Adult-FanFiction.org : Celebrity

Champagne Supernova	By : SolusNemo Category: Singers/Bands/Musicians > Good Charlotte Views: 862 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I do not know the members of Good Charlotte. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Champagne Supernova
- 2-Chapter Two
- 1
- 2
Chapter Two

“The me that you know, he doesn’t come around much. That part of me isn’t here anymore.”

A great part of me was convinced that if I just told myself that nothing had ever happened the powers of suggestion and denial would fix everything. If I said that I had never shot Nancy with my father’s old gun, if I had never been the one to jokingly suggest to my brother that we knock over a gas station…none of if would ever have happened. It was all in my head, I could repeat over and over. Maybe if I said it long enough fate would rewrite itself.

But of course that would never happen. My future had taken a drastic change the second I walked out of the house at nine o’clock, the moment I had lied to my mother and told her Joel and I were going to a friend’s house for a small party. In retrospect if I had just stayed in the house my entire life would come out differently.

For one, a middle-aged woman named Nancy would still be alive and well.

I wonder what the future would have held if I helped my little sister cheat on an important History assignment?

We would have been evicted, sent out to live on the streets or convince distant relatives – not in mileage, but emotional closeness, closeness in friendship – to let us stay a while in their spare bedroom or couch. But then we might have found a place to stay, a landlord who’d take a first payment to the amount of Joel and I’s next combined paycheck. Then what? I’d find a way to pay my way through college and become a successful businessman, live in an apartment in New York City with my brother?

That’s all gone to Hell now, in a nice woven hand basket with attractive Celtic plaid fabric misted with the sent of the ocean.

What did my future hold now? Police investigations, night terrors, guilt, and possible jail time? A suspicious Mark Jacobs who wanted to know how a dead broke family suddenly gave him the four figure amount of money they owed him so quickly? Constantly being stalked by the ghost of the woman who’s life I took, the one who just wanted to see her baby niece in person for the first time?

If there’s a worse human being in the world, please, stand up.

“It’s okay, Benj,” Joel said softly. He sat down next to me on my bed, put an arm around me and pulled me to him. He set his chin on my left shoulder, joined me in looking out the window at the water droplets racing down the pane of glass, yellow from the glow of the street lamps. “It’s going to be all right.”

“You’re not the one who put a bullet through someone’s spine.”

I shut my eyes tightly, tried to will away the image of the bullet traveling right through the middle of Nancy’s neck.

“No, I’m not, but it was self-defense,” my brother stated.

I wanted to laugh, I tried to laugh, but it came out more of a wheeze. “We robbed her, Joel. What she did, that was an act of self-defense, but what I did is nothing less than murder. No jury in the world is going to acquit me on that. Yeah, she was going to shoot you so I killed her first, but we went there to rob her. Maybe if we just went in there without the guns, the ski masks, just wanted some Twinkies and she flew off the handle I might not get sent to prison, but that’s not how it happened.”

Joel griped me tighter, as if he thought that if he held me close enough all of this would wash away with the rain. “They won’t know you did it.”

“The security tapes. We called each other by name, it’s on the security tape.”

“There’s no tape in the recorder, never has been. The manager hasn’t ever had any problems with robbery because, he says, the cameras and the security sticker on the front door scares ’em off. We don’t need to worry about that.”

“The bullet. They can trace the bullet back to the gun, can’t they?”

Joel’s breath hit my neck, sent shivers up and down my spine. “Mom doesn’t believe in guns. Remember, she used to tell Dad about how barbaric and sin infested they are all the time and he finally told her he’d get rid of them? There’s a reason why we found those two stashed under some moldering boxes in the attic. When we go to work tomorrow afternoon we can throw them in the lake. It’s deep, they’ll sink to the bottom. If someone comes around asking, Mom’ll tell them that Dad got rid of all his guns years ago. They’ll just think someone stole the gun or something.”

“That doesn’t sound right. No one would fall for that unless they’re extremely slow.”

I felt Joel shake his head. “No, but I won’t let anything happen to you, Benj. You’re going to be all right.”

“And what if I’m not? What if someone saw something or they figure out it’s me who killed her? I’ll be tried, convicted. Do you know where I’d go, Joel? Supermax to be locked up 23 hours a day with a concrete bed or in Maryland Penn. I don’t want to be stabbed to death, Joel. Nor would I liked to be a punk. I wouldn’t last in jail, I can’t even handle being grounded.”

I could hardly breathe, Joel was holding me with that much passion. “I’d trade places with you. Haven’t I always done that before?”

“We’re not talking about being held down on a locker room bench and being rubbed with Bengay for me because I was the one who asked the wrong girl to the dance, being beaten up for me because I was the one who ran my mouth off about a jock. This is serious. 25 to life for me? I’m not going to have you ruin your life even more for me. If we’re caught you’d have a lesser sentence. You have more of your life ahead of me than I do. You’re the harder the worker, the better father figure. I won’t hear of any trading, okay?”

When I was a toddler I had make the mistake of watching a scary movie with my older brother Josh. My parents had gone out for an anniversary lunch and hired a baby-sitter that thought it better to spike up our phone bill talking to her boyfriend than sitting on us. When she wasn’t talking on the phone, she was upstairs in the nursery goggling over baby Sarah.

Because Jenny – or at least I think her name was Jenny. It was something with a J, that much I’m sure of – wasn’t paying attention to any of us like she was suppose to, I had gotten the great idea of being like Superman and snuck out of my nap. Hey, Superman had to start somewhere, right?

