"What a wicked game you played to make me feel this way."
Jo Jameson doesn't need help. At least that's what she tells everyone.
Following the disappearance of her best friend, she's made a lot of changes - be it from the hair dye or the...
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"Tongue-tied like we've never known, telling those stories we've already told"
Jo brought down the old baseball trophy hard against the plastic bag until the contents had turned to dust. She opened the bag and emptied the powder on Riley's bedside table. She chopped it into even lines with a butter knife she'd stolen from downstairs as Riley rolled up two dollar bills. He handed one to her before leaning down to roughly inhale his share.
They couldn't have been more grateful for the girl in his class with exaggerated anxiety and a heavy prescription. It was her crush on Riley that led her to give him some and her inexperience that led her to do it for free. Nevertheless, he planned to take her on a date the following weekend in return.
When he pulled back and sniffed to clear his nose, Jo finished off the rest. She wiped up the residue with her finger and rubbed it across her bottom gums. The taste left in her mouth was both terrible and incredible.
Jo sat down on the floor with her back against the side of his bed as she felt shortness in her breath. Riley followed suit.
He rolled his head to the side, looking at her. His pupils were slowly becoming larger as he whispered, "I still hear her scream in the back of my head."
"Well, get over it." She said as if her dreams weren't filled with a gun being shot. Some nights she watched Ian do it and in others, her finger was the one pulling the trigger. Each time she woke up with a cold sweat and a twisted stomach that she never talked about.
It's over with, she'd tell herself. He doesn't get to haunt me anymore.
But it wasn't that simple.
Riley's face went pale. "I can't stop wondering what the hell was going through his head at that moment."
"A bullet."
"Yeah, I fucking know that. But was he scared? Was he even sorry?"
Jo thought about redirecting the comment back to herself. She was scared and her friends were, too. Whatever he was feeling didn't justify all that he had done to them. Why mourn someone who had been terrible to her, she wanted to ask but couldn't when she looked at him. Jo understood the truth came too quickly for him to swallow. The Ian he used to know was long gone. Riley had lost a friend and however terrible that friend was still couldn't change the grief.
It was a troubling thing to love and hate someone at the same time. Instead, she said, "I think he couldn't handle the bad stuff he had to live with."
"The bad stuff always catches up to you, no matter how far you run."
She laid her head on his shoulder. "Probably thought he was untouchable."
"He wasn't always that way." He sighed, "I just don't understand how he could've changed so much."
