but he kept up. Anguish and savageness dripped off his words. “There were blast holes in the monitors of the computers in the back of the classroom and someone’s sneaker, smeared with blood, covered a keyboard with a dangling mouse moving back and forth. Back and forth. I was left hollow inside; my insides…the things that made me Kade, never escaped that classroom. He never made it out of that school alive.”

  Kade shifted off me and stood. The absence of his weight and tightness of the grasp he had on me, made my body throb with pain. He walked over to a stone fireplace and went about building a fire and as the first flames licked at the dry wood he had placed inside, the scent of pine and burning cedar filled the room. His muscular broad back, full of its hard ridges and tight muscles held a tattooed list that ran down his spine. A list of names, 32 of them, with Thomas’ at the very bottom. Just as if he’d carried the weight of them on his shoulders and down his spine since that very day. My throat knotted and I jutted my chin out painfully to stop my tears from falling. Kade Grayson was not the kind of man that wanted anyone’s pity, but I sure as hell wanted desperately to cry out loud and sob for the sixteen-year old boy who lived through that hell. As he turned back to face me, a log crackled in the fireplace and a burst of small sparks shot against the darkness of the room.

  I folded my legs underneath my body and leaned further into the cushions of the couch, quickly wiping at the stream of tears rushing down my cheeks. “Have you ever spoken to anyone about this?” I asked.

  He was gazing down at something on the floor, and I waited patiently until he lifted his head and pained pale eyes locked on mine. “No.”

  “But, you should. Talking through these…”
>
  “Will do nothing,” he snapped. “Don’t. Please, don’t.”

  “But you’re telling me?”

  His body collapsed on the couch next to me. “I think you’re hiding demons too, Samantha Matthews. I want you to introduce me to all of them, because I think I finally found someone whose demons would play nice with my own. It’s okay if I call you Samantha Matthews, right?”

  I sat silent.

  He leaned his head back and offered me a sad smile. “Fine, I’ll fucking continue giving you everything. Shot after shot. Pop. Pop. Pop. Then clicks, like he didn’t believe all the bullets were used, repeatedly pulling back the trigger in hopes that more bullets would tear through our flesh. I was so happy he was out of bullets…but, no I was wrong. The insanity didn’t stop, because he had more fucking guns, with a hell of a lot more ammunition. He never even told me he was that angry. He just joked about it, so I thought it was just a morbid joke. I never even knew he had a gun. I never thought he was serious.

  After the massacre, I mean it was still surreal to me, that word, massacre. How many people can say they’ve lived through a massacre? After the massacre, I became fascinated with blood, especially my own. How it ran through my body, what kept it pulsing through my veins, and the biggest question I could never find the answer to, was why my heart was strong enough to keep surging that blood through my bullet riddled body when my fucking mind wasn’t. Why did I survive? I know I didn’t live after the incident, but why the fuck did I survive?

  I was hospitalized for weeks after, but all I remember was pain and news reporters, which in essence was the same monster, wasn’t it? When I finally got released from the hospital, I spent the majority of my time locked inside my room repeatedly slicing open my skin with razorblades like it was a drug. Just to watch my blood flow, watch the choices it made…to clot or to run thickly down my arm in one long stream of crimson. I could feel the quickening of my blood as it thickened and pulsated through my veins. How many people can say they feel that?”

  He ran his fingers through his hair, tugging its ends, and scratched at his scruffy face. With a corded neck and clenched jaw, he continued, “Finding me one day, hands bloodied and scarred, my mother dragged me to the hospital and they kept me there for evaluation and questioning.

  Did I have blood lust?

  Did I feel the need to hurt myself?

  Did I feel aggressive towards anyone?

  He was my best friend, how did I not know?

  Was I in on the plan?

  They listened to my fears. I didn’t want to go outside. I always needed an escape plan…but to them, my fears weren’t justified, and medicine was their answer to everything. They believed I was just as sick as Thomas was. Why do people always vilify the people they don’t understand?

  Then came the fucking Lithium. They said I was bipolar, manic, beyond repair. So they gave me mood-altering drugs for voices I did not hear and mania I did not feel. I had to have blood tests to closely monitor me and regulate the toxicity of the drugs in my bloodstream. Do you know what it’s like on that? I threw up for a month straight and lost 25 pounds. You don’t get high on it, nope - but you can enjoy some other wonderful benefits, including, but not limited to shit like diarrhea, vomiting, numbness of the brain. God that’s fucking fun, and oh yeah, this one’s the best…permanent deadness. Now, the other shit they shoved down my throat got me high; I hated not being in control. I hated sleeping, nodding out like a fucking junky all the time, moody and irritable. Insatiable.

  I was a normal fucking sixteen-year-old kid before this shit. I had seen horror movies, I was well read and smart, I knew what I could turn into because of this. I knew there might be a monster lurking somewhere inside me waiting to escape. And I waited and watched, wondering when the Mr. Hyde in me would introduce himself. Nightmares kept me up, drugs put me out, and my mind was so out of focus and narcotic-induced-comatose that I would sometimes forget my own damn name.

