Into the Blue

Chapter Thirty-Two

            Heather stood there, turning her face towards the sky and wondering how she had survived so long without breathing.

This was good, and right, and beautiful, and she decided she didn't want to spend another day inside of some cold, boring old building without leaving at least once just to bask in the glory of the world.

She was better now. They'd gotten all the fluid out of her lungs, and she could breathe without assistance now. It was crazy how a little thing like deciding to go skating in the middle of the night could really screw up a person's life for a while.

She was exhausted, though. A body mending itself apparently took a lot of energy, which was why sick people were so tired all the time. Well, either tired or sleeping.

I could have died. She thought, and for the first time it really sank in. What if Jason hadn't been worried about her? What if her phone hadn't been lying there where the stranger could pick it up? What if the ambulance didn't come in time?

What if?

But here she was, standing on her own two feet with no fluid in her lungs, able to breathe and run and live life as she normally would have. Yeah, sure, her parents had taken her skateboards away, but that was alright. Heather didn't really want to skate just then anyway.

Jason is gone. He'd died without her there to talk to him, and now his aura was probably floating somewhere, moaning about unrequited love.

But Heather had known. She'd known for a long time how he really felt about her, how he tried to distract himself by dating the prettiest girls he could find, but he always just ended up more miserable.

She almost felt like maybe she should have said yes all those years ago...

No. She couldn't think like that. She couldn't look back on the times she'd had with Jason and beat herself up because they weren't the totality of he had wanted.

Man, it was weird to talk about him in the past tense.

The funeral had been solemn, she'd heard. His parents and two older brothers were there, completely dressed in black. Mrs. Smith cried. The Smith men just looked completely numb.

When Mrs. Smith saw Heather there, she'd run towards her and embraced her. "He talked about you all the time, you know," she said, fussily straightening Heather's dress straps, tears blotting her makeup. "He really cared about you."

Heather had just nodded. She hadn't been there when he died. She didn't really know what had gone down, except for the fact that she was the one who should have died. He shouldn't have been hurt. He shouldn't have been there at all.

She'd always miss that dumb Movie Star. She'd always miss his bad jokes and skate tricks and the way the sun shone on his skin in the summertime. In the best of times.

But those times were gone.

The door behind her opened, and her dad walked out.

She bit her lip, knowing that this day had needed to come. Knowing that every day she had avoided him, she had really just been avoiding this conversation.

"You remember, don't you?"

The words hung in the air, tainting the summer breeze with poison.

And then came the whispered reply, the word she had been hiding from for six years.

"Yes."