"Robert Grudin is out of the race for election," the news anchor said solemnly, "after his vehicle exploded abruptly this evening, and the hopeful potential elect was killed inside it. Police have their suspects, but no arrests have been made thusfar. The main suspect is also deceased. Still, the community mourns a man who could've been great for them, had one angry individual not taken him away from us. This is-"
The TV clicked off. Calvin leaned back against the couch, exhaling, as he rolled his head and looked over at Rachel who was seated on the couch alongside him. Rachel looked at Calvin, bit her lip and shook her head, then leaned forward and buried her face in her hands, running them up through her hair. "...I can't believe this," she whispered, "I can't believe it happened. It all just seems so surreal." "That mother fucker," Calvin muttered. "What?" Rachel asked, turning and looking back at him. "That was my goal, my decision, and he took it away from me. I was supposed to do it for my family, and he took my vengeance out of my hands," Calvin said, "mother fucker. I never liked him." "Why?" Wyatt asked, stepping back into the living room, beer in hand, Celia right behind him; he sipped the beer then asked again, "inform me why you never liked me." "Because you always had to be the center of attention!" Calvin said sternly, standing up now, almost face to face with Wyatt, adding, "and now look what you've done! Nobody asked you to do this for me! Nobody asked you to...to take away what was rightfully mine to do! He destroyed my family!" "Calvin, I just saved you from a lifetime of prison, alright? Trust me, you would've been one of the first people they looked at. That situation was highly publicized, and you two were closely entwined. They would've come for you almost instantly. What I did was divert that attention to someone else, and give us a bit of breathing room to figure out what our next move is." Wyatt sighed, wiped his mouth on his jacket sleeve then sat down on a nearby ottoman, Celia seating herself beside him. "Now," Wyatt said, "...let's figure out a way to make sure this never comes back to us." *** Robert Grudin was heading out to his car when he heard his wife running up behind him. In an outstretched arm, she held his coffee cup, which he graciously took before kissing her on the cheek and then getting into his car. He started it up, pulled out of the driveway and headed down the street, completely unaware that the car across the street from his house, the one that'd been there all night, had also started up and was following him closely. Calvin gripped the steering wheel tightly, his knuckles turning white. Simply being in the general vicinity of this man made him want to do awful things. He heard the sound of a chip bag crunching and he looked to the passenger seat to see Rachel sitting there, shoveling chips into her mouth and chewing noisily. "What?" she asked. "Nothing." "Where are we even going?" "We're gonna get a sense of his schedule. I need to keep tabs on it, make sure it doesn't change. That way I can pick the right day," Calvin said, "It needs to be an ordinary day, not a day where something unexpected happens." "I'm pretty sure getting blown is rather unexpected, but I get what you mean," Rachel replied, making him smirk. She adjusted herself in the seat, tossed the now empty chip bag into the back of the car and asked, "so...you're gonna explode a politician? That's a pretty serious target." "He deserves it." "Frankly they all do, but that goes without saying," Rachel said, "So what did this one do? Raise taxes?" Calvin stayed quiet. He didn't want her to have any more details than she needed to have, just on the off chance they were somehow caught before or after the fact. This way she couldn't incriminate herself and be considered a suspect. He wanted to keep her safe. This wasn't her fight, after all. She was simply along for the ride. "Well," Rachel said, "Whatever it was, it must've been serious. People don't just blow someone up for no good reason." "You have no idea," Calvin mumbled. *** Calvin had begun having trouble sleeping. He'd always had light insomnia, but after the accident, after the loss, he really couldn't sleep. Which was unfortunate, because being asleep was what he wanted to escape the constant reminders of what had been lost, and yet each sleep brought with it dreams about what he no longer had. Calvin simply had no way of winning. One evening, Calvin dragged himself out of bed at around four in the morning and headed downstairs. He pulled a package of cookies from the cabinet and plopped himself down on the couch in the living room, putting the television on mute so it wouldn't wake his folks, and sat there in the