  Psychotropic oval-shaped blue pills made me constipated, gave me a sharp case of palsy in my limbs, and kept me in various states of fear and madness. I wasn’t crazy, but they were making me become it. I was a walking zombie, a twisted imitation of myself, damaged by violence and tragedy. They called me delusional and paranoid. They called me the dead kid walking. But when I didn’t take the medications they offered me as my cure, I would still see the splashes of blood against my skin, still smell the gun powder, still hear the echoes of the bullets and laughter. I could still see those fucking pitch-black colorless eyes of my tormentor, my best friend, as he tried in vain to kill me.

  The world was trying to change me, telling me I was broken and damaged inside. I decided I was better off on my own, where people wouldn’t assume I was going to turn into the monster that attacked me, like it was a contagious disease.

  I ceased to be a person, and instead, became a case fucking study in violence. I became mute, voiceless for months, not wanting to give them anything more than what they took from me. So I wrote in one of those composition notebooks. It was an outlet for my adolescent aggression, my violent thoughts… I was alone and learned to live with the gruesome imagery in my head, by writing. The doctors kept telling me that it was all in my head, but what they forgot was that it had been in front of me. All of it was laid out brutally for my eyes to see the last breaths of my classmates, for my skin to feel the warmth of their blood, for my ears to hear their cries and pleas, for my nose to smell gun powder and acidity of iron, for my soul to feel damaged beyond repair. This wasn’t in my head, this wasn’t in my fantasies, it was chillingly and viciously real.

  I spent years building up walls around me to keep people out…If I go to my brother’s, I have to sit in the back, near the exit, in view of everyone, where escape would be quick. The tension coils tightly in my body all the time, I’m constantly in a strained state, my muscles are always working against themselves. I never had to spend too long in a gym, because I get more of a workout just standing somewhere thinking.”

  The tips of Kade’s fingers traced a soft line on my jaw. One lone tear quickly slipped over my lashes, then more followed, streaking sadness down my cheeks. He curled his right hand possessively around my throat while the other wiped away my tears. “Kade, I’ve seen nothing in you that show madness, only your very understandable anger. Bad therapy can mess up the rest of your existence if you allow one person whom you think holds a degree in something use their opinions to change you into the person they think you should be.”

  “Enough about me. Now,” he breathed against my skin. “Now it’s your turn, Samantha Matthews. I just laid my life out for you, so don’t be scared, because there’s nothing you could say that would make me think differently of you.” The fingers at my throat stroked my skin and added pressure.

  “Kade, I’m very happy with the person I was and the person I am. I accomplished more in my life at thirty-two than most people do in their entire lives. I’m not ashamed or guilty of anything I’ve ever done. There’s nothing that I think I’ve done that I regret. Oh, yeah maybe one,” I laughed bitterly. “I guess I didn’t check my husband’s pulse after I thought I killed him, because the sick son-of a bitch is still after me.”

  Chapter 12

  “So what did you do to him? Fuck, Sam, you tried to kill him?”

  Her skin blanched, turning bright alabaster white. “Nah, I used my mega brain power to make him self combust,” she tried to joke, and then tears poured down her cheeks, because she knew it wasn’t funny.

  “What happened?” I asked. Did she really try to kill her husband? Husband? She was married? She was a killer? Attempted murderer?

  “I stepped out of the train wreck. Battered and bruised, but free. It all started in a heartbeat when my world shifted right out from beneath me and everything I’d ever believed was one huge lie.”

  “Fuck, give me one night of truth. One fucking night of truth for the both of us, before you run for the rest of your life and I get left here wondering w
hy I let you go.”

  Samantha opened her mouth, about to share something then closed it tightly. Averting her eyes to her hands, she shook her head in frustration. She wiped the stream of tears off her cheeks and struggled to find the words. Her pain was killing me. She sat in silence, and I thought to offer her a bit of space to gather her thoughts together, so I excused myself to change out of my wet pants and get us both a drink. Brandy was always my choice.

  With heavy wet pants, I trudged back up the stairs and into my bedroom. Inside my mind, I could feel the pressure building, the not knowing what had happened in her past, and whom she was running from. The question that slammed around my brain like a damn pinball machine was if the person I was obsessing over, the one that made me calm, the one I didn’t want to leave. Was she a cold blooded killer? Or was whatever she did justifiable? My mind raced, and the pressure came close to bursting through my gray matter and splattering it against the walls.

  Struggling to peel my pants off, my anger took over and I ended up ripping them off and launching them across the room into the corner, where they landed with a loud wet splat then slid wetly down the wall. I yanked open my armoire so forcefully the inside drawer came flying out at me and landed on my foot, sending sharps spikes of pain across it. “Bloody-Motherfucker-Wank-Shanking-Bugger!”

  Pinching my fingers over the bridge of my nose, I knew I had to calm myself; I needed to get back downstairs and try to talk to her. I couldn’t be up in my bedroom having a goddamn episode.

  Rummaging through the mess of clothes that had spilled all over the floor, I found a pair of boxer shorts and pulled them on, then ran for the brandy. Opening the plug, I took a long swig right from the canister trying to settle my anger, then with harshly clenched fingers, I poured us both a glass. The only image that came to mind to help calm myself was smashing both glasses against the wall while still in my hands. I wanted to see the blood that would drip from the wounds and feel the burn of pain. I itched to taste the coppery liquid when I placed my mouth against the broken skin, craved it.