Chasing Air // Billie Eilish

Chapter 3

ELLIOT'S P.O.V

"What do you do for a living?" she asked.

What did I do for a living?

To which I responded, "a little bit of everything."

I didn't know what to tell her. She already hated me. She had her mind made up before she ever met me.

I wondered what all Claudia could have told her?

I made my money by stealing stuff from nice houses and selling it. It was that simple but it was not that simple. You have to be good or be good at it. That's what my mom used to tell me. I wonder what she'd think if she saw me now. I knew she'd be disappointed but I didn't have time to care. I had exactly 100 days left. Pretty exciting.

What happened in 100 days?

Two years before then, I found Daniel. Or rather... he found me. At the top of a cliff in Arizona. I was nineteen. It was after it had been three or four days since I'd eaten. I didn't have anything. I was just over it all. I literally had nothing and living was more painful than the most preposterous, torturous death I could think of. I had nothing to do, nothing to eat, no house, nobody to help me, and no will to live. All I had was time. Time to think and to overthink.

It sounded like a lot of fun to jump off of a cliff. It's something that I would get to choose. It would feel like flying for a few seconds and then, all of a sudden, I'd be gone. It was easy. It was simple. It was controllable. It was exhilarating to think about.

And I longed for that day again. It was so peaceful. I was so close. But Daniel was there and he wouldn't let me. He told me he could make it better. He told me to give it a year, and if it wasn't better, I could go.

And then he told me to wait another year, and I did.

And I would not wait another year. Everything was terrible and everything could be ended so easily.

And it was really hard. I had to try so hard to not just pick up a gun. To not just sneak onto the roof of one of the many tall-enough buildings that I had access to. To not just unbuckle my seat belt and ram my car into a brick wall. To not just take every pill in the cabinet. At that point, I didn't care how it happened. I just wanted to die. I just wanted to be gone. I wanted it to be over.

I sighed, closing my small journal and putting it in my glovebox. I liked writing out how I felt. It made me feel like I was talking to somebody. And when I was gone, I hoped somebody would find it. Like Daniel. I hoped his little bitch ass would find it. I wanted him to know how much everything he'd done had affected me. I wrote the number of days I had left on it almost everyday because I wrote in it almost everyday.

I was a little conflicted by my relationship with Claudia. The problem was that she was too nice. I was having trouble getting rid of her. I'd been trying to stay away from people that might get emotionally attached to me. Damage control, you know, but she made it hard. She seemed like she actually cared about me. And she really kept up with what I did. But I didn't want to have to do something mean to get rid of her because she didn't deserve that.

There was no good way out of that one.

Somebody knocked on my window and I jumped, looking up at them. It was Jeremiah, my boyfriend. "Come on," he said frustratedly, his voice muffled by the piece of glass separating us. "Let's get this shit done." I opened my door and got out. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me into the house with him. "This shouldn't be that hard."

I nodded. "By now, I'm sure nobody here has the means to walk straight—let alone stop us from going into certain rooms."

"And they'll only have to stop us if you fuck this up."

"What if you fuck it up?" I replied defensively.

"I'm not a fuck-up, therefore I won't fuck it up." He shook his head.

"Bloody hell," I mumbled, speeding up to get away from him. He wasn't the nicest person but he made me feel better sometimes, and he let me live with him. I would've been homeless if it weren't for him, so I'm good at convincing myself everything's okay with him even when it's not.

100 days.