dark eating cookies and staring at the screen. Distraction was the only thing that worked. Buying himself a few precious hours from the regular rotation of pain that engulfed his mind nonstop was all he could really hope for anymore. Sitting there, he didn't even realize that he'd begun to cry. It wasn't until he felt his pajamas getting stained with tears that he was aware he was crying and he knew why. After glancing back up at the TV screen, he saw there was a commercial for some princess toy line. Something his daughter had wanted for her last birthday. Had he known it'd be her actual last birthday, he probably would've tried harder to track them down and get them for her. Toy commercials now made him sob. Here he was, a grown ass man, crying at a princess toy commercial. He missed them so much. His wife, his daughter, his family. The family that he only had a beginning with. He'd been told by many people - often friends of his parents - that the less you knew someone the less it hurt, but he didn't believe that. If anything, the grief was worse because with them gone, he could see how great it all could've been had they been allowed to stick around. He could see what he missed out on. What it all could've grown into. Calvin fell asleep on the couch that night, and when his father woke him about two hours later, morning cup of coffee in hand, he just held Calvin for a while, and let his son be sad. Calvin was eternally grateful for his parents, and eternally angry that he'd never get the chance to be one himself. And Robert Grudin was going to pay for that, no matter the cost. *** "Nobody told me that, as an adult, the majority of your time spent was running errands," Rachel said, "seriously, if I'd had known that I was going to spend most of my time doing laundry and grocery shopping, I'd have perhaps tried not growing up so fast." "I'd kill to do something mundane," Calvin said softly, "I loved grocery shopping with my wife." Rachel looked at him, smiling. "That's really cute," she said, "I had that with my friend Kelly, back in high school. We were inseparable. We did everything together and it was so much fun. You never realize how much you can get along with someone until you find that someone, nor how much it hurts to lose it once they're gone." "He killed my family," Calvin said suddenly, shocking Rachel with this random admittance. She stared at him, almost in disbelief of not just what he'd said, but the fact that he'd just so openly and casually said it; Calvin continued, "Robert Grudin killed my family. I don't mean like he meant to, it was an accident, I'll grant him that much, but...but he did it, and he never took responsibility for it." "How could he not-" "Because he's famous, Rachel, duh. Famous people can get away with anything," Calvin said, "It was stupid of me to believe that he'd be held accountable for his actions. And frankly, I might've even let that slide, if he hadn't then made the accident about drinking and driving. He was driving home drunk, which was what caused the accident, and then instead of accepting blame, showing he's a decent man, he decides to state that his goal while in office will be to make the streets safer and crack down on alcoholics. He used what he'd done to my family as a way to further his career." "Jesus, guy deserves to be blown up," Rachel said. "Exactly," Calvin said, "...she supported him. Stacy did. She wanted us to vote for him. We went to rallies and shit. Then he kills her, our children, and uses his actions to try and gain a lead over his rivals. People tell me that time heals all wounds, but I don't buy into that. I think the only thing that heals anything is vengeance." Rachel chewed her lip and leaned back in her chair, pushing her bangs from her eyes. "...do you think she'd want you to be doing this?" Rachel asked. "You know, shortly after she died, my mother paid for me to see a therapist, and they asked the same thing. Course, back then I wasn't thinking about blowing the man up, and they were asking me if she'd want me to continue to not trying to get better. They said 'do you think she'd want you to live your life like this?' and I just thought the audacity of this idiot was galling, because they didn't even know her. How dare they think they'd know what she would feel. I'm the one who married her. I'm the one who knew, if anything." "And?" "Yeah, I think she would. We used to joke about the people we wanted dead," Calvin said, "We'd catch somebody we hated on TV or somewhere out in public and be like hey we should add them to the list." "Yeah but, dude, there's a difference between an in joke and actually blowing a human being up," Rachel said, "You do realize that, right?" Calvin looked down at the steering