Calvin walked through the doors of the Open Arms motel, six blocks away from the police station. He had taken his time getting there, taking detours and circling around wherever he could. It had been a solid hour and a half, in fact, since he had said goodbye to Cameron and left the precinct. The wind stabbed through his jacket like a thousand knives, the cold freezing his joints and making him shake more than he already was. Despite the sub-zero temperatures, he had always preferred winter over summer. But he wasn't taking the long road home just to feel the cold winter air.
He had been thinking about it again.
Calvin walked up to the front desk and tapped the bell. The receptionist, for lack of a better term, was a sweaty, greasy man with a baseball cap on his round head. Currently, he was asleep in his chair, ear buds in and music on full blast. This guy didn't even care, obviously. But, then again, Calvin needed his room key.
"Hey." Calvin said. No response. "Hey, buddy. Wake up."
The guy didn't even move. How the hell was he sleeping like a baby with death-metal booming in his ears? Calvin was tempted to just hop the desk and grab his key. Then again, he would prefer not having to visit his father again, so he decided against it. He was going to have to wake the guy.
Calvin looked on the desk. Pencils, pens...
Paper. He grabbed a sheet and began folding it. Hey, if he was going to get this sweaty guy to fork over the key, he was going to do it his own way. After about a minute, Calvin had in his hands a pretty nice looking paper airplane. The wings were even, and he approved of his work. He had always been a perfectionist.
Calvin took a few steps back, closed an eye, and lightly threw the paper airplane, aiming it perfectly into the sleeping man's open mouth.
The man's eyes shot open. He hit the airplane out of his mouth and onto the floor, glaring at Calvin. He pulled the ear buds out of his ears, and sneezed.
"Need your key, kid?" He asked. The guy was in his forties, but he looked almost as young as Calvin, making the question a whole lot more awkward than it needed to be.
"Yeah. 207." Calvin replied.
The receptionist grabbed the key with his fat, sweaty fingers and plopped it into Calvin's hand. "Mmm. Bye." He said, and put his ear buds back in.
What a dick.
Calvin dealt with a lot of assholes, so he was used to how entitled and self-absorbed other people were. It wasn't exactly new. He walked to the stairs and took a few slow steps. He wanted to try and sleep, but that wasn't likely. He wanted to watch television, or play a game, or... anything. Anything that wasn't what was on his mind.
He walked down the hall, battling himself for every step as he looked at his room's door, right at the very end. The cheap lights above his head flickered, and the crappily made floorboards creaked with every step.
He reached the door and held out the key to his doorknob, his hand shaking profusely. He unlocked the door and walked inside, immediately feeling even worse. The place was... crusty. The walls were stained all over the place with unknown fluids and the disgusting looking beige carpet felt almost solid. He took off his shoes and his jacket and rested them on his sheetless bed, and he put his hands to his head. He was having another migraine.
On top of his insomnia, anger issues, cavalier attitude and drinking problems, he received horrible migraines once or twice a month. His dad always told him it was because he drank so much, but they had been getting more intense over the past few months, and he had been having them for the past two years. It wasn't the drinking that was causing them, either.
"Two years." The doctor had said.
"What?"
"You have two years, Mr. Nicholson."
According to his doctor, a routine scan revealed a slow growing and inoperable brain tumor in his frontal lobe.
In two years, the cancerous lump would eventually spread, and it would kill him.
He hadn't told anyone yet. He figured it out a little before he had broken up with his girlfriend, Audrey, about nine months ago. He had gotten the news about his tumor, and on that very day, he had gone out to buy a ring, to propose.
They had been dating for three years, and he had never really thought about marrying her. Sure, it had come up, but he felt like if he brought it up and it led to a proposal, it wouldn't have been as special, and left it at that. But then he figured out that he wasn't going to live for much longer. He had to say something. He went to a jewelry store called The Perfect Cut and bought a glistening, beautiful diamond and gold ring that amounted to about eight thousand dollars. It reminded him of her eyes, he just had to get that ring. So he spent a chunk of his life savings on the pretty piece, and he brought her to her favorite spot in the entire city, a quaint little park in Chinatown. He brought her to the bridge in the middle, got down on one knee, and asked her to marry him.
But she said no.
