Dead to me

C H A P T E R O NE

I was getting really tired of this.
The only thing keeping me from collapsing was the hard industrial counter, my elbow aching against the hard glass. I'd been standing here, chewing on my thumbnail for thirty minutes, according to antique clock across the store, and casey still hadn't showed. Her shift started almost an hour ago. She did this every sunday morning, the same excuses every time.
"I wonder what it will be this time", Alfie said, reading my mind. He'd been leaning against one of the hundred rickety bookshelfs Quarter Price Books houses, flipping through a dusty 1970s comic book that hasn't seen the light of day in decades. "Last week she said she had to babysit her granny's cat. So i'm thinking this week one of the cats got the cholera, and she had no choice but to fly them out to the nearest animal emergency care centre."
I cracked a smile when he said that, he always knew how to cheer me up." well, she has more fun on saturday night than either of us does. Maybe she knows better than we do." Alfies the one smiled then, but in an unpleasant sneering kind of way. "Come on Cora. You need to stop romanticizing everything. That girl will be pregnant before she graduates high school. I bet you twenty bucks she will be." Then the ancient brass bell over the door clanged, and casey walked in. Tears were streaming down her face. For a second, I thought she must have heard alfies snide remark, but no, the walls were thick and she had only just gotten in. I never found out why she was crying.
The dream of a memory wakes me up, Knocking me rail straight. My eyes burst open, where am i? I twist on the floor, my heart beating overtime. Then slowly, The memories flood back. I ran away. I'm with friends. My heart slows, and now there are only two things I am aware of. The first is that a horrible beeping noise emanating from my alarm is what must have woken me up. Usually when i set it this early I don't have time to dream. The second, is that the alarm reads 5:30 am, march first. There are 26 days until my birthday. When i turn 18, i won't be a runaway anymore. I'll be a legal adult. I painfully rub the sleep from my eyes and let out a belly aching yawn, cut in half by the searing pain down my throat. Damnit. I reach for another cigarette, even though I know that it will wreak even more havoc on my raw esophagus. I reach into the pack lying on the floor next to me. just one left. I light it, and take a long drag, watching the beautiful cloud erupt from my lips.
For some reason, I seem to have fallen asleep a few feet to the left of my bed, rather than on top of it. The bruises that i am beginning to feel from my knees to my face indicate that I did not realize this, as i dove for it last night. Damnit, I didn't want to get wasted again. Jamie always talks me into drinking more than I should.
As if she can hear my thoughts, the comforter on the bed begins to rustle, and out pops jamie. Huge dark circles under her eyes, her nose is bleeding a little and there are more than a few cigarette buts tangled into her long blonde hair, the ends of which she insisted on dying pink a few months ago. The color has faded by now, and she looks like something out of a clip that schools show kids to warn them how bad drinking is. Still, her smile is electrifying.
"Damn last night was crazy." she giggles. "Now turn that alarm off and let me sleep in you wild fucker." I groan and rise to my knees. "Dammit jamie, why am i on the floor?" "babe, thats a long story. It involves the fact that you passed out before me, and this bed really doesn't work for more than one person. Anyways, just turn that damn alarm off. I need my beauty sleep."
she laughs again, fully aware that she looks like a disaster, and disappears back into my soft, pillowy blankets.
I roll to the balls of my feet, my spine cracking up and down. I loose my balance for a moment and stumble; i'm still more than half asleep. My skull pounds, it seems to bounce with every step. I never get enough sleep anymore. I step carefully, so as not to bounce my brain, and make my way across the dark room to our only window.
The view is unimpressive to the average observer, a hundred feet above the ground, the apartment window faces a soaring rust colored brick wall. the bricks once contained a classy hotel, but as this side of town got poorer and rougher, the hotel went out of business. Now the building is a home to all the local tweakers and mentally ill who roam the city. In the farthest corner from my window, with some beginners acrobatics and a sharp eye, you can see the rising sun. I press my face up against the icy glass of the window pane and twist my neck while simultaneously straining my eyes as far to the right as they can go without rolling out of their sockets. my breath melts a thin layer of frost, as the first light of the day peeps through a hole in the clouds.
The world is finally beginning to shift from a soft grey to a more peachy color. In the distance, hundreds of millions of miles away, the sun is rising. A brilliant ball of flame that has seen everything, been everywhere, a star that will one day swell, until the earth is engulfed in its apocalyptic energy. This is how i get by. Looking into the eyes of something so beautiful, but ultimately, the thing that will destroy planet earth, is how i choose to start every day. Yes, that's a little dramatic i know. My friends either laugh or groan or roll their eyes when they see me, standing tiptoe, stretched out to my maximum five eight, staring as hard as i possibly can into the orange glow. but i've been doing it for nearly four years, so why stop now.
Some people have adderall or coffee. I crack open a lukewarm mt dew and stare down the future apocalypse.
After the sun has risen, and the glory of endless potential has faded into nothing more than empty promises and a headache, I begin to go through the motions of what has become a regular day in this new life of dark circles and cigarettes. I go to the tiny bathroom, and turn the tap on the cracked plastic faucet to cold. I would turn it to warm, but the warm water hasn't worked since Jamie bought the place.
I've been living with Jamie since i ran away, two months ago. She graduated last year, and parents are letting her take this year as a gap year, as long as she leave them alone and doesn't ask for too much money.
I splash the cold water on my face, but i still feel filthy. Goosebumps run down my spine as the freezing streams trickle down my throat and collarbone. I wonder what Alfie would think, if he saw me now. I throw on tee shirt from the floor,it advertises a gas station i've never been to. Over that i strap on a pair of overalls i found at a half price store down the street. I run a comb through my brown hair, attempting to shape my bangs, but failing.
Alfie had been with me the day I cut my hair. I picked up the scissors, and he was there watching me. He was leaning up against the counter, his breath was fogging the mirror. He watched as the scissors sliced through the strands of my hair, and his eyes dropped with them as they floated to the ground. When I finished, I turned to him, my eyebrows raised.
"What do you think?" I asked, not really caring one way or another. Alfie studied my face for a moment.
"Beautiful. You always look beautiful."
As I stare at my reflection now, my pale skin and bruises, the way my eyes are beginning to puff up with sleep deprivation, I am anything but beautiful.
For a moment I am so angry. Angry enough to slam my fist into this thin wall, angry enough to scream profanities until my lungs burst and my voice cracks. Instead, I take out my lighter and bring a marlboro red to my lips.
What would Alfie think? Alfie would be disgusted. But if Alfie didn't want this, if Alfie had cared, I wouldn't be here. It's Sunday morning. We would be at quarter price books, joking about why Casey hadn't shown yet. If Alfie had cared about me, or how I felt, he wouldn't have done what he did. If Alfie had truly loved me, he wouldn't be dead.
The hand that isn't holding the cigarette slides over my eyes, as if it can prevent the tears from coming, and suddenly I am too weak to stand. I sink to my knees, then to the floor.

