Dead, Sweet Boy (Book One - Dead, Sweet Series) Read online

  Dead, Sweet Boy

  By

  Susan MacQuoid

  Copyright © 2010 by Susan MacQuoid

  These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All songs in this book are used as emotion the characters are going through. The Author gives complete credit to the groups who perform these songs and is in no way taking credit for writing these songs.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Susan MacQuoid.

  Cover art by David Crosby

  Photography – Steve Coven

  Cover Models - Sam Paschall

  This book uses music to emphasize the emotions of a character. Just for fun and to support the music I love, I would like to recommend these songs to download and listen to while you read. I have always loved all kinds of music. Rock music is a passion of mine so enjoy.

  Susan MacQuoid

  Funeral for a Friend (Love Lies Bleeding), Elton John, Yellow Brick Road

  Cryin’ Like a Bitch, Godsmack

  Dead Memories, Slipknot

  She Burns, Finch

  Helena, My Chemical Romance

  Until the End, Breaking Benjamin

  Gives You Hell, All American Rejects

  Poison Girl, HiM

  Just Like Heaven, The Cure or AFI

  It’s Just Me, Escape the Fate

  I Was So Blind, All American Rejects

  Guardian Angel, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus

  Soul Meets Body, Death Cab For Cutie

  This book is dedicated to my father,

  David C. Crosby

  Years ago he was pronounced brain – dead while in a coma. He came back from the coma realm with stories that never faded.

  I love you Dad.

  Dead, Sweet Boy

  Chapter One

  Funeral for a Friend (Love Lies Bleeding)

  The roses in the window box

  Have tilted to one side

  Everything about this house

  Was born to grow and die

  (Elton John’s, Yellow Brick Road)

  It was Christmas break, and I slept through the whole thing. My presents were still under the tree, along with the gifts I wrapped for Mack. He hung himself. He left me.

  I hate Christmas.

  There was a time when I thought my family was close. Holidays were magical; especially Christmas. Shiny bows, snow and the smell of cookies baking, used to conjure up miraculous possibilities, and images of angels. Then my family broke down, but I was okay. I had Mack. My best friend. When they found him hanging, Christmas was replaced by nightmares and I couldn’t make them stop.

  “Sunny, get up now,” Mom yelled up the stairs – for the fifth time. “I’m not going to tell you again.” She was up and making breakfast from ingredients of guilt or something similar. Believe me, mom hadn’t been Martha Stewart for years. Mom had become “mother.” She hated when I called her that.

  “I’m coming. Cripe, leave me alone,” I screeched back at her. It was the only way to make her shut up. Her voice threatened to overstretch my last nerve.

  I didn’t want to move from the foot of my bed to my very large closet. Behind those doors were too many colors and expensive fashions for my heart to manage. Oh, and my guitars. I stuck them there. Out of sight - out of mind.

  “I can’t do this Mack,” I whispered. “How can I do this without you?” Before the tears could start, I got up and took a look at myself in the mirror. “Yuck.” Dark circles aged my blue – green eyes, making me look like my mother. I tried to wipe the circles away with a smudge of spit, but they were part of me. They were a tattoo of my pain. My long auburn hair was tangled, like a puzzle I couldn’t solve. “Look at me, Mack.” In two weeks time I had lost pounds from my already slender build.

  I was expected to be a normal seventeen year old girl even though Mack was gone. I wasn’t normal before. I’m sure my parents hoped his death would be the end of the band, and by some sweet miracle they might sway me back to the bright future I had in classical music.

  Two weeks felt like a year, and it’d been two weeks and a day since they told me he was gone. It was his parents who found him like that, but I couldn’t get the image out of my head. I wasn’t there to help him when he needed me, so that image haunted me. I’d see him in different shades of blue, like he couldn’t breathe.

  There were things we still hadn’t done together. Things I wanted to tell him. Like when he found the Elton John album on the turntable in my room. When he made fun of me, I told him the record was my mother’s, and she made me listen to it. The truth is that Yellow Brick Road, is possibly my favorite of my huge vinyl collection. I couldn’t tell him a lot of things. He was a musical genius, and I was a private Elton John junky.

  Mack had changed over the past year.

  Christmas break was over, my parents decided I’d had enough time to recover, and I was being forced to go back to school. How could I make anyone understand that half of me was gone? How could I explain the flashbacks that made it difficult to breathe? How could I face the world without my friend?

  My eyes scanned my very large room. I had more than most girls my age and didn’t want any of it. Not without Mack. His spirit left an imprint in every corner of who I was and what I had. There wasn’t anything in my very pink room he hadn’t touched or used. I missed his presence in the room, along with his laugh and his hands. I could still see those hands sometimes strumming out a song in my head.

  “Sunny!” she yelled again. God if she knew how close I was to…

  I picked up the scissor on my dressing table and held it up in front of my reflection in the mirror. My hands shook as I raised the shiny blades close to my neck. When I didn’t answer, my mother started up the stairs. If I didn’t hurry, she would stop me. With no time to think, I acted. I cut.

