Let me know if there’s anything you need.
He’d been the one that had organized the direct burials for not only Jade, but my mother, and the deadbeat I no longer spoke about, when I was completely fucked off my face and told him to ‘just put them in the ground.’And now, I had to believe that these text messages, the ones that came every couple of days, were his way of dealing with his own guilt for watching the way my father treated my mother and Jade; and not doing a damn thing to stop it.
Guilt was a bitch, especially when the person you felt it against was dead.
He’d have to live with that now, the same way I’d have to live with not protecting Jade and Laiken the way I’d always told myself I would.
Harlen is already at the mouth of the tunnel when I turn and whisper over my shoulder, “Love you, J.”
I drag my dripping nose across my shoulder, choke back a cry, listening to the throb of my own heart when I walk away. “So. Fucking. Much.”
My blanket slips from my shoulders as I stretch for my phone. Half my torso hangs off the single bed pushed against the pale-pink wall in my room at Nan’s.
I crawl my fingers across the surface of an upcycled turquoise bedside table until the blinking device is clasped in the palm of my hand.
I fall to my back with a sigh, pull the covers to my chin and try not to look at it, in fact, I bury it beneath the covers, even go as far to contemplate switching it off. Only, I had never been good at running on anything but impulse. And four weeks ago, that impulse killed my best friend, and left me in pieces.
I drag it out, stare at the glowing screen, hoping it to behim.
Harlen
You got this, Laik.
Tears lick at the back of my eyes and I swallow twice, strangling a cry.
Harlen was a gift, and while he wasn’t the person I’d been waiting to hear from, his messages and support and visits always felt like a small portion of the gentle hug only he, and his best friend,could give me.
My stomach tilts at the thought ofhim, of Chase Keller, of my best friend's older brother. The boy I didn’t realize I’d become to be so heavily reliant on since my father’s suicide. I suck in a breath, allow a moment for my insides to realign, pushing down the agony until nothing but numbness follows behind.
Today, I was returning to school a broken version of the sixteen-year-old girl I no longer knew, missing the most important part of me—my best friend.
I chew on my bottom lip when it wobbles and my teeth begin to chatter, clicking inside my head.
My thumbs shake when I reply with a love heart to Harlen, feeling my stomach—that I’d worked so hard to settle—lurch into my throat.
I didn’t know how I was supposed to go on without her. How I was supposed to get myself up and dressed and fed when I had forgotten how to breathe.
I fight for another breath, begging for it to curl around my lungs when I swipe out of the thread, feeling my thumbs instinctively reach and stretch for the one that had long become one-sided.
Two more weeks had passed, and my final plea had fallen on deaf ears. When Harlen came around last night, I wanted to ask him if he had given Chase my message from the night we were at the cemetery, when I was crying and it was raining.
“Please tell him that I miss him.”
I wanted to askhimmyself. I wanted to ask him what I had done to deserve his silence. Was it because I had run that night? Did he walk out of the hospital room and realize that I didn’t fight for his sister the way he’d expected me to, even though he’d expressed anger with the choices I had made.
I was rightfully confused.
I reel my thumbs in, don’t let them move. Anger and embarrassment rise inside of me, and I force myself to shove it down. I leave my phone on the bed, throwing my blanket aside.
Part of me wanted to stop reaching out, but the other part, the small piece that felt everything for this boy, wanted to turn up in some place he was, begging for him to look at me and tell me to my face why he was avoiding me.
A chill washes through me when cool air drifts across my bare skin.
I work quickly, dressing in a black tube top, shimmying on a pair of light denim shorts that I button and zip high on my waist.
I force my mind, my body, my soul to return to numbness. It was better that way.
I pull on my Reeboks before moving out of my room and to the bathroom across the small hall.
