My Best Friends Brother

Chapter 174

I’m grateful when we pull up outside Brie’s and I can escape this horrific fucking noise that he calls music.

“Do you want me to come in and try with you man or...” He gets distracted, staring at the front door and noticing the person with their back to us knocking on the glass. “Damn, who's the blonde?”

I try my hardest not to roll my fucking eyes at him, I guess even with someone in his heart there is a very different organ of his that will never fucking change.

Slapping the back of his head first, he shouts something after me as I walk down the path, flipping him off as he drives away and approaching the person still standing with her back to me on the deck.

“Hope?” Jesus fucking Christ Milo, she’s deaf you idiot, she can’t fucking hear you.

I try my best not to sneak up on her but it’s kind of fucking impossible when she’s this distracted trying to see what’s happening inside the house. I tap her on the shoulder and she almost jumps straight out of her skin, before smiling widely as she turns to face me, those cute little cheeks of his turning the sweetest shade of red when she realises I’m standing so close to her.

This crush of hers has been going on for years but it still makes me smile whenever I see her like this. I feel like I’ve known her forever, I could never see her that way but it’s nice to know that she’s probably still doodling ‘Mrs Milo Thompson’ in her notebooks.

“Milo, you scared the crap out of me.” She manages to stutter out, her eyes quickly trailing down over my body before they come back to meet my lips.

Sometimes I think she’s just a moment away from kissing me... Then I remember that she’s reading my fucking lips and I feel like an absolute dickhead all over again.

“Sorry,” I chuckle, glancing in through the windows and finding the place looking eerily empty. “How long have you been standing here?”

She looks freezing, Hope has always worn a bit more clothing than May does but standing here in her little shorts and fucking crop top when it’s practically fucking Christmas makes her just as bloody crazy.

“Not long, I’ve knocked a bunch of times but she isn’t answering.” Hope smiles as I unzip my hoodie and wrap it around her arms, I can’t stand to see her shaking like this. She signs me a thank you before returning her attention to the front door. “I know she’s in there, she hasn't been answering my texts but she called earlier. The moment I answered she hung up, I tried calling her back like ten times but she wouldn’t pick up again so I walked over. Do you know when Brie will be home? I thought nobody was leaving her alone?”

Brie and Steve both had to work today, May can’t constantly have one of us babysitting her when she isn't even leaving her fucking room anyway. Brie told her that after Christmas they have to get a tutor in to help her with her home schooling because she's even refusing to do that right now.

Reaching over, I twist the door handle and it immediately springs open, Hope looks at it in disbelief but I only laugh.

“Brie always leaves it unlocked... because... Well in all honesty, who would be stupid enough to steal from Brianna Parker?” Hope laughs as we walk into the house, but the minute we step inside something feels really fucking off. There’s something in the pit of my stomach that’s telling me everything isn’t fucking right here.

“May?” Hope shouts up the stairs then looks to me to see if I hear her answer but I shake my head, it isn't usually this quiet. Even though May has been locked in her room, she’s had the music blaring out of there day and night, probably trying to drown out the evil voices in her head.

Something’s not right. I fucking know it.

“May!” I shout, taking the stairs two at a time with Hope chasing up them behind me. When I step onto the landing I look down the corridor to the right at the end door. It’s an eerily familiar sight, her room in the exact same position in this house as her one at the Manor. The same door that I’m terrified to open, like Heather is going to be convulsing on the floor again when I do.

It’s too quiet. May is never this quiet.

Hope pushes past me and I realise I’ve just been standing at the top of the stairs, she was all smiles outside but it's almost like she can feel the thickness in the air too as she races down the hall and starts smashing her flat palm onto the grain of the wood.

“Thelma, it’s Louise, open the door.” I remember Lee showing them both that movie for the first time, the two of them sitting on the couch with their fingers interlocked and looking at each other the moment the car went off the cliff. It pretty much sums up their relationship, two people who’d live and die for each other.

Hope looks to me to see if I’ve heard anything but there's not a fucking peep coming from the other side of that door, I quickly open the bathrooms to make sure she’s not in there before walking straight back to her door and trying to open it.

“May, unlock the door. We won’t come in if you don’t want us to but can you just tell me that you’re okay please?!” Hope shoves me back by my shoulder, I realise now she couldn’t read my lips and she starts signing so fast that I can barely keep up with it. I’ve never been as good as May is when it comes to sign language.

‘Kick the fucking door in.’

She’s panicking, if there’s one thing I’ve learned being around Brie and Lee, it’s that you never doubt a fucking soul sister when she says there’s something wrong with her best friend.

Hope steps away as I shove my foot against the door, surprised at how quickly it just swings open, revealing May peacefully asleep in her bed.

Thank god.

Wait... How the fuck did she sleep through that?

Jesus Christ, look at the fucking state on her....

