Page 92 of The Art of Drowning

That was a big fat lie. My parents might willingly pay for things, but they didn’t willingly see me, and I had no interest in going back there. Not ever.

With my Frappuccino in hand, I cut through the campus grounds and headed back up to my dorm room.

To my horror and embarrassment, Bowie was back, and he’d found Spike.

“Dude,” he said, turning to face me, Spike in one hand. Concern held tight in the fist of the other hand. “Have you been here the whole time?”

The room wasn’t a disaster. Well, not his side anyway. Mine looked like it had been stirred by a tornado. Take-out containers and dirty laundry piled up. Things I knew I had to deal with but couldn’t make myself.

“I was going to clean before you got back.” With my free hand, I took Spike from him and set my pet rock back down on my desk.

“Why do you have a rock with googly eyes on it?”

Bowie asked too many questions.

“That’s Spike.” It wasn’t an explanation, but maybe Bowie didn’t need one since he walked over to me and just pulled me into a bone-crushing hug.

“You’re going to be okay, D.”

Of course, I hadn’t believed him then. But as the months wore on and one day slipped into the next, things felt easier. Brighter. Better. Until one day I was outside a dorm, on a lawn, reading one of the most boring textbooks known to man when it hit me out of nowhere that I was happy.

Happy.

Not, not-miserable, or not-sad, or just-okay. But actually happy. Happy in a way that lit me up inside when I thought about it. Happy in a way that made me feel like my heart was standing in the sunshine.

And I’d done it without Callum.

I looked over at Bowie and I don’t know if I stared too long or what, but Bowie looked over at me and when he saw the expression on my face, he grinned from ear to ear. “It took you long enough.”

Coming from anyone else, it might have felt like a criticism. But coming from Bowie, I knew it was just him celebrating my triumph.

I’d told Bowie about Callum and Sam after he busted me for staying at the dorm alone during winter break. I hadn’t told him right away, but the story had come out of me in dribs and drabs, each kernel of truth I gave him lightening my load.

“Thank you.” I ignored the way he shook his head at me as if to refuse my gratitude. Like he wasn’t the reason I found the courage to breathe again. To live again. If it were possible, I’d have fallen for Bowie, and we’d run off into the sunset and get married. But Bowie was just a friend and wishing would never make me feel for him what I’d felt for Callum.

Once upon a time.

“I’m always going to love him,” I told Bowie later in the safety of our dark dorm room.

“Of course you will.”

What I loved most about Bowie was that he never tried to make my emotions seem like less or like they were unimportant or that they would change if I just gave it enough time. An emotion was a truth, he once told me. And a truth didn’t stop being true just because it made you uncomfortable.

Yes, I loved Callum. Truth.

Yes, I could live without him. Truth.

Yes, I still got sad sometimes when I thought about him, but those sad spells were getting shorter and shorter.

I would always love Callum.

Truth.

But I needed to love myself enough to let myself live happily without him.

And that was the greatest thing Bowie ever gave me the space and support to learn.

I owed him everything.