One Love: Book of Short Love Stories

Broken [Teen Fic / Romance]

It's not every day that someone dies in my small town. It's not every day you lose your best friend after she kills herself.

                Our entire student body saw when she hit the asphalt.

                I wish I could say that time froze. I wish I could say that I didn't see it coming. I wish I couldn't have avoided the blank look in her eyes before she jumped. There are a lot of things I wish for these days.

                Time didn't freeze, but it didn't need to. I had seen how the light left her eyes day by day. I had felt the way she slowly dried up and shrunk into herself.

                I wish it hadn't happened.

                I never thought that someone could be so broken, but Tommy Fetcher broke her. He picked her up, high into the air, until she was one with the sky. A time when even I had been jealous of my best friend. She had been loved by someone perfect. She was loved by the richest and best looking guy at school. The guy every girl wanted for herself. She was the lucky one. I watched her above me, floating with happiness. Then I watched when he dropped her and watched her shatter.  

                I thought she would pick herself up, but broken people can't be put back together. I should have known that then.  She didn't crack. She shattered.

                I was there when Tommy Fletcher told her the truth. When his group of rowdy friends snickered and hooted at my best friend. Tommy Fetcher held my best friend's virginity in his hands, then he waved it around for everyone to see. Just another one on his list.

                Even I had felt dirty then.

                I held her when she cried. It wasn't what he did, she said. It was him she cried for. It was his fault for picking someone who could love the way my best friend could. I remember thinking that I could never love someone who did what Tommy Fletcher did. I lied to myself, thinking her feelings would pass and time would carry her away from everything. Yet, I knew. I knew she was broken. I had to. I was the one holding the pieces. I was the one feeling the rough edges on the tips of my fingers.

                I was the first one to run. I ran straight towards her, but Principal Shaw was much quicker in holding me back. I watched as they took her tangled and twisted limbs and set them on the stretcher. People who hadn't even known her cried, but I was stuck. I was stuck in a place she had involuntarily put me in. A lifeless place.

                I didn't even cry at her funeral. The person who I had grown up with was dead. The person who knew my deepest secrets. The person who would have been my college roommate and the godmother of my children. The person who I laughed with uncontrollably and cried with unabashedly.

                Yet, I never cried.

I was still stuck in that lifeless place. School resumed and I continued far away from everyone else. It was like I was floating, untouchable, and cold. I wasn't broken, not yet, but there were cracks.

                No one could touch me in the place I was in. If anyone did, I'd be broken then.

                So many days passed that I started to forget the good things. Like the look she would get when she told me a secret, or the way she would listen to all of the crap I got at home and make me feel better. I could only remember the empty look she absorbed from Tommy Fetcher.

                I wanted to see Tommy Fetcher and hate him with everything that was left of me, but he wasn't Tommy Fetcher anymore. He kept his friends and his popularity, but he lost the little life he had left in his eyes. At least my best friend was able to take that from him.