Chapter Nine Spade One
Alistair
I went to therapy once.
Once as in, one single appointment that lasted maybe twenty-five minutes before the psychiatrists refused to work with me any longer.
I was twelve, five inches shorter than I was now, and I tried to stab my nineteen-year- old brother in our kitchen during a Christmas party, after I’d broken his nose and my right set of knuckles.
It’s funny, I don’t remember much of it besides what I’ve been told and in perfect vision I recall sitting on the kitchen floor watching as connected people tugged strings calling the best plastic surgeons and doctors money could buy.
My mother was bawling, holding Dorian’s face in her hands while he held a blood soaked handkerchief to his face, waving her away from him.
They rushed out the door, everyone leaving shortly after and not a single person even looked for me.
Not for punishment. Not for worry. Not even to ask why I did it.
Nothing. The only reason I’d been put in therapy was because my grandmother insisted it to save the Caldwell name.
Claimed I had temporary explosive disorder, anything to make it look better.
They all waltzed right past the kitchen where I sat, clutching my shattered knuckles in my hand, watching them look right through me like I was nothing but glass. Something to only look through, never at. Not like Dorian, who was nothing but pure gold.
That had been my first punch. My first explosion of rage that I couldn’t contain. I physically could not swallow it any longer, I had to do something. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to kill him.
I’d walked to the fridge grabbing a bag of frozen peas, knowing the cold would help the swelling go down. Rook had taught me that before I was even seven.
Dorian was in his second year at Hollow Heights and he’d decided he wanted an office, to study, fuck girls, whatever bullshit he’d told my parents.
Instead of taking one of the fifteen thousand other free bedrooms, he took my conservatory.
He picked it because he knew it was the only place in that fucking house I could stand.
He didn’t even want an office he just wanted to show me, once again, that everything in my life was nothing but his to take.
The conservatory was all the way on the west end of the house, it was a small circular extension of the original house. My grandfather had built it for my father when he was my age, and it had never been used until I was five.
I stayed in there all the time. I never came out unless I wasn’t at home.
I liked to listen to the rain pelt the glass case that surrounded it, watching the lightning strike trees and the thunder shake the small green couch inside. There wasn’t much in there besides the couch. A few dead plants and useless bookshelves, but it was mine and it was the only place I had.
And he took it from me.
At the same age he was when I attempted to murder him, I still couldn’t step into that room. When he left for graduate school, they left all of his shit in there and truth be told it stopped being mine the second he requested to have it.
The short list of places I could escape to, had grown even shorter that day. It’s still just as short.
The Graveyard was only for weekends, I ruled the ring. Never beaten. Never touched. But it wasn’t mine. Not really. Occasionally I would go to Thatcher’s house but even there I felt out of place with all the one-of-a-kind sculptures and Victorian decorations.
The only place I had now was Spade One.
It was a tattoo shop just outside of Ponderosa Springs, shoved between an old barbershop and a general store. The neon sign that clung to the side of the window buzzed and cast a purple glow through the shop windows.
With two layers, the bottom being the waiting room with black leather couches, the reception desk and a small storage closet.
The upper floor was sectioned by tall glass plates, giving each artist their own space to decorate their station as they saw fit.
Most of which was custom designs framed on the walls, stickers and tattoo equipment.
And in the back was a wooden desk where I stayed unless I was cleaning the shop or helping out.
The reason I’d been so furious at Dorian all those years ago, the reason he’d pushed me to throw my first punch, to truly awaken that rage inside me that won’t leave, is because it’s where I’d sketch.
I didn’t keep it a secret because well, it’s not like my parents gave a fuck what I did. So I would hang them on the glass panels of the conservatory walls. Each one covered with a cream sheet of paper and some sort of design I’d drawn. Dorian knew about it. He’d seen it.
By twelve I had covered the space with them. So, when they remodeled it into his office, I never saw those pictures again. They had all been thrown away. Just another nail in my emotional coffin.
Not wanting him to win, never wanting my doodles to ever fall into their hands again, I started drawing on myself. My fingers, my hands, arms and thighs. Wherever I could reach.
