On the night Logan died, Skylar hadn't been working. She had been with one of her friends from work, a girl three years older than her. Maria. She used to bring her a box of cigarettes each shift, and they smoked at the back of the bar. That bar was now an abandoned building, and Maria had moved to America with a rich man, twenty years older than her, after they had been dating for one and a half months.
Skylar had received a phone call from the hospital. Logan's parents were notified first, and were already with her. Or they were with her body, Skylar thought. The voice on the phone was a woman, and she sounded sympathetic, but not at all sincere. She sounded robotic, like she had rehearsed her words, and Skylar knew it was because she probably made hundreds of these phone calls each month. She didn't believe the woman's careful words.
And when she got to the hospital, and saw Mack in the waiting room, already discharged, examined, and found to be one hundred percent healthy, she collapsed.
Her brother, two years younger, his always messy hair in his bloodshot eyes. He killed Logan.
A nurse came to help Skylar off the floor, and she pushed her off. It was probably the same insincere nurse. Mack watched, his mouth open, and Skylar wanted to slap him. She wanted to scratch him with her nails, to push him out onto the street so he could feel exactly what Logan had felt.
He apologized profusely to Skylar. He didn't admit he'd been drinking to Logan's parents. He didn't admit he'd been drinking to anyone but Skylar, and when his court date was set, he pleaded not guilty, and he was found not guilty, because he was young and an honours student and it was a mistake.
And it had been dark, and Logan was young, walking the streets alone in Toronto, probably a little drunk herself.
It was an accident to everyone but Skylar. She knew he had gotten into his car, was on his way home after drinking too much as always, and taken Logan from her.
-
Skylar took the long way home. Lloyd had offered to drive her, but she politely declined. She wanted to feel the wind against her raw skin, as she always did after shifts at the bar. She hated it. Shoving her hands into her coat pockets, she decided right then: she hated working there. She hated working at any bar. It was exhausting, both physically and mentally. She didn't like being around drunk people, so why did she surround herself with them, night after night?
Her phone buzzed in her back pocket. She ignored it the first time. But when the person hung up and re-dialled, only a second later, she sighed, stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, and retrieved her phone from her jeans.
"Hey Blair."
"Skylar," she said. One word, and Skylar already knew it was panicked. "You need to meet me at the hospital."
"What?" And now Skylar was panicked, too. Like it was contagious. "Are you alright? Blair, are you okay?"
"I'm fine, Skylar. It's Jude."
Skylar's mind reeled back a few hours, to the empty shot glasses stained with red lipstick.
"Oh, god." And she thought, alcohol poisoning.
What she didn't think was, single-car accident.
"I'm coming," said Skylar, turning and starting to run in the other direction, her blood boiling with fear that history was about to repeat itself, but also with anger that Jude gotten behind the wheel, drunk, just as Mack had. She was pissed because Jude might have killed herself, or someone else.
Blair didn't have to text her the directions. Skylar had been to this hospital four years and two months ago, where she had ran from Maria's house twenty minutes ago. She had seen Blair briefly; she remembered her as the pretty blonde girl, sobbing silently as her body slid down the wall of the hallway where they had tried to shock Logan, or do CPR or something to try to bring her back, but failed.
Skylar stumbled into the emergency room, the automatic doors sliding slowly in front of and behind her. The generic smell of disinfectant that was always associated with hospitals stung her nose immediately, and she found herself out of breath as she slammed her hands against the information desk, demanding to know where Jude was, and then it occurred that she didn't even know Jude's last name.
As the secretary began looking up the first name "Jude" in the computer system, which Skylar knew would take forever, and mentally punched herself for not even asking Jude's last name, Blair's fingers clasped Skylar's wrist, pulling her away from the desk.
"There's Jude Marie Anderson, Jude Dante-"
"It's Jude Anna Emery," Blair interjected, and the secretary scowled at her, "and I know which room she's in." Blair tugged on Skylar again, and the brunette quickly flashed the secretary an apologetic smile.
"What happened?" Skylar demanded, to which she already knew the answer, but wished that it would suddenly change. Like Jude, Skylar wished, in this moment, that magic was real, so she could easily change what had happened, and the fate of it if need be.
