Suicide Buddies

Cardio, Conversation, & Other Forms of Cruelty

(hi, vote if you would be so kind, and enjoy this mess of a chapter)

The beginning of my lifelong teenage crisis began the same way most teenage crises do: with morning cardio and a boy problem.

The Senior Sunrise Hike was an annual thing for the second semester in a pseudo-celebration for the majority of college apps being done in our senior class. It was supposed to be an easy trail at a low degree. However, at the cost of waking up at the ungodly hour of 5:50 in the morning just to trudge through damp dirt, grass, and the occasional suspicious mound of either animal feces or a squirrel carcass, it managed to exhaust me anyway.

Should've jumped earlier, I thought when our chaperones appeared and promptly informed us of our planned route to the lookout point.

"All right," Miss Hernandez said, clasping her hands together. "Pop quiz."

"God help me," I muttered, jolting awake at the clap.

Maia looked back at me with a snort. "I hope you know where we're going."

"Er, yeah, for sure."

"We go...?"

"Left."

"Straight then right."

"I'll get there either way."

"Yeah, I'm sure the mountain lions will be very welcoming to you."

I stiffened. "There are mountain lions?"

She ignored me in favor of turning her attention back to warming up her hands in the pockets of her sports jacket. Morning fog had laid itself over the hills, painting the whole world a momentary shade of gray and sickly blue. Exhaustion was as thick as the mist in my head, muffling my brain and whatever likely important thing Miss Hernandez was going on about.

My hands tugged the strings on my hoodie tight, closing the dark blue fabric around my face just slightly.

"...and lay out your stuff there. Okay? Did everyone get that?" She waited for us to nod, and when most of us did—not me, as I was not a liar type—she turned on her heel. "Then let's go!" 

We began to move. I tried not to stiffen up at the altitude we were at, opting to stay on the other side of the trail despite the itchiness I was developing from all the plants brushing up against me from it.

I was able to get approximately a fourth of a mile of in before mountain lions became the least of my worries.

My cardiovascular stamina was not the best, but with all the walking I did throughout the neighborhood, I stayed fairly steady in the middle of the group as we walked with Maia  complaining behind me about the cold weather for majority of our sporadic conversation.

As I went, I could see the barest flash of pink in my peripheral. I swiveled my head.

Sure enough, two black eyes under a mound of bubblegum-colored hair was right adjacent to me. At my gesture, they turned to my direction.

Haruki immediately muttered, "Oh, jeez."

I scrunched my face at him, looking down. "You're shorter than I thought."

He sputtered at that. I held my hands up in defense as he straightened in a futile attempt to appear taller. I barely touched five foot seven, but he couldn't have been anything higher than five foot one.