Something Is Wrong

Something is wrong. Lights were flashing outside at two in the morning. He should be asleep. Instead he’s stumbling out of bed, stubbing his tone on the floor, limping to the window to see – to see what? To see what’s going on? He supposes this must be it. He doesn’t know. He can’t think.

He ignores his questioning parents as they emerge from their room, runs downstairs, roughly pulls on his boots and stamps them on as he jumps off the porch, to the pavement outside. It couldn’t be happening. He was going as fast as he could, now, screaming at the policemen and the neighbors and the nurses: what was going on? What are you all gathered around? The cops can’t stop him, because he cannot be stopped, or so he thinks. He doesn’t hear the neighbors talk to the chief of police – mention something about best friends. He throws himself on the pavement, and he sees his two friends. Mark, the boy, is on the ground. Lucretia – or Lu – is on her knees, his head on her knees. She is stroking his hand. Mark is sleeping. He had to be. His eyes were closed. What else would he be doing? He doesn’t know. He can’t think.

That’s when he realizes he’s scared. More scared than he ever was after a couple hours spent in his living room watching the Jurassic Park movies with Mark and Lu. He doesn’t know. He can’t think.

He sees Lu’s face, in a moment of clarity. It scares him even more. She looks so calm, he thinks, so calm and I don’t know how she does it. She looks up at him, and says his name.

Dylan, she says quietly. Dylan – do you know what’s happening?

He remembers how her mother is a psychiatrist and wonders if that has to do with it. He shakes his head in answer to her question. Lu bows her head. He wonders why. He doesn’t know. He can’t think.

Then suddenly he’s screaming again. He’s screaming at Lu to stop being so calm, so accepting, to be angry and confused and to refuse to believe it. Refuse to believe what the paramedics are saying.

O.D.’ed, says one doctor. Kid had to be shooting up for weeks. I guess his friend didn’t know.

Poor guy, said another. If only the kid knew what he would put his friends through.

He’s shouting at them now, saying how this stuff doesn’t happen to them, doesn’t happen to people like him and Mark and Lu, doesn’t happen in his neighborhood and his city. It happens a million miles away to people who deserve it, people who do drugs and are in gangs and have tattoos and kill people and hate everyone.

Mark and Lu and he had always fantasized about what tattoos they would get. Mark wanted a scorpion. Dylan wanted a python or a cool twist-y design that made nothing but was really cool looking. Lu wanted the Chinese symbol for peace, or a butterfly, or a swan. He always wondered why they chose what they did. He didn’t know. He couldn’t think.

Lu is still looking at Mark, that same look on her face, so sad, so miserable, so…knowing. Gentle Lu, who’d never hurt anyone, who’d stuck up for the little kids at recess, who had once pushed her own brother into the mud because he’d been calling Dylan an idiot for getting a C on his history test.

That had been a long while ago, long before they’d gotten interested enough into girls to fight over one. It had been over Susan of all people. Susan, who had turned out to be a bitch and not worth it anyway, who had torn them apart.

Now, though, Dylan knew. He could think. He could think about how sorry he was, and how angry he was – at himself, at Mark, at all the people standing around gawking like it was a freak show. He could think about all the things he had said and wished he hadn’t, and about the things he wished he had said but didn’t. He could think about all that would never be, about how different he would be, now that his best friend in the world had died.

All over a drug. All over a girl. All over. Forever.

* * *

Lucretia had seen a lot of death. She’d buried a lot of people. Cancer, gangs, drug overdoses, suicide, war, car accidents, heart attack, stroke – there was a lot of ways to die. You learned how fragile Life was, how you had to be careful or else you could lose it.

She’d seen a lot of people cry: at birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, and funerals. After a bad day, after a baby. Over a guy, over a girl, over a dead pet. You name it, she had seen it. And she hated it.

She’d seen a lot of broken hearts: broken over death, another woman, another man, unrequited love, etcetera, etcetera. She’d seen someone die from a broken heart, once. Slowly, bit by bit, they lost themselves in their grief, beginning either from the moment they lost it to when the first handful of dirt was thrown on the coffin.

Today there was a combination of all three. Someone had died, from a drug overdose. People crying everywhere – she was crying. Someone’s heart breaking. Someone burying their true love.

As she walked away, that cold morning in September, she couldn’t help but feel that someone was her.

* * *