Author's Note: Okay, I really don't like begging, but here goes! Guys, I do check my reader traffic, and there has been a good chunk of people reading this and only one review (and Bialy, I love you for it!). I mean, I know I'm an amateur in this category, but couldn't you throw a poor puppy in the corner a bone when she needs it most? All right, my pathetic begging for consolation in a dark age is done. I really am sorry that I'm emotional, but my life's kind of in the toilet right now, so writing and art are really all I have to turn to. So, here's my update and confession.
*S. Snowflake
La Chanteuse et la Danseuse
Part II
"His girlfriend April left a note saying,
'We've got AIDS'
Before slitting her wrists in the bathroom…"
Roger should have known that living the way they were was asking for trouble, but the drug sharing was like a bad habit. It happened at parties, gatherings, just about anything. There was little talk of who they had known in the past either, but Roger knew April had spent some time in the dark shadows of the nightclubs and other places where she no doubt met some equally dark and shadowy men. Either way, somehow, one of them contracted it. HIV…which would become AIDS…the disease that was only fatal, no other road, no other way. Neither of them had known about it until that one day when April went to the doctor and found out the truth alone.
For a few days after the visit, April would neither eat nor drink. Anything pleasurable was out of the question. She did not talk much, and never said anything about her visit to the doctor. She was like a shut door with no answers escaping or entering. A beautiful spring day came soon afterward that just couldn't be missed. It was still cold as hell outside, but none of the friends wanted to stay in.
Roger tried to convince April to leave the loft as she lay on the couch, emaciated and shaking.
"Babe, you wanna go out for a little while? We could sit in the park and I'll tune up the guitar. We could even mess with Mark and Maureen. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"
She sat coldly and replied with a quiet, "no."
Roger was the last to leave the loft that day, somehow dreading to leave April alone by herself, but he did. How he would regret it afterward…
Roger had not been the one to clean up the blood. The police had already taken care of most of it, and Mark finished the job bravely by cleaning up the stains. Maureen, Mark's girlfriend at the time, threw up at her discovery of April's body in the bathroom, and for once, her dramatics were all too appropriate. It was not too bloody a scene (surprisingly, since April had slit her wrists), but her lifeless, crumpled body was enough of a chilling memory to last an entire lifetime. Mark had also been the one who found the note first on the scene. The words were scrolled on the back of April's blood work card: We've got AIDS.
So, that was why it had happened. She gave up on living since she knew what the virus would already do to her, Roger thought. She couldn't have told me while she was alive, so she told me in this way
For awhile, things stood still in the loft; time seemed an illusion. Benny took his time indulging in his dreams of opening a cyber studio, and eventually he met Allison Gray. Maureen cried about it for the first week or so, but soon searched for sources of distraction from Mark or (more likely), whomever she could get her paws on. Only Mark and Collins tried to help Roger through the difficult time he was having.
"It wasn't your fault," Collins said to Roger who was in the middle of a fit from drugs and depression.
"Nobody would've known she'd do that," Mark added, watching the scene happen as if he were filming it.
"I-I shouldn't've l-left her-r-r," Roger choked, shaking and sobbing at the same time. "That bitch! She left me here, like this!"
Collins and Mark had both lost their patience, and Collins finally shook Roger's arm as he yelled, "Roger, knock it off! Don't you see you're going as crazy as she went?"
Roger shoved him off and breathed deeply to get some air. "-And I'm going to die, just like she did. I gave up on her, and now I'm giving up too."
Mark and Collins watched their friend shake uncontrollably that night and listened to his muttering. There would be no more consoling that night. They knew that things were about to change soon, and not for the better.
