Chase and Charlie Sneak Preview

Good morning, everyone! As some of you may know, I recently reached 100 likes on my Facebook author page. In celebration of this, I am posting the first two chapters of Chase and Charlie. Your support means more to me than you know, and I hope you know how much I appreciate it.

So, without any further ado, here is your free sneak peak at Chase and Charlie. Enjoy!

Chase and Charlie

By Jessica A. Scott

1

My big brother is awesome.

Sure, brothers and sisters are supposed to fight all the time, but Chase and I never have (Don’t worry, my parents don’t understand it either). Chase is two years older than me and, despite his enormity (he’s 6’6” and 310 pounds) and my petite-ness (I’m only 5’5”), a lot of people mistake us for twins, possibly because we do everything together. We go places together, we watch movies together, we finish each other’s sentences, we read each other’s minds…well, sort of. In our conversations, there’s never a “Chase” without a “Charlie,” never a “him” without an “me” right after it; we’re so close that my mom says we’re basically one soul living in two bodies.

Basically, Chase is my best friend—which is why I had to try to clear his name when he was framed for murder.

It happened at the movie theater, of all places. Chase and I had gone to see the new Star Trek flick two nights before his college graduation. It was supposed to be our last hurrah—our symbolic last night of fun before he had to go off and join the adults in the “real world,” where he had already landed an internship as a physical therapist at the YMCA. To start our night off with a bang, we had gone to Chuck-E-Cheese, where we had won enough tickets to combine and exchange for an enormous, life-size Chuck-E-Cheese doll and a handful of disapproving looks from the younger kids’ parents. Next came the movie (we left Chuck waiting in the passenger’s seat of the car to guard our leftover pizza) and after that, we had planned to go to an all-night mini-golf course, where we were going to play until one of us got a hole in one (which probably never would have happened, due to my appalling lack of coordination and the fact that Chase’s hands made the putter look like a Barbie doll accessory).

Our night was supposed to be epic. Instead, it was epically awful.

“Ugh, I hate previews,” Chase groaned as we filed into two seats toward the middle of the theater.

“What, you don’t like movies about talking dogs?” I asked, plopping down in my seat and pouring my box of Snocaps into our gigantic communal bucket of popcorn.

“No, I just don’t want to see all of the funny parts of a movie in the trailer.” He emptied his box of Sour Patch Kids into the mix as well. “Half the time, the movie they’re advertising only has about three funny parts in it altogether, so they show those in the previews to market it as a comedy and get you hooked—”

“—then you pay to see the movie, expecting it to be hilarious, but it’s actually some dramedy about a girl who gets impregnated by some dude she met in a club,” I finished.

“Exactly.”

We had had this conversation before, many times. Chase and I loved movies. We had seen every movie that had come to that theater since we were ten years old, even if we had had to scrape together all of our birthday money or do extra chores around the house to finance our trip. When we weren’t at the real cinema, we’d watch movies at home on cable or DVD, or on one of the hundreds of old VHS tapes our Grandpa Max had left us when he died. Films were our passion, and just one of the many things that brought us together when that pesky “real world” kept threatening to pull us apart.

The lights dimmed a bit lower as the more impressive trailers began to play, reducing the visibility of the theater to “can barely see my hand in front of my face” levels. I leaned back in my seat and shuffled my feet to unstick my sneakers from the floor, then I fearlessly plunged my hand down into our trademark cesspool of movie theater snackage.

“Ugh.” I grimaced as my hand squelched against the soggy popcorn. “We put way too much butter in this.” I took my hand back out to show it to Chase and we both watched as big, fat teardrops of golden butter glinted in the light from the cartoon movie preview on the screen and splashed back down into the paper bucket.

“I’ll run and get some napkins,” Chase sighed, rolling his eyes as he squished his extra-large soft drink into his cup holder and stood up.

“What am I supposed to do while I wait?” I asked, waving my dripping hand at him.

“Just stick your hand back in there and mix the butter in with the rest of the popcorn,” he said, shoving my hand back into the soggy mess. “It’s already all gross anyway.”

“Thanks.” I smirked.

He stuck out his tongue at me in reply, then began his slow, hulking, disruptive shuffle to the end of the row of seats. A few of the Trekkies behind us shouted angrily that he was blocking their view of the whole screen (which, admittedly, he probably was), but he was eventually able to sidle past everyone to the end of the aisle and down the carpeted stairs.

I did as Chase suggested and stirred the popcorn, mixing in the butter with the melting Snocaps. Half-drooling with anticipation of its gooey goodness, I grabbed an enormous handful of greasy popcorn, oozing chocolate, and sticky Sour Patch Kids. Just as I was about to shove the delicious disaster into my salivating mouth, the lights went out completely, plunging the theater into complete darkness.

I dropped my popcorn back into the tub.

It was normal for the house lights to go down at the start of a movie, but the movie wasn’t playing. The screen was just as pitch black as the rest of the theater, and I couldn’t even make out the shape of my sticky hand anymore when I waved it in front of my face.

All around me, people began to shift in their seats, whispering nervously to each other, as if the darkness imposed some sort of volume limit.

