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The world made her blind.She wasn’t supposed to be sorry. Victims aren’t the ones who are supposed to be sorry. I walked away unscathed, but Sam wasn’t so lucky. She didn’t hear my voice telling her that she wasn’t a bad person because everyone else spoke in unison. She asked for it. What did she think would happen?
What did they think would happen when she was gone and only I was left, knowing her truth?
The paper crinkledin my hand. I’ll never forget how neat her penmanship was. How even with her last words, she made sure they were pretty and that she’d written each letter as best as she could.
My thumb traced over the one spot on the sheet of paper that was crinkled and slightly discolored. Where she’d let her tears fall onto the paper.
I don’t know how I forced myself to move. Every step to the bathroom made my fear more real, made my skin that much colder.
My hand shook as I pushed open the bathroom door wider, my heart refusing to continue beating when I saw her.
Sam never cried before that night.
And she never smiled after it either.
“Sam,” I said, and my voice scratched my throat as I fell to my knees in the bathroom. The tile was cold and hard. She was in the tub with the drain open and the water barely running. It mixed with the blood and pooled around her body.
Her pajama pants were stuck to her legs, soaking wet and stained with the blood.
I covered my mouth as I cried, hating the sight before me. After she slit her throat, she must have lurched forward; blood was splattered on the wall and on her arms. Like maybe she tried to stop it. But the knife lay by her thigh and she was still.
“Sam.” I could barely say her name as I inched forward.
I had to touch her, even with her eyes open and staring back at nothing, a stillness that only comes with death. Even then I still had to climb into the tub and hold her, begging her to wake up.
But she never would.
Even as a fifteen-year-old girl, I knew that.
She hated herself for what she’d done. She came to believe she deserved it because that’s what everyone told her. She was confused and she forgot how to be happy. She must’ve thought she never would be again and maybe she was right.
Worst of all, I left her.
I listened to my mother and left her when she needed me most. It could have been me and I didn’t even stand beside her.
I could never take that back.But I made her a promise that night.
DEAN
There’s an expression about seeing red.
They say when you’re consumed with rage, you see red. Your sense of awareness is skewed. Your thoughts aren’t logical. Your decisions aren’t sane.
You’re seeing red.
I’ve been angry before. I’ve let it get the best of me rather than accepting the pain that was always there.
I never knew the true meaning of seeing red until I heard Allie scream.
I could hear her behind the door.
I thought I heard her all the way from the sidewalk. It was a scream that made the hairs on my arm stand on end. A scream the neighbor heard as well and I caught her looking toward Allie’s door with concern.
My heartbeat picked up and it was already pounding in my chest.
Every step I took before I heard her, I thought about the text I sent her. I was fixated on it.
I almost didn’t send it. I almost acted like a coward and let her leave me.
