It's late Friday night and I'm staring at the ceiling of Andre's bedroom wondering why I do the things I do.

His house has always been freezing every time I've been here, but right now it feels like a sauna and I can't think over the heat under my skin. My body aches, in a good way, but I feel guilty and I know he does too, though neither of us has talked. The ceiling fan spins above me and my eyes try to follow a black speck on one of the blades as it goes round and round and round. Andre's arm brushes against mine and I flinch involuntarily.

"Do you feel any better?" He asks, and I take my time responding even though it's an easy question to answer.

"No. Do you?" Out of the corner of my eye I can see him looking at me. He shakes his head a little.

"No." We lie in mutual silence for several minutes and I want to leave but I can't get up. I want to just blink my eyes and be home, like magic. I want my parents to leave me alone, and if I did have magic powers I'd bring Tori back too, so I could revive my sanity for a minute or two.

"Are we bad people?" It sounds like such a Tori thing to say and I can't resist turning to him now. I pull the sheets up to my neck and hide my insecurities beneath them when I can't answer him right away.

"I don't know about bad, but I think we're both insane."

"Yeah, probably." He lowers his voice and I can barely hear him as he adds, "We can blame Tori for that."

"Fucking Tori. She ruined my life."

"Bet she did it on purpose." He's trying to joke around and make me feel better but it isn't working and now I'm just crying. I'm so horribly embarrassed, I just want to disappear. I want to go away and live in a world where I never knew Tori and I never knew Beck. A world where I never slept with the only person who has even tried to understand my pain. I want to die, but not permanently. I want to join her but I'm not ready for that yet.

Andre obviously doesn't know what to do, but he takes a big risk and moves closer to me, pulling me up against his chest while he surely prays I don't claw my way out of his grasp. I don't, I just lay there and cry like a little baby and I want to die even more than before.

"Jade?" I take a deep breath and acknowledge him with the absence of my sobbing. "You're not suicidal, are you?" Just then, it hits me.

"You're the only person who's ever asked me that." I don't give him an outright answer. "Nobody takes me seriously enough to think I might be considering going after her." He's gone completely rigid beside me. Maybe he took that as a yes.

"Why would you want to?"

"I don't know. I miss her a lot. She was my best friend and...I loved her." I surprise myself more than him when I say that. I don't know why that possibility hasn't fully appeared in my head until now. Everything would make more sense if I'd been in love with her. Suddenly my memory is blank and I can't remember how she's ever made me feel. I don't know if that's a plausible answer. "I mean...you know the feeling, right?"

"I don't want to die though." I finally give him the response he was originally looking for. "But I keep thinking to myself...if I did would anybody care? Would they just be over it in a week like they were with her? If I died, would everyone just go on with their lives, and I would just become some taboo subject that nobody ever lets themselves think about?"

"They think about it, Jade. They just keep all the sadness to themselves." With a pause, he starts rubbing my back, either more comfortable with me or just distracted. "That's usually how it works. For a while, everyone mourns together...then you just do it in private."

"I'm tired of doing that. I don't want to do that. I want to be sad in public and not have people yell at me or tell me how worried they are. I just want to be sad for once, is there something wrong with that?" He laughs but it's a depressing and misplaced laugh.

"Nah, I'm pretty bad at keeping my feelings to myself too." Sharing my socially unacceptable method of grieving with him really doesn't make me feel much better, but my eyes have finally dried up.

"Andre, did you... That song you sang with Tori, sophomore year...was that about me?" I know it was, but he doesn't answer right away. He sighs, and his fingers curl into a fist against my spine.

"I kinda hoped you wouldn't find out."

"What we just did sounds a whole lot better if you've written a love song about me."

"Guess that's true." He cringes and his breath gets louder. "Man, Beck's gonna kill me."

"No he won't." He just had to bring up Beck's name. I was having a great time, pretending he didn't exist for a few minutes there. "We broke up, and he's not a jealous person. He doesn't give a shit what I do anymore. ...Just as long as it doesn't involve crying. He has a problem with emotion." Everything's gotten awkward again and I'm seeping into the mattress, trying to disappear. It's not working. I spit out a joke to try to fix it. "And a small penis." Now, Andre's trying so hard not to laugh it's hurting him, and I can smile at that.

"I'm not laughing." He chokes on his words and I let them go without saying anything. "Probably still shouldn't tell him though."

"Yeah, definitely." I finally remember what I was originally going to ask him. "When you wrote that song though... Why'd you never tell me?"

"You scared me."

"I scared you?" Not the answer I was looking for but it makes a lot of sense. "What about now?"

"You still scare me."

"Do you think... Is that why Tori didn't tell me?" His hand's massaging my back again and I'm not sure which one of us finds it more soothing.

"You figured me out, but not her?" He doesn't answer but I figure that must be a yes.

"You wrote me a song."

"She helped. She sang it with me."

"True... I guess I just never thought it was that serious. I knew she had a crush on me...but I never imagined anyone could actually love me. Especially her."

"That's the dumbest thing you've ever said." He laughs and I could say the same about him. "You're beautiful, and...unique. Tori liked that. I like that. Anyone could."

