The Beginning of The End of Jude Anderson's Miserable, Little Life.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
FOR THE PAST year, Jude resisted the urge to strangle Calum over his newfound morning routine. Jude did not strangle her younger brother, mostly because she wasn't a heinous bitch, but partially because Will Byers, one of Cal's friends, went missing last year. The town held a funeral for him—Jude knew, she was there—and he mysteriously came back after being lost in the woods. When she was in middle school, the most excitement she got up to was telling her parents she was going to Daphne's house after school but going to a boy's house instead.
She knew there was something off about the whole Will thing, only because it prompted Cal to get up at the ass crack of dawn. And, before last year, Cal loved to sleep. Now, he acted like sleeping was a weakness. (Did Jude want to strangle him most days? Yes. But, Jude also maintained that she was the only one allowed to strangle her little brother and his friends, so whatever made Cal scared of his own shadow was not cool with her.) However, whenever Jude prompted a conversation about Will, about November, about that blonde girl that came over once because the Anderson house was—quote—a "parent-free zone", Cal changed the subject.
So, as Jude went through her perfectly normal morning routine—smack the top of the alarm clock until she eventually hit the off button, stare at her ceiling in the dark until she garnered enough will to live to get up, actually get up, slap cream cheese on a bagel, then haul ass to school (Cal was a bike rider—something about carbon excretions or emissions or something. Jude was not a chemistry person.)—she pondered whether her brother was replaced by an evil clone who liked to get up at five in the morning and practice his soccer skills against the vinyl siding of the house until sunrise.
At first, Jude thought this Cal, who enjoyed time management and a developed work ethic, was just a result of seeing how near death is. Cal, his other friends—Lucas, Dustin, and Mike—, and the blonde girl were all at the Anderson house when they decided to set out on foot again to search for Will. (Apparently, because Jude was the only one in Cal's house and was sixteen, she didn't care as much about their wellbeing as Mrs. Wheeler. But, Daphne and Nick were over too, and the three of them insisted on chaperoning.) And that was when they spotted the ambulance parked next to the quarry. So, it all made sense: Cal watched the supposed decomposed body of his friend get pulled from the depths of a quarry, so he was going to shape up.
However, no thirteen year old had the discipline to maintain such a stringent morning routine—no matter how traumatized. And, that's how Jude knew something major was wrong. But, she did not have experience in tapping into the mind of a pre-teen boy—especially one she wanted to strangle because he got up too early and kicked a ball at the house before six. Something major was wrong, but Jude wasn't an actual mother or a shrink; she didn't have some sort of magical wavelength connection with her brother.
