“You were the best thing to ever happen to me, Sasha Price.” I swear I hear his voice break before he takes a deep breath, “I hope you find someone who loves you half as much as I do.”
This isn’t love.
Love doesn’t hurt this much.
“Goodnight,” I tell him.
five
SASHA
Everything looks so… normal. I don’t know what I expected Claire’s room to look like, but it wasn’t this.
For whatever reason, I thought it would reflect the mental state of someone who had just gone through something so terrible. But it looks like a normal room.
Like she isn’t a stranger to pain.
Her bed sheets are clean, smelling of fresh laundry and whatever perfume she wears on a daily basis. Her desk is neatly organized, with books and makeup laid out like she was expecting company.
Pretty sure when she had people over last night, shewasn’texpecting a drunk girl to crash in her bed.
Flashes from last night hit me, and I cringe, horrified by how drunk I got. I’m not that person, I don’t drink at parties, and I definitely don’t drink to avoid my problems.
But looking at her last night, seeing how okay she was, it broke something inside me.
I don’t even know why I came here, maybe because Ineeded to see for myself what life looked like for everyone else. What would life look like if I were just another girl attending college and going to parties?
Maybe I wanted one night where I wasn’t Jurian’s sister, or Nathan’s friend… maybe I just wanted to be close to Johnny.
And yet, I couldn’t stop myself from slinking back into the shadows that bring so much pain, and yet so much comfort. I stood back and watched her with her friends, laughing and singing along to music while I crumbled.
How could someone be so resilient?
Everyone was going about their life like nothing had happened, and I guess to most of them… nothing had. To them, today was just like every other day, no one had died, no one had crushed their spirit, and no one had left them alone in this world.
My fingers graze the soft wood of her desk as I look around at the rest of her room, slowly falling in love with how perfectly imperfect it is. Put together, yet chaotic.
It’s a mix of beautiful blues and soft yellows, pale pinks and bright green. Colour is everywhere, like she bleeds life into whatever space she enters.
But that’s the kind of girl she is. She’s the ray of sunshine that lights up a room, she’s the sound of birds chirping in the morning, she’s the shooting star that grants people’s wishes.
I catch a glimpse of myself in her mirror, messy hair, smudged eyeliner and the red lipstick I love so much smeared across my cheek.
The one thing that doesn’t belong here is me. Not in this room, not in this house, and definitely not in any of their lives.
They would hate me if they knew whoI am.
Grabbing the makeup wipes off her desk, I peel them open and wipe away the remnants of last night, hoping that when I go downstairs, no one is there to see me.
They saw you last night, idiot.
I make it halfway to the front door before I notice everyone staring at me. I squeak, startled by their presence, before lowering my head. “I’m so sorry about all this. I don’t know what happened last night. I never do things like that.”
“I’m just glad you’re okay,” Claire says. She’s too kind, if she knew anything about me, she’d probably regret her hospitality.
The feeling of their eyes on me makes me want to crawl into a hole and die, it causes the itch to come back.
They’re looking at me, but are they really seeing me? Are they seeing the pain that’s so close to the surface I feel like is going to pour out of me any second now? Are they seeing the guilt for not stopping Nathan that night?
