She was the only one who made it better. Who made this shithole bearable sometimes. It was her window that he tossed pebbles onto at midnight and her body that fit perfectly into the crook of his arms and her smile that made him want to stay in this godforsaken world.
She'd found him on the roof of the school, ready to launch himself off. She didn't seem bothered, just offered a noncommittal "hey" and sat down, opening her book.
He had to see what she was reading. It wasn't War and Peace like all the other goth girls that hung around the library and watched him while he browsed the shelves. It was a slim book with a large cover and pictures inside. His breath turned ragged and she looked back up as he began to step down from the ledge.
"Changed your mind about offing yourself?" She didn't shut her book. He looked down at the ground. "It's okay, I do it all the time. You get ready, you write your note, you cock your pistol, and then you feel like you're going to wet yourself."
This time, she closed her book. "I'm Violet."
Tate sat down on the ledge, facing her. "Tate." He watched her move from his face to his rolled up sleeves and the scars on his arms. "I haven't seen you around school."
"I don't like to go to class," Violet shrugged, turning back to her books.
"Neither do I. I spend a lot of time in the library." Tate glanced at her book again. There was a brightly colored parrot on the cover. He liked it.
"That's your first mistake," Violet said knowingly. "All the fake existentialists and goth kids hang out in there. Its more full of shit than the actual hallways."
Tate felt the corner of his mouth twitch. "So what are you reading up here?" He stood up and walked so he was standing next to her, looking down at the cover right side up.
"It's about birds," Violet said vaguely.
"I like birds," Tate replied simply. "They can fly away when things get too crazy, I guess," he said in response to her raised eyebrow.
"I like the backgrounds. The natural habitats. Anywhere but here, you know?" She patted the ground next to her. "C'mere."
Tate eased himself down next to her as she flipped through the pages of the book. As he did so he picked up the rock he'd left covering his goodbyes on the ledge and let the notebook paper slowly flutter away in the breeze. He didn't need them anymore.
He met her on the roof whenever things got to be too much during classes. When her world closed in on her. She let him bring the books if he let her bring the music, because most days she just liked to close her eyes and lean against him. Sometimes she'd open them and look at him slowly, but she didn't think he noticed.
He noticed everything about her. The way she always looked happier when her headphones were on and her notebook was open, and the way she smelled like smoke, but only in the afternoons, and the way tears would leak out of her eyes as slowly as the minute hand moved in math class when she fell asleep on his shoulder.
He noticed her scars, and he noticed that she noticed his. They didn't say anything. He knew she had too many people preaching to her about her bright future and where she could go in her life. He knew all she wanted to hear was that she was okay now.
Sometimes he'd sit up there for a long time by himself, flipping through the pages of library books and sometimes staring down at the pavement he'd nearly jumped onto. She'd arrive and say she had a good breakfast that morning, or her father hadn't holed himself up in his office and actually helped her with her history homework, and she hadn't really wanted to miss out of life that morning. Those were the days when she whistled. The tune was always the same, and it was only good days, but he liked it just the same.
She was whistling when he couldn't let his question go unanswered any longer.
"Violet?"
"Hmm." She looked up at him, her head tucked into the soft part of his body where his shoulder met his chest.
"Do you ever think that life would be easier if you didn't care?" Tate's voice caught. "Like, if I didn't give a shit about anything, maybe I wouldn't be so miserable."
"You're allowed to care about things, Tate. I like that about you." Violet awarded him one of her rare crooked smiles. "I like that you understand because you want to."
Tate's mouth twitched, then slowly curved upwards into a smile. "You really don't care about anything, do you?"
"No, I care," Violet said simply. "I just don't care about much. And when I do care, I don't pretend that I don't."
"What do you care about, then?" Tate asked, feeling his hair whip around in the cold breeze.
"Good music. My parents, sometimes. Myself." Violet looked down as her cheeks filled with pink. "You."
Tate looked down at her, only able to see her hair. He couldn't think of anything to say. He felt like one of those poets that his teachers liked to ramble on about, like Shakespeare or William Blake. Like he would have to resort to calling her a summer's day to express what he felt.
Instead, he kissed the top of her head.
And Violet, with an immeasurable bravery that he couldn't fathom the edges of, looked up at him, eyes blazing, and pulled his mouth down to hers. He could taste the happy tune on her lips.
Tate found a note in his locker the next day when he went to get his lunch. It was written on lined paper with the fuzzies still attached and a phone number written in a careless black scrawl.
For when you can't find the roof, it read. It made him smile.
He called it that night. A woman answered the phone with a pleasant voice. When he announced that he was calling for Violet, she thought she covered the receiver and exclaimed in wonder at the household that Violet actually had some friends. She then passed on the conversation.
"Sorry about my mom," Violet said instead of a greeting. "She's… I don't know."