She left him there, wide eyes and all, down on one knee in the middle of the bridge. In an almost cliche turn of events, it started to rain. He walked, with no expression, back to the jewelry store, his heart shattered into a thousand pieces. They didn't even let him return the ring.
That ring sat in its velvet box inside of a Nike shoebox under his bed, where it had sat for the past eight months next to... other things. After a moment of hesitation, he looked under the bed and pulled out the shoebox. He rested it on his lap and looked at it for a moment.
He couldn't. Not now.
He dropped the shoebox, flinching when it hit the ground, grabbed the remote to the television, the only decent appliance in the entire room, and flicked it on. He scrolled through channels, trying to stop thinking about it. He stopped on a news report. A schoolbus crashed into a garbage truck, and four kindergartners died. It didn't exactly help his mood.
Before he even knew it, he had opened the shoebox, which was back on his lap. He kept all sorts of crap in that shoebox. The ring box sat in the upper left corner, turned upside down from when he dropped it. He looked at an item wrapped in paper across from it, and took it out of the box.
He didn't have very much experience to go on, but for a pistol, it was relatively light.
He had bought the gun two nights ago. The thought of succumbing to the tumor wasn't something he was fond of, and, if he had to, he promised himself that he would use the pistol to end his suffering before it started.
There was nothing to really live for anymore. Sure, there was Penelope, but Calvin was sure that the "relationship" wouldn't pan out. She would reject him, or worse. His sister and father could live without him, easily, and he hadn't talked to his mother in years. They would mourn, but they would get over it.
The reason that he took so many detours on the way home was because he was looking for something. Nothing in particular, really. The night that he saved Penelope from being raped, he had been wandering for hours, looking for... nothing. And he happened to find her. He wrote her number on her hand, and they had parted ways. That was the night that he had originally chosen to die, but when he got home, he just couldn't bring himself to do it. He cried that night.
So here he was now, finger hot on the trigger and contemplating doing the tumor's work for it. He was done weighing his options. He had to choose. His hands were shaking.
He screamed as he raised the gun up to his head and pulled the trigger.
He opened his eyes. He wasn't dead.
The safety was still on.
He threw the gun across the room and put his hands over his eyes, trying to stem the flow of tears that were coming out. He was ready to die right then and there. The fact that he willingly pulled the trigger without a thought sobered him up. His mind cleared, and he realized what an idiotic person he was being. He couldn't do it. It was stupid.
But what was he going to do?
"Our top story tonight, yet another robbery has been committed in the south district this morning, here's Frank Rear with the details."
Calvin looked up. He had heard about the robberies that had taken place recently. He didn't watch the news often, but Snyder certainly did, and he had recanted all of the information during a conversation a few weeks prior. They were a group of four publicly proclaimed master robbers with styles similar to those of another four man team from a couple of years ago. Apparently, everyone thinks that they're copycats, but Snyder said that he thinks that it might be the same four guys, and that they're back in the game. It was an interesting topic, definitely, but he had forgotten about it until just now.
"Thanks, Anna. I'm here in front of a jewelry store on the south side of town called The Perfect Cut-"
That was the jewelry store that Calvin had gone to for his engagement ring. He grabbed the remote and turned the volume up a bit, rubbed his eyes and continued listening.
"-And as you can see from these shots here," The reporter said, a few pictures of broken display cases showing up on the screen. "The thieves left almost nothing behind. The robbery wasn't reported until minutes after the robbers left the building with bags full of precious gemstones worth over hundreds of thousands of dollars in their hands."
Calvin realized something at that moment. Something that he really needed to realize. An epiphany, if you will. That epiphany was this; if he killed himself right then and there, then he would leave nothing behind. If he waited for the tumor to kill him, then, just like if he offer himself, no one that he loved would get anything. He didn't even have a will.
...But he could make something to leave behind. It was the only way to do it.
When Calvin was a kid, he, like all other kids, wanted to be rich and famous. He wanted his appearance to turn heads, and he wanted to be able to swim in dollar bills. He wanted a private jet, a yacht, a badass sports car. No, sixteen badass sports cars. Those dreams were far away now, but he never dismissed them.
If he was rich and famous, would be able to pay for insomnia treatment, and anger management, and help with his alcoholism with the snap of a finger. He wouldn't have to break his bank to get a fix from gambling, and he wouldn't have to put a fake smile on everywhere that he went.
He wanted to be rich and famous.
Now he could be both.
