End Note

by Sonya Loveday

  THERE WERE EIGHT ROOMS TOTAL in the upper level of the house. I found Murphy in the last room on the left after walking down a wide hallway lined with doors. My suitcase was open on the bed, partially emptied. Beside it was a pile of clothes she’d dumped from her bags.

  I leaned on the doorjamb, watching as she hung up T-shirts and hummed to herself. She turned and smiled when she noticed me.

  “I started putting your stuff away.”

  I pushed myself from the jamb and nodded to the pile of clothes on the bed. “I see that. Need any help?”

  “Sure. Hand me your jeans.”

  We worked together, putting our stuff away until everything was unpacked.

  Murphy folded the empty bags, setting them on a deep burgundy chaise lounge that stretched out in front of the only window in our room.

  The room, like the rest of the house, had the feel of a cabin. Rough-hewn wood beams cut across the vaulted ceiling with thick eyelet bolts to keep them in place. Even the furniture was made of a heavy wood. Each drawer was fashioned from the rounded part of a log.

  The floor under my feet had a buttery softness to it, giving the room a rustic feel. But the centerpiece of it all was the massive four-poster bed covered with a patchwork quilt of cranberry red and brown.

  “Wait until you see the bathroom. Licks was right. It’s amazing. The shower is made of some type of rock and the tub… you can practically swim in it,” Murphy said as she climbed up on the bed and sprawled out. “Mmmm… I think I’ll stay right here for the rest of my life.”

  I kicked off my shoes and fell backward beside her, sinking into the mattress. “It really does feel like a marshmallow.”

  She laughed at me and rolled over, putting her head on my chest with her leg draped over mine. “Jared, if you need to go home, everyone will understand.”

  Something broke inside of me. Holding Murphy in my arms, the softness under me, the strangeness of the house… it was all of those things and none of them. Putting my finger on what exactly tipped the scale on my emotions was unknown, but it happened nonetheless. I wiped a tear that escaped from the corner of my eye away before it could get very far, taking a breath that caught in my chest.

  Murphy grabbed my hand and gripped it. Settling in against me, she gave me what I needed—someone to hold when my world was falling apart.

  The tears I never let fall, fell. The ache I contained tight within me raged, and I let it go. I let it all go and rolled Murphy onto her back, burrowing my head into her shoulder.

  From an early age, I’d learned guys didn’t cry. I wasn’t sure why they weren’t supposed to. Like it would make us look weak if we sat around blubbering like babies.

  In adolescence, tears were shed behind closed doors. Lumps, bumps, and bruises built our immunity, our way to learn how to control pain and form it into other outlets like anger. But nothing in life taught you how to handle saying goodbye, to accept death, or to learn how to make it on your own. Especially when all you’d had was a steady support system since you were in eighth grade, slugging it out because the class bully decided to pick on a kid for being different.

  Tears were no more than an outlet, a solitary way to purge the overabundance of pain, or anger, when they became too unbearable to hold anymore.

  I fell asleep there, nestled against Murphy as she ran her fingers through my hair, soothing me the only way she could.

  For whatever reason, Murphy was set in my path, and I’d be forever grateful for it.

  I had no idea how long I slept, but I woke up to Licks jumping on the bed beside me.

  Rolling over to look at him, I cracked one eye open, glaring at him. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Jumping on your bed. Duh!”

  Murphy’s hand shot out and caught his ankle.

  “Whoa!” His arms pinwheeled as he fell sideways and rolled off the bed. “Ouch… that sucked,” he grumbled, pushing himself up off the floor as he rubbed his shoulder.

  “Go jump on your own bed next time,” Murphy said as she grinned at him.

  “You two are no fun!” Licks said as he stalked out of the door. He was back seconds later, pointing his finger at us. “Oh! Now that you’re awake, maybe you can come help us finish setting up downstairs. I mean, we do have an album to make, ya know!” With that said, he spun around and left.

  Murphy’s body shook against mine as she laughed. “Did you see his face when he fell?”