"You want to talk about it?" Tate asked.
"It's not a phone conversation."
Tate almost smiled for the second time that day. "I know a place."
They walked to the beach from the darkened school parking lot. She leaned into him as they walked, her shoulder pressing into his, not talking. Just walking was enough.
"It's cold," Violet said as they stood on the rocks. Her voice sounded small, in front of the darkened ocean. "Are you out here a lot?"
"Yeah. When the walls close in at home, you know. Stuff gets too big. The ocean makes everything feel small. But it's not just me, it's everyone. High school is just a blip on your timeline, we can't get stuck there." Tate closed his eyes and reached out to his side. Violet's hand slid into his. "C'mon."
They picked their way through the rocks carefully, Tate going first and not letting go of her hand until they reached the bottom.
"I feel so small," Violet murmured as she sat down, her legs curled under her. Tate spread his arms out wide, breathing in the air. It was one of those nights that made him feel like he could stay alive, if only to see more of them.
It made him feel a little bit drunk. Violet sighed slowly. "You're right," she continued. "I feel so insignificant."
Tate whirled around to face her. It was his turn for a confession. "You don't have to feel insignificant. Cause I know we are, in the grand scheme of things, utterly and completely irrelevant, but you're significant to me. And I've never felt that way about anyone." He stopped suddenly, when the punch-drunk feeling of being with her started to fade.
Violet's face went soft around the edges.
Tate closed his eyes, letting the sea spray cool down his red face. He didn't know why telling the truth was so hard. He didn't see Violet stand up and slowly make her way over to him.
"Thanks for not pretending," she whispered, wrapping both her hands around one of his.
It was one of those perfect moments, the kind Tate liked to think about while he stood on his ledge, looking at the pavement. It was one of those moments that he replayed while he took his steps back to earth. It was one of those moments that he usually kept completely to himself, hoarding it from everyone on the outside, anyone that would try to take it away from him. Only this time, he shared it with her.
He liked to make her smile. It didn't happen very often, the curling of the corners of her lips and the sudden visibility of the fine lines of her cheekbones. He could get one out of her when he kissed her nose, or when he told her she mattered, but the biggest smile he received by far came when he got her a flower.
They met underneath the shadow of her shit afternoon. She molded her lips to his automatically, with a fury he'd never felt before. He didn't wind his hands in her hair, because he was too busy holding on to a tiny sliver of happiness that he'd hoped would brighten her day.
She broke away abruptly, still glaring. "My mom still won't ask my dad to move out, and she's crying all the time, and-"
"I got you something," Tate burst out. He watched the lines around her eyes soften as she looked up at him. "I got you a flower. I painted it black, cause I know how you don't like normal things."
She reached out for it slowly, seemingly not believing that it was true until she held it in her hand. "I love it," she whispered, bringing it up to her face. "No boy has ever given me a flower before."
He waited for the smile, the crooked way that her mouth moved that made him feel like he had a purpose.
"It smells like paint," she said, and then there it was. She looked like she was made of light, the bright at the end of his tunnel. "Why are you looking at me like that?"
"I want to make you feel better." He wanted to tell her that her parents didn't count for shit, and that she was the most beautiful person he'd ever seen, and that he wanted her to understand that she was the most important thing in his world.
Instead, he took a step forward, feeling the cool breeze rolling off the ocean, and he pressed his lips to hers. He could feel the flower pressing against his chest as her fingers curled around it, careful not to touch the thorns that he could feel digging into his skin through the fabric of his shirt.
They didn't break apart for a long time, but when they did, she had a smile on her face and a flower in her hands.
The phone rang at 2 in the morning. Tate picked it up before his mother could wrap her robe around herself. It was Violet.
He heard her gasping tears as soon as he picked up the receiver. "Tate?"
"It's me, it's me," Tate crooned, clutching the plastic receiver like a lifeline. "Violet? Are you okay? Do you need me to come over?"
"I need to get away, Tate," she sobbed. "Please come take me away."
"I'll be right there," Tate said firmly into the phone. "Don't go anywhere without me, okay? I'm coming, I promise."
He hung up the phone while trying to pull on a pair of his jeans, cursing as he fumbled with the buttons. He realized he forgot shoes when he pressed his foot down on the accelerator of his mother's car, feeling the car rev to life beneath his bare feet. He didn't turn around.
He arrived at her house with nothing on but a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt he hadn't bothered to button. He'd been to her house before, when he threw pebbles at her window because one of them wanted to escape, but never like this, never frantic and worried out of his mind.
He threw pebbles at the window, like he always did, but it felt wrong. Pebbles were too small. He wanted her to hear him breaking down walls to get to her, because he would.
