Chapter 2
Past
The cell doorclanged behind me with a loud metallicthudas I land on my ass on the barren and cold cement floor, shivering out of fear and dread.
Everything is cold and metal in this fucking god-awful place. I’d been led to believe as a child that Hell was fiery and hot, but it’s not. It looks, feels and smells just like this jail cell. It’s a stench of bodies – still living, but dead on the inside - along with my butchered heart. It used to beat with the warmth of love and blood, and now it only serves as a reminder of everything I’ve lost.
Everything that happened to me in the past six months was akin to living out a nightmare.
A nightmare that never goes away.
I’m gripped with sadness over what my life has become. Eighteen years old looking at three years in this god-forsaken place.
Why did this happen to me? What did I do to the universe to make her hate me so much? To be given a childhood so fraught with abuse and neglect and shame that it’s a touchstone of my future, branding me with a bleak existence. Why was I born into a family where hatred was as prevalent as the booze and pills that littered the home I lived in?
The night I accidentally killed my dad still feels surreal. As if I’m looking through a pair of 3-D VR goggles and my life is shown in slow-moving, distorted animation. Not real, just a version of reality.
There was no disputing what I did. I murdered my father.
I watched him bleed out and take his final breath, all while he stared up at me with unseeing eyes. But his death wasn’t in cold-blood. It wasn’t premeditated or planned, even though I’d wished him dead too many times to count throughout my childhood.
It was an accident, plain and simple. But in the state of Tennessee, it’s still manslaughter, a Class D or E felony. The question is whether my attorney can get the charges dropped down to a lesser sentence, not that a jury would ever let me off the hook. I only hope I can plead to the lesser crime of criminally negligent homicide, involuntary manslaughter instead of first-degree.
Either way, whether it’s reckless homicide or criminally negligent homicide, I’d still be facing hard time with a two-to-twelve-year prison sentence.
While my two best friends would begin their adult lives in college and the military, becoming model citizens, I’d be locked away, chains around my hands and shackles at my feet, as well as my soul.
I hung my head in my hands, wallowing in self-pity over the circumstances that led up to this pitiful existence. I put myself in this position by being stupid. By making the wrong choice.
Prom night was supposed to end with me wrapped up in Cam and London’s arms – our bodies melding together in perfect harmony. Instead, I ended up being handcuffed and tossed in jail.
That night and the decisions I made, will haunt me forever.
I was supposed to go directly to the hotel after work to meet Cam and London, but I had to run back home to get my clothes and money. I should’ve brought everything with me when I left for work that day, but I was in hurry and my head was in the clouds, thinking about what it would be like that night. Would Cam let me touch him like I’d been dying to do? Would I let him fuck me while London watched? There were so many possibilities, and my imagination was full of all of them.
None of that happened, though, because the moment I got home and got a whiff of the wretched stench of my father, I knew I wasn’t going.
I found the old man in my room, wildly ransacking and turning it inside out and upside down in search of my money. The hard-earned, “get me the fuck out of Dodge” savings that I was going to use right after graduation. He was yelling and screaming at me in a way I’d never heard before. He’d gone mad.
There was no way in hell I’d even give him a wooden-nickel from my savings. I didn’t owe that fucker a goddamn red cent. I wasn’t stupid enough to hide my money anywhere in that house. I’d been very careful over the years, knowing something like this was bound to happen one day, so I’d hid it in old lady Manoff’s backyard. She paid me to mow her lawn once a week since I was thirteen and I kept the money in a box underneath a loose floorboard in the shed where she stored her lawn equipment.
Needless to say, it didn’t go over well with my dad when I called him stupid.
“What’d you call me, boy? You’re a worthless piece of shit.” He stumbled back on drunken legs, catching himself with an unsteady hand against the wall, spittle drooling across his chin.
Merle Hendricks was once again wasted. An addict who’d lost everything when his wife, my mom, died. The way he saw things, it was all my fault. Her body wouldn’t have given out like it did had she never gotten pregnant with me. I was the constant reminder every time he looked at me of how shitty his life had become.
I scoffed, sneering at my dad. “Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, then, I guess.”
Stepping back to keep my distance, I crossed my arms defensively, eying his movements carefully, puffing out my solid chest appear more intimidating, like someone he shouldn’t fuck with. Merle was known to fly off the handle without cause and backhand me on more than one occasion.
It was then that I saw his half-lidded eyes track across the floor to the corner of the room where I had a baseball bat and my guitar.My beloved guitar.
The look in his eyes told me exactly what he was thinking.
“No,” I shouted, lurching across the bed and wailing on him, just as he picked up my guitar. “Don’t you fuckin’ touch that.”
My guitar wasn’t just an instrument. It held sentimental value. It was the only thing I owned that was mine and had nothing to do with my dad. I got it for my fifteenth birthday, bought and paid for with the birthday money that London’s mom gave me. It meant everything to me and I loved making music with it, hearing the chords chime and feeling the strings vibrate under my fingertips. It was an escape from reality when I wrote and played my music on that guitar.
