Frankie
Life isn’t fair.
I guess she’s right. It sure isn’t fair that I’m dead and she’s still hobbling around at eighty-seven. Man, that doesn’t seem fair at all.
But I guess no one expects to die. Not even old people. I mean, you must be kinda prepared, but that still doesn’t mean you’re ready. Another thing I remember my gran saying: ‘I know we’ve all got to die, but even now, I still think God will make an exception.’
I guess we all think that. Even when I began to put things together and discovered some of the bad stuff that had happened, I still didn’t think the bad stuff would happen to me. No exceptions, man. It kinda sucks.
Maybe Cash thought the same. Or maybe not. Otherwise, he would never have written the letter.
But I’m getting way too far ahead. I should backtrack, right? Cos right now you don’t know why I’m dead or who the fuck Cash is. Or maybe you do. Maybe other people have been talking.
Man, I wish I had some weed right now. My brain gets hyper, all sorta tangled up.
ADHD, the doctor said, but my mom and dad didn’t really believe in that type of ‘Big Pharma’ stuff, so they never gave me my meds.
As a kid I was like one of the silver balls in a pinball machine, just bouncing off the walls.
But then I found weed, and it helped. It slowed my brain right down. Maybe too much at times. But it was better than being the human pinball. I liked being mellow. Things that used to drive me crazy didn’t matter so much.
Mom and Dad didn’t know. I got my gear from Eddie, who also worked at the diner, but I reckon he must have got busted because he left Serenity overnight. A moonlight flit, someone said. Or at least, that’s what I believed at the time. Now, I’m not so sure.
But yeah, getting ahead again. So, I’d already gotten a few plants from Eddie, and that’s when I started growing my own. Mom and Dad were kind of old-fashioned – when I told them I was growing my own herbs they didn’t notice I wasn’t exactly growing basil.
Everything was sailing smooth until someone, I don’t even know who, visited and must have recognized the marijuana plants in Mom and Dad’s back yard. So, the shit hit the fan, and Mom and Dad kicked me out.
That’s how I ended up living at my gran’s.
She was happy to have the company. I knew she’d had a lodger a while back, but he’d died or something.
Mom and Dad were always saying how she couldn’t carry on living in that big house on her own, but I often thought that was just because they wanted to sell the house and get the money for themselves.
Either way, Gran was cool. She didn’t even mind me growing weed and, believe me, she knew exactly what I was growing, even baked a little into her cookies sometimes. ‘For my arthritis,’ she would say.
I was kinda bummed about my folks being all mad and that, but I figured they’d come around eventually. In the meantime, life settled into its usual groove. Work at the diner, smoking some weed, selling some to the high-school and college kids.
Not that I didn’t have aspirations. I mean, I didn’t want to stay in Serenity Falls for ever.
Often, in the evening, I’d resolve to send some applications to one of the malls out of town, but inevitably, come morning, I’d find the drive to do it had gone.
The fear had crept in. And then I’d start to think that maybe staying in Serenity Falls wasn’t so bad, and living with Gran was kind of sweet cos she didn’t ask for any money.
But I needed to do something about the room.
The furniture was all heavy and dark, and the bed was in a weird place too.
It takes me a while to get round to doing stuff but, eventually, one weekend I didn’t have a shift at the diner, and I wasn’t too stoned, so I decided I’d move the room around.
Turned out it was a messy hot day that day and Gran’s aircon was, like everything else, a bit old. By the time I’d manhandled the wardrobe across the room, I was almost done. Then a knock came at the door and Gran shuffled in holding a Diet Coke. Like she’d read my mind or something.
‘Sounds like you’re trying to move the furniture all the way through the ceiling.’
I popped the tab on the Diet Coke. ‘Sorry, Gran. Just shifting some stuff around.’
She nodded. ‘Yeah, my old lodger did the same. Always thought it was weird how he wanted the bed all the way over there.’ She waved a hand. ‘You go ahead, kid. I want you to feel at home here. I like having you.’
She grinned, and I grinned, and after she went, I go back up feeling kind of energized. I loved Gran, and I guess in a way I’ve always felt closer to her than to Mom and Dad.
Anyways, up I got and set about shifting that old bed. It was heavy like every other fucking thing in the room, but I grunted and heaved and managed to shove it into place in the middle of the bedroom.
And that’s when I saw it.
Right under where the bed had been.
When I say Gran’s house is old, it’s not like ‘olde worlde’ old, beams and proper floorboards and all that shit, but upstairs there’s some kind of wooden flooring covered with faded old rugs.
It’s not real wood. Like most stuff in Serenity Falls, it’s some fake-ass shit made to look genuine.
Everything here is a reproduction. Like a movie set.
But anyway, point is, under the bed it was plain to see a section of the wooden flooring had been cut out and stuck back down again. Not well, either. You could see it didn’t join properly and stuck up a bit.
I stood for a moment, scratching at my head. There was something about that patch of floor. It sounds weird, but looking at it made me feel kind of ick. Like I was looking at a puddle of vomit. It was wrong. It made the part of my brain that the weed soothed start to jangle.
I crouched down, fished in my pocket and took out my multipurpose knife/bottle opener. Everyone in the diner has one. I jabbed the blade down by the slightly sticking-up corner and pushed. The board was thin laminate, and it popped right up.
Underneath was a layer of chipboard. I could see where it had been cut roughly and shoved back into place. I didn’t need the knife this time. I used my fingers and yanked it up.
Something had been wedged beneath the flooring, in between the joists of the sub floor.
It was bulky, covered in bubble wrap. I wedged my fingers in and pulled it out.
It felt like a book or a bunch of papers.
Carefully, I unpeeled the wrap. I sat back on my haunches and looked at it.
A thin sheaf of papers bound with large multicoloured elastic bands, the sort you get around a pile of post.
In fact, the first page on top looked like a letter.
I pulled it from the bands, and that’s when I realized this was some serious shit.