RANDY WHITE - SIDE FICTION

Randy White sat on the edge of his cot and dragged both hands down his face.

The small room felt hot and his headache was still there. Not the sharp kind that made him want to put a hole in the wall, just that deep, steady pressure behind the eyes that never really left after the doses. Some mornings it stayed quiet. Other mornings it felt like something was slowly cranking a bolt tighter inside his skull. Tonight it sat right in the middle. He could live with it. He’d lived with worse.

The room was mostly quiet except for the low hum of the vents. Down the hall a toilet flushed and a door clicked shut. He stared at the floor between his bare feet. The skin looked gray in the dim light. He tried to pin down what day it was. Eleven. Maybe twelve. After Michael the days had started sliding into each other. He’d catch himself standing in the common room with no idea how long he’d been there. People talked around him and only pieces stuck. Faces he knew started feeling slightly wrong, like someone had shifted them a couple inches from where they belonged.

He lay back and closed his eyes.

Sleep took its time. His head kept chewing on small, useless shit. The sound of the vents. The cheap detergent smell on the sheets. The fact that he couldn’t remember the last time he actually felt like himself. Eventually the thoughts thinned out and everything went dark.

When he opened his eyes, the ceiling was wrong.

He sat up fast and noticed the old gouge in the plaster on the wall. Then he noticed Sharon’s robe on the closet door. His eyes darted to a cheap digital clock glowing red on the nightstand. It read 2:17 AM. He was home. In his and Sharon’s bedroom in Lowell, Massachusetts.

“What the fuck…” he whispered.

He could hear the refrigerator running in the kitchen. Everything felt solid in a way the lab never did.

“You were thrashing again,” Sharon said from her side of the bed.

Randy jumped at her voice and pushed himself up on his elbows. “Jesus Christ. You scared me. I think I was dreaming about that place.”

“What place?”

“The trial. The lab.”

She gave him a tired look. “Randy. You’ve been out of there for months. You keep having these dreams and then you wake up thinking you’re still locked in. You’re not. You’re home.”

He looked around again. The dresser. The window. A car passing outside. It all lined up.

“I thought…” He rubbed his eyes. “Jesus. It felt real.”

“They’re just dreams,” she said. “Go back to sleep. The girls have school in the morning.”

He settled back against the pillow. For a few minutes he felt a great relief wash over him. Everything was normal and okay again. The sheets felt right. The weight of the blanket felt right. Even the faint detergent smell on the pillowcase felt right.

Then he noticed his wife was still watching him.

Not the tired way she used to look at him when he came to bed late. This was different. Steady. Quiet. Like she was waiting for something.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing.”

She didn’t look away. There was something cold and detached in the way she looked at him.

Randy shifted under the blanket. “Why the fuck are you looking at me like that?”

Sharon tilted her head a little. “You never talk about it.”

“Talk about what?”

“What really happened.”

His chest tightened. It got hard to breathe.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he said.

Sharon’s voice stayed low and even. “Yes you do.”

He sat up straighter. “Sharon, cut the shit. What is this?”

She held his gaze for a long second. When she finally spoke again, the words came out flat and certain, like she was simply reminding him of a fact he already knew.

“The night you killed us.”

Randy froze. His heart beat so hard it felt like it could punch through his chest.

Sharon’s mouth twisted.

Blood started running from her hairline. It cut a dark line down the left side of her face, hung at her jaw, then dripped onto the sheet. She didn’t wipe it. She just kept looking at him.

“You don’t remember?” she said. “You stupid bastard.”

The bedroom door opened.

Randy’s little brother stepped in.

Andrew.

The left side of his head was smashed in. Bone and torn skin showed where his temple used to be. One eye was gone. The other one locked on Randy and didn’t blink.

“Don’t you remember, Randall?”

A sharp zap went off behind Randy’s eyes, like someone had touched a live wire to the inside of his skull. His ears filled with a high, thin ringing that didn’t match anything in the room. The air suddenly smelled like hot metal and old blood. His stomach lurched.

He tried to say something and only a broken sound came out.

Then it all came back at once.

He was behind the wheel with the bottle jammed between his legs. Whiskey sloshed every time the car drifted. The road kept sliding under the headlights. His mouth tasted like ash and whiskey.

Sharon was twisted toward him in the passenger seat, one hand locked on the dash.

“Randy, you’re all over the road. Slow down. Please!”

In the back the girls were already crying hard. Jenna on the left, Rachel on the right. Andrew sat between them with both arms stretched out, trying to hold them in place.

