The Black Swan Behind (Beauty of Fire)

Chapter 25: Calvin Lee (3)

My eyes got widened. My heart was beating fast and my breath was ragged. I immediately turned the pages of the newspaper to read the full news. It turned out that the news was put on two full pages along with some terrible pictures. And the pictures that sent a cold chill to my bones were a picture of a suicide rope that still hanging on the ceiling of my brother’s room and a picture of a guy hanging stiffly with a blurred face. I didn’t need to look at it longer to know that the figure in that picture was my own brother’s body.

Tears rolled down my cheeks. My body was still shaking and my breath was very heavy. All that time, all I knew was my brother died of asthma. That was what Grandma always said... to lie to me. But it turned out that my brother killed himself. But why? Why did my brother do that?

With a sliced ??heart, I tidied up the newspapers as before. I didn’t want grandma to know that I already knew the cause of my brother’s death. If Grandma finds out, she would definitely get sadder and it would affect her health. Even though I’m disappointed that Grandma had lied to me, I knew that Grandma did it because she was afraid that my mental health would be disturbed. She wanted to keep this only remaining grandson safe.

Even though I acted like I didn’t know anything, that didn’t mean I kept silent. Since knowing the truth, I’ve been secretly trying to find out why did my brother chose to commit suicide. At first, I thought that my brother did it because of depression due to the death of our parents, as it was written in the newspaper. But I believe there must be something else causing it.

Since I was in junior high school, I began to witness various events that made me feel uncomfortable. Yes, there have been cases of bullying happening at my new school. Actually, I wasn’t too bothered about it, because no one had ever bullied me all this time. Maybe because I was a pretty popular kid in both academics and sport. I was also pretty good at making friends.

But I knew some kids were not as lucky as me. The kids who were not very sociable, and were pretty quiet. They were often called as losers by my friends and seniors. But I didn’t pay much attention to the kids in the shadows. I was too busy with my own fun activities.

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Not realizing, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Since knowing the cause of my brother’s death, I began to pay attention to the classmates who were called as the loser. I just realized that their clothes were always dirty on their way home from school. I just realized that they were always surrounded to be made fun of by the class boys. I just realized that they have no friends. I just realized that they were always isolated.

.....

The scenes of my older brother whose clothes were always dirty when he came home from school, was coming back to me. The picture of his depressed face that I didn’t even notice before. The wounds on his face didn’t look like injuries from sports, but from blows. Could it be that he was a victim of bullying at that time?

The bad prejudice made me go to my brother’s room. Since being abandoned by the owner, the room had been cleaned about four times only. Grandma wanted to keep my brother’s room as unchanged as possible.

As soon as I opened the door to the room, which was now cold, the hairs on my spine got tingled. Not out of fear, but the preconceived thought of a gloom that took place in that place horrified me.

Since Grandma was no longer able to roam around the house, I had no worries of digging through some of my brother’s belongings to look for evidence. The first thing I approached was my brother’s desk which was always neatly arranged. At the top were displayed several trophies and medals from various academic competitions.

After searching for quite a while, I couldn’t find any evidence to support my suspicion that my brother was been bullied. Until I unpacked some of his high school books and found that they looked very dirty and some were damaged. At the time of the incident, my brother had just entered high school. There was no way the books would be damaged so quickly. Also, the damage to the books was very unnatural. It was as if the book had been deliberately tampered with, there were even stains on the soles of the shoes.

My chest was getting ached. Even though the evidence wasn’t strong, but my suspicions were getting doubtless. I searched through the drawers and cupboards, but to no avail. There was no more evidence.

With a limp body, I sat down on the floor of my brother’s room hopeless. My eyes closed and started to get wet. I really missed my brother. The fact that he died by suicide really hurts my heart. As soon as I opened my eyes, my face looked up at the ceiling and saw the wooden roof beam that my brother used to hang the rope. The photo in the newspaper reappeared in my mind.

I felt that I could no longer be in that room and just wanted to get out. But a memory suddenly popped into my head. When we were kids, my brother once showed me the place where he hid the game cassettes that he bought secretly without our mother’s knowledge. Under the bed, there was a loose wooden floor. He kept some stuff in there.

I crawled under the bed, it was so dark that I used my phone as a light. As I suspected, the shards on the wooden floor were still there and that piece of wood could be lifted. While coughing a few times from the dust, I opened the broken floor. There, I found several items that were very important to my brother when he was a child, even though these items actually were not important at all because they were only toys. But there was one thing I’ve never seen before. It was a notebook.

I took the book that looked suspicious. As soon as I got out of the under the bed, I immediately opened the book. After reading it a bit, I finally found out that the book was my brother’s diary. He hid it in there.

It seemed that my brother started to write a diary since our father and mother died. On the first page, was his writing which told the story of the first day after we sowed flowers into the sea. The day that we had to accept the fact that our parents were dead and would not be found.

I couldn’t stand it, my tears fell on my brother’s writing. From there I could see that he was completely crushed. In that book, he poured out all his feeling that he always kept hidden and never showed them to me or my grandmother. Then I started reading to the next page and the next page. But my brother’s story started to get weird.. He was talking about his social life at school has been getting worse.

My brother wrote that his sadness made him lose interest in socializing or pursuing achievements again. Because of this, his friends began to distance themselves from him. Until when my brother entered high school, he said that he didn’t recognize himself anymore. At that time my brother must be experiencing severe depression.

However, unusual things started to write in his diary. He wrote that he didn’t have any friends in high school. And also some of the bad boys in the class started to bully him.

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