She wouldn't think of him talking about the black beast cornering him inside his own head, how he felt the beast was conspiring to push him out of himself entirely. She wouldn't think of her heart beating ferociously in these moments as if it belonged to a much larger animal, as if it could pretend that it did, as she wrapped all her limbs around him just to pin him down to the love he still had on the ground.
Cassie didn't think of him in her room, it was imperative that she didn't. She didn't think of him in her room but her pillow sheets did, even after several, violent washes; her sheets remembered him well; almost as if to spite her.
Cassie slept on the floor while her sheets fumed clouds of vanilla-scented fabric softener and musk.
It was 2 am when Lin called Cassie asking her if she could drive up to her college dorm. Cassie was in the throes of the first deep sleep she had gotten in months, but without a second's beat she said, "Yes, of course, I'll be there."
She found Lin sitting cross-legged in the parking lot in front of her dorm. Lin was covered from head to toe in layers of monochromatic gray, but at least her hair was again in those high pigtails, lopsided and un-streaked, but Cassie still took it as a good sign.
Lin lifted her hand in a small salute, and Cassie mirrored her. They didn't embrace and they didn't have to. They both thawed upon simply seeing each other.
They drove in silence. Lin had given Cassie the location to what she called "the best spot in this crowded purgatory" and when they got there, Cassie understood why.
They stopped at a quiet hill that overlooked the town's landscape, now comfortably darkened by the late night, with just a few lights that still flickered on here and there.
They laid on top of the front hood of the car, still blanketed by silence. Lin's sandals rhythmically tapped Cassie's Vans as she shook her feet back and forth like an anxious pendulum.
A long time trickled by before Lin finally interrupted it. "Thank you." She said.
"Don't mention it." Cassie replied.
"You don't even know what I'm thanking you for!" Lin said in the highest, most animated pitch Cassie had heard her use in years.
Under different circumstances, Cassie might've smiled. "I think I might know why."
"Still," Lin began, dropping down an octave or two. "I think I want to say it."
Cassie closed her eyes and waited.
"Being around you has been like being around him, in a way. And I really needed that, because all the time that I had counted on having with him was cut off." Lin's voice shook but she pushed through. "I could never tell you this back then, because I worried that you might misunderstand, but I thought I would spend the rest of my life with him."
I would have misunderstood, Cassie thought, I misunderstood so much back then.
Instead, she said, "I know." Her own voice was shaking now.
"You know...he didn't once tell me what he was going through. And since he passed all I've been asking myself is 'why?' and believe me I came up with a lot of reasons why. Like, maybe I was too bubbly. Too smiley. Too preoccupied. Too...too fucking bright, all the damn time; and for what? Why was I-"
"Lin," Cassie grasped Lin's wrist, and the other girl broke down, almost instantaneously. "It's not your fault. It's not on you, what happened. It's not on anyone, despite how awful it is, there's unfortunately no one to blame for it."
Their fingers intertwined with no conscious effort, and they curled up again into the silence that has become so safe and familiar to them.
"You know, I was always a little bit jealous of you, Cass." Lin said, moments later, through quieter sobs.