"You're not going to like this," said Blair, turning towards Skylar for only a moment. Her normally tan skin was now as white as her own. "She drove drunk, Skylar. Fortunately, she was driving back to my apartment on one of the backroads. There was no one else on the road. She drove right into a telephone pole."
Skylar felt sick. She had a sudden sensation that she was wobbling, that the world was tilting, and she couldn't straighten it. And then the hallway blurred, and she couldn't bring it into focus.
How could Jude do this? How could she endanger not only herself, but anyone else who might have been walking or driving on that street? She knew it was wrong. Everyone knew it was wrong, and yet so many people still did it. Skylar just never thought Jude would be one of them.
She shouldn't have let her leave, but she had no idea she'd be driving. How did she even get a car? Whose car was it? And not only that, she shouldn't have to babysit Jude. They were friends-barely. That thought made Skylar grimace. She cared so much about Jude. She should've kept an eye on her once she saw how much she had drank, and made sure she got home alright. But the bar had been so busy, she hadn't even seen Jude leave.
"Here, Skylar."
Stopping dead in her tracks, Skylar swayed. She felt faint. What was she about to walk into? How badly was Jude hurt?
Skylar didn't even care. Or at least, this is what she told herself: I shouldn't care that she was hurt, because she did it to herself. She knew it was wrong and she still did it, just like Mack knew it was wrong and killed Logan. Logan never deserved to die-Mack did.
And then she felt even sicker, turned her head both ways to ensure there was a trash can in her near proximity, if needed.
She laughed at herself as she entered room 112, and it came out shaking. Of course she still cared that Jude was hurt. No matter how much she deserved it, she still cared, and her heart still broke when she knew, taking one step inside the tiny room, that Jude was in here, hurt. That was the moment she realized how much she liked Jude.
But she would never get the chance to tell her, or to act on it. Jude had ruined that chance by driving drunk. Skylar couldn't let herself like someone who had engaged in the same crime that had killed Logan.
The bed, Jude's feet, Jude's legs, Jude's torso, Jude's head, all in tact, appeared before her eyes. As if her body, bandaged and bruised but not damaged-not dead-materialized right in front of her.
Skylar held a shaking hand to her mouth, realized that her teeth were chattering, and so quickly clenched her jaw. If she stared at Jude a second longer, she knew she'd break. Not the collapsing-my-girlfriend-just-died kind of break, but the crying-in-front-of-best-friend-and-the-girl-you-liked-twenty-minutes-ago kind of break.
"Skylar," said Jude, weakly pushing herself up a little higher in her sitting position.
"Jude."
Blair looked between them for a moment, and, realizing that she was interrupting something, bid a quiet goodbye that went unheard by both girls, and hastily exited the room.
Skylar knew that Jude was expecting her to rush to her side, to ask her how she was feeling. Jude would want Skylar at her side to inspect her wounds, to put her hand on her cheek and tell her everything was okay now, everything was going to be okay.
Instead, Skylar silently, slowly, tiptoed towards Jude. She kept her eyes on the smaller girl, tears stinging them, but ignoring the pain. She ignored the pain of approaching crying, but did not ignore the pain of seeing Jude hurt herself by being so, so stupid.
"How could you do this?"
Jude frowned. She was still a little drunk.
"How could you," Skylar repeated, and then stopped, because there was no use asking. She was aware that this was likely a mistake by Jude. A mistake that could've taken her life, or the life of an innocent person, or innocent people. Skylar usually forgave mistakes. Almost everyone did. But this was a mistake that could not be forgiven, and especially not forgotten.
Jude's eyes moved back and forth: on Skylar, off Skylar.
This was a mistake, but not an innocent one.
"Skylar, I wanted you to-"
"Don't," said Skylar, and she turned then, because she had stared at Jude for far too long, and she was long past her breaking point. "Don't talk to me, Jude. Okay?"
"Sky-"
"Don't."
Jude's mouth hung open, looking like she was about to say something more, but knowing that there were words on Skylar's tongue that she needed to vocalize, and if she spoke, she'd just be shut down again.
"I hate you." Skylar turned. She didn't wait to see that Jude had now reached another breaking point, too. She didn't care that this was probably the girl's hundredth breaking point reached in the past month.
She couldn't care anymore.
It hurt her too much.