There are ways of dying that do not end with a funeral. Types of deaths you can't see, feel or smell. Because death, just like love, has a mind of its own and some things can't be prevented.
What started as an innocent high school quest in search o...
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I didn't get to celebrate my eighteenth birthday—the grand age every teenager impatiently awaits because reaching it feels like reaching a certain milestone, a turning point of adulthood, I suppose—because I was in coma, plugged on life support, fighting for my life.
Turns out, celebrating my birthday is a bigger deal to Timothy than it ever was to me because he decided to throw me a late "welcome back" party at his place and no matter how many times I told him it wasn't necessary, he didn't budge. As usually, he wanted to go big and do it properly which in his dictionary means he wanted to invite as many people as he possibly could (especially after the fact that I won't be able to graduate with the rest of my classmates sank in because I missed several months of classes and needed to cram everything I missed into summer school and additional tutoring sessions if I wanted to finish in time for college— or at least that's what my parents and principal Joshi came to terms with in the span of last week). Not that I even felt like thinking about going to college. Processing the fact that I missed the majority of my last year of high school, missed so many important things (not the prom and not the homecoming, although that sucked a little, too) because of lying unconscious in a hospital; and eventually trying to differentiate the reality from my coma hallucinations was a task on its own (even with my tri-weekly therapy and recovery sessions) and college just had no place in all that.
I got Tim to tone it down a little at least, which meant that the only people invited were the ones from our former group.
Jason told me they paused the Shameless Virginity Games, supposedly because it wouldn't be fair to me if I was unable to participate under the same circumstances as them—for how long, I don't know, but if there's one thing that I'm sure about then it's that I won't be part of it ever again. The games were stupid to start in the first place and it was never meant to grow from a pathetic little prank-dare to our yearly-recurring high school tradition.
I tried to find out more about Courtney—discreetly—and got her new number from Jade but she didn't pick up any of the calls so far, so determining whether there is any truth to the conclusion I got in my coma still looks more or less like a dead end.
The pristinely white couch in Timothy's huge living room dips slightly, snapping me out of my spaced-out zone.
"You enjoying yourself?" Cassidy asks, drawing her feet up and getting cozy beside me, a little closer than I feel comfortable with.
I shift a little but it doesn't really make that much of a difference. "Uhm, not really." I spin the almost empty bottle of beer between the pads of my fingers, briefly thinking how strange it is to imagine I used to be so physically and emotionally close with her once upon a time when I feel anything but disdain right now.
"Yeah," she scrunches up her nose, "I figured. Your blank expression's making that pretty obvious. To anyone but Timothy, apparently."
