“You’re going to stay? For what?” he asked, his voice cracking with fury. “You’resixteen. He’s twenty-one. Do you know what that looks like? He should have never been with you, and now he’s gone.”
“No.” I said desperately. He couldn’t be.
“Yes.” His friend pushed back, trying to grab my elbow to pull me from the floor where we’d slept that night, but I ripped my elbow back. “And he didn’t leave a letter to his mom or his family. He left it to you.”
Jonny never had approved with us being together. No one had. And his words pelted me like a hailstorm that I couldn’t see through.
“We love each other,” I murmured.
“He didn’t love anybody but the drugs,” he grumbled and swiped the mess off the floor.Needles and powder and . . . God, had we done all that? “How much of this did he give you?”
I was sobbing, the tears pooling so high before I blinked them away that I could barely see my lover’s blue lips. Could I drown in them? Could I get lost in my own tears so I didn’t have to wake up either? Because without him, I didn’t want to.
“How could this happen? I was right here the whole night. I was right—”
“He gave you more than you asked for, and you passed out.” He shook his head in disgust. “He’s known for—”
“Don’t you dare talk bad about him right now.”
“He’s been cheating on you this whole time!” his friend bellowed at me. The words cut through me, trying their best to cause damage.
I shook my head in denial. I would ask him when he got up. “He needs our help, Jonny. He’s not fucking breathing, Jonny. Call someone. Call someone, please.”
He pursed his lips, and his chin shook but no tears came. “You gotta get out of here, or he’s going to be charged with statutory rape and dealing to minors before they pronounce him dead. You’ll cause the family a shit storm. Disappear. Don’t come to the funeral, and don’t mention his damn name.”
“But...” I glanced down at him, “He’s not dead, Jonny.”
He grumbled “Fuck me,” before he came for me. He didn’t hesitate to swoop me up and carry me to his car kicking and screaming.
“How can you do this? I love him! Don’t you love him? He needs help.”
As he threw me in his pickup and slammed the passenger door, I scrambled for my purse to look for my phone. By the time he rounded the hood and got in, he held his up to his ear and said, “Yeah, my friend OD’d. I’m pretty sure he’s gone, but we need an ambulance.”
Whatever he said after that, I didn’t hear. I was bawling, begging, pleading with God. I needed my first love back, even if he was a secret. Even if I was his dirty little plaything.
At sixteen, everyone would have said I’d been groomed, coerced, pushed into loving him.
They’d have been right. I learned that much later. Jonny called me to say our drugs had been laced with fentanyl. I’d been lucky. Vincent hadn’t.
Yet, it didn’t negate the pain. It didn’t make this any less hard. He’d gave me my first kiss, my first falling in love, my first time letting go of my innocence. He’d also shared my first high, and now I’d shared his last. We were connected. He’d told me I was his forever, that he’d love and take care of me to infinity and beyond.
I crumpled up that paper and stuck it in my pocket. His last communication with the world had been for me. For only me.
That had to mean something, right?
“Get rid of that note, Izzy,” Jonny warned as he dropped me off two blocks from my house. “And here, take a few bars. If you’re feeling down, they’ll pick you up.”
I snatched them, my body already scouring for a way to avoid the sadness, the agony, and the trauma I would have to endure on my own. “Jonny, I don’t think I can do this.”
That first heartbreak, it was like a meteor flew from the sky and landed right on the one thing that pumped love through my veins.
“You can. Do it for him, Izzy. For us. We’re your friends. We can’t have this on our records. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell anyone, or you’ll ruin the memory of him.”
My mother and sister greeted me as I walked in that day. I told them I was sick from my sleepover, that my girlfriend had been the worst kind of friend and I needed space.
They knew something was wrong.
Lilah knocked on my door for much longer than normal. She probably somehow felt my grief. So I covered it up with a pill.