  “What have you done?” Mother was standing in my doorway with her hands over her mouth. “Your beautiful hair.”

  The locks of my hair fell to the floor. One fell on my foot and it really bothered me. It didn’t belong there. I shook it off and went to my dresser instead of my closet.

  “What did you do to yourself?” Poor mother was in shock. The only thing she could be proud of me for was gone. My looks. According to her, I was a better package than any of the other young women at our club. Her friends admired me.

  The guys in my band didn’t get my look. They wanted me to dress like them, but I didn’t wear black. The band looked hard core, and then I would walk on stage looking all meadows and sunshine in a cotton dress. The raw nerve I struck with the audience when I made my guitar scream was visible on their faces. When I opened my mouth and sang, well that was what Mack called “the hook.” He loved my look.

  “Answer me,” she shouted. “What have you done?”

  I didn’t answer. From the dresser I pulled out an old pair of jeans and a t – shirt. In the next drawer up I found his hoody. One that Mack left at my house. One I kept because I liked having his things in my room.

  “Why would you do that? You have to go to school in a minute and you chop your hair off? There isn’t time to fix it Sun.”

  I closed the bathroom door before she could follow me in. The sound of the latch made her pound on the door.

  “Let me in now.”

  “Don’t worry mom, I’m not slitting my wrists or hanging from a rope.”

  “
Don’t talk like that. Open this door now.”

  I stepped out of the bathroom a new person. My hair was choppy and short. My face was void of color and makeup, and the outfit expressed how little I cared. Mack would hate it. If only I could hear him say so. I needed to hear his voice.

  “You can’t go like that. I’m not letting you out of this house looking like that.”

  “The bus is here,” I mumbled as I pushed past my mother. “You don’t want me to be late. Life goes on mom, right? Isn’t that what you said?”

  My words struck her deeply. I could tell. She covered her face with her hands. Her eyes looked at me through the spaces of her fingers. “Oh Lord, what’s become of us? Sunny please. Stay for a minute and I’ll take you to school. I’ll figure this out. We can figure this out.”

  “How?” I shouted. “Are you going to call your beautician? This is me now. Look at me now. Are you proud of me? Do you love me this way? I can’t be who you want me to be. Okay?”

  Before she could answer I was down the stairs and out the door. I hadn’t taken the bus for a couple of years, and now I was a loser again. I was one of those kids who was either too young to drive, or too poor to own a car. My car was in our five car garage and I wasn’t allowed to use it. I guess the folks thought I might do something rash. My dad took the keys.

  The way I saw it, I was being punished for being sad. They were making me pay because I stayed locked in my room and wouldn’t go to the funeral. How dare I have my own way of dealing with Mack’s death? I think the folks were glad he was gone. They blamed Mack that I wasted my thousands of dollars worth of classical musical training on a rock band. It wasn’t his fault. The truth is that I love classical music, but when I try to express myself musically, it comes out hard and furious. I express myself with rock music.

  The bus was full as it pulled up to my driveway. My end of the road was the end of the route, with only one stop after my house. The doors opened out and I sucked in a breath to steady myself and face the world. Before I stepped up, I turned and looked at my house. It was so big and looked really cold sitting on all that land in front of the river. My life was different, I could hardly recognize it.

  The seat behind the driver was empty. It was the one seat on the bus that took a lot of guts for anyone to sit in. You either had to be cool enough to pull it off, or you had to be comfortable being the geek of geeks. I wasn’t either but I didn’t care. My wits were ready to snap. I was on the edge. There was nothing I could do about it. Mack and I had been friends since we were two. He left me.

  I held my breath as we passed Mack’s house. Every eye on the bus looked at his house, and then rested on me – waiting for a reaction. I heard whispering; something about my hair. The cut was obvious, even with the hood up. A song started to brew in my head. It was strong and I couldn’t keep it from coming.

  After Mack’s house, the next stop would have been Linda’s. Mack’s ex – girlfriend. Of course she wouldn’t be riding, because she had a car. Her house was a piece of crap, but she had a better car than some of the teachers at school. Priorities.

  The site of her house, or shack of a house, on the other side of the river, caused a reaction in me so violent, that I blurted out how I felt. “Bitch.” Everyone looked at me again. I felt them looking, but the music in my head was taking control. It was the band Godsmack, and the intro to Cryin’ Like a Bitch, started swirling through my brain – absorbing all my feelings until it was part of me. My foot began to tap like I was playing the lead guitar. Before the words started I turned to confront the gawkers.

  “What are you looking at losers?” Everyone looked away. When I turned back, the bus driver gave me a warning look and shook her head.

  At first I moved my lips to the words of the song, but the pressure was building and I wouldn’t be able to hold it back. It was like a tick. Some people hum or whistle without noticing. I blurt out songs. My head dropped, and my eyes tried to focus on anything that might pull me out of the trance, but instead I focused on my tapping foot.

  The words came softly and under my breath at first, but then I couldn’t hold them back.

