GONER

23 • Hide and Seek

A/N: So, Tyler is supposed to be irrational and anxious, so his thoughts are scrambled.

This chapter is long, by the way :-))

ARE MY EYES BROKEN OR IS THIS AT 5K. SERIOUSLY SOMEONE JUST TELL ME IF WATTPAD SCREWED UP OR NOT.

Keep in mind that I don't play ukelele, I play trumpet :-))

(go brass)
***

And, then, Josh disappeared for ten days.

He wasn't at school, didn't answer any of my messages or phone calls, and literally no one had seen him. There was always the prospect of him just being at home, or in the hospital, or something else. Or maybe he was just ignoring me, and that seemed the most likely. Either way, my heart flared with disappointment every time I walked outside and didn't see his car, and when I checked my phone and his name wasn't on the screen, and when I sat down in first period and waited, in vain, for him to appear. It was all very secretive and strange, and I wanted to cry at the possibility of him leaving and not bothering to come back. I knew it wasn't impossible, but it was irrational and dumb of me to think that, and so I woke up everyday to the thought of him laying next to me, knowing he wasn't going to be there.

I shook my hair out, water droplets falling against the wall. It was the fourth day, and I was struggling, in the most blatant and obvious way. I didn't know where he was or where I was, and I felt like I was dead while I moved through my house, climbing back down the stairs.

It was a Friday, which kind of sucked, because I had nothing to do. I didn't even go to the football game yesterday, because it didn't make sense to go if you had no one to go with. Mercury and James were the closest people I had here besides Josh, and we didn't know enough about each other to talk for a long amount of time. Which is what I needed. I hated being alone when I was like this, and I didn't want to get bad again. And I hated that Josh falling off the face of the earth could determine that. He shouldn't be able to.

It was like having an oxygen tank, and knowing that if it failed, so did you. Josh was my oxygen tank, and now he was gone, and I only had a while left without it. Which was sad and no where near what I wanted. This was not what I signed up for when I met him, and I wonder if he knew that.

My hair was still wet when I sat down at the kitchen table, not enough energy left in me to worry about my mom who sat across from me, and I held my water bottle in my hand. It was cold, like Josh's fingertips. I missed him.

"What's wrong with you?" She asked, and I rolled my eyes. Wanting to look like I had something to do, I kept my eyes ahead of me, too tired to move them, while I unscrewed my water bottle with trembling hands. I knew I was shaking like a leaf in a hurricane, but I couldn't even stop it, and I decided to just let it happen. "You can't just not talk to me," she laughed, and this is why I never came downstairs early. "It's rude. I'm your mom."

I felt like the strength to turn my head had completely evaded me, and it took effort to breathe. Josh reminded me to take in air and to think and to be, and I had no reason to worry about any of that now.

~~~

The fifth, six, and seventh days were as painful and awkward as the one before. I did nothing all weekend, and no one sat next to me in class, seeing as establishing relationships with other people rarely went well with me, and so I sat and doodled the entire time. In time, I drew a stick figure, like the one he drew forever ago, around the time when I first got here, and angry tears welled up in my eyes at the thought of him. He wasn't allowed to just leave. But the worst part, was that he was. He could totally do whatever he wanted, and I would never object, because it wasn't my job, and, knowing Josh, he probably had everywhere and everyone in the world to be concerned with, and he probably wasn't thinking about me. Especially not the way I was thinking about him.