You Have 86,400 Seconds To Find Me

8:00pm (82,800 Seconds Remaining)

    "What do you mean again?" I asked Kelly, sure I must have heard her incorrectly. There was no way this could have happened before. Macy was not the type of girl to commit suicide. She just was not. I was bewildered enough that all of this was happening this time, the thought of it having happened before is just.. well... No.

   Kelly kept her hands up in front of her mouth, watching me. She didn't answer me, she didn't move. It looked as though she was lost. Like, everything she thought she knew about the world had just disappeared right before her very eyes.

   I knew the feeling.

   "The-," Kelly began to say, and then stopped herself, hesitating. "The reason why Macy and I stopped talking...." Kelly paused again, taking a deep breath. Then she walked towards my open car door and sat down in the drivers seat. "It was because I couldn't handle it... The last time she did this."

   "She's done this before? You're serious?"

   Kelly nodded.

   "When?"

   "It was in junior high... seventh grade, I think. It was right after you had started going over to her house after school on a regular basis."

   The seventh grade? No way. Macy and I had already been hanging out for a few months by then, there was no way I could have missed something like that. 

   "She was thrilled when you two started hanging out after school. She said that you were turning out to be a really good friend and that she enjoyed your company more than she probably should because she thought you were into Ashley."

   Ashley Corina? What?

   "I never liked Ashley," I clarified. "She was just my lab partner in Science."

   "Well, that isn't what Macy thought," Kelly said, shaking her head at the memory. "She would call me up on the phone every night and cry about how she was losing you to Ashley and how Ashley would come over to your table at lunch and flirt with you the entire time, like Macy wasn't even there. I remember she was so upset the day you had to go over Ashley's house after school for some writing assignment... That was also around the time Macy's Mom stopped coming home at night. Because of her drinking."

   Macy had never liked talking to me about her Mom's drinking problem. It really isn't a big deal, she would say. My Dad always comes home right after work so it isn't like I'm home alone or anything. And if my Mom feels she's too intoxicated to drive home, she just stays at her friends house overnight and drives home in the morning. No biggie.

  No biggie. That was like Macy's catch phrase. Except that now, I'm finding out that it actually is a biggie. Macy felt abandoned. 

   She felt alone.

   And the worst part? I hadn't even noticed. Or maybe I did, a little. But, I had always just assumed that if Macy ever wanted to talk, she would just come find me. I thought she knew I would always be there for her, if she ever needed it. All she had to do was show up at my door and I would know. But maybe... Maybe that was too hard for her. Maybe I should have pushed her to let me in.

   "That night, after Macy's Mom hadn't come home, she had called me up on the phone, telling me that she was going to kill herself," Kelly spoke quietly, almost like the words were burning her throat as they left her lips. "She told me that she couldn't stand the idea of living in a world where no one loved her, where no one wanted her." Kelly continued talking, but the words she was saying to me didn't make any sense. This didn't sound like Macy. This didn't sound like her at all. I remember that day I had gone over to Ashley's house after school. Macy had come up to me that morning at the bus stop and asked me if I would be coming over after school, and how we could order a pizza and maybe play Monopoly, her favorite game. And I told her that no, I couldn't because I had to finish a project at Ashley's house that day. Macy had responded with an Oh, okay. No biggie, we can just do it tomorrow.