Chapter III

April, 2010

North Elba, New York

“Lake Placid”

It was barely six in the morning as the reddish spring sun struggled to cast its light through the young boy’s bedroom window. The early sunlight magnifying through the glass would be enough to wake anyone from sleep, but the boy was already awake.

He was sitting on the edge of his bed with his back to the sun, fully clothed and fully groomed, as if he had been up before the break of dawn. He was wearing a light, gray-striped DC hoodie and a pair of bluejeans defaced by holes in the material of various sizes. His dark hair was long and ragged, reaching halfway down the back of his neck and almost over his eyebrows, and his expression was one of bitterness and exhaustion. Not exhaustion due to lack of sleep, but rather mental fatigue. To him the weight of everyday life pressing down on him was taxing and burdensome, and he would see himself confined to his room for long hours each day, as it was his only means privacy.

The boy’s name was Alex Lee. Clutched in his hand was a black, steel-tipped throwing dart. He stared down at it for a moment, twiddling it around in his hand as if admiring or disparaging the thin, metal point of the dart. The silver surface glistened faintly as the morning light reflected off of it. He looked up at his bedroom door. There was a dark-red target spray-painted on the white wood. All over the target and its surrounding area were dozens of tiny puncture marks, as throwing darts against his door was an activity that he would do aimlessly most mornings upon waking up, sometimes for hours on end. In a way it helped him clear his mind. Whatever it was that he needed to break away from, this was how he did it. Without any effort, Alex quickly repositioned the dart in his hand, wound up and whipped it at the door. The dart instantly drilled its sharp point into red center of the painted target. Alex brought his hand up and rubbed his head lightly as he let out a drained sigh of self-misery.

In the next room over from his own, a young girl was lying awake in her bed. As the light of the new morning sun also brightened her room, she too had been awake before dawn. Her name was Nickole. She was Alex’s 12-year-old sister, and she was awoken this morning, as she was every morning, by the sound of her brother piercing his door with darts.

With each dart that dug its way into Alex’s door, the sharp sound made Nickole’s mind wander. Her thoughts traveled deep into the far reaches of her mind in search of the better memories of her brother. She could recall a time not that long ago when the two of them were much closer. They never knew their father, as he had left when they were both very young. Alex never spoke of him, but everytime Nickole would ask their mother about him, she would never give a proper answer. All of their friends were convinced that he simply turned out to be a typical dirtbag that ultimately wanted nothing to do with family. But somehow, Nickole did not get that sense from her mother. She was the only one in the household who really knew what kind of person their father was, and though she rarely ever talked about him herself, she never showed any sort of contempt or anger toward him. Was she just trying to forget him and move on? Or was there something she knew that she did not want either of them to know of?

Whatever the reason, Nickole somehow doubted that Alex’s radical decline in spirit was due to the disappearance of his father. She could vaguely remember when Alex was not the gloomy, emotionless boy she knew now. His darkened hair was once much lighter and his gray, somber eyes used to show off a rather elegant, cool form of blue; the shade of ice cold blue whose gaze would temper one’s exhaustion in the summer and fill one with peace and amity in the dead of winter. But the one thing she missed most was his smile. It was a short smile that warmed people up inside, the kind of smile that showed aspiration for life and for the lives around him. Yet for all that was once good in his heart, Nickole would wake up every day to see more and more of her bygone brother sinking further away.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a rapid knock on her door. Nickole’s eyes jerked open and she turned toward the door as a woman’s voice traveled through. “Get up, Nickole. You two will be late.”

Nickole rubbed her eyes and sat up in her bed. “Coming, Mom,” she replied tiredly. She stood up and lumbered over to her dresser, glancing into the mirror that stood on top of it. Looking at her drowsy reflection, Nickole casually recovered her tangled, blonde hair from the night of unconscious tossing and turning. Soon she began to notice that the darts in her brother’s room had stopped flying.

At the sound of their mother waking Nickole, Alex tossed his last darts at his door and allowed himself to fall back down onto his bed. Instead of coming next to knock on his door, Alex’s mother walked past it and proceeded down the stairs at the end of the hallway. Every morning she would wake her daughter as she had done but knew that her son was always already awake and disturbing his quiet mood was the last thing he wanted, so she saw no choice but to leave him alone until he picked himself up. For several years everybody watched the boy slowly decline into discord with the world he had grown up in, and they knew it was having an effect on his small family, even though they did their best not to show it.

After dressing for the morning, and still feeling the ragged effect of sleep, Nickole applied a small amount of makeup to cover the dark circles under her eyes. It was the only amount of makeup her mother allowed her to use. She was extremely perceptive about the concept of makeup and, unlike their father, always made sure she was close enough to ensure that her daughter would not grow to become the kind of reckless adolescent who felt the need to drown her true self beneath the veil of a false image. Setting down her makeup, Nickole smiled at her mother’s tacit notion of, “You are beautiful just the way you are.” She walked over to her closet and pulled out a light, sky-blue jacket and put it on. She opened her bedroom door and started to walk down the hallway, but before she passed by her brother’s room, the door was pulled.

Nickole halted suddenly as her dismal brother emerged from his den of solitude. He stopped in his tracks as well and directed his attention to Nickole. The two abruptly locked eyes. It was something that they rarely found themselves doing much anymore, and from his taller stature she felt like Alex was glowering down at her with his dim, gray eyes. Trying to show no expression, Nickole waited for her brother to say something, anything. Instead, Alex just nodded to her ever so slightly, as if he wanted to say good morning but found himself holding it back. He then turned and continued down the hall to the stairs. Nickole exhaled with some disenchantment and proceeded to follow him.