Tragedy ✔️

Chapter Twenty Eight

Chapter Twenty Eight: Mint & Nicotine
River Jenkins

I know what happened to Sophia.

“He asked me to marry him, in the car. He took out a black box and gave me the ring. I remember kissing him because I was so happy and then everything after happened so damn quickly… It was night and raining, the road was completely covered in water…The car swerved and collided with another car head-on. I woke up in a hospital and a nurse telling me that Daniel died in the ambulance.”

I wish I didn’t know because that is all I could possibly think about.

The way Sophia kept sniffling while she explained to Ana what happened… I could hear the emotion behind Sophia’s words, like it was slowly breaking her piece by piece the more she explained to Ana what happened.

I was smoking a cigarette out of everyone’s view. It was a hospital and if a security guard were to catch me smoking a cigarette near a hospital, I’d be arrested, so I hid behind a tree and inhaled the smoke before exhaling again and the next thing I know, Ana and Sophia took their seats on one of the wooden benches in front of the hospital’s entrances and Sophia poured her heart out.

Her boyfriend died in a car accident, one Sophia caused.

Now I know where she got those scars from, the ones I teased her about—calling her Scarface in front of everyone in the hallways when we first met… Hell, I never thought I’d be capable of feeling bad for someone, but when Sophia started to tell her story and told Ana how she blamed herself for the accident and her boyfriend’s death, I felt bad in more ways than one.

What happened to her was fucked up.

I wanted to tell Sophia that I knew what happened to her, but her mother arrived before I had a chance to tell her, that I was sorry for all the times I was so rude to her, so I stormed away from her and now I’m back at home with the guilt of always being rude to her eating me up from the inside.

I knew her deepest darkest secret.

I understood now why she kept saying that she was a killer—she took her eyes off the road for a brief second and bam, a car accident took her boyfriend’s life. She blames herself for it. She thinks she’s a murderer for one mistake she made.

Just because you did one bad thing doesn’t mean that you are a bad person.

“How is Sophia’s grandmother doing?” My aunt asks when I entered the house, after I shook off all the excess snow from my jacket and damp hair.

I look at her, trying to process her words. I was trying to rid the image of Sophia’s accident from my mind, but she explained it so vividly, I actually saw it. I kept seeing the accident in my mind and I couldn’t even shake it away.