  I’m tougher than nails, I can promise you that

  Step out of line and you’ll get bitch slapped back

  And you can run your little mouth all day

  But the hand of God just smacked you back into yesterday

  There was no saving up the outburst for later. Usually I had better control, and only some of the people around me knew what a freak I was. Control was gone. I shuddered as the words came more loudly. The whole school would know now.

  The next stop was Rick’s house. Two of his little sisters still rode the bus. Rick was in the band. A guitar player. His house wasn’t as big as mine and Mack’s but it was a palace compared to Linda’s. He was Mack’s best guy friend.

  It wasn’t until his little sisters were getting on the bus that I noticed Rick going out to his truck. I pushed past the girls and ordered the bus driver to open the doors. She started to protest, but when I turned to face her, it must have been the look on my face paired with my singing that made her change her mind. By that time I had completely taken over the lead singer’s part, and if you ever heard the song – well it’s loud.

  I didn’t have to call out to Rick. He heard me singing. I stood where the bus had left me, unable to stop the music. Slowly he walked over to me and took my hand. I could feel his touch, and see his blonde hair, but I was lost in every emotion I couldn’t face. I was getting a rewind of images and fears. My last days with Mack played over in my head, while flashes of Linda made me sing louder.

  You were cryin’ like a bitch

  You were cryin’ like a bitch

  You were cryin’ like a bitch

  Oh, bitch

  When it was over, he pulled me up into his arms and swung me around. “I was so worried about you. What are you doing on the bus?” Like I said. He was used to my strange outbursts.

  “Put me down dork. My parents took my car. Can you give me a ride?”

  “Oh man, I was so worried about you. Why didn’t you call me? I must have left you a hundred messages.”

  “Do I really have to explain? Seriously?” Even though he didn’t react to my performance, I was uncomfortable. My hands were sweaty and my shoulders were as tense as the song.

  “Get in the truck. Of course you don’t have to explain, but I was worried. I went by your house and your mom said …”

  “Don’t. Okay? Just don’t. What does everyone expect?” He stood there like a dummy, so I walked past him and got into his running truck. For a second I thought about sliding over into the driver’s side and taking off, but in that second he was sitting there. Against my will I was back in the world. His mouth started moving and I couldn’t keep up with the mess of words that came out. I guess I didn’t really care what he was saying or even that he was there.

  I interrupted him. “Did you go? I mean did you go to the funeral?”

  He sighed, as he guided his old truck down his driveway in reverse. “Yeah I went,” he said softly. “The other guys in the band were there too.”

  “And Linda?” I asked, through gritted teeth.

  “Don’t get me started on that bitch.”

  “Tell me. I want to know.”

  “She was there Sun. What’s there to say?”

  “You tell me. What’s there to say? I want to know.”

  He sighed again. “You know how she is. It was like watching a reality show or something. She dyed her maroon hair black.”

  “That sounds about right. She has to play the part of Gypsy.” Linda wanted everyone to call her Gypsy. Stupid. I never called her that and it pissed her off. It made her even angrier that Mack wouldn’t tell me to call her that. He and I laughed about it. Linda had no influence over Mack when it came to me.

  “She was wearing his leather jacket, and she found a black rose from somewhere. She put it on his grave. I wanted to puke.” Rick’s jaw muscles clenchedr />
  I saw red. The view from the truck was there, but behind that view, deep in my head, I saw red. That leather jacket was a gift from me. It was my Jacket.

  That’s how the rest of the day went. People stared and whispered. I sat in the back of my classes, against the seating charts and ignored anyone who protested. Not even teachers protested too loudly. I must have looked nuts. Last period I was called down to the office and escorted to the school shrink. It was my mother who prompted that mess by calling the school with her concerns. That’s a good one. My mother was concerned. Since my mother started mixing fancy drinks with prescription drugs about ten years earlier, I hadn’t seen her concerned about anything or anyone.

  “Your mother called me,” the round little woman started.

  “That’s nice.” For a split second I considered turning the tables on my mother. I considered telling the shrink how my parents dealt with things. But I didn’t have the strength to deal with their problems. I was having enough trouble dealing with the anger growing in my heart. Mack always said I was a kind and generous person. I wished he was there. He knew me. I was losing myself.

  “She’s very worried about you Sunny. It’s understandable that you would have a hard time adjusting to the death of your friend, and how he died, but your mother says you’re showing some signs that are cause for concern.”

  “Okay.” It did surprise me a little that my mother was risking having the spot light reveal her own dark corners. Involving the school shrink could blow her drug induced cover.

  “Your mother says you didn’t go to Mack’s funeral. She said you’ve stayed in your room since it happened.”

  “She’s right,” I paused. That was the extent of my generosity. “Hey, did you go to school for this? I mean aren’t you supposed to have your head together to be a shrink?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “How are you gonna help me? I mean you obviously have issues. You let yourself get really fat. Seriously? You seriously think I’m gonna listen to you? You’ve got issues.” Mrs. Harden, the shrink, sat there with her mouth hanging open, while I got up and opened the door to her office. I turned back and snarled at her. “Get a grip. Put the fork down and breathe.”