“What’s going on?” A man yelled from behind me, sounding oddly panicked (Apparently he didn’t know about the volume limit).

“Yeah, where’s the movie?” called a gruff-sounding woman toward the front of the room.

“Chase?” I squeaked, completely inside the noise parameters. It was a little known fact (except to Chase, of course) that I was—and am, to this day—deathly afraid of the dark. It seems irrational, yes—until you consider what kind of things could be lurking in said darkness, especially in a shadowy movie theater full of possible perverts and rapists. “Chase?” I whispered again, my heart pounding so hard in my chest that I was sure that the Trekkies behind me could hear it.

Slowly, people started to remember that they all had cell phones. Soon, the theater was filled with tiny, floating squares of blue light, all bouncing toward the exit. It didn’t help me see any better, however; it only dazzled me, stinging my eyes and reminding me of a swarm of lightning bugs bobbing across an empty, black abyss.

Suddenly, there came the sound of a scuffle from up by the screen.

The quadrilateral fireflies flocked in that direction as I rooted myself to my chair, cowering in my fear of nothing and straining to keep myself from hearing what was going on.

“Help!” a muffled male voice cried out, as most of the fireflies reached the end of their thirty-second lifespan and flickered out. There was a loud grunt and a clang, then the sickening, splattering sound of a pumpkin being smashed to pieces across the carpeted floor.

Several people screamed, but I didn’t know why.

Who cares? I thought. It was just a pumpkin!

Wasn’t it?

My mind was too alert, too many thoughts were racing through my brain for me to figure out what was really happening, and the bright, burning, blistering cell phone lights couldn’t even begin to penetrate the cloying, suffocating darkness around me. There was more grunting, more thumping, more cracking, more screaming. Just as one last, loud, agonized moan reached my ears, the lights came back up, this time to their full brightness.

Everyone gasped.

All of the people in front of me were staring at the platform beneath the screen, covering their mouths in horror and disgust. Some were crying, others were stoic and emotionless as they stared ahead of them with blank faces, as if they were in shock. One of the Trekkies behind me stumbled to the aisle and threw up.

I couldn’t see anything. I didn’t want to see anything. I didn’t know why, but I was sure that my sense of foreboding, for once, should be heeded, and that I should not, under any circumstances, look at the platform below. Every neuron in my brain was telling me to just stay seated, to just wait, to just sit still and stay quiet until my big brother came back to get me.

But I was standing up.

Against my will, my numb, tingly body brought me to my feet, to stand atop my jelly-legs.

I took a deep breath and looked down at the platform.

I felt the popcorn bucket fall to the ground, brushing wetly against my pant leg, as I met Chase’s eyes beneath the blank white screen.

It was him. He had been the one grunting, the one groaning, the one smashing the pumpkin (it was a pumpkin, right?). He was what everyone had heard, what everyone was gaping at with a mixture of fear and anger.

He was holding a bat. A shiny, silver, aluminum baseball bat covered in something that not even my delusional brain could confuse with pumpkin guts.

“Don’t look, Charlotte,” Chase plead, in a whisper that carried to me through the now-silent theater as well as if he had shouted it. “Please, don’t look.”

But I looked.

I looked at his red-stained clothes, at his wide, panicked brown eyes staring out at me from the depths of his pallid, blood-streaked face. I looked at the bloody bat in his hand. I looked at his once-white, now-crimson tennis shoes. Most of all, though, I looked at the battered, bleeding, broken body of the man that lay on the floor at his feet—the man that everyone in that theater knew had just been killed by my big brother.

That’s when I fainted.

2

I had never fainted in my life, but I fainted then, and I fainted hard. I fainted so hard that I didn’t even know where I was when I woke up…probably because where I woke up was nowhere near where I had passed out.

“Chase?’ I muttered as I came to, unsticking my fuzzy tongue from the roof of my dry, cottony mouth as I squinted around at the lobby of what appeared to be a police station. My head was in my mother’s lap (I could tell it was her because, even in the face of adversity, she still smelled like warm chocolate chip cookies and laundry detergent), and police officers swarmed around us like busy worker bees, fluttering their paperwork wings and buzzing questions at her so sharply that they physically stung her.

“Mrs. Chapman, has your son ever physically assaulted you or your daughter?” one of the officers demanded, his pen suspended over a clipboard as he stood in front of her, his belt buckle just even with my nose.

“Of course not!” Mom exclaimed, her hand flying up to her neck to touch the crucifix necklace that my dad had given her when they were teenagers. From the position I was lying in (face up, staring at the bottom of her chin), I could see that her jaw was clenched in distress, and her long, pale fingers were trembling.

Mom had always been fragile. She had been sick a lot as a kid, and now she rarely left the house for fear of catching another debilitating illness. Her hermit-esque lifestyle had never really bothered me—having her home meant that I was never lacking for a female confidant or a plate of warm brownies—but it bothered Chase. While Dad treated Mom like she was a tiny glass butterfly that could be shattered by the slightest jostle or raised voice, Chase thought that Mom should get out into the world and experience things.

Somehow, though, I don’t think that a murder investigation was exactly what he had in mind.

