The Black Swan Behind (Beauty of Fire)

Chapter 24: Calvin Lee (2)

It was a normal day at school. I study in the class diligently. I didn’t think it would turn out to be the most terrible day of my life.

Suddenly my homeroom teacher came into the classroom and called my name. Her face seemed surprised with a strange look, but at that time I didn’t notice it. She took me to the teachers’s room.

“Calvin. Something bad happened to your brother. I will take you home, hem?” The teacher said.

I was confused, what was the bad thing that happened to my brother? In my mind, maybe he fell off the bike or got injured while exercising. Like myself, who once broke my leg while attending a karate club. In my mind as a child, that was the only most terrifying thing in my imagination. But in reality... what happened was far more terrifying.

When the teacher’s car arrived in front of my house, we found there were a lot of police cars. I turned to my teacher who covered her mouth with one hand with both eyes shaking.

“What’s going on, Miss? Why are there so many police in my house? Was our house got robbed?” I asked panicked. But she didn’t answer, just kept stroking the back of my head repeatedly.

Suddenly a policeman knocked on the car window. My teacher opened the window and said, “I’m Rossa. This is Calvin Lee. Lucas Lee’s little brother.”

.....

“Fine. Can you come down and take this kid to his grandmother?” Asked the police. My teacher nodded.

Then we got off the car and my teacher took me to the yard. I saw my grandmother was sitting on a bench in the yard. She kept crying hysterically with two policewomen sitting on her right and left sides.

I immediately ran towards my grandma in a panic. Grandma must be really scared because our house was robbed, I thought.

“Grandma!” I arrived before her. Grandma looked at me and immediately hugged me tightly. She cried more and more hysterically, as if the world had come to an end.

“Calm down, Grandma,” I said sadly.

But she shook her head. With her raspy old voice shaking, she uttered a sentence that seemed to devour the world around me, “Your brother is dead, Calvin.”

At first, I couldn’t get my grandmother’s words. So I asked again, “What’s wrong with brother, Grandma?”

She let go of her hug and looked into my eyes, “Calvin.. Your brother died. He is gone.”

At that moment, I could only be silent. The whole thing felt unreal. My children’s brain still could not accept this fact. Until I saw people from the ambulance coming out of my house pushing a metal bed on wheels. On it, was a figure lying down covered with a white cloth from feet up to his head.

Grandma immediately ran to the wheels bed. Her weak knees didn’t even seem to be able to support her body weight anymore... or, couldn’t stand the weight of the realities of life. Grandma removed the cloth covering the guy’s head.

I, who had been standing behind my grandmother, was immediately surprised when I saw who was behind the white cloth. It was my brother’s face. But he looked very pale with his eyes still half-open. There was a large bluish-purple stain all over his neck which looked strange. I didn’t like my brother’s face that looked like that. It scared me.

The day changes. During that time, many things happened. Hospital, police station, funeral, news on TV. It all went like a speeded-up videotape. I didn’t understand and just always follow my grandmother’s steps. During that time, she kept crying and looked very stressed. All I could was only cheer her up, even though it always seemed to be failed.

Until finally, all the tiring activities had ended. No more crowds, no more police or journalists coming to ask things to my grandmother and me. All that remained was the silence and the faint sobs of my grandmother that could be heard every night.

Since that incident, my grandmother always forbade me to watch TV. She always threw away all the daily subscribed newspapers when they arrived in front of our house. I didn’t understand that at that time my grandmother was trying to hide it from me, that the cause of my brother’s death was suicide.

One year passed. I was no longer a child. I was a kid who became a teenager. My brother’s death had left a big wound and hole in our hearts. I lost someone very precious to me. And what was worse, my grandmother seemed to be consumed by her sadness so that she started to get sick.

My parents owned various businesses and many investments. We have never had financial difficulties. You could even say, what we have was more than enough. Fortunately, my father had a friend he could trust to take care of his business which was going to be inherited to my brother and me. But of course, since my brother’s death, I become the main heir when I’m old enough.

My uncle, who was my father’s best friend, always sent us money every month and hired a house assistant to take care of our house and grandmother’s. Meanwhile, he himself, lived abroad to take care of my father’s very complicated business.

It just so happened that the assistant only took care of the visible things. For example cleaning and cooking. She also made sure that Grandma took her medicine properly and took her to the doctor regularly. But one thing she never paid attention to, was my mentality.

I didn’t get enough attention. My sickly grandmother was too weak to take care of me. Like a pet, the assistant just made sure that I was eating right and had clean clothes to wear. For the rest, I took care of myself. Because she was not in charge of being my mother, so she didn’t care what I do, as long as she did her job properly.

At first, I was not allowed to watch TV, I started breaking that rule because I was bored. All the rules that Grandma made since my brother died, I slowly started to break them because I didn’t understand what Grandma’s real purpose was.

Until one day I found a pile of old newspapers in the warehouse while looking for bicycle spare parts. For some reason, I became curious about the dusty pile of paper. So those things that my grandmother had forbidden me to read?

I took a cutter and cut the plastic rope that tied the pile of newspapers and took one of them. Then I read what was in the newspaper. Nothing out of the ordinary, just some old news that happened in Handway city.

Feeling nothing interesting, I put the newspaper back. But one newspaper underneath caught my attention. There was a very familiar picture on the front page. It turned out to be a photo of the front of my house. I immediately took the newspaper and read the title.

‘A High School Student Found Hanged Himself In His Room.’

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