Joel had been out like a light, sucking his thumb, so I didn’t bother to wake him up. I slinked downstairs into the living room with my blue footie pajamas with the red and white airplanes on them (the reversed coloring of Joel’s PJs), convinced that I was like a tiny Errol Flynn – swashbuckling my way past the bad guys to get the girl. Back then I had thought girls were icky, so I had amended that prize to treasure.

When I got to the living room, grinning like the three foot tall gnome I was, I had crawled up on the sofa next to Josh and prided myself for getting to the television without getting caught and sent back to my room.

He kind of looked annoyed that I was there, but then he let me drink some of his apple juice and told me that if I didn’t tell Mom and Dad that he had allowed me to watch a scary movie, he wouldn’t call Jenny – or Jessica, Jamie, Julie – down to the living room to drag me back to nappy-time.

So I had sat next to Josh and watched Halloween for the first time in my life. I had thought it was the coolest thing in the world, hanging on the couch with my big brother watching a horror movie and giggling when the people died, the sexual parts of the film flying right over my head.

I got sleepy halfway through so I embarked on my mission back to Joel and I’s bedroom without running into Jenny – or Jackie, Jacquelyn, Jane. I reached my destination successfully and tip-toed into my bedroom, eased the door shut behind me, and climbed back into bed. I fell asleep the moment my head touched the pillow.

But Michael stalked my dreams and I woke up soon after terrified. I laid there for what seemed like ten hours, trying to close my eyes without being convinced that Michael was going to pop out from under my bed and cut me with his knife. It was a futile effort and I had to spend the rest of my nap-time huddled against Joel in his bed, unable to sleep. I was cranky the rest of the day.

I mention that experience because I was going through a similar thing as I tried to go to sleep that morning. Every time I would close my eyes I’d relive what I’d done, hear the screaming, the gun going off, smell the burnt metallic odor of the gun shot residue, see the blood.

I was sweating and my heart was surely going to explode with all the fast beating it was going through. I just couldn’t shut my eyes without seeing myself kill Nancy all over again and I realized that the rest of my life was going to be like that: unrelenting insomnia with the monster of homicide waiting in the wings.

After rubbing my eyes I threw the bedsheets off my overheated, sticky body and got out of it.

Joel wasn’t able to sleep either and moved toward the wall to make room for me, pulled the sheets back for me. Neither of us said anything as I got into the bed, settled myself so that I was facing my brother, Joel on his back and me on my side. I latched onto the hem of his shirt with my right hand and put my left arm across his chest, set my head down on his left breast to hear his heart beating.

We laid like that for a while, holding onto each other, until by some miracle I fell asleep.

▪▪▪

The weathermen said that this was going to be not only the hottest summer in years, but the wettest. When there wasn’t going to be torrential rain the days would seem like a Twilight Zone episode had finally come true: the one where the earth was moving way too close to the sun.

We had air conditioning, but we never liked to use it unless we absolutely had to – it saved a bit of money on the bills. We did the same with heat, wearing layers and using extra blankets until it got too cold to do. So that day we had all the windows open even though it didn’t help significantly and we were all dressed in shorts and t-shirts.

I’ve always hated warm weather, but if given the choice I’d choose it over cold. Besides, I knew where the coolest spot in the house was.

It was in the corner of the living room farthest from the archway into the kitchen and the one to the dinning room. Think of it like a triangle: the doorways being the two points of the base and the cool spot being the top point. I had a chair there and luckily it was to the right of the television, meaning no missed cartoons. Or the news.

It was currently the morning edition on Fox, Mom never missed it. She would sit on the couch with her cup of decaffeinated coffee and find out what was going on in the world. The rest of us were somewhat forced to watch it along with her – not that we minded, she’s an awesome mother, but the tone in which she says “Are you sure you don’t want to know what’s happening around the country?” makes it the only thing she ever needs to say to make us sit down and watch the news with her. You’d have to be there to understand what I mean. It sounds like a benign enough question, but it’s the way that she says it that makes you feel like you’ll break her heart and be the stupidest person in the world if you don’t sit down in the living room and watch the television for an hour.

When I saw the breaking story I wish I had for once remained in the kitchen to eat my Cocoa Puffs.

The anchorwoman sitting at the desk was a fill whose name I couldn’t pronnounce even if you paid me. It was Russian, I can tell you that much.

She was sitting at the desk, looking right at me, as she explained in her soft, alto voice that a robbery homicide had taken place around one o’clock in the morning and that at the moment there were no suspects. There was no tape to be shown and all anyone really knew was that Nancy Hawthorn was working the graveyard shift when at least one armed and masked perpetrator came into the building and robbed her. As of yet no one knew why Nancy Hawthorn, a 32-year-old single mother of one, was shot. The bullet, found lodged in the brick, blood stained wall was beyond recognition: completely flattened with nothing to compare it to. No one saw anything in the vacant post office and farm land surrounding the gas station, no one would have heard anything either. The channel four news team would keep everyone informed when new information was found.

“Who would do something like that?” Mom asked, angry and disgusted. “What’s the world coming to? The poor family of that woman. I hope whoever has done this will be found and punished severely.”

What was I suppose to say if I could have said anything at all? On any other day I would have agreed with her, wished that justice would come to whomever took a life like that. But that wasn’t any other day. I had been the one to kill someone to save the life of my own flesh and blood, but I knew that didn’t change the fact that I had committed an act of murder.

I turned my head and looked at Joel, leading against the doorway with a half eaten granola bar in his hand. We had each lost out appetite knowing that if Mom ever found out about what happened she’d ostracize us from the family.

I supposed it would only make things worse if I told her that we had done it all for her. She’d only ask God where and when she had gone wrong.
- 1
- 2
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Champagne Supernova