I often wondered if my father and mother even glanced at me, saw that I actually had talent.
But I could have been an MIT graduate at ten with an IQ that rivaled Einstein and it still wouldn’t have been enough to equal my brother.
There was nothing I could ever do that would be good enough for them.
I think it was better I learned that at a young age instead of living my entire life vying for their attention when it would never happen. They had everything they needed in a child when they had Dorian. I was just waste.
Since I was seventeen I’d started coming here. I found it one night while I was driving my car around late, contemplating running it over a popular jumping cliff with me inside of it. I had nothing I wanted to live for.
It’s not nearly as sad as you think. I mean it happens every day. People die, you get over it.
I’d been wanting to die since I found out the reason I was even given life. I mean the boys would’ve had each other. I wasn’t needed and I was tired of fighting for a life I hated. And that’s when I saw the shop.
So, if you believed in Hollywood bullshit like fate, you could call it something like that.
When I walked in, met the owner, Shade, and started showing up with a fake ID just to get tattooed, I’d realized I finally found something that was truly mine.
Not my brother’s. Not my parents’. Not even the boys’.
It was all mine, and no one could take that from me.
Shade let me work here when I had the time, free of charge on my part, and the only time I ever used a dime of my parents’ money willingly was when I applied for my internship here after I found out I would be staying in Ponderosa Springs for the next year.
The original plan, before Rose, was leaving for New York.
Shade had taken a liking to my work and said he would set me up with a shop on the east coast for my internship.
It was like someone had lifted a lifelong weight off my chest and I’d finally felt the wings they’d clipped as a child start to grow back.
Then someone had to go and murder my best friend’s girl. A girl I’d saw as a little sister. And that entire plan was put on pause.
I was going to get the fuck out of this place, away from all the bullshit and just start a life where nobody knew me. Where no one knew my last goddamn name.
The pencil in my hand snaps into two pieces, splintering onto the worktable and my unfinished tattoo design.
It was a thigh piece I’d been working on since I got here today.
Every tattoo that was on my body, I’d either done or drew myself.
My entire body was my portfolio. I’d let Shade do the ones I couldn’t, but my legs were all me.
“Good time for a smoke break?” Shade says from his booth, looking up from the guy’s leg he is blasting.
I nod, “I believe so.” Pushing my chair back and standing up into a stretch.
“On your way back up grab me some more gloves out of storage, make sure—”
“The black ones. I do remember things you know?” I call as my feet carry me down the steps and out the front door.
The foot traffic is slow, leaving me with some peace and quiet as I light a Marlboro Red, letting the familiar smoke fill my lungs with the first draw.
I thought I was going to have peace and quiet.
My phone started buzzing in my front pocket on my second puff and I can’t not answer. Not with everything going on.
I place the smoke on my lip, holding it between my teeth as I slide my finger across the screen, placing the speaker to my ear,
“Yes, wife?”
I hear a scoff, “If I was your wife you wouldn’t dress like a retired motorcycle club president with a drinking problem.” Thatcher informs me.
“You sure do bitch like a wife.” I slide down the wall, squatting down and resting my back against the floor to ceiling windows outside the shop, “Why are you calling me?”
“Better question, where are you?”
“Why?” I answer his question with one of my own.
“Because you’re supposed to be here helping us supervise Rook. You know, making sure he doesn’t blow my house to tiny million-dollar pieces, while he makes chloroform in my basement.”
Fuck.
I forgot about that.
Granted, it was pretty important, but I’m sure they could handle this one thing without having me be there.
Chris Crawford, the teacher’s assistant our snitching drug dealer told us about, was the only lead we had left. Saying it like that made us sound like vengeful detectives. Taking the law in our own hands, save the badge and give us knives.
All week we’d been following him around, just trying to catch him doing something out of the ordinary and we’d almost stopped, gave up on him, until Thatcher scored pictures of him going through product in his car after school.
Whether he was our killer was to be determined.
But he was supplying the drugs that killed Rose and that was better than nothing.