  Propping myself up on my elbow, I looked down at her. “Don’t be surprised if he pays you back for that.”

  She pushed herself up and pecked her lips against mine. “Don’t worry, there’s plenty more where that came from. Let him try.”

  I fell back to the mattress with a groan, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “You’re just as bad as Riley.”

  She smacked my leg and scooted off the bed. “I’d like to meet her someday.”

  “I should probably keep you two apart with as bad as you both act,” I said, peeking through my fingers at her.

  “Hey!” She swatted at my leg, “You know he deserved that. I’m surprised you didn’t do it first.”

  I could see her there in the cabin with all seven of us. “You’d fit right in, ya know?”

  “Fit in?” Her head tilted as her eyebrows pushed together, as if she were trying to piece together what it was I meant.

  I stretched my arms with a yawn before answering, “With the six, well, technically seven… no, eight with Paige.”

  “What?” She gave me a perplexed look.

  I held my hand in the air, forming the shape of the number six with my fingers. “The Six.”

  She eyed my hand and then looked down at me. “The six what?”

  Laughing, I pushed myself up from the bed and walked over to the closet. Pulling down a fresh T-shirt, I explained, “Remember on the bus, I showed you the picture of my friends?” When she nodded, I continued. “They are the Six, well, we are the Six. That’s what we referred to ourselves as. Then there was Riley, and she’s good friends with Paige…”

  She looked at me oddly, as if testing my words to see if I was telling her the truth.

  “Honestly.” I chuckled. “I know it sounds odd, but the nickname didn’t really come from us. It came from our parents. Usually, when we were all together, and that was most of the time, it was always something like, ‘what are you six up to?’ or ‘the six of you always manage to get into something,” and so on. They probably did that because saying everyone’s name took too long.”

  Riley had never been added into the generalized statements of ‘the six of you’ because our parents thought her to be some sort of angel for putting up with a rowdy bunch of boys. If they’d only known that she was right alongside of us for half of our escapades, they would have started calling us ‘the seven’.

  She shook her head, pushing herself off the bed. “Speaking of friends, the guys are waiting.”

  Murphy slipped from consoler to band manager, gesturing to the door.

  “Why does it make you so uneasy when the subject of friendship comes up?” I asked, taking her hands into mine.

  She tugged against my hold, but I laced my fingers through hers and moved our arms behind her, pulling her against me.

  “I’m not uneasy about it. I just find it really hard to understand how you can have that many close friends, when most people have one, maybe two, if they’re lucky.”

  I let her hands go and took a step back. “You have just as many.”

  “Like who?” she asked, laughing as she turned for the door.

  I caught up with her and ticked off names as we made our way downstairs. “Let’s see… Lars, Retro, Licks, and I’m pretty sure you can count Oliver on that list. Then there’s me. That gives you a grand total of five.”

  She made a sound of disagreement. “They’re business associates, Jared.”

  “Don’t let them hear you say that because I know for a fact you’re more than that to them,” I said, sliding my hand along
her lower back to rest on her hip. Squeezing, to make my point in her silence, I added, “They think highly of you. And like it or not, they consider you their friend. Guess you better get used to it.”

  Murphy stayed silent as we crossed the kitchen and made our way down the basement stairs.

  The basement was cold compared to the rest of the house. Even with the heat set on low, the concrete floor kept a permanent chill to the air. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like when winter arrived.

  “I found a good place down here to set the recording equipment up,” Retro said, as Murphy and I made it to the bottom.

  “Yeah, there’s a good-sized room that’s sealed up nice and tight for us,” Licks added.

  I walked over to where a crate was pried open against the wall and peeked inside, finding coils of cables and microphone stands.

  “We can get the rest of this set up, but we won’t be using it much until we have actual songs written,” I said to the guys over my shoulder.

  Lars spoke up. “I have a notebook of stuff I’ve worked on over the years. I even have somewhat of an idea of the beat and chords that goes with them.”

