AN: Sorry this is such a short chapter, but I'll post the next one soon. Thanks everyone for the reviews!
I'm sure it took a lot of strength to kill herself, but if there was one thing Spencer lacked, it was not strength. If anything, she had too much of that. At least that's the way it seemed from her outward appearance.
Twenty-four hours.
It's been twenty-four hours since she killed herself, and I miss the girl I used to know more than anything.
God, I miss her.
-
"Draw what you see," the art teacher, Montgomery, was saying for the fourth time that class period. I had given Spencer that little piece of information nearly every day since we met, and it kind of bothered me to know that she was listening to him more than me. I was her best friend. He was a crummy art teacher with a ponytail and paint on his hands that he could have washed off if he had just tried. That may sound poetic to some of you, but I'm not much of a poet. I'm a novelist, which is why...well, it says a lot about me, that's all. That's all you need to know.
Her drawing had gotten better and mine had gotten worse. That's not an opinion, it's just a fact. It was a fact that I had tried to ignore, but when Montgomery was complimenting Spencer's artwork, and all I got was a pat on the back, I knew I could do better. I was always trying to push myself. I pushed myself until I couldn't push any further.
Spencer was drawing my bicycle for some reason only known to herself and God. And I was drawing her eyes. That probably seems weird and stalkerish, but she had asked me to draw them the day before. I would have been doing really good, too, if my pencil wasn't being so stubborn and if I had had enough sense to know that a piece of graphite could never capture the shade and tint of that girl's eyes. They were so blue.
"Are those my eyes?" she asked quietly. She was getting to be more and more quiet those days, but it didn't seem like a big deal. We were both changing. When I nodded, she locked eyes with me. "Draw what you see, Ash. Just what you see."
I wish she could look me in the eye right now. Look me in the eye and tell me that she made a mistake. She couldn't have meant to do it.
She didn't mean to do it, I swear.
-
Maybe I speak for Spencer too often.
-
I'm going to take a break for a moment, maybe for my sake, maybe for yours.
Maybe this is just another story for you to say you have read, but to me, it's not just another story. It's more than words on a page. It's Spencer's words on my page, because everything was easier on us when we worked together.
You're probably wondering—and if you're not, you should be—why I'm so concerned with writing Spencer's story rather than my own. To that question, I have to say that I only have one answer. She wanted me to.
She asked me to.
-
Back to the past. Sound good? Good.
Two years ago last night, Spencer and I went trick-or-treating. Yeah, we were total nerds, but who cares, you know? We figured it would be our last Halloween as kids. Now that I've grown up some (especially in the last day) I realize that it was our last Halloween as kids.
We stopped at every house on our block, except for Aiden's, and only gave up when a group of semi-hostile soccer moms with sadly similar haircuts gave us a group-wide scowl and sent us running home, laughing the whole way.
So much for being kids, right?
-
We weren't the type of girls most parents would want their children being around, but only because I wore all black and had an eyebrow ring, and Spence was viewed as a stuck-up prep to everyone but me and her dog.
Have I told you about her dog? Well, he's my dog now. I'll tell you about him soon, don't worry.
Parents didn't like us, so we really didn't have many friends besides each other. But that was fine, just fine. It was fine until last night, when I realized she needed more than what I was giving her.
I tried.