Open When I'm Gone

20. Hold My Girl.

I never thought I would be here again, but yet here we are. I'm sitting holding the hand of the one person who has kept me going, and I don't know if they're going to be there to let me do the same for them.

I cannot lose another person who means the world to me. I don't think I'll be able to keep going if I lose her.

I don't want to live if she doesn't. And I never thought I'd feel this way again.

The secret got out pretty quickly around the cast, even though school's been out for a week or so already. Sometimes some of the girls Jolie has seemed to grow fond of offer to come sit at her side while she recovers, sometimes Justice, sometimes JD, sometimes Dakota. But today, Blake sits next to me, his legs crossed over one another, hands fidgeting with the hem on his navy blue t-shirt.

He told me he wanted to show he cared. I don't know how much I believe him, but of course what does it matter now?

Both of us are silent as we sit there, the tapping of his foot in sync with the swirling of my fingers against Jolies boney hand.

She's awake, but basically by medical standards, unresponsive. Her eyes are wide, focused on something too far in the distance to be a real object. I could say her name a million times and she would never look my way. It's scaring the doctors, and that's never a good sign.

She's just there, merely existing in a world where life should be lived at its fullest.

"You were... Eddy's boyfriend, right?" Blake asks hesitantly, even though I know he knows the answer. Everyone knew who I was, just because of Eddy.

"Yeah," I breathe out, my chest tightening at the mere mention of her name. I thought that I was over this feeling.

"Dang," He breathes out, running his hand down his face. "That's... That's really rough. I'm really really sorry, Simon. That's... God that's so awful."

The way his voice tenses as he says the words, the way his eyes water makes my gut twist. He knows how it feels, more than any human should.

"I..." His breath hitches as he speaks, "I know what it's like to lose someone, and it's just... No one ever deserves to feel like that. It's really, really hard."

I nod my head, turning to look at him.

"Who were they?"

Blake lets out a soft, pitiful chuckle, so broken it tears at the loose strings of my emotions.

"Summer of my Sophomore year I met this girl. She was two years younger than me, about to be a freshman. She was sitting outside of one of the studios, looking really pitiful, so I went and sat down next to her. She just looked so sad, and I wasn't just going to leave her there alone."

He looks at Jolie, a hint of memory in his eyes as he looks almost fondly around the room.

"The next week she came up to me and gave me a letter, I guess less of a letter and more of a note," He chuckles, "She told me she had been going through a lot of chronic illness stuff and had been debating taking her own life the night that I sat down next to her. We were in a play together the next year, and she introduced me to Justice. That's how she and I met."

I try to picture Blake and Justice with another person, and surprisingly it's not as hard as I thought. They are both such polar opposites that it's easy to imagine another person to hold them together. The glue, you might call her.

"Emory, our friend, didn't show up to rehearsal one day. Didn't call, didn't text, nothing. It was pretty normal for her to be absent, but not without texting or calling Justice or I. We didn't even hear anything from her mom. But we didn't think much of it, we were used to her not being okay for a minute and then coming back completely fine the next week. But she didn't show up the week after that, or the week after that. And pretty quickly, we started to get worried. Like really worried. And neither of us had heard from her for weeks, so we decided to take matters into our own hands."