#KILLME2

Chapter 8

#KILLME2

By: theinkslingerr

Chapter 8

Everyone grows up thinking they're special, and our parents are mostly to blame. But eventually, you start to realize you're just like everyone else, and there are people more beautiful and talented than you could ever hope to be. You struggle to find things that make you unique; set you apart from the crowd.

I think that's why I started making clothes. And I think that's why Maya embraced her identity as Turkish Selena Gomez.

But Liam?

He never outgrew that mindset. He'd never had that rude awakening. He was insanely good-looking, smart, athletic, had a knack for languages, an eye for photography, and stole but never got caught. He legit thought he was special. Maybe if he'd grown up somewhere other than Brookside, like LA or New York, the mediocrity epiphany would've hit. But Liam had lived in a small pond, so he got to be a big fish. That was mainly why I'd teased him about looking like the diversity pick on a liberal arts college brochure, and looking like he had nothing but a closetful of Sperrys.

Because half of me agreed with him and thought he was special, but the other half wanted to keep him grounded.

Liam spent a lot of time studying and critiquing photography. He disliked the usual subjects of pretty people, places, and pets. He liked taking pictures of ugly things instead. Dilapidated buildings, rotten fruit swarming with bugs, pitbulls that had been in dog fighting rings. He had a fascination with things that weren't pleasant to look at— the opposite of his face in the mirror. But he rarely posted those pics on Instagram. Instagram was for his easy-to-digest stuff. The grotesque pictures he was so passionate about were hanging in his room and featured on a couple of online galleries.

So many things had come out about him this past week, but I was confident in my knowledge of one detail. For all his smack talk about "basic photographers and their basic photography," he secretly liked taking pics of the most basic thing of all: sunrises.

His camera roll was full of them, and so were dozens of memory cards. Most were against back drops of abandoned buildings, rotting trees, and desolate waste lands, but they were there.

Whenever I called him out on his hypocrisy and made fun of him for shooting what every thirty-year-old woman included in her online dating profile, he got annoyed. Insecure, for a change.

So maybe that's why after ripping all my memories off the ceiling, I decided not to take any sleeping pills. I lay in bed for three days and never hit non-REM, because I wanted to see the thing that sometimes made Liam realize he was like everyone else. I wanted to bask in the beautiful but very generic experience that forced him to admit he could be brought to his knees by every day things.

On Wednesday, the sun rose at 7:21 AM.

I stayed up to watch it, and wondered how many he'd seen with Maya. The whole day it felt like there was an anvil on my chest, and it hurt to breathe, much less get out of bed.

    The day before, my mom had freaked when she'd come back from work to find me sobbing in bed, covered in ripped pictures and paint chips. She begged me to tell her what was wrong, but I didn't know where to start so I said nothing at all.