Chapter 43
Chapter Forty-Three
I don’t move until the sound of her footsteps fade away. Until she’s gone, leaving me alone again, and half-wondering if she was ever here in the first place.
Maybe none of it was real.
No. No!
I slam my fist into the wall. Pain explodes through my hand, bone meeting brick with a sickening crack.
But it’s nothing compared to the fire inside me, or the way each breath feels as though I’m swallowing razorblades.
The world tilts, fades out at the edges, so I hit the wall again …
and again. Until blood is smeared across its surface, and my hand is as broken as everything else about me.
My legs give out. The floor rushes up to meet me. Every word I said to her replays in my head. Each one had been chosen to cut the deepest, designed to make her hate me, and stop her looking at me as though I’m someone worth saving.
You’re exhausting.
The lie burns in my throat, mixing with bile. She was never exhausting. She was air in my lungs when I was drowning. Light leading me home when I was lost in the dark. Hope when I’d forgotten what it felt like to want more than survival.
Playing the savior.
Another one. This one tastes of blood and shame.
Because she never played at anything. When everyone else looked through me, or saw a kid living on the poverty line, a problem that made them uncomfortable, she looked deeper.
She found parts of me I thought were dead.
She made me believe I could be more than just another kid dying in the cracks.
I don’t need you.
That was the cruelest lie of all. Because I do need her. Like breathing. Like poetry. Like everything that made life more than just existing. But that’s the reason she had to go. It’s why she has to hate me.
And why she can’t be here to watch what happens next.
My undamaged hand is shaking when I pull the pill bottle out of my pocket.
It’s the third prescription I’ve picked up since the first one I forged, and most of them are already gone.
They barely touch the pain anymore. I shake out two tablets, then a third, chasing relief that gets further away with each dose.
I remember forging that first prescription. How easy it was to fall back into the same pattern I’d learned watching my mom. Hearing the same excuses she used to make while I wrote the second.
This is different. It’s just to handle the pain. Just until I can breathe again. Just until …
But ‘just until’ turned into ‘just one more.’ Then ‘just two more.’ Then watching the bottle get lighter while the pain got worse, and shame burned heavier in my veins.
Baby, sometimes you need help. Mom’s voice whispers through my head. Sometimes the pain is too much to handle alone.
A memory hits me harder than Dan’s fists.
Mom on the bathroom floor, blood on her lips from coughing, and track marks covering her arms. Me, ten years old, helping her count pills.
Her voice breaking as she promised it would be the last time.
She’d get clean. She’d get better. She’d be my mom again.
Now I’m the one making promises to myself I can’t keep. The one watching pills disappear too fast.
The one becoming everything I ran away from and swore I’d never be.
The factory spins around me. I can’t tell if it’s a fever or the pills anymore.
Both probably. My reflection catches in a window—hollow eyes, skin stretched too tight, slight tremors wracking my body.
I barely recognize the person staring back at me.
I see my mom, and the desperation her face always wore.
This is why I couldn’t face her. This is why I couldn’t let her touch me.
I want to throw up, I need to flush the pills out of my system. I have to be stronger than this.
Instead, I swallow another, because the damage Dan and his friends caused me is too much, and the pills numb the pain for a few minutes … until the cycle starts again.
With Lily going out of town, I have no reason to keep track of days. One day blurs into two. Then into three.
The wet sound in my chest gets worse. Each breath is harder to take than the last, air whistling through damaged tissue.
The bruises from Dan’s beating have spread across my ribs in shades of purple and black, but that’s not the only reason for the discoloration.
My ribs are broken, and I’m sure there is more damage as well.
And that’s why I need the pills …
Pills … I need to refill the prescription again before New Year comes, but I don’t think I could make it to the pharmacy across town even if I tried.
Lily’s voice keeps me company while I lay on the ground and count down the hours until I won’t breathe anymore. Sometimes I think I can smell her perfume. Sometimes I think she’s still here, believing in me and thinking I can be saved.
But I can’t be saved. I can’t write poetry in the margins anymore, and I can’t dream about futures I’ll never have.
I’m no longer the boy who let her light touch him, and believed, just for a moment, that he deserved her.
I write her name in the dirt with a shaking finger, and just that simple action sends pain through my limbs. But I force myself to do it, then erase it, and write it again.
It’s my confession, my truth about her importance.
By day four or five, I’m vomiting up blood.
Thick, dark clots that splatter across the floor.
I don’t know whether it’s being caused by the drugs or by internal bleeding.
