Why couldn't he have been the reason Neil didn't pull the trigger?
Ashamed though he was to admit it, this was the first thought that crossed through Todd's mind when he heard the news.
Why?
Why did Neil mean so much more to him than he did to Neil?
Because, Todd knew, if it had been him? If it had been him with a gun to his head, ready to pull the trigger? Only one person would have come to mind. And with that one thought, within that one moment, Todd would have put the gun back down and walked away, because Neil would have been reason enough to keep living, even if every other part of him wanted to die.
So why couldn't he have affected Neil the same way?
And why would he expect to?
Sure, there had been moments. But that was all they were—moments. Disjointed, disconnected from the rest of the world. They had no place in Neil's timeline, in his life. Hell, Todd realized, they might not even have existed after all.
Because if Todd could make himself believe, even for a few seconds, that he meant enough to someone to keep them from killing themselves… and if that turned out to be false… what else had he just made himself believe? What else had he thought that was just… so… damn… wrong?
With every tick of the wristwatch, every new, terrible idea that swirled through his mind, and with every soft, shuffling step towards what used to be Neil Perry's desk, Todd was sure that he was going to die right there. Just… poof. Disappear. Cease to exist, as his parents certainly wished he would have done years ago, as Todd was sure Neil wouldn't have minded.
Because killing yourself and killing your best friends had the same consequences. You could never see them again. Never look upon their faces, hear their voices or their laughter or smell their tears as they cried into their wall, hoping you were too slow to realize what they were doing. And when Neil had killed himself, Todd thought, he had essentially kept himself alive and killed everyone around him. Or put himself in a box. He existed, they existed, but there was no contact between the two. And to do something like that, he thought, you would have to really hate everyone. To not have anything to live for. Which meant, Todd concluded, that Neil didn't care about any of them. That they, that he, meant nothing to Neil, no matter how many moments, disjointed or otherwise, had happened between them.