All Saints Hotel and Cocktail Lounge by Nathan Monk

Author:Nathan Monk [Monk, Nathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-09-29T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

The End

I don’t know how to tell this part other than plainly.

While Clementine was off celebrating her birthday she received a call from her mother. Someone had acquired some of the nude photos she had taken for some of her clients and had sent them to her father’s work. The email went out to all 537 employees. Her dad was mortified and called her, “a personal embarrassment and a disgrace to her family.” She was staying with her cousin and her aunt. Because her father was who he was, and his company employed a lot of family members, her aunt let her know that she wouldn’t be able to stay after that night. She needed to pack up and leave first thing in the morning.

When I got back over to Joy’s apartment, the day after Clementine’s birthday, I found Joy slumped over in her chair. She was sitting in front of her laptop. I walked into the kitchen and set down some food I had brought with me. I had a small cake that I was about to put in the refrigerator for when Clementine got back. I was setting everything in its place and Joy still hadn’t looked up. I assumed she was enthralled with some project.

“What’s up, beautiful?” I was fondling a head of lettuce. “You doing alright?”

“She’s dead.”

I dropped the lettuce.

“Who? Who is dead?”

“Clementine. She’s dead.”

With that, Joy jumped up from the computer and into my arms. I stood there, holding her as she wept into my arm, and I was in complete shock. I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t ask anything. I just waited and waited for answers.

Clementine and her cousin had decided to continue on with their plans to celebrate her birthday. They were out all night and Clementine was extremely drunk. She spoke the entire cab ride home about how she was a disappointment; that she was a failure and that no one would love her ever again. When she got back to her aunt’s house, her cousin put her to bed. At some point during the night, Clementine got up, likely still intoxicated, and she downed the entire bottle of her heart medication and then moved on to a bottle of someone else’s pain medication. She took as much of it as she could stomach. Her cousin found her the next morning on the bathroom floor.

My grandma’s voice came to me. “Be careful, boy, death comes in threes.”

It seems everyone has a different breaking point and some people are more fragile than others. Some are fragile like a bomb and some like a flower. Clementine at times seemed both. She was fiery and explosive toward injustice when that injustice was coming for others, but when it came for her she took each stroke like a hurricane wind shattering its waves against her foundation. It seems that the loss of Shane, the fear of losing what she hoped for us, and then finally the exposure of her modeling work was a trifecta too big for her in that moment.

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