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CHAPTER TWENTY NINE XXIX. WASTING AWAY
IF JULIET COOPER HAD TO DESCRIBE THE WAY SHE HAD FELT EVER SINCE THE NIGHT THAT JOHN B AND SARAH WENT OUT INTO THAT STORM, THE ONE THAT HAD KILLED THEM, SHE WOULD HAVE SAID SHE FELT LIKE SHE WAS WASTING AWAY. She was slowly wasting away and waiting for something to take over. Death, maybe. Or an everlasting depression that was worse than death. Juliet hadn't felt anything in weeks. No emotions, nothing. She didn't even feel sad, she was just empty. The once loving and caring girl had gone and she was just an empty shell.
And the only thing that ever made her feel slightly better, the only thing that ever made her feel anything was snorting white powder up her nose or popping multicoloured pills behind everyone's backs. No one had any clue that Juliet Cooper was getting high behind closed doors. How she was buying cocaine on her way home from the shops or stealing pills from the medicine cabinet in her mothers bathroom. And it wasn't as though her friends would've been mad at her. Her family probably would but her friends, they would've understood. Her boyfriend would've understood. But Juliet also knew that they would try to help her but she didn't need help. She wasn't trapped or being forced to do anything. It was her choice. That's why she kept it to herself.
It wasn't as though Juliet was getting high every single day. Maybe once or twice a week when she knew she'd be alone for a few hours. Most of the time, her own pills were enough. The prescription that she had for anti-depressants and her anxiety. Ones she hadn't taken in years but her mother had insisted that she needed to go back to the doctors and ask for them again. Death often made people depressed so it wasn't unusual but death made Juliet so depressed that she wished her own life would end. She had when her father passed away and she was doing it again after being told that her best friend was gone.
The girl would lie awake at night and imagine all the different ways she could do it, even sometimes while she was lying beside her own boyfriend. She would imagine it in so much detail that she sometimes dreamt about it and it would leave her screaming herself awake in the middle of the night. Thankfully, that hadn't happened while she was sleeping beside JJ, because Juliet wasn't sure if she would be able to explain the reasoning for the bloodcurdling screams that left her lips in the middle of the night.
Juliet's family had tried to help the girl as much as they could. Addison had tried cheering her sister up with movie nights, Tyler had tried taking Juliet out during the day to take her mind off things, Maria and Paul had given Juliet time and space to greave. But the problem was that she couldn't greave her friend, none of the Pogues could. Not properly. Not when everyone on the island was talking about how John B was a murderer, not when they still saw Ward and Rafe Cameron walking around and not when they couldn't even have a funeral for their best friend.
