Young Love Lost

Chapter Two

Tears splattered my clothes as I realized Calvin would come home right now, eat his dinner and call me to tell me how beautiful and amazing I was. I would tell him his scruffy brown hair was cute, but he so needed to cut it.

My mom was downstairs calling the therapist. That was the plan. Apparently every injured person, that wasn’t dead, would need a therapist. We would go to group therapy and individual too. It was a guy therapist apparently, and he would work out any hostile, depressing feelings.

I felt numb sitting on my bed with my suitcase. I realized the poison in my body was already spreading. It would take a while to settle in for me, because it was in my back and had to make it to my brain. I would fight it off all I could but not one thing could cure it. Want to know what happened? Riley got special bullets, with poison. He forgot that sometimes you don’t die instantly, you die slowly. He didn’t know shooting me would slowly kill me.

I fought the urge to jump out the window and die already. Calvin would yell at me in heaven. I smiled a little knowing that heaven was just the place where he did belong. Riley’s image suddenly popped up, as if my subconscious was asking me where he would go, heaven or hell? Was there an in between for heaven and hell?

My head hurts my brain told me, as it pounded. I shrugged off my jacket and stepped into the bathroom. It hurt to be an only child, to have your dad run away from you, and your boyfriend be shot. Yeah, it hurt, but the worst part was knowing your best friend could have saved you from all the pain. But no, he was the one causing it.

I stripped my clothes and slinked into the hot shower that was burning my skin. It was burning and it felt so good. California’s hot summers were nothing compared to my burning skin in the shower. I got out and dried off slipping into shorts and an old Coldplay band tee shirt. Calvin bought it for me at the concert last year. Yeah, that concert.

My mom knocked on the door releasing me from my trance. I realized I was awkwardly staring at my bed and jumped onto it to make myself seem less awkward. I ducked my head into a pillow and yelled out in pain. My back, it hurt so badly. No more jumping on beds.

My mom shook my shoulders as she called out, “What the hell Jill! What’s wrong? Are you hurt or dy-“she stopped mid-sentence suddenly.

Her eyes welled up in tears as she stopped herself instantly. I wanted her to say it out loud. Dying I mentally whispered to her.

She calmed herself and lectured me on jumping on beds or something. I nodded my way through it like a zombie. Whatever, I was done with this town and the whole world talking. Pillar high school was never interesting, go back to your own lives, world.

Once mom left and I was alone for the night to sleep, I fidgeted. I grabbed onto my necklace with the locket and rubbed it over and over again. I shut my eyes and kept opening them; having tiny hope that Calvin would shake me awake and say I had a nightmare.

But each time I closed my eyes I would get more scared to open them. What if Riley was sitting there holding a gun? What if he was waiting there? We had had fights before, not too serious. Mostly about Calvin though. Calvin may have been his best friend, but there was something else I never saw between them, something I only saw when he shot Cal.

I decided I would play graveyard like I did with Riley. I would be as still as possible, and I would lose if I moved an inch. Slowly but surely it worked. I drifted into a deep sleep.

In my sleep I was also playing graveyard. Riley was staring at me with his grey blue eyes. They always seemed sad now a day. The sky was grey too, matching his eye colour. It was a dreary day and the fields were nowhere golden, but so wasn’t Riley or mine’s house.