Degausser

”Long is the way. And hard. And out of Hell leads up to light.”

For most people, growing up is a gradual process, the slow moving of an individual along a continuum until, before you know it, you wake up and realize that you’re just completely jaded with it all and you’re no longer that innocent kid that you used to be. Life just loses its beauty, and all you’re able to see is the ugliness.

For James Diamond, that hardening happened over the course of forty-eight hours.

The most tragic part of the ordeal was that, even after two years, the memory was still embedded in his brain, the visual as vivid as it had been that cool February morning. No matter how many days passed, he still couldn’t forget. And no matter how much he wanted to move on, he couldn’t bring himself to, even though he knew that that’s what Carlos would have wanted. He would have wanted James to be happy.

James couldn’t remember what happiness felt like.

--

He remembered walking down the plush beige-carpeted hall of the Palm Woods in his bare feet, his body pumping with excitement as he approached Carlos’s apartment. They’d had plans to go to the gym that morning, the two seemed to be in constant competition over who could lift the most or run the longest, and James was determined to be faster than Carlos for once. Back when they’d played hockey in high school, James and Kendall were always the strongest of the four, but Logan and Carlos had them demolished when it came to speed and agility.

Thinking back, James missed those days. At the time, he was constantly longing to be older, to be able to drive or get into a club, but now he’d do almost anything to get his youth back.

James remembered pushing his thick chocolate bangs out of his face as he reached instinctively for the doorknob, not bothering to knock. None of the guys ever knocked, even now that they all lived in separate apartments.

The knob slid in his hand, but it wouldn’t budge, so James resorted to pounding on the door with his fist.

“Carlos, open up! Don’t give me that ‘you caught that stomach virus again’ bullshit, let’s go!”

After a few moments passed without a response from the other side of the door, James turned to walk away, assuming that Carlos had had a girl over or something, but just as he began to step away from the doorway, something held his feet to the floor. It was the nagging feeling that something wasn’t quite right, his intuition kicking in as his heartbeat quickened, throbbing against his chest as he stood there, two hazel eyes never moving from the door.

A sudden burst of adrenaline sent the power of his leg thrusting towards the door, and James struggled to gather himself as he stood in the doorway. His eyes skimmed over the familiar view of Carlos’s living room, but something still felt off to him. The apartment was silent, and James tried not to make a sound as he eased his way through the empty living room and into the kitchen.

The soft slap of James’s bare feet against the linoleum was eerily amplified, and he noticed that the door of Carlos’s bedroom hung slightly ajar. James could make out the soft silhouette of his friend’s body hidden beneath pale blue sheets.

He stood in the doorway, barely peeking in, and knocked softly against the door. The body on the bed didn’t budge, and that was what terrified James the most, the fact that he couldn’t see Carlos’s chest lift upwards with each slow and steady breath. That he didn’t hear the obnoxious snore that had constantly kept him up at night for over three years.

It wasn’t until he saw the vacant stare in those chocolate brown eyes that reality struck him like an army tank. His breath caught in his chest as his mind refused to register the scene laid out in front of him. There was no way any of this could be real. This was just another one of his nightmares, and he kept waiting to wake up in a cold sweat in his bed, but it never happened.

It took everything James had to pull back those sheets, to press his head against the cold skin of his friend’s stiff chest, only to hear nothing but emptiness. Nothing but hollow emptiness, completely devoid of that spark that embodied Carlos.

Carlos was gone, and so was James, bolting from the apartment as quickly as his legs would take him, down the hall to Kendall’s place.

“Kendall! Kendall!” James repeatedly choked out his friend’s name, a desperate waver in his voice.

A weak wave of relief washed over him as soon as he was met by Kendall’s tired expression.

“What is it, James?” he asked in irritation as he wiped the sleep from his green eyes.

“Kendall…Carlos is dead.” The words hung in the air between them, and it hurt James to hear them, as if hearing them and speaking them made them that much more true.

“What?” Kendall’s face seemed to drop, his eyes lined with a million questions that James couldn’t answer.

“I-I went to his apartment just now, and he was just lying there with this stare on his face. Kendall, he wasn’t breathing, and I couldn’t hear a heartbeat.” He quickly blinked away the tears that were beginning to flood the corners of his eyes.

Kendall was speechless, but his mouth finally haphazardly formed the words “What do we do?”

For once in his life, Kendall didn’t have a plan. How could he possibly plan for this?

“I don’t know. Maybe we should tell Logan.”

--

Logan’s expression mirrored Kendall’s, except that his coffee-colored eyes darted back and forth between the two guys, his lips desperately fumbling for words as that brain of his tried to mesh everything together, come up with any sort of explanation.

For once, Logan didn’t have an answer.

“We have to call 911,” he uttered, his eyes glued to the floor as Kendall reached for his cell phone, slowly dialing the three numbers that everyone knows by heart but hopes to never have to use.