  Licks rocked back on his heels, giving Lars a squinted look. “So that’s what you do in your notebook. I thought you were doodling or some shit.”

  Lars ignored him. “Does anyone else have lyrics written?”

  “I have some that might be worth working on. But maybe we should all take a few days and see if we can come up with something new. Something that’s us, or how we got here,” I said, looking to the others for their thoughts.

  “I’ve never really written a song, but I can try,” Retro said. His hand brushed over his jaw, followed by a shrug. “Can’t hurt to have new material.”

  Lars nodded in agreement and said, “Okay, so let’s do that. Bama and Licks will have to figure out the chords and rhythm, and then we can put the rest of the songs together. Once we have one done, we’ll move onto the next one. Sound good?”

  WRITING SONGS WAS HARDER THAN I’d thought it would be. Before, when I’d had a line pop up in my head, I’d build around it. Mold it into something that related to whatever I had going on in my life at that point in time. I spent two days jotting down and crossing out words until I had something workable. The only problem was, it was about home. But there was no way to move forward and write something new until I got it out of my head.

  Stashed in one of the three living room closets, I found a beanbag chair. It had seen better days, but it worked perfectly for me to set close to the floor-to-ceiling windows and look out as I worked my way thorough putting chords to words.

  I’d been at it for a few hours that morning while Retro paced the floor behind me. He tapped a rapid-fire beat on a notebook with his pen, and then, with a bursting sigh, he tossed his notebook in the air. It landed in a flutter of pages, bent in all sorts of directions, beside me. I snatched it up off the floor, thinking Retro would yank it from my hands.

  “It’s pointless drivel. Nothing worth working on,” he said as he continued to pace behind me.

  But he was wrong. I blindly sought out my pencil, mulling over the words he’d written. Scratching some out, and moving others, the song came together… the chords playing in my head as I read the lines. I dropped the pencil in my lap, pulled Stella against my chest, and ran the chords, stopping to jot them down, and moved on to the next line.

  “Whoa, what is that?” Retro asked from behind me.

  I answered him as I jotted a chord change in the margins of the line I was working on. “Your song. Well, part of it. I just need to figure out the chorus line.”

  “Not that,” he said, kicking the beanbag chair. “That! What is that? Holy shit, that guy’s in full gear.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I looked up to see Retro holding a pair of binoculars up to his eyes, pointing to somewhere out in the trees.

  “Where did you find those?”

  “Over on the table by that book of birds.”

  I got to my feet, setting Stella down in the beanbag chair so I could look out of the window and see what the hell Retro was talking about.

  “That dude is decked out for war.” The tone in Retro’s voice alarmed me. Why would some guy be outside in full camo in the Poconos?

  I couldn’t see anything but trees.

  “Let me see,” I said, gesturing for the binoculars. He put them in my hand, and I brought them up to my eyes. Fighting a wave of nausea that hit me from looking through them, I managed to get them focused far enough out to catch movement. Once I had that, I focused in. It didn’t take me long before I picked up a pair of lace-up, green boots. Had I not known someone was out there, he would have blended in perfectly with the canopy of trees.

  “Is it hunting season here or something?” Retro asked as he fidgeted beside me.

  “Have you ever seen a hunter dress in a Gilly suit?” A chill rolled down my spine. Whoever it was, he picked his way through the densest parts of the tree line, stopping every few seconds as if listening for something.

  “Could be paint-ballers. Sometimes they do war games and shit…” I could hear it in his voice. The need to come up with anything other than a fully dressed sniper outside our balcony.

  I didn’t take the binoculars away from my eyes as I answered him. “Maybe… but I think we should let Oliver know there’s someone out there.”

  “Yeah, we probably should,” Retro agreed, but he didn’t move from my side.

  I kept the binoculars trained on where he was crouched. After a few tense seconds, he lifted his rifle to his shoulder and pointed it at something directly across the lake from him.

  “What the hell are you up to?” I whispered.

