Authors: Shey Stahl
“Really,
how would you think rationally? It took you a fucking hour to decide what you
were going to drink with dinner. Fuck you. Leave my bottle alone.” I said with
no sense of rationality.
“Jameson!”
Again, Sway yelled right in my face. “He’s trying to help you.”
In my
mind, my very drunk and injured mind, he wasn’t helping me. Before I knew it, I
curled up in bed because apparently I wasn’t social material that evening. At
least that’s what I was told when I woke up on the bathroom floor at four in
the morning feeling like Mardi
Gras
had shit on me.
Sway
convinced me to go down to the lobby and eat breakfast with her, so I did, but
when we got back to the hotel to start packing, I wasn’t excited with what I
witnessed. I was Mortified yes.
Our room
was right next to Aiden and Emma’s room. When we entered our room, we walked in
and crashed on the bed, neither of us wanting to move. For one, my leg was sore
and I had a headache that felt like someone was beating nails into my skull.
Sway, recovering from her allergic reaction that turned out to be something in
the water, felt the same way. “I just want to go home.” She said with a heavy
sigh.
“Me too,” I
agreed rolling to my side to face her. Even with her blotchy skin and swollen
eyes, she was still incredibly beautiful. “When does our flight leave again?”
She looked
over at the clock and sighed again. “We have about four hours until we should
leave.”
“I can
think of a few things to take up that time.”
And that’s
when we heard…
“Oh baby!
Oh…
Jesus
…yes…just like that!”
Yeah, that
was my sister screaming. The next few seconds went by brutally slow and I
covered my ears but heard noises I never wanted to hear.
“Not
again!” I groaned covering my head with a pillow.
Sway
started laughing hysterically.
Nothing is
worse than hearing someone having sex, when you’re not, and then knowing it’s your
sister and brother in law. Like battery acid, the worst fucking images get
imbedded into your brain.
The noises
were close to the wall and just about the time, I was ready to lock myself in
the bathroom, we heard wood splintering and an ear splitting crashing noise. I
wasn’t sure if the hotel was collapsing or what. Frantically my eyes darted
around the room searching for the noise when I saw the adjoining door collapsed
about ten feet from our bed. Aiden and Emma, naked, on top of it looking around
as though they had no idea what had just happened.
“Oh my God!”
I
screamed like a dying feral cat. “Cover up! Cover up!”
“We’re
trying!” they both screamed.”
Sway, all
calm and relaxed, peeked over me to look down at the floor. “You’re right Emma,
he does where his socks when you bone.”
I wanted
to claw my fucking eyes out at the vision before me. My sister was naked but
worse, Aiden’s ass in my face as he tried to scramble back inside his own room.
Squeezing
my eyes shut, I ran full speed toward our bathroom, smacked right into the
wall, and nearly knocked myself unconscious. If I was being completely honest,
my plan was to knock myself out. I didn’t want to remember this vacation. I
silently hoped it would be like a traumatic post war syndrome and could I block
it out, it didn’t help.
After that
vacation, I was thankful it was time to go home. Still not on speaking terms
with Aiden or Emma, I vowed never to fly anywhere with them again but I knew
that wouldn’t last long. Much to my liking, they were a bit self-conscious over
the incident and kept to themselves. Sway couldn’t stop laughing. Every time
she looked at Aiden, she laughed. Every time she looked at Emma, she laughed.
They did
not.
I also
never planned to go anywhere that had animals of any sort. Sway was right, I
wasn’t one with the nature and those evil bastards confirmed that. I was meant
to be on a track and only a track.
Sway
looked at her iPad when we were waiting for the plane to take off and gasped,
“Uh, well, apparently the kids set the street on fire.”
“Kids,” I
sat straight up in the seat adjusting my sore leg that would need to be looked
at when we returned. My head felt like someone hit me with an ax and I could
barely walk on my leg this morning. It wasn’t me just being a baby either. It
was red and swollen and that shit wasn’t looking good, “My kids?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How’d
they manage that?” I wasn’t all that interested because it wasn’t the first
time they had set something on fire. But a street…that was a first. Despite all
of that and the disastrous vacation from hell, it felt good sitting here beside
Sway. It felt good being disengaged for a few days and provided a distraction.
One hell of a distraction but regardless, it was nice.
“Oh look,”
she pulled up the local news website, “it made the news and there’s a video.”
6.
Red and Yellow Flag – Jameson
Red and
Yellow Flag – This flag is displayed to signify debris (oil, sand, water, or
other substances) on the track.
On the way
home from Costa Rica we spent more time looking over the news of our street set
on fire by our kids than remembering the horrible vacation we had just
experienced.
The video
didn’t show how it caught on fire, just the aftermath, or I guess you would say
the
duringmath
? It was still on fire but being
contained, so they said. At least no houses were in danger because after all,
it was a private piece of land, my private piece of land.
The more I
thought about it on the flight home, the more upset I became.
The
problem was that it would be a danger for a housing development that was on the
other side of our 230-acre plot. Therefore, once again, I was going to have to
pay for all the damage.
When we
got home, the fire had been contained and all that remained was lingering smoke
and a lot of burnt trees. We had a private gate when you entered the property
and it looked as if someone tried to run into with a bulldozer. Turned out to
be where the fire truck smashed through it. A $23,000 gate was completely
destroyed.
Awesome.
“Keep
calm.” Sway said when she noticed my anger rising. “Let’s not overreact until
we know what happened.”
