It wasn’t that I thought he wasn’t entitled to his own life, and his own secrets, but that hadn’t been the dynamic of our friendship up until that point. We’d shared everything—our thoughts and feelings, the most intimate and personal details of our lives, women... everything.
Or had we? I didn’t even know any more. I couldn’t help but think about what else he might have been keeping from me, which I knew made me a hypocrite, because I was keeping things from him, too. Important things.
“Did you know that a shotgun to the temple is the most effective way to commit suicide? I’m sure he knew that. He’d never do anything so important and leave a crucial aspect of it like the odds of success to chance. It has to be the temple, by the way. Not in the mouth, and most definitely not up through the chin. That’s a recipe for spinal cord injury, and/or blowing half your face off, but surviving, and living with a lifetime of pain, disfigurement and disability, unless you’re game enough to try again by some other method.
“Why are you telling me all this?” The tears that had started falling as Fox was speaking earlier continued to streak Rose’s face. “I’m not…”
“You’re not what? Not planning on killing yourself? Shame, really. Still, there’s no harm in being prepared if you were considering it, now or at any time in the near future. I mean, if you were considering it, at least you’d have done your due diligence and had everything in place to ensure that you got it right first time. Just like he did.”
Chapter 23
Fox
I took a few steps closer to her, and noted her quiver as I did. She was scared. Good. That was exactly what I wanted.
“Hmm... now, why would I be talking to you of all people about shooting yourself in the head with a shotgun, Tabitha Rose Arden? Maybe now that we know the end of the story, we should circle back to the beginning, and see exactly where you fit in. What do you say? Does that sound like a good idea?”
She nodded mutely, looking down into her lap.
“I said, does that sound like a good fucking idea? Answer me!”
“Yes.” Her voice was thin and reedy, and she nodded again, emphasizing her agreement.
“Good. I concur. Okay, so once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess. She met and fell head over heels in love with her prince while they worked for the same company. Theirs was a whirlwind romance, the stuff of storybooks, if you will.” Her look of fear was tinged with confusion as she listened.
“They married quickly and settled down for their blissed-out happily ever after, but that wasn’t to be. Not in the way they’d hoped, anyway. In fact, straight away the loved-up pair hit a bump in the road when they found they couldn’t have kids. However, not the type of people to quit, or take no for an answer, they carried on trying, and eventually, by the miracles of modern medical technology, they were blessed with not one, but two bouncing bundles of joy. Two sons.”
I watched her as she watched the images scroll past—Jules and me as little kids doing various cutesy little kid things. It hadn’t been hard to come by footage—the doting parents had taken hours upon hours of footage and thousands of photos, capturing every notable milestone, and many not-at-all-notable happenings. I could have bored all of us to tears for days with the sheer volume of footage, but chose just a few select clips to illustrate my point.
“As ‘miracle babies’, they were the apples of their parents’ eyes, and admittedly, overindulged as a result. As far as the doting parents were concerned, their beautiful sons could do no wrong. No request was too great for them to try their hardest to fulfill. ‘No’ wasn’t a word the boys heard often, and when they did, it was normally coming from the children to their parents, not vice versa.” I studied her features as the videos progressed, chronologically detailing the boys’ growth, in more ways than one.
“One area in which they rarely heard the word no was food. Although their father had grown up a pampered prince in Singapore and struggled with his weight way into adulthood, he somehow felt powerless to help rein in his sons’ eating habits, and so did their mother. Nor could they bring themselves to curtail their children’s technology addiction. The boys spent every waking hour staring at screens of all kinds—rarely engaging with the outside world, except to compete in this game or that.”
I swallowed down the bile rising in my throat. I just had to get through this part of the story. There was no room for sentimentality.
“So as they grew, so did their weight, though disproportionately. As you can see in the footage, by the time they were in grade school, they were at a weight where they were considered clinically obese. What you can’t see behind the staged smiles here is that life was a living hell for these boys as a result. They were teased relentlessly and mercilessly their entire childhood, and beyond.
I saw the moment it dawned on her. Total recognition. If we were in a cartoon, her jaw would have hit the floor. As it was, it hung unflatteringly agape.
“You probably want to close your mouth. It’s not your finest look, and you might catch flies.” She closed it, but her eyes were still bugging out of her head. “‘Lucky’ for the boys, the playground bullies had plenty of fodder to work with in targeting them. Not only were they overweight, but they were also the token poor scholarship kids who didn’t even come close to fitting in at the exclusive Hartford Academy. To add insult to injury, they were also smart as balls, and geeky as all get out. But it doesn’t end there! They wore glasses and they were (and one still is, of course) part-Asian. The acne in the teenage years was just the icing on the ‘playground target’ cake, wasn’t it, Tabitha?”
She shook her head. “I never—” Her words were barely intelligible through the tears.
“You never what? Used a racist slur against them? That’s true. Of all the piece-of-shit things you are, racist isn’t one of them. Give yourself a round of fucking applause, a pat on the back, and a gold goddammed star.”
“No... that’s not... what...” Her words were punctuated with sobs that rang around the hollow space, but somehow seemed to land back at me, like heat-seeking missiles with my name on them, headed right for my chest. I did my best to block them out, and make myself numb to what she was feeling. This wasn’t about her, it was about me, and more importantly, it was about Jules. I had no business feeling anything for her other than hate.
“I was going to say that it was a small mercy that nobody found out that on top of all of that, Jules was also gay, but then I realized how stupid that sentiment was. What could have happened that would have made matters worse than they actually were? They suffered from so many angles—their clothes, and lack of high-end anything, their surname, their weight, their looks, their haircuts, their grades. Everything. There was no mercy, small or otherwise, and in the end, the worst happened, and then some.”
As I spoke, the vision on the screen moved to footage of the funeral, and just like every other big family “occasion”, there was lots of it—the hundreds of mourners from far and wide, a mother so distraught she had to be restrained to prevent her from throwing herself into the grave after the coffin was lowered, elderly grandparents struggling to deal with their grief, Jules’s one and only friend, whom he had been crushing on badly, putting on a brave face.