I’ve seen May not at her best; I’ve seen her after basketball practise dripping with sweat and her hair matted to her skin, I’ve seen her crying hysterically in the hospital until she passed out when they told her she'd never be able to play or dance again, I saw her that day laying on Granny’s grave completely fucking lifeless.

But I’ve never seen her look like she does right now.

Her beautiful caramel skin is ghostly pale, her hair looks like she hasn't run a brush through it in weeks and she’s so exhausted she is barely fucking moving... wait.

Is she moving?

Hope gets there quicker than I do, realising something isn’t fucking right and shoving past me to get onto the bed next to May.

“May! May!” Hope starts ripping back the covers and shaking my sister viciously, May doesn’t so much as open her eyes. What the fuck did she do? “Thelma!” I can’t even fucking move, just frozen solid staring at her until I hear something drop from her hand onto the floor.

Suddenly a force greater than me takes over my body and I rush to her bedside unconsciously, only to find an empty pill bottle laying on the floor.

No.

“May!” My heart starts to beat out of my fucking chest as I grab hold of my sister’s face and lean down to see if I can still hear her breathing.

She’s still alive. Fuck, she’s still alive.

“Milo! Ring an ambulance, we have to wake her up!” Hope springs from the bed and I have no fucking idea where she’s going, pulling my phone out of my pocket and dialling 911.

May... Fuck...

“What’s your emergency?”

“Yeah I um... Fuck, I need an ambulance... My sisters taken an overdose! I-I... s-she’s not waking up.” Fuck me, what the fuck did you do May?!

The woman on the other end of the line starts to ask me so many questions that I can hardly fucking answer. I manage to get out some of the details and where Brie lives but become distracted when Hope hooks her arms under May’s body and starts to drag her off the bed.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I throw my phone down on the bed with the woman still talking on the other line about how fucking far this ambulance still is.

I realise Hope didn’t fucking read my lips and is continuing to drag May lifelessly across the floor towards the bathroom.

Grabbing hold of her chin, she suddenly realises that I’m still in the room.

“Shower. Get her in the fucking shower.” I don’t know how the fuck she’s so calm right now, she doesn’t even look scared. Hope has always been that kind of person who is the mellow to May's mania, it’s why they work so well, ying and yang. “I’ve seen someone overdose before, I know what I’m doing.”

When the fuck did she see someone...

I look behind her to the bathroom, she’s already slammed the shower on to make it pour out with freezing cold water, so I scoop up May in my arms and don’t even bother to try and strip either of us of our clothes before forcing us both straight under the stream, collapsing to the ground of the shower as the cold stream smothers our bodies.

“May?” Please... Please wake up.

The tiniest amount of life brings itself back to me as she instinctively starts to turn her head away from the stream that continuously hits her face.

Fuck, she’s awake. She’s in there.

“May! May, wake up!” How many of those fucking things did she take?

Hope starts to dig through the bathroom cabinet, knocking things from the shelves down into the sink and onto the floor before running back out and into the hallway. May’s eyes flutter, opening until I look into the pool that is my own orbs staring back at me from her face.

“M-Milo?” Oh thank fuck... May...

Tears rush down my face as I look down on my baby sister in my arms, relief flooding my body of the fear until I watch her starting to slip back into unconsciousness.

“No, no, no! May! Don’t go back to sleep!” Hope smashes her way back into the room, dropping on her knees at the edge of the shower tray and getting my hoodie soaking wet as she leans over the two of us and shoves something down May's throat, cupping the back of her head to keep her upright.

The green liquid spills out of her mouth and coats her lips. I look at Hope with total confusion but she seems to know what the fuck she’s doing because only seconds later May launches up in my lap and starts to throw up straight onto my shirt.

I don’t give a fuck when I realise everything that’s leaving her... She took so many.

Water continues to hit us all over as May violently convulses and unloads the contents of her stomach all fucking over me, most of the pills still coming up whole telling me that they hadn't had time to completely dissolve themselves into her system yet.

Thank fuck.

“May? May.” But she can’t answer me, everything still pouring out of her.

Hope falls back from the edge of the tray onto the floor when she realises what she was trying to do is working, wrapping her arms around her legs and finally looking like the fifteen year old she should as she bursts into tears and sobs down into her knees.

Thank fuck she was here, she was fucking incredible.

May continues to gag and splutter out liquid until she has nothing left, the both of us coated in everything that once filled her, although it just seems to be pills and fucking water that was in her stomach.

I knew she wasn’t keeping that food in her, she’s skin and fucking bone. Lifeless.

I don’t let her go, even when she begins to sob and tries to pull herself away I still keep my hold on her firm. She needs to know I love her, I fucking love her.

What the fuck was she thinking?

She could have... If I hadn’t come over here when I did, and Hope hadn’t been outside, she would have...

