Reverse Rivalry

The Highest Of The Highs

5 years ago.

Even a broken clock was right two times a day. 

Jale remembered clearly that fateful night he came home late. He had been bruised from the crucifixion of Skylar Lain and his tyranny. e had been exhausted and dehydrated but more than anything, he had been drained of all emotion.

He stood in front of the home door and felt all the crippling fear course through him knowing what was beyond it. Every day without fail he had to face it, face him because if he didn't, who else would?

That thought alone was what made him turn the door knob and enter. The uncanny feeling was instant. The house was quiet. The sizzling of cooking in the kitchen was absent. The house was dark and most striking of all, was the void of that maddening irritating piano.

Jale's school bag had fallen off his shoulders to the ground in the living room. The coldness of the house seeped through his mind. It didn't take too much of his weary brain to know his father wasn't home.

His eyes moved from one corner to the other searching for any inclination that he was home. Jale's whole body shook with that information when they settled in the same spot it began. He stood at the bottom of the stairs and stared up at that room like he was in a trance.

It had taken him a long fifteen minutes to find the courage to climb the stairs. With each step, he took he felt like he could hear a single press of piano keys. His fingers trembled when he reached the room. It took him five minutes before he placed his hand on the doorknob and turned it, slowly opening it an inch to feel the warmth of the room brush over his face.

He could see a glimpse of the piano from this angle. His heart was thumping out of his chest when he used his feet to push it open and that imaginative sound that meant doom came to a screeching halt in his head.

It was empty.

Jale remembered how anti-climatic it had been at that moment. He couldn't comprehend how he felt because he had felt too much in that second of bliss. He didn't celebrate the absence of his father.

Deep down, another fear filtered through him. He was afraid this was a dream, a decorative nightmare that would end the moment the door opened and his father would just step in stopping this blissful moment in his tracks.

That day, Jale sat down on the floor for hours glaring at it in silence. It took three hours of not even a budge of the door for him to move. He remembered lifting himself silently. He walked slowly out to the living room. He took up his bag from the ground and headed to his room.

Vale had returned home but like a pre-teen girl in her prime, she was busy chatting on her phone loudly.

Jale wordlessly passed the door, went into his room, and sat on his bed. He resumed staring at the ground as if he was possessed. Every strike of the clock felt like a hammer against his head. He felt dizzy and the world must have been spinning out of control because everything was tilting.

Vale's loud laughter from across the room sounded like demons laughing in his ears. Any semblance of a door opening made his heart skip a beat. Jale had been sure he had been having a heart attack right there on his bed but when he opened his eyes at five am the next morning, everything had been quiet again.

He had passed out on his bed.

The same thing repeated for two days straight. On the fourth day, it sunk in that his father had disappeared. The fourth day of entering that room and sitting on the floor for hours on end with not even a hint of his father coming home had finally cracked the hard shell Jale created.