“Just pull over,” Andrew said. “I’ll drive. Please, brother.”

Randy’s grip tightened on the wheel. “I’m fine. Just shut up.”

“You’re not fine,” Sharon said, voice rising. “You’ve been drinking since dinner. Look at what you’re doing!”

The car drifted across the center line. Rachel’s voice came high and broken from the back.

“Daddy, please stop!”

Randy felt the heat climb up his neck and into his face. “Everybody just shut the fuck up before I lose my shit!” He turned on Sharon. “You hear me, bitch?”

Sharon grabbed at his arm. “You’re going to kill us! Stop the car!”

“Daddy, stop!” Jenna this time, pure panic.

Andrew kept his voice low but it was shaking. “Randy, the kids. Just pull over. I’m begging you.”

Something inside Randy snapped.

“I’m so fucking tired of all of you telling me I can’t handle my drinking!” he shouted, and slammed the dashboard with his fist. “Every single day. Like I’m some kind of goddamn child who doesn’t know what he’s doing!”

He stomped the gas harder. The engine screamed. Sharon was yelling his name now, full volume. The girls were sobbing and calling for him. Andrew was still trying to hold both of them, eyes squeezed shut.

Randy’s voice climbed higher.

“You think I don’t see how you all look at me? You think I don’t hear the little comments? Slow down, Randy. Stop, Randy. That’s enough, Randy. I can’t even have a few drinks without everybody acting like the sky’s falling. I’m the one who goes to work! I’m the one who puts food on the table. And this is what I get?”

He took both hands off the wheel and smashed his fist into the windshield. The glass starred under the impact with a sharp crack. When he looked back up the tree was already there, dead center in the headlights, filling the whole world.

There was no time left to turn.

The impact hit like the end of everything. Metal folded. Glass exploded inward. The dashboard rushed up and the world went black for a few seconds.

When he came to, the car was twisted and smoking. Someone was making a wet sound that stopped almost immediately. Randy’s ears rang so hard he could barely hear his own breathing. He looked over and saw Sharon slumped against the passenger door, her head at an angle that was wrong. The girls were quiet in the back. Andrew wasn’t moving.

He knew what he had to do if he wanted to walk away from this.

He unbuckled, climbed half over the console, and dragged Sharon’s body into the driver’s seat. It took everything he had. Her arms kept catching on things. Blood smeared across the seats. When she was finally behind the wheel he shoved the ruined door open with his shoulder until it gave, then crawled out onto the cold pavement on his hands and knees.

He stood up in the middle of the dark road, both hands buried in his hair, and screamed at the sky like that might somehow take it back.

After that the memories kept coming.

The hospital. Bright lights. The smell of antiseptic and blood. Cops stood at the end of the bed with notebooks.

“Who was driving?”

“How fast were you going?”

“Had you been drinking?”

Randy stuck to the story. Sharon was behind the wheel. She lost control. He tried to grab it when he saw the tree. He said it the same way every time. They wrote it down and left.

The psych evaluations started soon after.

First one was in a small office with a dying plant on the windowsill. The doctor mostly watched his face.

“Tell me about the accident.”

Randy talked about the crash and the grief. The doctor nodded and wrote things down.

The second evaluation felt colder.

“Walk me through that night again,” the doctor said. “Who was in the car?”

“My wife. My brother. The girls.”

“And who was driving?”

Randy hesitated. For a second the real image tried to surface. His own hands on the wheel. The bottle. The tree. Then something inside him shoved it back down.

“Sharon,” he said. “She was driving.”

The doctor made a note. “Some of the physical evidence didn’t line up cleanly with that version. Do you understand why that matters?”

Part of him floated away from the conversation.

“I told you what happened.”

“I’m asking if the story still feels true to you.”

He didn’t answer.

By the third evaluation the questions kept circling the same places.

“Tell me about your brother.”

“Andrew.”

“What happened to him?”

The truth pushed up again. The sound of the impact. The way the left side of Andrew’s head had looked. For half a second he almost said it. Then a smoother version slid into place.

“Some drunk asshole crossed the line and hit him head-on,” Randy said. “Killed him.”

“And your wife and daughters?”

“They’re home. They’re fine.”

The words came out steady. He could almost see it.

“You believe that?”

“It’s what happened. I’m not crazy.”

They sent him to the psych ward after that.

Everything in the ward smelled like mop water and old coffee. They made him walk around in soft socks. He sat in a circle of plastic chairs with eight other men and a counselor who spoke in the same calm voice the whole time.