C H A P T E R 2

Alfie killed himself a month ago last year. The day it happened, the sun was out, the birds were singing. It was the kind of day that the weatherman calls picnic weather, and the nice old lady down the road calls cheerful. We were parked underneath a roaring four lane bridge. The bridge lead from the city to the suburbs, so the ground beneath it was free of construction, and the trees and graffiti had formed new kind of jungle. A living concrete giant of bark and cement.
It was hard to get there in a car, but we had found a little trail that if you kept to, made getting there almost bearable.
The expression on Alfies face was brooding, he was staring intently at the graffiti, as if he could decode the twisted patterns.
I had known something was wrong with him for a while now, he hadn't smiled since he turned nineteen a few months ago.
Alfie turned the air conditioner up. The icy blast gave me goosebumps.
"I want to leave." He said, breaking the odd silence. his jaw was clenched.
"I can't do this any more. All pop does is drink too much and cry about mom. I've been graduated for almost a year." I nodded and listened, hoping that if I agreed with him, sympathized, he would calm down. But then suddenly he was almost sobbing, there was a hitch in his voice, and his skin had gone white.
I was scared, I had never seen him like this. But I chalked it up to sleep deprivation and stress. Alfie was always so calm, so cool. He could stare down a freight train if he felt like it. It was jarring to see him this way.
"Alfie." I said, talking softly, trying to soothe him. "You graduated high school with honors. You can go to any college you want. Things are going to work out fine, you'll see."
He nodded, took a deep breath. But there was something in his eyes that I had been seeing more and more of. Something cold and blank. His calloused hands were clamped on the steering wheel, leaving imprints on the waxed leather. He had waxed the car just this morning, it looked so shiny when we met at the park. Now the inside still glistened, but the windows were covered with dust from the dirt road, and there was mud on the tires. We didn't normally come down here when his car was clean. I thought it was strange that he was willing to throw his morning's work away, but not enough to say anything when he was clearly already upset enough. That retro mustang convertible was his baby. He hated when it didn't look pristine.
I slam the door of Jamie's car, the sound brings me back to reality. I'm going to get groceries for dinner. Jamie has a job, and I still have quite a bit in college savings, but we both tired quickly of eating out for every meal.
As I walk through the sprawling parking lot, clouds cover the sky and just like that, it's pouring. Shit. On any other day I would love the rain, but I'm starving and Jamie's waiting for me at the apartment and now I'm going to have to haul a week's supply of groceries through the pouring rain.
The vents dry some of the water off of me, but my hair is still soaked. I check the list Jamie wrote. Cucumbers, frozen corn, carrots, and celery. She must be going on a health kick. She has a tendency to go an an extreme diet for about a week, at which point she decides she's skinny enough. Then she binges the whole next week, and the cycle continues.