It was three in the morning, and Amy took her dads keys and drove the nearest gas station. She bought a pack of cigarettes.

She came home and stood on the back steps and smoked her first one. It was bitter and hot, and she sucked it down as though drinking it, and for a few moments the world was nothing but sweet air and sad, floating stars.

She threw the rest of the pack down the gutter, went behind a tree and vomited. Her head spun pleasantly, and her eyes were dry. She sat down in the dark, fresh mud, and felt the old rain from the grass make the backs of her thighs cool.

The loneliness smothered her, and she thought that she might have tricked herself out of something that could have helped her survive. Maybe the only thing that could have.

*You killed him!*

He certainly had not. Even at three in the morning, shaking from nicotine poisoning in the mud in her back yard, she knew he certainly had not.

She could barely remember the argument. She just remembered the color of Andy's scrubs against the white floor. That blue-green reaper who stood in the threshold, that shimmering, sad moment where it could have been anything. Anything at all. He was so empty looking, and Amy had filled him inside her head with something perfect.

*Oh, Amy, I'm so sorry.*



And then she saw him standing in the corner, watching the floor, and suddenly it occurred to her, he's already dressed for the funeral. That was the last thing she remembered clearly.

*You fucking liar! You fucking thief!*

Her lips remembered words that tasted wrong. They chapped her whole body with their falseness, and she squirmed against the heavy bark of the tree with the bitter taste of sickness and remorse.

How could she have allowed this too to die?

*I wish it had been you!*

It might as well have been. Everything was dying. Everything was dead.

*Don't touch me! Don't touch me, Ephram, don't!*

He hadn't. He had taken a step back. He had looked like he was waiting for something. And she gave it to him.

*Seeing you is pain to me. Seeing you is knowing that this is all your fault. Seeing you hurts.*

She had said that.

*I wish I didn't have to hate you.*

Yes, she'd said that too.

*But I do.*

Yes.

Hope died once that night. And then again, when she murdered it.

Amy felt strong enough to stand, and did. She went inside and changed her clothes and showered and sat down at the computer in the dark. She began to type.

She was up until five twenty, when her mother came out in her nightgown like a ghost. Rose sat her down on the couch and cried with her until she fell asleep.

The next morning, Ephram went to school and found a note slipped into the grates in his locker. It was small, and oddly, it was typed.

Ephram I'm sorry. I had a really awful day.

-Amy