We Were Born To Die

Crash

“I think I’m in love with her.”

Alice’s head turned away from the box in front of her, looking at the boy behind her. Despite the years she spent telling herself that Tate would never love her the way she loved him, she never would have been prepared to hear him say he loved someone else. It felt like her heart had been ripped out, her chest had collapsed inwards. She was almost certain that if she were alive, she wouldn’t be able to breathe. Tate, on the other hand, looked happier than she had seen him in a long time. It looked like he had a reason to be happy again, as upsetting as that thought was.

In a way, she was glad Tate had told her he had fallen in love with Violet. It still meant he thought of Alice as his best friend, but that didn’t make the pain hurt any less. In a different way, she wished she had heard it from someone else. She didn’t care who, whether it had been Nora, Moira, even Chad, as long as it hadn’t have been Tate. Then she would have been able to pass it off as a rumor, not needing to truly believe it for a moment. But she had always known, hadn’t she? From the moment Tate started talking to Violet, she had known this day would come, just simply seeing the way he looked at her. He had had girlfriends before and never looked at them that way, nor did he ever look at Alice that way.

She forced herself to try and think rationally, as difficult as it was and turned back to the box in front of her. Her head was spinning. Her entire body felt like it hurt, even though she knew it was just her mind. She wouldn’t let herself cry, at least not now. Tate didn’t know he had done anything wrong. He didn’t need to know either. She tore her mind away from her thoughts. Despite how bad it hurt, Alice knew she just wanted him to be happy. If Violet made him as happy as he said she did, she would have to be happy for them. Something inside of her, her gut feeling, knew this couldn’t end well at all though. Violet was alive, Tate wasn’t.

She shook the negative thoughts from her mind, smiling as she hid the sadness like she had so often done before. “I’m happy for you.” She said softly, taking in a breath as she tried to calm herself down enough for her liking. She pulled out a box, finding the game she had been looking for and turned back to Tate, a smile still painted on her face.

Alice was standing at the foot of the basement stairs, looking around nervously. It had been a month since the Ramos' were chased out of the house and she knew that Violet and Tate had broken up for good. It wasn’t hard to hear about news when they were all trapped in the same house. She frowned, remembering the look on Tate’s face when he had confessed to being in love with the girl. If she knew her friend as well as she thought she did, he was down here somewhere, hiding away from the world in his sorrow.

She made her way through one of the doorways, calling out the boy’s name quietly from time to time. It wasn’t long before she found him sitting on the floor with his back against the wall. Her heart hurt immediately at the sight of the boy. She spoke his name quietly, tugging her sleeves over her hands and holding the fabric in her palms as he raised his head to look up at her. The look in his eyes told the girl that he was handling it just as bad as she had thought.

"I fucked up, Alice. I fucked up and lost the only good thing I had." His voice was hoarse and he looked down as he spoke, his fingers lacing together and untangling repeatedly. Alice sat down beside him, tucking her feet underneath before smoothing out the white fabric of her skirt. His words stung, but she pushed the feeling away like she had managed to perfect since Violet moved into the house.

"If she loved you as much as she claimed to have, she would have been able to forgive your mistakes…" The weak response was all the girl could manage, gently putting her hand on Tate’s arm. He was silent for a minute and Alice couldn’t imagine what he was thinking. She knew that he blamed himself for everything that had happened recently in the house, but she didn’t. That was where her love for Tate was different from Violet’s love for him. She forgave his mistakes where Violet seemed to just bring them up again and hurt the boy further. Hadn’t she known from the start that the other girl would only hurt her friend?

"You should hate me like she does, Alice." Tate was looking up again, his sad eyes staring at her intently. "I’m a psychopath. I didn’t deserve her and I don’t deserve your friendship."

"You should know better than to even think I could hate you." She said quietly with a sigh, biting her lower lip. "I’m not going to leave you, Tate. No matter what you think, you will always have one friend in this house."

Alice leaned over, wrapping her arms around the boy’s neck, hoping perhaps that the small contact would ease some of his fears. It always baffled her that he seemed to think he was alone all the time. He may not have a lot of people, but she knew for a fact that Nora was there for him, as well as her. She would always fight so that Tate wouldn’t be alone, even if that meant arguing with him like she had probably a year ago. She felt Tate’s arms go around her in response and closed her eyes. She would give anything to have the guts to tell how she really felt.

"Fuck, what am I going to do? I fucked everything up." His voice softened as they separated and he looked at the girl. The blonde had never seen her friend look this upset and broken up over something before and she realized just how much Violet Harmon meant to him.

"Give it time, love, I’m sure she will come around." Although she hated Violet at that moment for what the girl had done to her friend, Alice knew that if she happened to find Violet, she would at least attempt to talk to the teenager to give Tate another chance. It would ruin any sort of hope she had of possibly being more than friends with Tate, but she really didn’t have much of a chance anyways. She would always be his best friend, there when no one else was, but nothing more. Violet had made Tate happy, and Tate deserved that happiness. If talking to the girl brought that happiness back, then she had to at least try and help. She could deal with her own pain another time, when she wasn’t trying to help others. Perhaps one day she could even get over him.