“What about your work? With the paper? Or your music? You always cared about that.”

“I sold my guitar…what? A year ago?” He shrugs. “Maybe two. You don’t have a right to judge me. No one has the fucking right.”

I feel like I’m drowning, watching every good moment we spent together disappear into an endless darkness of oblivion.

“I can fix this,” I say quietly.

“You still don’t get it. No matter what you do, you still don’t fucking get it.”

I feel a sense of weightlessness as I wait, where anything is possible, when he could say or do anything.

“Not everything is about you, Andre. My life is my own. You can’t just go back and ‘fix’ me. Who do you think you are?”

“I didn’t—” I sputter.

“No. Shut up. It’s my turn to talk. Not yours. This is my life now. This is who I am. Maybe it’s not someone you want to be with. Maybe it’s not who you thought I’d be. But you know what? Screw you. I wish I’d never met you.”

“Michael…” I want to tell him to stop. I want to tell him I’m sorry. To say so many things. To apologize, explain how wrong I was. But there’s an invisible wall between us, with a complex lock that I don’t know how to pick.

And there’s a familiar, growing pain.

I can fix this, I think. I can fix this. Screw what Claire said. This is worth fixing. I won’t be the cause of this. I won’t be the cause of hurting someone so pure, so good. This won’t be his destiny.

But before I can do anything else, a pain unlike anything I’ve felt before pierces my side.

I can’t tell up from down, left from right. Colors blur together, and every sense is going haywire. Is Michael grabbing my shoulder? I can’t tell. Is he speaking my name? Does he sound worried, or is that my imagination?

There are only three things I know for sure.

Pain.

Blackness.

And a desire to die. A desire so strong, I barely feel my body hit the floor before that darkness swallows me whole.

Twenty-Nine

When I wake, I’m not fully conscious. I can hear words. Mom’s voice. A doctor that’s not familiar. All slices of a giant movie reel stitched together in the most inconvenient of ways.

My body won’t respond to my commands. Blink. Move. Scream. Twitch. Nothing. It’s like my orders are sent out and shot down in space, disappearing into vast nothingness, leaving me at the mercy of whatever this is. I have no idea how much time goes by before I finally wake up, but when I do, I can tell it’s mid to late afternoon. The sun through the window is low on the horizon.