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Beloved daughter.
Beloved sister.
Beloved friend.
Because, you know, who she was to the living is far more important than who she was as her own person.
My vision tilts, blurring, a roar filling my ears as the words before me distort, taking new shape, new meaning…
Beloved son.
Beloved brother.
Beloved friend.
Try as I might these last forty-eight hours, I can’t get it out of my head—what Jeremy said, the way he said it…
Like he was so damn certain that that reality would’ve been easier on us.
And the worst fucking part is that to some degree, he might be right. Waylon would still have his best friend, someone who was a far better friend to him than I ever was. He’d likely still have the people who raised him like their own. He’d mourn Jeremy, but… but it’s different, and that’s just the way it goes with these things.
But that’s where it ends.
“Now would be a really good fucking time for you to come back,” I say, or I think I say. I can’t really feel my lips. “Last chance.”
I try to imagine what she’d look like now if she did reappear. It’s the first time I really let myself accept the fact that the girl I knew, no matter if she was dead or alive, is gone all the same.
In my head, she’s frozen at seventeen. I suppose we both are.
I look down at my hands, my bruised, swollen, scabbed-over knuckles—blood caked over from where I split them on the bag earlier. I take in the sharp juts of bone and ripples of sinew going up my forearms as I shove up my sleeves.
Except…I didn’t freeze.
What would she think if she saw me now?
Swallowing thickly, I grab the bottle and take another sip. I barely feel it going down this time.
My fingers tremble around the neck when I set it down on the grass.
“Would you hate me?” I find myself saying. “S’okay if you do. I kinda hate me too.”
I don’t elaborate. I don’t have to. The Izzy in my head is all-seeing, all-knowing, and the pain mingled with forgiveness shining back at me from the only version I have left fucking guts me.
No…no, she wouldn’t hate me. Because if she was here—if there was some alternate reality out there where it was him instead of her—she’d be just as guilt-stricken, and just as desperate to trade places as Jeremy so clearly is.
How did I not see it? I wonder, replaying his words the other night… the way he said them.
But just as quick, the answer comes.
You didn’t want to.
Slowly, I shake my head.
Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, logic tries to point out the futility of what ifs, insisting nothing good comes from this line of thinking. And it would be right…
But it’s also too late.
Relieved.