"Why don't you just stop talking before you give me another reason to hurt you?"

"That's why you scare me." The conversation ends here and I close my eyes, finally feeling comfortable against him. He's been fighting sleep for an hour now and he goes quickly, but I'm not so lucky. I get to lie in his bed completely paralyzed, curled up beside him. It feels less wrong now, somehow. Every part of me but my mouth had been shouting "no" a few hours ago, when it had started. We'd talked a little in the car as he drove me here but it wasn't anything remarkable. He told me that his grandmother was out of town with some friends until tomorrow night, and we'd both expressed surprise that that crazy mess of a woman had any. I cracked some stupid joke and he made an even dumber one. The subject had turned to Tori, as it always did anymore, and we were quiet for a while, until he parked the car. Saying that I was surprised when he leaned over and kissed me square on the mouth is an understatement, but that didn't stop me from kissing him back, or from crawling over the console into his lap, nearly falling out of the car when he opened the door and led me inside. I knew it wasn't right and it wasn't going to fix anything, but I let him take me to his bedroom anyway, and soon enough he was kissing me and touching me and my body was screaming that everything was better but my mind and my heart were still a melted, scrambled mess inside of me and now I'm not sure where we stand, or even where I do.

My brain crawls into sleeping mode, and I drift off while imagining what it would have been like with Tori. For a second, I tell myself I'm going to find out, but then I fall asleep before I can remember that that's impossible.

…

It was a Tuesday when I went back to school, against the wishes of my doctors, my parents, and my so-called friends. My body was healed, and that was all I was concerned about.. Everyone was so worried about my mental health, but no one entertained the thought that maybe I was fine. I'd lost a baby, not a vital organ. I could live. Sure, I'd been devastated at first, but it only took me a few days to realize that things were better off that way. No child deserved to have me as its mother. Missing out on this world isn't such a bad thing, if you ask me. Life just hurts. My baby didn't have the time to hurt.

Tori took a while to approach me. I caught her watching me at my locker all morning, and she kept staring when she thought I wasn't looking at lunch, which we all ate in silence. The rest of the group was being just as cautious with me as she was, and I hated it. I didn't bother to talk or give them any kind of sign that I was okay, but they should have known. They were my friends. The only people who talked to me at all that day were Beck and Lane, and the latter did more of the talking.

I went home after school and I passed out in my room. I slept all through the night and still felt tired at 7 the next morning, when I finally crawled out of bed after trying to tell myself for half an hour that I didn't have time to make it to school by 8, and therefore shouldn't go.

I was still half asleep when I stumbled inside and went to my locker by myself. I didn't bother to find Beck and he didn't bother to find me. I didn't start the day alone very often.

Just as I got my locker open, a flash of brown and green appeared next to me. Tori had straightened her hair that day, I remember because she'd only done it a handful of times since the day I met her. She was wearing an ugly green sweater that was hanging slightly off her left shoulder, though it obviously wasn't meant to be worn that way. She had a cup of coffee in her hand, like some kind of peace offering. My blood boiled just looking at her.

"It's kind of cold now but I thought you might need some caffeine today." She held it out but I didn't move. I just stared at her and I couldn't even part my lips enough to breathe out my mouth. "Jade?" I blinked. "Are you still mad at me?" I didn't really feel any way at all toward anybody at the time, but I guess subconsciously I'd convinced myself that I was mad, because without even thinking about it I grabbed the cup from her, popped off the lid, and dumped it down the front of her shirt, before slamming my locker closed and walking away, leaving her at the exact point where we'd started.

Instead of going to class, I then went straight to the janitor's closet, leaving the lights out as I sat down on the floor. I rested my head against a trash can while I cried because I definitely was not okay and I was never going to be.

…

It's Saturday morning and I walk into my house feeling a lot better than I had the night before. The sound of the door closing has alerted my parents, and they nearly sprint into the entryway, from the kitchen, looking relieved and angry at the same time. Dad's always fucking here when he thinks I have a problem, but I can't even rely on him to realize he's forgotten me on a sidewalk.

"Where've you been?" Nobody's even going to acknowledge the fact that it's entirely not my fault that I didn't come home last night.

"Oh, just out. Spent the night with some black guy who picked me up off the street when you didn't." It's funny because my dad's been a judgmental, hotheaded racist since the day I was born and even he doesn't take me seriously enough to take offense to that.

"We've both been calling you all morning!" My mother raises her voice with me and I suddenly want to slap her. I've never really felt that way before. We don't exactly have the greatest relationship - we don't really have one at all - but we get along. We don't exactly fight. We're not like most women and for that, I guess I'm grateful.

"And by that time it really didn't matter, did it?" I push past them and head for my room, but they stop me not even two steps away.

"Jade, we're sorry, but you should have called and reminded one of us. Somebody would have come to get you. You can't just spend a whole night out somewhere and not tell us!"

"I'm depressed, not an idiot. I know how to take care of myself, so you can stop pretending you care about any of my real problems." I make it to my room without any more obstacles and I lie down on my bed, realizing that this is the most I've really talked to my parents in a long time. Honestly, it wouldn't be difficult to lay the blame for everything on them, but it's too hard to pry it from my own shoulders.