Barely Legal (Julian Casablancas)

.::Chapter Forty-Two||Hardest Choice::.

           Janae awoke to Tiffany gently shaking her shoulder. Her eyes peeled opened, but wanted to close immediately upon looking at her blonde friend.

"I'm leaving in the morning."

"Don't remind me." Janae closed her eyes involuntarily, mustering all strength to roll over and face away. She didn't want Tiffany to feel bad for leaving, but couldn't resist the words from slipping out. She faced the wall, knowing that by the end of this verbal exchange, she'd be crying.

          Janae felt horrible. Not only because she was pregnant, but because of the way she reacted... to everything. Albert had proclaimed Julian a ticking time bomb—ready to implode at any moment. Janae was the same, only she was explosive, going from zero to ten in a matter of seconds, assaulting everyone in her wake. Her emotions were raw and overpowered any and all logic.

          An entire day had come and gone since the brutal assault on her boyfriend, (...ex-boyfriend.) The assault an entire room filled with strangers got to bare witness to. Then came the annihilation—the death of a whirlwind romance that only Albert and Tiffany got to witness the aftermath of.

Janae slept nearly the entire day away, too weak and pathetic to move anywhere except to the bathroom to relieve herself. It seemed she had to piss every hour, sometimes right after just going. It felt like her uterus was inhabited by several baseballs; the constant sensation of pressure resting right on top of her bladder. She couldn't imagine what it would feel like in the later stages of this dreaded nightmare—she didn't want to.

          "When will you be back?" Janae managed to choke, already feeling the back of her throat ache.

"That's what I wanted to talk to you about. I... I won't be back until next year."

          Janae shot up out of the bed, her vision like a reverse vignette, sprinkling out of focus with little white dots. It was like her head was suddenly filled with helium—she had risen up too fast.

"Whoa, are you okay?" Tiffany saw the dazed look in her eyes as Janae lurched forward before tipping to her side.

"What do you mean, next year?"

"It's a four week trip... It's December fifth. I'll be back the third of January."

"What am I supposed to do?"

          Tiffany's face fell, her eyes went to her lap in defeat, picking at her cuticle unsure of what to say. She felt like a bad friend, but deep down, Tiffany was relieved she wouldn't be around when Janae did the unspeakable—for her own sake.

"You're supposed to do what you want. What you feel is best for you."

"I can't do it by myself." Janae whispered, confiding that piece of information mostly to herself.

"I already talked to Al about it, he's gonna be there."

          Tiffany had gone over to Albert's apartment the night before—mostly to give Julian a piece of her mind. But when her eyes fell on him—the most "I-don't-give-a-fuck boy" she'd ever met—sobbing in the floor by the fire escape in his bedroom, she simply couldn't. Something about kicking a wounded dog when it was already down felt wrong.

She had never witnessed a guy genuinely bawl the way Julian had—an actual breakdown. She couldn't stop thinking about it; the sound of his loud sniffling coughs as he tried to breathe. The way his voice cracked and sounded two pitches higher, repeating "I'm sorry- tell her I'm sorry." The way Julian's face contorted to a lost boy like he had just witnessed someone die. The image of Julian wiping his face with the back of his hands so hard that it left red marks reminded her of a child. She had never taken such pity on anyone ever before.