why we fall apart

seventeenth ; why we fall apart

It's been two weeks since Alex found me. 

We don't talk about it.

None of us breaks the silence and mentions how I could've hit my head and died if he wasn't there, or that I was slowly falling apart even though I tried not to show it, or even that we weren't just roommates who lived on separate sides of a room that were as emotionally distant as the physical distance between the North and South poles. 

Not a word.

But we were thinking it. 

I could just picture Alex, his boots propped onto the table like it wasn't contaminating every inch of surface it touched, leaning back on his chair so that it balanced on only the two back legs, arms wrapped behind his head and sighing quietly before saying something completely irritating but absolutely true, like, "It's not wrong to have friends or to ask for help you know. We're all freaks here." Then he'd laugh annoyingly before trying to dispense more wisdom. "Just because you don't act like you're falling apart doesn't mean that you're not." 

In that instance, I'd be the one to get up and leave the room without another word, not that I'd said any in the first place. Not because I was mad. But because I didn't want to accept what he was saying as the truth. 

But he did speak, later today, after running into the room, breathing heavily from sprinting over, clearly stressed, not about what we were both thinking, but about something else, something deeply concerning, something that chilled every student in the academy to their very core and broke the best of wills.

Two words: "Parent night." He gasped out. 

I dropped my bottle of water on the floor and we both stared at it as it bounced and rolled to a stop, watching the water trickle out onto the carpet slowly. 

Our parents were coming. Not to take us back, not even because they cared, but as a mandatory requirement for the school board to give some boring assembly about new rules. 

I fell back onto my bed and shut my eyes. This was going to be a disaster.