It could even be a hallucination because I see Mom sometimes, a tourniquet around her arm, and a needle pressed to her vein.
I see Rick’s fist coming at my face. I see Lily’s eyes shining, bright with tears I put there.
Tears I had to put there. I have to remember that.
Remember what? Why isn’t she here? Where did she go?
I force myself to think, to remember.
She deserves better than watching someone she loves die. I’ll become a ghost in her story. A cautionary tale she’ll look back on in years to come. A ghost she won’t see cry.
More memories bombard me. My fingers tracing poetry on her skin. Reading Steinbeck aloud to her in the dark. Her laugh when I argued with her about symbolism. The way her body curled against mine, fitting perfectly in all the places that mattered.
Time stops making sense. I lose chunks of it, waking up in places I don’t remember going to. The wet sound in my chest turns to rattling. There’s blood every time I cough now, bright red against my palm, splattering across my clothes. It’s a warning I can no longer ignore.
I’m dying.
Deep down, I’ve known it since the beating. It’s another reason I sent Lily away.
My body is shutting down, piece by piece. I’m drowning in my own blood. Fever is burning through what’s left of me. The pills that were supposed to help are killing me faster.
I thought I could do it. Die here alone, and become another nameless casualty in an abandoned building. But now the time is here, and there’s no way to escape it, I’m scared.
And I’m tired. So fucking tired.
The pill bottle mocks me from the floor, nearly empty now. I’ve spent the past week trying to numb everything. The pain. The guilt. The knowing that I broke the most beautiful thing in my life.
And still the memories come.
Mom in the emergency room. Tubes in her arms. Her voice weak as she promises to get clean.
Me, twelve years old, believing her because the alternative was too hard to face.
Mom, same situation, two years later, only this time frothing at the mouth as she overdoses on the bathroom floor.
EMT’s shouting. Police taking Rick away …
and me, unnoticed, stuffing clothes into my backpack, stealing what little money is in my mom’s purse, and slipping out of the door before anyone sees.
I can’t die here.
In one brief moment of clarity, I know what I have to do.
I snatch up the bottle and force myself out of the factory. Each step sends shockwaves through my body. I shuffle past the diner where she convinced me to sit with her, past the library where we hid in the stacks, past the places I’m going to haunt forever.
The walk takes forever. My vision narrows to a tunnel, the edges spotty and dark. Streetlights bleed into each other, watercolors running together. I stumble, catching myself against a wall, then force myself to keep moving.
The entire time I keep one thing focused in my mind.
Feldman’s store. There are cameras, alarms, all the things I’ve spent months learning to avoid.
My feet know the way. Her memory keeps me company. What I have to do keeps me upright when my body wants to collapse.
I know what they’ll think when they find me. Just another junkie looking to steal so he can get his next fix. Another kid who chose wrong. Another story that ends the way everyone thought it would.
They won’t see the truth.
This isn’t about stealing, or drugs, or any of the things they’ll put into their report. This is about a boy who’s watched this story play out before. One who knows how it ends, and is willing to give one last desperate chance to choose a different ending.
The lock is easy. I make noise. I make mistakes. I fumble with the doorknob. I trip over the threshold and knock into a display rack. Cans scatter across the floor. I set off every alarm I know how to avoid in my sleep.
And somewhere in the distance, I hear sirens.
I sink to the floor, head falling back against the counter, and tip out pills, four of them, and swallow them dry. They stick in my throat, choking me, but I force them down.
The sirens get louder. Closer.
Closing my eyes, I think about Lily, and the note I left in her pocket. My truth hidden in a goodbye.
Red and blue lights flash through windows, visible behind my eyelids. Car doors slam. Footsteps approach. Voices shout commands I can barely hear over the ringing in my ears.
I stay where I am. I don’t fight, or run. I couldn’t run, even if I wanted to. I don’t bother speaking. My voice is gone anyway, destroyed by coughing up blood.
I just let them see what’s left of me, and I let them do what I can’t.
Hands grab me, rough but not cruel. Someone checks my pulse, and shouts for an ambulance. Someone else is reading me my rights, but the words are garbled and don’t make sense.
The last thing I see before they drag me out is her name, written in my blood on the white tile floor.
Lily.
Some stories don’t get happy endings. But maybe some endings help other stories find a better path.
Maybe she’ll forgive me someday.
Maybe she’ll understand.
Maybe she’ll forget about me.
The sirens wail as they load me into an ambulance, and everything goes dark.