She emerged from the back door after two taps. Her face was red and her eyes were swollen and traced with tears. The first thing he noticed about her was that she had thought to put on her beat up Converse and a jacket, at least. Then he thanked a god he didn't believe in for her life.
He ran in his bare feet to wrap his arms around her seconds after she stepped out of the doorway. She practically collapsed in his arms, her sobs growing in volume as he pressed her face against his bare chest. He was astonished to discover that he himself was crying into the top of her head. "It's okay," he heard himself whisper, over and over. "I'm here. I'm here."
"I need to get out of here," Violet choked out.
He took her hand and made to start walking along the sidewalk the way they always did, bumping shoulders all the way to the beach.
"Not the ocean," Violet said, tugging her hand away. "I want to drive somewhere."
Tate didn't protest, just got into the front seat of the car and turned the key. Violet sat next to him, her lips pressed together tightly, staring straight ahead at the road in front of her. Tears still dripped out of her eyes every now and then, and she caught them on the backs of her hand, swiping at them angrily.
They drove in silence for a while, punctuated by Violet's little gasps she made when she wasn't quite done crying. "I'm sorry," she muttered after one of them.
Tate looked away from the expanse of black and took her hand. "You're okay."
"I felt so small," Violet said, somehow spurred on by the circles Tate was rubbing on the back of her hand. "Like how I feel at the beach but a million times worse, and I couldn't think about anything other than the fact that I'm going to die and nobody will remember who I am and nothing will be different in the world because I'm not worth anything, and it's true, it is-"
Tate looked straight into her eyes without letting up on the gas. "Don't say that. Don't. You're worth so much to me. Everything."
"I wanted to feel like the only person in the universe," Violet explained softly.
"You're the only one in mine."
Violet finally took her eyes off of his hand on hers and looked into his brown ones. That was all it took for him to smile at her, for the worry lines that creased his eyes to vanish and the boyishness of his face that he'd slowly revealed to her come to the surface.
And then she was smiling, her salty cheeks pulling up slightly, one higher than the other, like always. They would be okay, he decided, as she set to finding a radio station that played "real music," her hair falling in front of her barely illuminated face. They would be okay.
They drove for hours, taking winding back streets and playing with the radio. Tate liked to switch the stations to play the boy bands, making Violet rant about the state of music in their fucked up society and fight with him to change the channel back. They stopped for gas at a station they'd never been to before, Violet refusing to let him out of the car in his bare feet and instead getting the gas herself. He watched her smile as she walked into the rundown gas station, her silhouette picking out the sourest candy she could find on the shelf, paying for it with crumpled dollar bills she'd found stashed in the glove compartment.
She dropped her bounty on the seat between them, tossing the change at him absentmindedly. She whistled softly while she combed through the warheads and gummy worms to find the one pack of sour patch kids. "You have to bite the heads off first," she said handing him all yellow candies. "It's more humane that way."
He laughed, accepting her rejected candy as she picked through each bag. She smiled when he stuck five warheads in his mouth on a dare, and kissed away the tears that came out of his eyes when the sour became too much.
The dark road that stretched out for miles in front of him seemed to be illuminated by the cadence of her voice and the roundabout ways she said that she loved him. Handing him the pink and blue gummy worms; checking his seatbelt before they left the parking lot; squeezing his hand whenever she caught a glimpse of a bat or a particularly interesting tree.
He knew she'd never say it so plainly, the three words that every teenage girl in their high school longed to hear and said too soon. But he knew it was true. He knew that they were young, and in love, and that they were the only two people in the universe lucky enough to have fallen into each other's arms on a windy rooftop.
Except soon he could see the sun, and he knew that he had to drive home and face reality. Face his mother wondering why he took the car in the middle of the night, and Violet's parents wondering where she'd been, and the schoolteachers constant jeers when he didn't know the answer. They had to return from their little bubble and to their large, personal hell.
Violet, who had been so happy just driving with him moments before, was hysterical when he turned down her street to drop her off.
Tate put the car in park and wrapped his arms around her. For the second time that night, she sobbed into the front of his shirt. "You said you'd take me away," she cried, her voice muffled.
"We can go back after school, Vi," Tate explained. "I promise I'll come back for you, and we can go away again, okay?"
"Don't leave me here." Violet looked up, her eyes meeting his, the brown intermingling. Tate caught the tears with his thumbs, wiping them off of her cheeks gently. "I thought we were getting away."
"We are, we are," Tate whispered. "We just need to get through today first. Just today, Violet. I promise you I'll never leave you." A new round of sobs racked Violet's thin frame.
"Hey," Tate said firmly, catching her chin in his hands. "I love you, okay? I swear I'll come back for you and we can get out of here."
She hiccuped, looking at him, and tried to smile. He kissed her once, hard, and let go of her slowly, walking to the car and climbing in the passenger's seat. The last thing he saw as he drove away was Violet standing in the doorway.
