Naïve

happiness

   Don't put your happiness in other people's hands. They'll drop it.

   They'll drop it every time.

   My happiness is small, white, sometimes baby pinks or sickly yellows, but they are kept in safe in a small jar, my happy pills - take one, two, every night and it'll make all the nightmares dreamt at night and seen during the day, all go away. 

   My happiness is the isolation, the infinite radius of emptiness that I keep between myself and these people, because calling them monsters mean they are like me, and I am not like them, I am not, I refuse to be, because I can’t be. 

   My happiness is Haleigh, a girl, brown hair, cerulean eyes, perfect laugh, the type of laugh that starts as a giggle at her throat and when it comes  out it makes heads turn and smile themselves, and wonder who she was. 

   That was how I first came to know her.

   The first thing I liked about her was her laugh. I heard it, in the quiet emptiness of the library, cutting the air like the slice of a knife. I had turned, surprised, to find her a few feet away from me as she leaned over her friend’s shoulder and looked at the computer screen. She had taken her hand from her mouth, after her laughter had subsided, and I saw her smile.

   Her smile was the second reason I fell completely, utterly, and unquestionably in love with her.

   Maybe not immediately at first. It was, in the beginning, slow, like pebbles of rain falling, and then all at once, when like when the storm hits. 

   The feelings I had for her was happiness, and when I gave her that she didn't just drop it - she had thrown it back in my face, but missed and it had hit my chest, ripping through the skin and bones and scarring my heart.

   “You’re quite poetic.”

   I slammed my notebook cover down, jumping and turning around to find a girl still bent over, the place where she was looking over being my shoulder a moment ago. She straightened, hands tucked into her high waisted shorts with the pocket linings showing underneath, probably some new trend. She looked bored, unkept, dangerous, with her dark mess of bed hair and black Jack Daniels shirt that was slit down to her waist at her sleeves, showing a silver of her bra. 

   She stepped over the bench that I had been slipping on, and I flinched and stepped back. An amused look flickered across her face before she bent down and picked something off the floor.

   “Yours,” she said, holding my pencil. 

   I looked at it without moving, but I didn’t mean to, not really, and she sighed and dropped it on the floor again.

   “Jesus, it’s not like I’m carrying some sorta disease,” she muttered. Her accent was rough, her tone veering towards  an alto, but in a twisted way, it sounded sweet to my ears. 

   I should probably say something, I know I should say something, but the words got stuck in my throat and shallowed down and it tasted like bad medicine. She saw it, she saw, she knows, she saw and now she knows. I hugged the book closer to my chest, hoping, praying, wondering - maybe if I don’t react she’ll leave me alone and forget all about what she saw.

   “So, Haleigh June? You do have it bad for her.” She looked at me with pitying, amused eyes, and my stomach sank and my head started seeing red. 

   “Don’t look at me like that.” She smirked. “Everyone in the school knows. I’m Quinn, by the way - oh, that’s right, you don’t like this stuff.” She had held out her hand for me to shake but before I could even contemplating reacting she had taken it back to her side. Her eyes sparkled in mischief, and I couldn’t help but comparing her eyes to Haleigh. Where Haleigh’s was a darker blue, Quinn’s were a violent pale blue against her dark lashes, clashing against her darker skin tone. 

   Someone hollers her name, and she is distracted momentarily for me to grab a quick look of her properly, and I feel no familiarity. 

   I had never seen her before, and she must know this because a grin flitters across her lips as she catches me staring at her. “I’m new - and the girl that your mother warned you about.” She winks, and walks off to the boy who had called out her name. 

   She turns around one more time and sees me watching her leave. “The world is going to judge you, no matter what you do or who you are, Ethan, so live your life the way you fucking want to,” she calls out, and then she disappears around the bend of a building with him. 

   I am left staring after her in awe, surprise. 

   Then I am reminded of my mother, and my vision blurs and I leave. 

***

   She had held on for as long as she could, but even the strongest people can’t hold on forever.

   I had chosen this to be written on the epitaph of her tombstone. 

   “Before you rise to heaven, you have to spend a few days in hell.” Her last words echoed back to me as I crouch down and place the white lilies on the grave. She always did like lilies - she found roses too cliché. 

   She had said it to me in her hospital bed - all I remembered were the tubes and the wires and the pine scent from the freshener near the window, and all the white - the walls, her bed, her sheets, her  - white, white, white like the lilies she loves so much. I had hugged her - or tried to, with all her tubes and wires getting in the way, and I hugged her tight, hoping, praying, that I could make all of her broken pieces would stick back together. 

   She felt so warm, contradictory to what she should be, and I had suddenly felt a surge of hope. I had fallen asleep, her stoking my hair as I hugged her broken pieces together like super glue. When I woke again, they were yelling and silent and tearing me away from her and I knew that it was all my fault, all my fault, because I could wake up again but she never will. 

   Nobody cares unless you’re pretty or dying.

   But than again, I could be both and nobody would still care anyway.

   All I hear are me, me, me.

   I spent a long time staring a white wall, as they apologised and told me they were sorry, sorry for her death, and I had wanted to cry.  

   I couldn’t, so I just stared blankly into space while feeling my heart breaking into pieces, and I died each day hoping she’ll live again.