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Sadness enveloped her features. “Joe.”
I knew that Shannon knew what was really happening here, and Shannon knew that I knew she knew.
Still, neither one of us spoke a word about the elephant in the room, and I was grateful for her in this moment.
She wasn’t lecturing me.
She wasn’t calling me names and reminding me of what a terrible person I had become.
She was justhere.
“It’s okay.” Breathing labored, I forced myself to look her in the eyes. “It’s going to be okay.”
She blew out a shaky breath. “You promise?”
“Yeah.” I nodded stiffly. “I promise.”
IT’S BEEN SEVENTEEN HOURS AND SIX WHOLE DAYS
DECEMBER 31ST 2004
AOIFE
With my worldshattered around me, and my heart splintered in my chest, I somehow managed to make it through the next week by committing myself to three methods/modes in order to survive the un-survivable.
Work mode.
Throwingmyself at the mercy of my boss, I snatched up every available hour of work at The Dinniman. Desperate for the distraction, and the mundane anonymity that came with waiting tables, until I could crawl back into bed at night and cry myself to sleep.
Revise for the leaving cert mode.
Because I wasn’tthe scholar that Kev was, I quickly found that this method, as optimistic and productive as it had seemed in my mind when I conjured it up, was a complete bust. I would have to inhale our books if I had a hope of passing our leaving cert. He only had to hear the teacher say it once and it remained in his big old brain forever. Me? The teacher all but had to force it in and stick sellotape over every orifice in my head to stop the information from falling back out. That’s how sucky I was at the academic side of school. Unfortunately for me, there was no exam on socializing, which, unlike Kev, I excelled in. Therefore, I swiftly moved on to the third method.
Take a bottle of vodka in the bath with me mode.
Yeah,when I had hashed up my three-step survival guide, I really hadn’t thought it through, because similar to method number two, it sounded like a fantastic idea. Then I remembered that Mam had switched our tub out for the fucking power shower.
See?Nothing was going my way.
Regardless of my methods, I found myself going through the motions.
On Sunday, I was numb.
On Monday, I was empty.
On Tuesday, I was hysterically optimistic that everything would miraculously work out.
On Wednesday, I was filled with deranged obsessiveness, which in turn, had caused me to fill his voicemail with needy messages that made me hate myself, and then angry ones that assured him that I hated him much more.
On Thursday, I was back to being grief-stricken.
And by Friday, I had resigned myself to the fact that I would never willingly celebrate another New Year’s Eve again.
Last year had been horrible enough when I had to sit back and endure the knowledge that Joey was upstairs fucking Danielle, but tonight, as I sat alone in my house, I knew that I felt a million times worse.
Sure, I was technically with Paul last year, and Joey was happily servicing half the school, but we still hadeach other.
Because last year, as messed up and as blurred the five year long precipice of our friendship had become, at least I still hadhim.
