My stomach lurches, like I’m falling from a height.
Every word is a stab to my heart.
I swallow the bile creeping up the back of my throat. I let the silence press into us. He is trying to hurt me. He is pushing me away—and Ihatethat it’s working.
He begins to move back toward the building, and I shout, “At least look at me when you squeeze the trigger, Chase.”
And he doesn’t, he keeps walking.
I press my hand to my stomach, feeling it shift. I wouldn’t beg, not again.
Chase Keller had become someone I no longer knew.
My headphones are still in my ears, and I don’t realize music is playing until “True Friends” by Bring Me The Horizon sizzles through the wire.
I step back on trembling legs, my whole body a gaping wound.
Harlen calls out to me and I don’t turn around. I stagger away, and when I reach the end of the street, one hand wrapped around my ribs, I fall to my knees. My stomach feels as if it’s filled with thumbtacks and I work them up my throat, forcing out dark bile.
I sit back on my heels, running my wrist across my mouth. My knees are in the dirt, my heart a metronome at the base of my throat. I pull air into my lungs, and when I have enough, I clamber back to my feet, burying what cries I have left deep in my chest.
I continue to stumble, never turning back.
One night.
One decision.
It changed everything.
It altered and cleaved our lives.
Wewould never be the same again.
Nineteen Years Old
“Motherfucker,” I curse around my toothbrush.
White minty foam sprays from my mouth when I slam into the lilac painted plywood on my way out of the bathroom.
The kettle is whistling from the kitchen. And with one hand clasped to the wet towel at my chest, the other curling around my body, latching to my now throbbing tricep, I stifle a sharp breath when I realize that instinctively I’ve reached forit—tracing my shaky thumb across the thick, depressed skinthat nightleft behind.
It makes me want to cry, then I want to throw something.
Because today is the third anniversary of my best friend's murder, and I’d already been struggling to keep the surfeit of emotions at bay.
I bite into my bottom lip when it wobbles, reach for the chipped nozzle at the stove and turn off the burner. My fingers tremble as I take a chai tea bag, dropping it into a pink checkered mug, filling it with boiling water. I leave it on the counter to steep and return to the bathroom. Spitting a glob of toothpaste into the sink, I hang my head, squeeze my eyes closed.
You can do this, I tell myself over and over again, until I’m working quickly, ignoring the pain at my arm—and my heart—layering my body in moisturizer before dressing in a pair of black booty shorts and my oversized taffy pink T-shirt adorned withNew Yorkin bold white letters across the chest.
Jade had the same one. We had bought them after the four of us made our pactthree years ago—New York, the boys on a stage, and us shouting for them at the back.
I swallow, tempering my emotions. Dreams were dreams back then, but they felt real and reachable and tangible. Now those dreams were just a graveyard of memories.
Life had changed.
So had I.
So had they.