She’d be fucking dead... She’d be dead.

This isn’t supposed to happen. This isn’t our family, look what they've fucking done to her!

“Hope...” I wave my hand in front of her weeping face, getting her attention before pointing to the shower head. She nods, forcing herself up onto feet and pressing the button to stop the flow of water before collapsing back at the side of me and May.

I don’t know where the fuck that ambulance is, apparently they had better things to do than come over here to help a fifteen year old child that tried to take her own fucking life. It’s funny that when they were called for Heather to the nice side of town, they were there in a fucking flash.

“May?” I ask gently. “May, are you okay?” She doesn’t answer me, I’m not even sure that she could if she wanted to. She has nothing, no energy to even lift her head. The room around us seems cold and empty as we both just lay here dripping wet with nothing else to fill the void but her tiny muffled tears.

“I’m s-sorry...” Oh May, it’s not you that needs to be sorry. “...I just d-didn’t want t-to do it a-anymore.”

I know you didn’t. I fucking know you didn’t. It’s too much, the guilt she's been bearing is too fucking much for one person. She needs help, she needs support and fucking someone to talk to that isn't going to judge her.

Mum tried to get her to go to therapy years ago but she really fucking needs to take it now, she can't keep living like this.

She won’t keep living like this. She’ll let herself die first.

Hope looks at the empty bottle on the floor, I must have dropped it when I brought it in.

“It says there w-were thirty in here, h-how many are on y-you?” She sniffles, not looking remotely fazed as she searches through the vomit covering both me and May to see how much is still in her. I thought I knew Hope well, but the reaction she’s having to this... She’s definitely been through more than I realised, it’s almost like this is something she’s seen a hundred times.

May didn’t seem to realise she was even in the room before she heard her voice, slowly lifting her head up from my shoulder but she's too weak to move entirely, it falls back down straight into her own vomit. Hope doesn’t seem to care about the state of both of us, climbing into the shower cubicle and taking May’s hand with her own as they both start to cry looking into each other’s eyes.

There’s no judgement there, it’s just pain.

They are as much siblings as me and May, they have been together for forever. Hope is probably running through her head a world where we didn’t get here in time, a world where she'd have to start walking around without her other half.

That same ridiculous world that keeps running around in my head whenever I think about going to see Josh. Fuck I’ve been so stupid, acting like there's this massive fucking barrier there when it isn't. Living in a world of what could have been instead of what is.

Right now he’s just sitting in his house, probably wondering where the fuck I am and why I haven’t spoken to him yet.

No more fear Milo, fear is just a controlling little prick and you can't let it have a hold on you anymore... You have to be stronger. Stronger than the fear. Letting the fear of losing someone prevent you from enjoying having then is no way to live, you need him.

We all sit at the bottom of the shower, freezing under the ice cold water until May's shaking becomes too much, I have to get her dry. Hope counted over twenty-five still undissolved pills between me, May and the bottom of the shower. I know there isn’t enough to cause her harm still in her blood stream, but I’m still really fucking pissed when I’ve managed to get her out of the shower, dried, dressed her in clean clothes, found something of Steve’s to put on and made her a warm drink, before the ambulance even fucking turns up.

Westbrooke has always been a town of two halves, growing up on the good side of it I guess I never really realised how bad it could be, but when the paramedic that turns up hardly gives May a second glance after I tell him that she threw most of the pills up, I realise the situation would be very different if we were sitting in the Manor right now.

It shouldn’t be this way, it’s so fucked up.

It’s funny how this house backs on to Lee’s. They both sit right on the boundary line, where one side have lives that matter and the other side are completely dispensable.

The way he looks at her isn’t lost on me either. I’ve seen that look, it’s the same one me and May get right before someone questions if we’re ‘really’ siblings. Racist piece of shit.

Once he told her that she was pretty much safe, May refused to go to the hospital to be checked out. I tried to argue with her but it's pretty much like smacking your head against a brick wall trying to get May to do something that she doesn't want to. He also seemed less than concerned that he was letting a mentally unstable fifteen year old who just tried to kill herself make her own decisions.

I’ve been so busy worrying about her I hadn’t even thought to ring fucking Brie. I look around the bed to try and find my phone, spotting it on the floor next to May’s bedside table, only to discover when I pick it up that this one is hers. The screen lights up the moment I touch it, but it's the words written in the pixels that force me to release every ounce of air in my lungs.

Oh May...

Tears roll down my cheeks as I read each word, May looking up at me and realising that I’ve seen it before she bursts back into floods of tears herself.

She... She wrote...

This ends. I will not lose my fucking sister. This all ends now.

Finding my phone almost halfway under the bed, I send out a group message to our entire fucked up fucking family.

‘Emergency at Brie’s. Need you here. Now. No excuses.’

It’s time to put this family back together.