  The man lifted his head and looked up, giving me a clear view of his face. I almost dropped the binoculars. “Aiden?”

  I jogged over to the door that led outside to the balcony, flung it wide open, and shouted against the howling wind. “Aiden! I know you’re out there.”

  Something whistled past my head, hitting the window behind me with a crack. My arms went over my head, and I ducked. “Stop shooting at me, you fucker!”

  When the banister in front of me exploded, sending pieces of wood at my face, I made a crouched run for the door. Oliver was there with some high-tech, scoped-out rifle, firing shots at the opposite side of the river where I’d seen Aiden. He all but stepped on me to keep me down on the floor. I tried to wriggle free. I had to know. I had to see what the hell was happening outside. Aiden, my friend for so long, had fired a gun at me, and I wanted to know why.

  I rolled away from Oliver and brought the binoculars back up to my face. They were out of focus, and I fought to zoom them in correctly. Oliver fired off three more rounds and slammed the door shut. Another bullet hit the window, chipping the glass.

  “Bulletproof glass…” Retro said as he walked over, touching where the bullet had carved a chunk out of the glass on the outside.

  “Get away from the fucking windows!” Oliver bellowed. “Go downstairs. Get everyone downstairs.”

  Another bullet hit the window with a solid thunk. I didn’t think twice. Running upstairs, I scooped Murphy up and threw her over my shoulder. I didn’t set her down until we’d made it to the basement.

  “Jared, what the hell is going on? And why is your ear bleeding?” Murphy asked. I could tell she was scared. Her heartbeat pulsed in her neck and her eyes were wide as she looked me over.

  Retro paced the floor. “Some crazy fucker was shooting at the windows after Jared went outside and started yelling at someone named Aiden.”

  “Aiden?” Murphy grabbed my arms and searched my eyes.

  “He was out there, Murphy. He shot at me. I don’t get it… He’s supposed to be in Texas. Why isn’t he in Texas?”

  Oliver double-timed it down the stairs, with a phone pressed between his shoulder and his ear, as he ripped someone’s ass on the other end. “…doesn’t make a fucking difference now, does it? No, he’
s not dead. And you’re lucky the bulletproof glass held up, or he would’ve killed us all.”

  He paused for a moment, listening. “No, I don’t want your fucking walking papers. Get your fuckin’ ass in here. You made this mess. You get to clean it up.”

  Oliver shoved his phone in his back pocket, ejected the clip from his gun, and then checked to make sure there wasn’t a round in the chamber. “Is everyone okay?” he asked as he crossed the room, opened the breaker box, and flipped two switches.

  The box popped away from the wall, revealing a keypad that he punched a sequence of numbers into. The louvered doors, of what I’d thought was a closet, rattled when the wall opened up on a hinge and swung out.

  Oliver walked inside the fully stocked room and set his gun on a large, metal table in the center. If ever there were a war, or even a zombie apocalypse happening, that would be the room I’d want to be in. Guns, knives, ammo, gear… it was all stacked floor to ceiling in boxes or on racks.

  Across the room, a TV screen flashed to life, and there was my father. “Status report,” he barked.

  I stepped into the room, just past the open doorway. “Dad? What the hell is going on?”

  “Not now, Jared.” His eyes shifted to Oliver. “Status report.” It wasn’t a question. It was a command.

  “Shooter terminated. Field op coming in. Possibly wounded.”

  “Civilian status?”

  “Nothing a little Neosporin and a band aid won’t fix,” Oliver said, glancing in my direction.

  “I.D. on the shooter?”

  “Level-Four target. Sharpshooter. Not very good though,” Oliver answered, crossing his arms.

  “Secondary re-con will be in position in the next thirty minutes. Positive I.D. on Level Four to be determined. Signing off.”

  The screen went blank, taking away the image of my father.

  “Shooter terminated? Level Four target… what the hell is going on, Oliver? And don’t you dare tell me nothing, ’cause that was not fucking nothing. My best friend just tried to kill me.”