“Chase has never assaulted anyone,” I grunted, sitting up. Mom grabbed my shoulders as I swayed, wincing as the blood rushed to my head so fast that it felt as if someone was hitting me in the head with a baseball bat.

Oops. Poor choice of words.

Just then, there was a scuffle and a loud, clinking shuffle of chained feet as Chase was dragged roughly into the police station. My mother gasped, covering her mouth with her porcelain fingers like a scandalized woman in a black and white movie.

I felt my own chest constrict with shock and horror as I got a closer look at my big brother, shackled between two rough-looking cops like a dangerous, Hannibal Lecter-like criminal. All he was missing was the leather mask. His white polo shirt was stained with dark, blackish-purple blood and his well-worn jeans still dripped with the stuff. Bits and pieces of bone and flesh and God knows what else peppered his pant legs and crunched beneath his feet as he crossed the shiny white linoleum floor, his sneakers making a sloppy squelch with every clanking step he took. His bare arms were coated in chunky, sticky-looking clumps of gummy, jelly-like fluid that glittered and glistened beneath the bright fluorescent lights, and the skin on his face looked as if it had been airbrushed with maroon spray paint, with specks of dark blood scattered across his cheeks like rusty red freckles.

But that wasn’t the worst part.

His eyes, his once-wide, once-kind, once-innocent, brown eyes were wild and round, filled with some sort of odd, disconnected look that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

“Where…where are you taking him?” I stammered, getting to my feet. Mom clutched the side seam of my jeans as if to steady me, but in reality she was probably afraid that I would do something stupid (which, admittedly, would not have been out of character).

“Interrogation room,” the cop to Chase’s right informed me, his voice curt and his thin, brown lips barely moving. His dark eyes stared straight ahead, not looking at me, as if he were afraid that seeing the humanity in me would lessen the evil he needed to see in my brother.

“Right now?” I asked, tasting bile. “Doesn’t he need to see a lawyer first? Or make a phone call?”

“He doesn’t deserve a phone call,” snarled the other cop, a young, clean-shaven rube with the face of a twelve-year-old combatting a nasty stomach virus.

“Watch it, Lieutenant,” snapped his older, wiser, wearier-looking counterpart.

“Hey,” I called, helplessly, as they kept walking, passing us now. “Hey, that’s my brother!”

Chase hadn’t looked at me before, but he looked at me then. His big, empty brown eyes focused on me for a moment, piercing me with a strange sort of strangled intensity, communicating a thousand desperate, wordless messages I couldn’t even begin to decode.

“Can I just… can I just talk to him for one second?” I begged, blinking furiously as they just kept on walking, dragging my brother farther and farther away from me.

“Charlotte,” my mother whispered, her voice choked with tears, “Sit down here and—”

“NO!” I shouted, growing more and more frantic with each clink of the chain and each squelchy, squeaky footfall.

“Ma’am, we need you to calm down,” the lieutenant called over his shoulder, throwing me a dispassionate smirk that only frightened me further.

I needed to see my brother. I needed to hug him, to touch him, to tell him that everything would be alright. I needed to make that distant, tortured look in his eyes go away, and I needed to tell him that I loved him and that I knew he hadn’t killed anyone, no matter how bad it looked or sounded to everyone else.

But they just kept walking.

The blue-uniformed officers led him through the lobby to a door on the other side. Suddenly, inexplicably, my heart filled with dread and a deep, dark, soul-shattering fear. Somehow I knew that, once he passed through that doorway, once he crossed over that threshold to meet whatever lay on the other side, the brother I knew would be gone, never to be seen again. And I would be left there alone, with no one to look out for me.

Before I knew what I was doing, I broke free of my mother’s limp, feeble grasp and took off running, bounding across the bright, blood-slick floor, dodging desks and chairs and trashcans and startling all of the off-duty cops. I was just sliding up to Chase when someone finally gave a shout to announce my presence.

The two policemen holding my brother flinched in unison, turning around just as I jumped in front of Chase and leapt up to throw my skinny, shaking arms around his neck.

“I know you didn’t do it!” I cried, hot, burning tears streaming down my face as I hugged him tight, praying that it wouldn’t be the last time.

“Charlie, get down,” Chase said gently, his deep voice thick with pain as it rumbled through my chest cavity.

“NO!” I yelled again, as one of the cops grabbed me around the middle and tried to yank me off him. I leaned my head back to meet Chase’s eyes, and was heartened to see that, though full of anguish, they were also full of life now, as that horrible hollowness began to ebb. “Chase, I need you to know that I believe in you!”

I wasn’t sure why, exactly, but I knew that, in that moment, there was nothing in the world more important than for him to know that someone, somewhere, still trusted him, still looked up to him, still had complete and utter faith in him and everything that he did.

Chase’s eyes softened as they filled with affection and the same fond, brotherly pride I had seen in them so many times before.

“I know you do, Charlie,” he murmured, a ghost of a smile pulling at his lips.

Reassured, I nodded as I returned his semi-smile. Then, with a final squeeze of his big neck and a kiss on his blood-spattered cheek, I let go, allowing the pissy young lieutenant to haul me away.