I haven’t been there.
I was standing in a neon room calling myself June’s boyfriend while her brother was overdosing fifty yards away in a garden. Because every time I get close to something good, the universe finds someone I care about and hurts them.
The curse. Stupidly, I thought maybe it’s just trauma making patterns out of coincidence. For a few weeks, I actually believed June and I could be happy without it costing somebody.
Putain d’idiot.
My stomach convulses again and I lean over and retch out the window. Nothing comes up this time. Carter is pulling into the hospital lot, following the ambulance around to the emergency entrance. We sit in the car and watch through the windshield as they wheel Aeron inside. The gurney rolls under the fluorescent overhang and the harsh white light catches his face. He looks like a sculpture. Marble. Still.
“We have to tell June.” Carter’s voice is barely there. “Y-you have to call June and Melia.”
My abdomen hollows out. “You do it,” I say. “I can’t.”
Fucking coward.
Carter’s hands are shaking but he picks up his phone. I open my door and get out because I can’t listen to this call. I can’t hear June’s voice break through the speaker. I walk toward the emergency entrance, one foot then the next.
Inside, the ER is a blinding white. No depth, no shadow, no contour. I go to the front desk and tell them I’m here for Aeron Belrose, who was just brought in. They hand me a clipboard and a pen. I sit in a chair.
My hands won’t stop shaking. They’re shaking too much for me to fill anything out, and my brain can barely think, so I just sit here. I sit with the clipboard balanced on my knees and my body is numb and cold.
Where are my gloves? I think I left them in the dorm.
Carter sits down beside me eventually. His eyes are red, his face swollen. “They know,” he says with a gravelly voice. “I’ll never get June’s sob out of my head.”
I close my eyes.
Time stops being reliable. The clipboard is still on my lap. The pen is still in my hand. Carter is breathing beside me. The fluorescents buzz overhead.
How much time passes?
The sliding doors open and somehow I know it’s June and her mom. I open my eyes to find Melia first. She moves straight to the front counter and the employee points at me. Melia crosses the waiting room and takes the clipboard from my hands without a word. She doesn’t look at me, just sits far away and starts filling out the forms while tears run down her face and drip onto the paper. She doesn’t wipe them.
June comes through the doors a second later.
She’s standing while Carter and I are sitting, which makes her tall. The two of us are tiny in these chairs. Her eyes are swollen and wild.
She hurries over to us. “What happened? Was it a car crash? Did he fall? What happened?”
Carter must’ve just said “accident” and not “overdose.”
She’s talking so fast the words tumble over each other. Carter opens his mouth and she’s already onto the next question, her hands pulling at the hem of her jacket, her body vibrating. Neither of us can get a word in.
Carter glances at me.
I turn away. I can’t look at him. I can’t look at either of them because the guilt is in every part of me.
Why didn’t I check on him sooner? Why didn’t I stay with him?
Why did I stop believing in the curse?
I only destroy people. Everyone I love, everything I touch.
Carter and June are talking and he’s telling her what the “accident” was. Their voices reach me from a long distance, muffled, like sound filtered through plaster. I come to when I realize June asked me a question. She’s waiting, with tears soaking her collar, for an answer.
“What?” I ask.
Her eyes are wide, pleading. Scared. “Were you at the party too?”
