Click to Subscribe - By L. M. Augustine Page 0,24

friend’s heart. I feel like they’re taunting me, guilting me, because these strangers, stares and all, must know what a hopeless idiot I am to turn away the one person I have left in the world.

I take a deep breath. Each step I take seems to fall in rhythm with my pounding heart—step, beat, step, beat. The air is thick all around me, and I feel my mind slowly fade out. All I hear is the sound of my heart and each of my footfalls, and the background noise seems to disappear. I keep fast-walking until I reach my car, step inside, slam the door shut, and back out of the parking lot.

The only thing I can think about on the drive back is Cat. Cat Cat Cat. I want to cry, want to scream and pound the steering wheel until this all goes away, until Harper ends up to be real and Cat and I can stay best friends and not… not this. Anything but this.

Cat is in love with me and I turned her down.

Oh shit. That really happened, didn’t it? I really turned her down. And she walked away like I’d just punched her in the face. Shit shit shit. I feel like I made a mistake somehow, like I should’ve done something more to fix this. I mean, she’s my best friend. Why couldn’t I have just manned up and given it a shot? What am I so scared of? I loved Harper, and if Cat is really Harper… what’s the difference?

I turn out of Main Street and make my way to the back roads toward my house, kicking myself internally over and over again. But I can’t love Cat, right? We’re friends, best friends, but we aren’t the kind to date. We wouldn’t date. We can’t date.

I’ve only ever truly cared for four people in the world: my mom, my dad, Cat, and Harper. Now two of them are gone and one is just about gone to me. Cat is the only person left. I grip the steering wheel harder. I’m not letting her go. I’m not going to fall for her—like, for real—and only have my heart ripped to shreds again. I care about her and I love her like a friend, but that’s all: like a friend.

I turn another corner. My head is throbbing again. I feel like I should’ve known Cat was Harper, or at least guessed it. I should’ve prepared myself for this, thought about it, given her a real response. But Cat being Harper makes so much sense. They both talk alike, think alike, and they both make me feel warm and happy inside. I only mesh with one person in the world as much as I mesh with Harper, and that person is Cat.

Because Harper isn’t real, idiot.

I still remember the night Mom died. I was sitting in my room, filming for my vlog, when it happened. Dad and Mom went out for a date night an hour earlier. They’d been fighting so much lately that they said they needed to “reconnect” for a while, which so clearly would not happen, especially because they had a heated, hour-long debate on where to even go to dinner beforehand. They ended up compromising on some cheesy French restaurant, which served alcohol for my dad and wasn’t filled with screaming sports fans for my mom. I knew the night would end in them fighting some more, of course, so I distracted myself with my vlog, hoping it would all just go away and we could be a family again—a real family.

What I didn’t count on was for Dad to get drunk or wasted or whatever the hell he was.

What I didn’t count on was for him to get so worked up that he forced Mom to let him drive because “that bitch would try to kill him” if she were behind the steering wheel.

What I didn’t count on was for him to run a red light to “get home faster” and for a truck at their right to crash into the passenger door.

What I didn’t count on was for my mom to die.

When I got the news, it was late into the night—really late. Even after factoring in the time for them to scream at each other by the car after they stormed out of the restaurant (this happened a lot), I knew it was still taking too long. The air felt off, and when the doorbell rang midway through my filming,