After You

Finn

Alfie,

I don't know what to say.

I've been trying to write this letter for hours. There isn't much else here to do, other than count the missing ceiling tiles, and I've done that five times. There are sixteen tiles missing, by the way.

Another letter from a hospital waiting room. That sounds like I'm not taking this seriously. I am, I just don't know what to say. I don't even know what to think any more. I can't cope. I want to get out, but waiting here feels like the least any of us can do now. We've done something terrible.

When Jess messaged us last night, we assumed Jacob would go to her. Jacob assumed one of us would go, because he was freaking out over the stuff from the inquest. When Willow text Max to invite him to a picnic, he took it to mean that she was with Jess, so he didn't go either.

For fuck's sake, why didn't one of us go to her?

Jacob called me at two o'clock this morning. He said he could see ambulances outside, and asked if we knew anything about it. When I told him we didn't go to see Jess because we thought he would, he just muttered "shit", and put the phone down. I tried calling him back a few times, but it kept going to answerphone. Willow wanted to get up and go down to his house, but I told her it was probably for a different house, and that if Jess was really in trouble, she would have tried calling us.

Then again, you never tried calling us, so I should have known that's no indicator of anything.

I didn't want to get in the way. I wanted to sleep and wake up and be told that everything was okay.

Willow's mum woke us up at eight, and said that Jess' mum was on the phone. Willow looked terrified, so I took the call. Her mum was beside herself, I've never heard anyone so terrified in all my life.

Jess tried to kill herself last night.

Why didn't we go to her? We were so wrapped up in each other, so selfishly wrapped up in what we were doing, and we let Jess down when she needed us most. Thanks to us, she's in a coma. They don't even know if she's going to live, or if she'll be the same if she does wake up. They had to resuscitate her and everything.

How did we let it get to this point? We didn't just let Jess down last night; we've been letting her down for months. We all knew she was struggling and we did nothing. There's no excuse. I've made way too many excuses for the way I've behaved since you died, and enough is enough. I can't excuse this. None of us can.

When you died, I thought we'd gone through the hardest thing we'd ever go through. Right now, I'm sitting in the intensive care waiting room, and I take it back. This is the hardest thing. Finding out you'd died was like tearing off a plaster all in one go. It hurt more than I could imagine, but once the shock wore off, that was it. It was done, and all we could do was try to live without you.

Jess is clinging on by a thread, and so are we. This plaster is being torn away so slowly, and we're in some kind of limbo, waiting to find out if she'll live or die, and it's all our fault. We could have done something, and we didn't. We're responsible.

Finn