Graffiti Girl // Michael Clifford

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If hell is a life without love, am I being punished for what I've done? The sky's on fire. All the stars disappear, no signs of life without you here. Tears will fall, oceans will rise, the earth will stop turning. Since you left every breath feels like it's burning. I know that life will go on. I'll survive, but for tonight, I'd swear on my life this is the end of the world.

«End of the World» Juliet Simms

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Michael's POV

"Andi, give me the bottle."

She shakes her head indignantly in taunting, lifting the drink back to her lips, walking backwards away from me with a manic look in her eye. I huff and roll my eyes, keeping my arms outstretched to her.

"Babe, you need to put it down."

"It's been six weeks," she huffs with a drunken smile. "Doctor said I can have alcohol after six weeks." Her lips curve smugly and eyes wide, she tilts her head back, guzzling the clear liquid.

I groan, reaching to forcibly remove her lips from the bottle.

Six weeks.

I don't know if we were even together for six weeks before all this happened.

What's supposed to be our 'honeymoon phase' where we can't keep our hands off each other or force the smiles off our lips; where everyone groans because we're that adorably sick couple that cuddle and sit on each other's laps and kiss goodbye—we've spent that time dealing with broken families and broken bodies and my broken girl.

Very few smiles between the tears.

The thing is—the tears weren't hers. In fact, this moderately-drunk-Andi is the most expressive I've seen in six weeks. She hasn't shed a single tear. It's the rest of us that sit up every night and cry after she's drifted to sleep.

She hasn't gone home more than three times since we got back. She didn't leave the warehouse for the first week and a half, until school started again and she didn't have much of a choice. Christmas and New Years were grim celebrations, a dead tree once ornately decorated in the corner. We'd tried to get her excited about something, but she spent the time staring blankly.

At the hospital, we thought, or figured, it would get better—that it would be better over a month later. We didn't expect it to be perfect, but it wasn't supposed to be this awful.

I feel like her babysitter more than her boyfriend, and I'll be fine with that for however long it takes...

But it's beginning to feel hopeless.

We wake her up every morning, make sure she showers and changes into clean clothes that we take turns bringing home to wash every week, then we get to school, at least one of us walking her to her classes, make her eat something at lunch, go with her to work at the diner, sit at the counter and do homework while she mindlessly waits tables, get home and lay with her until she falls asleep.

Only then do we sit in a circle on the floor and take turns sobbing—usually depending on who had her most that day.

We've given up on trying to make her do homework, realizing it was useless and we had too much else to deal with.

We take turns filling out her worksheets, writing out math problems, helping each other for essays. Tests she's on her own. She's passing most classes.

She yells at us to stop babying her every once in a while. We ignore her and it goes on.

But now, it's been six weeks and her body can handle some alcohol.