The Suicide Effect | ✓

forty-nine

I finished the story today.

I take it all back. It would never ever get published - not in a million years - because it's hands down the shittest thing I've ever read.

Becks got it all wrong. All of it.

You see, in the end, after Riley dies, life goes on. Selly gets a scholarship to her first choice university. She gets a boyfriend and she forgets all about Riley.The epilogue, recounting events that occur exactly a year later shows Selly at the grave, the guy by her side and flowers in her hand. He walks away, pretending not to listen as his girlfriend talks to the bones buried six feet under.

And Selly laughs a little, back resting up against the gravestone as though the two of them are together again. She tells the cold, inanimate remains of her once-best friend that things are going okay now and that she forgives Riley for everything. She tells her that she'll always miss her, but that life is now moving things on and that she's coping, that she's been taped back together and living without Riley isn't quite so painful anymore.

If you honestly thought I'd be like that, then fuck you, Becks.

I am anything but okay. I will always miss Becks - at least she got that bit right - but it will never stop hurting. Never.

I guess she didn't understand that.

My chest is burning up. I'm trying to hold back tears but I'm a tsunami; I'm a tropical storm of destructive force.

Something inside me snaps and I explode, waterfalls racing from my eyes, hurricanes caught around my arms. I grab the nearest thing to me and throw it against the floor, smashing the little glass window that is my last piece of sanity.

The broken shards slash into the picture.

It's the picture of me and Becks.

I suddenly relent, collapsing to the floor, shoulders heaving and mouth dry. I'm crying, but it's silent now because silence is the point where it hurts far more than you can ever tell the world.

And very last sentence in the notebook catches my eye, the words spinning around my head like they're stuck in a broken tumble drier.

And Selly walked away from the grave with a peaceful smile and a content heart - a content heart that carried Riley's fading memory; a content heart that in a year's time would not have room to do anything but forget about the girl who lay dead beneath the ground.

After all, what could be better than forgetting Riley Brook?