wheel and sighed. "I do, but I don't care," Calvin said, "I got no reason to not do it, that's the thing. Sure, I got my folks, and yeah, you're my friend, but what reason do I really have for not doing it? Had he apologized, had he taken even the smallest bit of blame, hell, had he not even used it to his advantage, I would've let it go. But when someone does something so horrible, so overtly evil, they shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. How can we continue to believe in a concept like justice when it so regularly gets disproved?" Rachel nodded. He had a point. Still...she wanted to talk him out of it in some way. "Calvin-" "Rachel, I appreciate your friendship, and I appreciate how much you care, but I've made up my mind," Calvin said, "his slogan was 'Choosin' Grudin!' and believe me, I chose him." Hard to argue with that, she figured. *** Rachel felt fingers tapping the top of her head, and she slowly lifted her face off the break table in the back room, catching sight of Sun as she finished tying her apron around her waist and smoothing it down the front, now facing Rachel. "You look exhausted," she said. "I had a long night," Rachel said, yawning and holding out her mug, "Coffee." Sun smiled and took the mug, filling it up with the machine in the counter, then handing the mug back to her as she seated herself across the table from Rachel. Rachel sat upwards and sipped the coffee. "You do something exciting? Out late? You have a hot date?" Sun asked. "God I wish," Rachel said, "No, I was helping a friend with a project." "Oh. Well, that's still cool." "I...yeah, I wouldn't say that, but okay." "Would you like to come over for dinner?" Sun asked, surprising Rachel as she continued, adding, "I wanna show my mom that I'm adjusting well to being back here, and I think it'd help if she saw I had a friend. My mother's an incredible chef, if that sweetens the deal." "That sounds good. I could use a decent hot meal," Rachel said. "Okay, cool. How about this weekend?" After finishing up making plans, Sun headed out to the counter to take care of the first customers, leaving Rachel behind in the break room to wonder when she'd broken her own code of expectations. Calvin didn't expect anything from her, but Sun...she was getting dangerously close to being relied upon again, and that terrified her. Rachel knew she, if anything, simply wasn't a reliable person, and nobody deserved to be regularly and repeatedly let down by her poor choices. Still...dinner with the girl she'd been crushing hard on for the last 15 years? How could she turn that down? *** Calvin had never really gotten interested in politics, and only did so because Stacy had been so interested. In hindsight, he wished he'd pushed back against it, and perhaps things would've been different, but he knew that living in a world of what ifs never solved anything. The ironic thing was how much politics played up the idea of "being the change you want to see in the world", and Calvin was indeed doing just that. Sitting in his parents shed that morning, looking at how much he'd managed to get done so far, he was pleased with his decisions. He'd never been that driven to do anything too difficult, and he felt good about himself now. Calvin looked down at his mug and noticed it was empty, so he scooted his stool back, stepped off and headed out across the lawn and into the kitchen, where his parents were eating breakfast. As he shut the glass door behind him, they looked up at him and smiled. "Morning," his mother, Amelia, said. "Mornin'," Calvin replied, heading to the coffee machine and filling his cup back up. "Jesus," his father, Barry, said, rustling the newspaper, "Fucking Grudin. He says he's going to allow these companies to destruct more natural resources when elected, stating the progress is more important than natural resources. Says these companies are being tied up in red tape by overbearing tree huggers. What a piece of shit. Like we haven't destroyed enough of the world. What you wanna bet he's getting kickbacks for that decision?" "Well, maybe he'll lose," Amelia said, "He keeps pulling shit like this he's gonna piss off the wrong person." Calvin smirked to himself, his back still to his parents. That was the funny thing, Calvin thought. Nobody ever expected their own children to be the wrong person.
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A group of former high school classmates reunite at their 10 year reunion, and discover they each want something different, many with someone else there. What ensues is a labyrinthian relationship amongst them involving crime, murder, romance and, in one particular case, terrorism. Archives
May 2024
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