There’s a clutching feeling in my chest that kind of hurts. My heart aches for the lonely misfit child she was, until I think of the perfectly self-assured adult she has become. Unruffled. Always at her ease. Unapologetically herself, talking a mile a minute about the things that matter to her, and enjoying the shit out of every day.
And yet…she knows how bitter and sore it feels to be really, truly, down-to-your-bones lonely. For different reasons than me, sure, but sheknows.
We havethatin common, at least.
From the WhatsApp channel called DEAN HAS A GIRL WTF SINCE WHEN??????!!!!!!!!! (Members: Leo Mills, Sadie Stewart, Eli Gastright, and Emily Cole)
Leo Mills: Holy fuck, guys
Leo Mills: Google Liaden O’Brien
Emily Cole: Why, what’s wrong?
Leo Mills: Just do it
Sadie Stewart: Leopold Beaudoin Gastright Mills, will you wind your neck in and leave the poor boy alone!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sadie Stewart: [GIF of annoyed woman clutching her head and breathing through her teeth]
Leo Mills: Sadie Louise Stewart, in the time you took to full-name me, you could have GOOGLED LIADEN O’BRIEN
Emily Cole: Holy crap on a cracker
Sadie Stewart:What?
Leo Mills:Right?!
Sadie Stewart: W H A T
Emily Cole: Um… Yeah, I’m with Leo. Easier if you Google.
Eli Gastright:Impressive
Emily Cole: OOF, I’ll say
Sadie Stewart: …
Sadie Stewart: Oh my actual god
Sadie Stewart: Fuck me
Sadie Stewart: [GIF of CM Punk looking stunned]
Leo Mills: 1. Just name the time and place, babygirl, and 2, TOLD YOU, SADIE LOU
CHAPTER FIVE
Dean
We’re in the gym, all decked out with streamers and a mirror ball and flashing lights. Callie is beautiful, god, I almost forgothowbeautiful, in her pink Prom dress. Pretty in pink for the eighties theme. And her hair is curly and her hands are covered in black lace fingerless gloves like Madonna, and the corsage I gave her is still on her wrist. She’s putting her plastic cup of that disgusting punch down, and I know what’s going to happen next, I know it in my bones, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
Huey Lewis and the News sing about the power of love being a curious thing, and I know he’s already here but I don’t know where, I cast frantically around the room, but I can’t see him… Just a flash of pink hair that I know doesn’t belong, but it’s gone before I can focus on it, like eye floaters.
It’s torture. It’s like being unable to turn away from a horror movie, not wanting to watch it but being held forcibly in place like in A Clockwork Orange, with metal holding your eyelids apart.
My Callie barely even has the chance to frown at the sound of the first gunshots before her head is shot apart, her blood and brains drenching my shirt, out of the clean blue fucking nowhere into dirty red-soaked reality. She was laughing with me, and a split second later she was gone forever without warning…
Now I’m cradling her mangled body under the table, where I scrambled in a blind panic, blank and terrified and trying not to taste the blood that splashed into my mouth.
