When you find the library, you aren't excited. What you're feeling is something beyond that - a feeling of finding a home you didn't know you were missing. You think you might have found everything you ever needed.

Your life changes over the next few months, slips around not yet - but someday and she's the one who let them in and Cassandra, listen to me. You never thought you needed anyone but now you find yourself wondering how long she has left. How long until the ticking time-bomb inside her skull explodes, taking you all with her.

You try to ignore it. But when you're holding her in your arms she smells like vanilla and buttercups and you can't help but think that maybe if you hold her hard enough she'll be able to stay. Because if there's one thing this world needs it's Cassandra, and if there's one thing you need, well, maybe it's the same.


The first time you kiss her, it's harsh and brief and it's all the I need yous you haven't been able to say. You pull back. You should never have done that (you don't need her, you don't need anyone. Because if you need her and you lose her you're going to drown.)

You can't remember when I learned my lesson turned into this desperate throbbing behind your lungs, and you didn't ask for this but neither did she, and you find yourself walking away when she's too close because you're afraid of what you might not stop yourself from doing.


The second time you kiss her is when you're all out celebrating at a bar and maybe you get a little hammered and maybe you go outside and maybe she follows you out and maybe you say things like I want you and I need you and maybe she leans up on her tiptoes and kisses you, slowly, softly, before walking away.

You watch her. Every time she comes into the room you wonder how she would feel crushed against your skin, every time she smiles you want to be the reason. Every time she falls, you wonder how you're going to breathe when she's gone.

You can't stop it, she tells you, and maybe that's the part that scares you the most. Your whole life, you've been able fit everything into neat little boxes.

Up until Cassandra. Up until the brain grape.

You can feel yourself breaking, day by day - shattering into fragments of something that used to be a person.

(You need her. You need her, and you love her, and she's going to leave you.)


The third time you kiss her, you're standing over a hospital bed, and she's somewhere in between the stars.