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TWENTY-SIX | ATHENA

Later, as she was leaving, Ella stopped me by the front door. She looked paper-thin. "Talk to your Dad for him, Athena, please."

I wanted to yell at her for being a waste of time, for not fixing him, for leaving. Instead, I said, "Fuck."

Ella placed a hand on my shoulder, and I allowed it. "It's all temporary, alright? All of it."

I looked into her great, brown eyes with all those hidden hints of yellow, and I felt some last piece of resistance crack in my chest. "I never should have said all that shit about you giving up. You've always been around for the both of us, and... I'm sorry. I just needed to be mad, you know?"

"I know," Ella responded and dropped her hand.

"I haven't been a good friend," I admitted. "But you came anyways."

"Well, you're still Athena. He's still Will, and I'm not in the habit of ditching people."

"I know, I know."

Ella skipped down the front steps of the porch, and turned back to face me. "Are you coming back to school soon?"

"They're still deciding if I'm expelled or not," I replied.

Ella stared up at me. "It wasn't Patti who vandalized your locker, by the way. They finally checked the cameras. They've suspended Dante and some of his friends for it."

"Oh." The word fell out of my mouth. "Shit."

"Yeah," Ella offered me a half-smile before turning down the driveway. "Oh shit, indeed."

Then she was gone, and another day went by. Will stopped getting up to make the journey down the hall to the bathroom.

Victor didn't seem like an option. Annie, at least, continued to make Will meals, even when they continuously ended up untouched. She cycled the dishes out of his room and made sure he had water every couple hours.

Charlie was my last resort. 

"Is Will like this often?" He had asked me not long after Ella left, as I was trying to distract myself with homework from classes I had not attended.

I looked up from the papers I'd been staring at, which were splayed out across the living room couch. I'd been sleeping there since Will's room felt more and more like a black hole. My back was in worse shape than ever. "I don't know," I said. "Do you care? You'll be gone soon anyway."

"I'm worried too, if that's worth anything for you to hear." Charlie replied, his eyes focused into his coffee mug as he sat on the couch's armrest. "I don't want him to go to the same lengths to outrun this shit as I did. You can only fight yourself for so long. It's exhausting."

"Did— did you ever get like this too?"

"Depressed?" Charlie sipped from his mug. "Sure. Sometimes it was hard to feel anything good at all. That's what the drugs were for."

"And now?"

"And now..." Charlie leaned back. "Now I have a better grip on things. I have routine, medication. I have therapy. It's not easy, but some things you have to understand about yourself, and about your own limitations. It's a shitty learning curve, though."

"Oh." Somehow, I felt like we were talking about Will behind his back.

"I'm not trying to make this about me," Charlie said, "but I was afraid that my being here would just make things worse for everyone."

I paused and took a long time to organize my thoughts. "You opened a lot of things up. I don't really feel like I have a good read on anything, to be honest." I shrugged. "Look, I'm not giving you a participation ribbon or some shit, but I think we needed to yell at you. Still, I don't think you made things worse. Things were just already shit."