​“How are things with your family these days, Randy?” she asked him one afternoon.

“Sharon’s still on my ass about every little thing,” Randy said. “The girls are fine. They’re with her. My brother Andrew… that one still hurts. Drunk driver took him out.”

She nodded and wrote something down.

The meds kept the days soft. Every time someone asked about his family the same story came out cleaner than before. Sharon was alive. She was a cold bitch who never let up on him. The girls were with her. Andrew was the one in the ground.

Later they moved him to the halfway house.

Shared kitchen with dirty dishes in the sink. Rules taped to the wall. At night the men smoked on the back steps and talked shit about the lives that had dumped them there.

One night around the scarred table Randy looked at the others and asked, “Any of you guys married?”

​A couple of them shook their heads.

“Lucky bastards,” he said. “My bitch wife is at home with the kids right now. Probably happy as hell I’m stuck in this place. Out fucking the mailman for all I know.”

One of the older guys raised an eyebrow. “She know you’re in here?”

“She knows. Doesn’t give a shit either. Never did.”

Nobody said much after that. Randy just kept smoking.

A few days later he found the ad online. Medical study. Three hundred a day. Room and board. A full month. He filled out the application that night.

The van had blacked-out windows. After that everything ran together. Forms. White walls. A narrow cot. The same buzzing lights. The same clean, empty smell. Whatever was still holding him together finished coming apart somewhere in the middle of it.

Now he was back in the lab.

The morning alarm blared down the hallway of the Nexus Mind Research Center. Randy sat up on the cot because that was what the body did. He pulled on the scrubs and walked out with the others. In the common room he took his usual seat and stared at the floor while people moved around him. He knew, in a distant way, that another dosing day was coming. It just didn’t touch him. He was going through the motions, empty and quiet.

Someone stopped in front of him.

Randy looked up. Black hair. Blue eyes. The face was familiar in a way that took a second to place.

​Jake.

The man with blue eyes was saying something, but the words barely registered.

Then Jake leaned in closer.

Something else came with him.

Not words. A hard pressure. A sudden light that slammed into the numb dark inside Randy’s head and split it wide open.

Randy felt his friend see everything.

And in the same moment he felt Jake’s shock hit him back like a wave. McCoy hadn’t expected this either. The surprise on his face was real.

“Randy?” Jake said. His voice sounded different now, tighter. “What the fuck am I looking at right now?”

Randy stared at him. The light kept pouring in and the old lie finally gave way.

He saw the bottle between his legs. His hands on the wheel. Sharon turned toward him screaming. Andrew in the back with both arms around the girls. The tree filling the windshield. The impact. Crawling out into the cold. Dragging Sharon’s body into the driver’s seat so the cops would believe the story.

“I killed them,” Randy sobbed. The words came out rough, like they had been buried a long time. “I killed all of them. Oh Sharon, baby, I'm so sorry. My girls... Andy...”

Jake’s eyes stayed locked on him. There was no judgment in the look. Only the seeing. And because Jake was still seeing it, Randy could finally see it too without the lie getting in the way. The weight of it should have crushed him, but the connection made it bearable. For the first time since the accident the truth had air. It felt like confessing something that had been rotting inside him for years.

“I did it,” Randy said again, tears blurring his vision. “It was me.”

Jake opened his mouth to say something else.

A hard hand clamped onto Randy’s arm and yanked him up out of the chair.

“Time to go,” Dr. Waters snapped. “Move.”

“Wait—” Jake started.

Waters didn’t wait. He dragged Randy forward by the arm. The connection ripped away like something being torn out of him.

The second the light was gone the pain hit full force.

It wasn’t memory anymore. It was the accident happening again inside his body. The impact. The sound the girls made. The silence after. Sharon’s weight as he dragged her across the seats. The full truth with nothing left to soften it. It tore through him like a wound that had been festering for years and had finally split open.

Randy thrashed hard. A raw sound ripped out of his throat as they forced him down into the chair in the white room. Someone swore and shoved his shoulders back. The left strap cinched tight across his chest. His right arm was still free.

Please make it stop, he begged inside his own head. Please just make it stop.

One of the doctors leaned over him to finish the restraints. A pen sat in the front pocket of the man’s coat. Simple. Blue. Close enough to reach.

Randy’s eyes locked on it while the pain kept tearing through him.

His free hand rested on the arm of the chair.
​
The pen was right there.

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