Clenching
my jaw, I pulled to the right and around crossed over the creek and then down
our road. Thick layers of smoke remained, curling as we drove through. “It
looks like the aftermath of some kind of war.”
“Yeah well
there’s about to be world war three up in the place when I find our kids.” I
seethed.
Entering
our driveway, I pulled into the garage and shut the car off taking deep breaths
and trying like hell not to explode. I remember all too well the shit me, and
my brother, did growing up and understood that parties get out of control. The
thing was, I told Casten no parties and he didn’t listen.
Spencer
was in the middle of our front lawn, passed out.
“Get up
asshole.” I kicked Spencer in the ribs before dumping my water bottle on him.
With a
laugh, Sway walked back into the house to find Casten. We knew instantly he was
behind this since Axel was racing in Chico.
“That kid
parties harder than we ever did.” Spencer groaned holding his head with both
hands. “I think he slipped me something.”
“I’m about
to slip you something. Get off my lawn.” Turning on my heel, I left him moaning
in the grass and I found Sway, upstairs, sitting outside Casten’s room watching
him talk to a girl. He was barely clothed and she was sitting on his
windowsill. Apparently, either coming or going.
The girl
was young, probably fifteen and pretty. Casten went for the blondes; he had a
thing about them. I never did so I couldn’t see that attraction, but she was
pretty.
“Oh my
god, my son is a flirt!” Sway whispered shouted in my ear with a giggle
forgetting that we intended to come up here because he was in trouble. “Go in
there.” She shoved me forward.
“No.” I
pushed against her and scrambled to stand behind her. “You can’t make me go in
there. I won’t.”
“You’re a
horrible parent.”
“I am
not.”
“Adding
breaking and entering to your dossier?” Casten asked the girl sitting on the
windowsill.
“What do
you know about my dossier, Casten?” The girl whispered sultry.
Wow, isn’t
she a little young? I thought to myself.
Sway must
have thought the same thing because she put her hands on her hips and scowled
at the girl from her place beside me. “Go in there,” she pushed me forward
again and gave me the what-the-fuck look, “he’s too young to have girls in his
room. Do something.”
I shook my
head and whispered no frantically. I was not about to go in there while he was half-naked
with a girl in his room. I was fourteen once. That would have been the worse
idea ever.
Casten
laughed and winked with his signature Riley smirk at the girl. “Ah, well, I
know plenty, honey.”
I laughed
quietly only to have Sway shove me again.
“He
learned from the best,” I whispered with arrogance and jerked back when Sway
punched my stomach.
We went
back downstairs. I did not intend to see him, or the girl, naked after that
ordeal with Emma and Aiden. I shivered at the sight and forced myself to focus
on something else.
“We need
to punish him,” Sway said once downstairs. She sat at the bar in the kitchen,
her hands cupped around her cheeks in a defeated gesture. “He needs to be punished.”
“We should
ground him.”
“Yeah
because that always works for him,”
Looking
around, we needed more than just the average punishment. The house had been
completely destroyed by water, red and yellow plastic cups, food and some
substance we had no idea what it was. It kind of resembled that crap that comes
from a fire extinguisher. You name it and it was on the ground and outside in
the haze of smoke.
I think we
were both in shock that the kids had done all this in four days.
“How the
fuck did they manage this?” I asked scratching my head.
“Maybe we
can take his iPad away and his phone and then ground him to your parent’s
house? He can spend some time with your dad.”
“Nah,” I
laughed lightly thinking of how well that would go over with my dad. It wouldn’t.
“Dad would kill him in a day. Maybe Aiden and Emma could take him. That’s
punishment.”
Sway
sighed, the defeated look returned. “No. Casten would kill Noah in about two
minutes. Then we’d have to bury a body. Clearly, we can’t do that anymore. Look
at our yard. It’s destroyed.”
“Good
point.”
We decided
we would ground him again but would decide on a proper punishment later. I knew
one thing he was cleaning this up. Walking to the fridge for water, I found
what looked to be actual puke in our fridge. Sway wasn’t impressed and neither
was I. We weren’t surprised though. The fire was a surprise but I always
expected Casten to throw a party. All of our kids had at some point so it was
only a matter of time. Axel threw one when he was sixteen. Arie threw one when
she was fifteen and now
Casten
.
“I may
kill my own son today.” She mused climbing up on the counter that had the only
clean spot and folding her legs up as if she didn’t want to touch anything.
“How many people do you think were in here?”
“Probably
the entire state of North Carolina,”
Aiden
showed up holding his phone in the air. “Phillip is on his way in case we need
him.”
“Need him,
why would we need him?”
“Well,”
Aiden shifted from one foot to the other and I had to look away from him. I
wondered how long it would be before I could talk to him and actually look at
him again. “They set a large part of the property on fire and there uh…” he was
stalling.
“Spit it
out,” I snapped shoving his shoulder. “What else happened?”
“I found a
large amount of weed on Charlie this morning when he stumbled home.”
“Weed,”
Sway perked up. “Why did he have weed on him? Our kids don’t do drugs.”
“Apparently
there was some drug use last night.”
I still
couldn’t understand the need for Phillip. “So what, all kids do drugs at some
point. Why does Phillip need to come?”
“Relax, I
asked him to come because of the fire, Jameson.” Aiden said getting frustrated.
“You can’t tell me the police aren’t going to be asking questions.”
“Was
Casten smoking pot?” Sway grabbed Aiden by his shirt forcing him to look at
her.
“How would
I know? I was with you and Tour Ted, remember?”