Obscure

seventh.

To Cas:

Taylor and I talked a lot that summer. She kept saying how she wanted me to meet her friends, and how she wanted all of us to become great friends like how the two of us did. But that didn’t happen. It always ended up being me and her or just her and her friends doing something that I wasn’t invited to. I always got to hear about it the next day though.

It turned into a tradition to go out to the lake at night and hang out and talk or swim or smoke sometimes when she felt like it. I told her a lot about myself. I told her about my relationship with my mom, and how much we didn’t get along, and how I practically hated her when I came out to my parents.

I told her how bad she made me feel and how she drove me to hurting myself like how some people do when they’re hurting like how I was. I told her how much it hurt to hear that I was an abomination and that I was a failure and that I was the worst daughter from the one person in the world who is supposed to love you no matter what or who you are. I told her that when my sisters found out what I was doing to myself, and why I was doing it they immediately packed up everything I owned and took me back to their house, which is where I’ve been since May.

She found out that after I came out to my school, I lost my friends, which didn’t make what I was going through at home any easier. I lost all but one friend who was named Alex and she was eighteen and I was fourteen but we didn’t care because I swear we loved each other and that was all that mattered. But she ran off to college before I had the chance to say goodbye. I think she wanted it like that, I think she wanted to leave with no answers and tons of questions.

I found out more about her. I found out that she wanted to kill herself many times last year, and that she was so close one time that if she had made a wrong move the knife would be so deep in her wrists she wouldn’t be able to dig it out. I didn’t hear why she wanted to die. She never told me why. Only that she wanted to, and that she didn’t.

I heard a lot about this guy named Nick, and that he was the only one who was able to bring her back from fully committing every time. He was a senior this year, and she was going to miss him when and if he went off to college. She said that he was like an angel, and that he was always there for everybody. She told me that he’d been through a lot too, and that he knew how to help people when they were hurting.

“If you had someone like Nick back at your old place, maybe you could’ve dealt with your mom better,” she told me once when we were wading in the water under the moonlight. “He can help you. He can help anyone. He’s amazing. He’s saved me so many times. When God wasn’t there, he was. I’d pray to Nick before any abstract being that’s supposed to be watching over all of us. And you know why?”

“Why?”

“Because God has forgotten me, and Nick hasn’t. God doesn’t love me, and Nick does. God doesn’t save the ones who need it. He leaves us behind because we aren’t worthy. You and me, Kira, we’re forgotten. You, and me, and all of my friends.”

The more she talked about her friends, the more this feeling grew inside of me that she didn’t want me to meet them. I was being stupid and paranoid, but I got the feeling she only wanted to talk to me when she had no one else to talk to, and like a I was a last choice for her. I mean, I was glad she was still talking to me, and that she wanted to still smoke with me but that didn’t knock the feeling that I very unwanted.

My sisters actually really hated Taylor, and they hated the fact that I spent so much time with her. Miyako, of course, was a hell of a lot more blunt and brash about how she felt than Kiyoko was. One night when I came home from hanging out with Taylor, Miyako got pissed off and cursed me out for it.