Inside, the crimson room blooms with light. The walls that used to be a sunny shade of yellow now shine with freshly splattered blood, leaking into each crack. All I can do is stand there looking at nothing but the heap of a body that used to be my best friend, her blonde hair turning redder with every passing moment. Her frail body crumpled in unnatural ways, limbs in every direction. The life in her eyes gone, blank, and empty. Her mouth will no longer rise in her usual smirk, and those dimples that she always complained about will never puncture her cheeks again. It is over. Here I stand, staring. Dumbfounded yet alive. I fall into my own pile of arms and legs and let the salty tears wash over me.
That is how they find me. A helpless girl clutching onto her best friend, looking pathetic. Bodies scrounge all around me. The police, the ambulance people, and her parents. The look of her parents is the worst though. The sadness that hits them like a tide hitting a rock when they see their only daughter lying there on the floor, blood crusted on her face. I see the accusation in their eyes as they find mine. It was my fault. They think it, I think it, and the police probably think it too.
“It was you!” Her mother begins to scream, “You’re the one that always gave here these stupid ideas. ‘Let’s get drunk, let’s get high, let’s cut ourselves.’ And now this? How dare you! You murdered my baby girl when it should have been you!”
As her screams turn into hysterical cries, the police gather me up from the floor and away from the angry wrath of Nolla’s parents. But the words continue to sink in, never leaving me. Allowing for a huge lump in my throat to settle.
I know that some of our ideas were not always the greatest. But she always went along with them, even came up with some of her own. But how did her mother know about all those things? We both keep a very secret journal log of things we do and how we like them, if we are going to continue, or if it was stupid and should not be repeated. But knowing Mrs. Ruggard she probably read the entire thing.
First thing we ever did was drink, but that’s harmless. Everyone drinks. Next we did all sorts of drugs but that gets boring after a while. Then we started starving ourselves, trying new ways to convince our parents nothing was wrong. That was one of my more accomplished ideas and an ongoing one. Next was the cutting. But that was all Nolla’s idea. One day, she came to my house with two switch blades and a pair of dark crimson towels. We sat on my bed and she showed me how to do it most effectively.
I watched her most attentively and once the blood pooled over the small slit, I took my own knife and in a swift motion, the blood flowed over my own wrist. I let the pain course through my veins until it left through my wrist. What a wonderful feeling I had thought and wrote so in my journal. That was a new thing that I would continue.
Then it was my turn. It was sort of a rule later on that we would take turns coming up with new things to fill our time. It was then that I brought forth the idea of suicide. She dismissed the idea right away, and I let her. I do not believe in pressuring people to do things that they do not want to do. I was going to get rid of the idea right away too, but for whatever reason the idea kept festering in my head, coming at the oddest times. Before then I never thought of myself as suicidal. But slowly, the quiet reality began creeping in that maybe I was.
I don’t really know what happened before what I like to call “the incident”, but I do remember the day Nolla came to me crying. She was upset, some boy she had gone out with that night had called her psycho and crazy. She went ballistic. There was absolutely nothing that she hated more than being called crazy. Nobody understood the kind of bond we managed to achieve through our ideas. Not a single human being on this planet would ever understand our need to hurt.
“I’m going to do it, Sage,” she had said.
“Do what?” I asked.
“Suicide.”
And that was it. In that one split moment she had decided she was ready, and there was no turning back. We did our research. It wasn’t a spur of the moment kind of a thing. It was planned, thought out, so that the execution would go perfectly and smoothly. We watched video’s and looked up ideas. It was exciting and fun, planning your own death.
Nolla decided that she was going to shoot herself with her dad’s gun. “No use trying to not finish the deed,” she had said. Most girls chose pills, and other things so that people could find them and try to help. She didn’t want that, and neither did I. Poison by carbon monoxide was my choice, Quick, easy, and effective.
The plan was set for the following week. We would both do it on our homes first thing in the morning. We would not go to school that day, and since our parents would both be at work, we would not have any interruptions. Nolla would be in her room that smelled of lilies and daisies, the gun held up to her mouth as she would stand before the full length mirror. And I would be turning on the car’s engine in our enclosed garage waiting for the invisible poison to enter my body, killing every cell. I am sure it will feel wonderful, I had thought. The feeling of my heart beginning to slow as it stopped working. My eye lids drooping gently as I go into my final slumber. Magnificent.
Fast forward a week and it is finally the morning of our final day. My parents have left our house and it is so quiet it almost echoes. It is time.
I text Nolla saying my final good bye and head downstairs to my garage. The butterflies in my stomach begin to do a dance, but I do not know why I am nervous. It is almost the end for me, something I have been thinking about for a while now.
I open up the door leading to our garage and stop dead in my tracks. In front of me is a big space of nothing, no car in sight. Quickly I text my mom. In a matter of seconds I find out it is being repaired. Today, of all days! But as a firm believer in “if it was meant to be, it shall be”, this was definitely not meant to be.
And if it was not meant to be for me, then why should Nolla have to go through this when it was my idea in the first place? She doesn’t, and so I called her. The phone rang and it rang but she did not pick up. “No, no, no.” I continued to mutter to myself as I had begun to run to her house. I was almost there when I heard it. Bang!
That is how I ended up where I am now. Tears streaming down my face, alive. Staring down at my best friend being lowered into the ground. Her mother’s eyes catch mine as I remember our earlier conversation. A lot of anger and hate went behind her words as she kept on telling me that I was a killer and that she would rather be at my funeral right now then her poor baby’s. But we all have a choice. I made mine and Nolla made hers. Yes I feel awful, this was not how it was supposed to be, but maybe that’s how it was meant to be.
But how could anybody be that cruel as to make me watch my best friend die and then be lowered into her final resting place? Maybe I have been given a second chance at life, though without Nolla at my side I am nothing. I do not care if it was not meant to be, I shall take my own fate into my own hands once again and end it for good this time.
After the funeral everybody goes back to the Ruggard’s house. The place is full of mourning and sadness. The room that was red the last I saw it now shines its usual bright and sunny shade of yellow reminding me of the sun. It is too cheerful for the emotions that fuel me at the moment. They need to end, as do I.
I go into the basement in search of the gun that ended Nolla’s very own life. The one that I am going to aim at my head wishing for the blood to splatter over the walls much like they did only a week ago. I want to join my friend in heaven so there too we can explore. As I look into the cabinet which should hold the gun I see nothing. It is empty. This time I get it, it is not meant for me to die at seventeen
I turn around and there she stands. Mrs. Ruggard with a shaking hand pointing the barrel at my forehead. Lines of salty wetness sliding down her cheeks
“Please, don’t,” I whisper.
“I’m sorry.” She says. She moves her finger over the trigger and pulls her finger in.
I guess it was meant to be.