He found her after school that day, when he walked to her house to check on her. She was lying on her bed, curled around an empty pill bottle, the quilt around her head damp with tears.
He couldn't think, and he'd seen it in movies, sometimes, when the character had too much to drink or smoke they'd put them in a cold shower. He grabbed her hands, the hands that had just been clutching his so desperately begging him not to leave her, and dragged her limp body down the hallway and to the bathroom. He lifted her up and lay her down on top of him in the old footed bathtub. The cold water cascaded down the tops of their heads, filling up around Tate's legs. She didn't stir. He tried to make her throw the pills up. She threw up some, but not enough.
"Don't you die on me, Violet," he yelled through clenched teeth. "Don't you die."
He sobbed, holding her against him, brushing her damp hair away from her face. He pressed kisses to her neck. He needed her to know that he loved her, in the end.
She died with her body nestled into the curve of Tate's chest, the one place where she felt like she had truly fit.
The principal called an assembly in front of the entire school to "explain the tragedy of the event." Tate didn't go. He'd heard it all before. The generic speeches about how she was such a great and passionate person whose light will never stop shining on the school without saying anything specific about her. They didn't give a damn about her. She was a statistic to them, a number that they had to add to their death toll, a subtraction that they could write off with a sappy speech and an abstract mural in her name.
Instead, he went to the library, the place that he'd spent all his time brooding before she arrived with her crooked smile and the way she said his name, like she wanted to savor the taste of it on her tongue. He watched as a girl with purple hair turned the pages of Wuthering Heights with disinterest, checking to make sure he was looking every couple of pages.
When he closed his eyes, all he could see was a book with brightly colored birds on every page and a pair of hands that fit into his like puzzle pieces turning pages slowly, tracing the outlines of the clouds and trees behind the birds.
He couldn't stop wandering the halls like a ghost. She whispered to him from the walls, telling him that he shouldn't have left her all alone. He should have taken her away when he could, because now she was gone where he couldn't reach.
He needed to reach her. He needed to get away from this fucking world. From all the shit, and the piss, and the filth. She whispered to him.
He prepared for the noble war.
His edges were blurred. It wasn't particularly unpleasant. She'd told him to take it, that it was like a soldier having one last sip of whiskey before the battle. After all, he needed his courage if he wanted to do what he had to.
It made her easier to hear. He felt, all of a sudden, like she wasn't far out of his reach.
After that, he let her voice take over. It didn't sound quite like her anymore. The way she said his name was harsh, and he couldn't hear it shaped with a smile the way it had been when she'd been alive and she'd loved him.
She told him to do things that he'd only thought about in his darkest moments. He loved her.
He followed her orders.
He found himself in the library, of all places. He could feel the image of the room sharpening, the books coming into focus faster and faster. Her voice raised to a shout, telling him to do it quickly, that she wanted him with her right away. That the faster he did it, the sooner he would be out of his misery.
He raised his gun and paced. As he wandered around the room and tried to keep from noticing the quivering forms under the desks and behind the shelves, he could hear her directing him. She'd tell him which ones needed to get the farthest away, which ones needed escape. He listened to her without hesitation.
She said he was done, that there was only one more thing left to do. He made his way slowly to the roof, to stand on his ledge. He thought about her crooked smile, and the way she smelled like smoke in the afternoons. He thought about all the ways in which he'd loved her, from the way she crossed her feet over his to the spot on the center of her forehead that he would kiss when she cried.
He heard the song that she'd whistled on her good days in his ears. She whispered in his mind softly, now, to the tune of her whistling, a poem he used to read in the library when it all became too much. Before he discovered her.
He whispered with her, his voice hissing in the bright morning air. "I'm happiest when most away, I can bear my soul from its home of clay-"
The door burst open and a number of cops spilled out onto the concrete roof. Tate stayed on his ledge. He was going to see her, soon. He felt a smile spread out the corners of his face.
His chest was spotted with red as they stared each other down. One man stepped forward slowly, his weapon still locked on Tate. "Why did you do it, son?"
Now, she told him. He made a sudden movement towards them, and they all opened fire, their dots turning into red holes in his now lifeless body, toppling over the edge of the roof and landing where he'd always imagined himself, sprawled on the pavement.
His last thought, while he was falling, was of her hair, and the way it fell over the pages of her book the first day on the roof. He wished that they were the birds from the pages, so she could whistle always, and so they could have flown away when they had the chance.
so this was at least 2 weeks of solid writing and maybe 2 days of revision so i hope that you guys read and enjoy!
*also take my characterization and world with a grain of salt, i'm fifteen so the 90s mostly elude me and, well, so do the inner workings of these immeasurably complex characters that i love dearly but cannot pretend to understand completely*