If anybody happened to be watching us sitting on the shore of the ocean, they would most likely think that the two of us were engaged in some sort of sighing match, both of us avoiding eye contact before looking over at each other briefly, then sighing again, at a complete loss for words.
Twenty two year old guys do not know how to grieve properly, or even well, which is probably why our reaction to the death of somebody else is to flee to the ocean and drink until we can’t feel our fingertips. We both still smell of The Hospital, and with the taste of bleach and beer mixing in my mouth, I cant help but feel like the anti-septic smell has seeped into our pores and enveloped us, made our stomachs uneasy and turned our tongues to lead. I hear a rustle and hear the click of Ryans lighter. He’s lit a joint, and I don’t bother waving the smoke of it out of my eyes as it washes over me. It’s a bit of a relief to smell something different than bleach and medicine and fear and loss. He puffs and I sink a little lower in the sand, slipping a little further into the earth.

It’s a good thing we can’t seem to talk because all I can think about was the fact that I would never miss a call from Kelly again or try to sneak into concerts for free together. I would never lose at mini golf to her and I would never be angry with her again or catch her when she fell off the low-hanging roof over her porch or take a bad photo together with her.
It’s been 4 hours since the ride to the hospital and the scratchy chairs and the bright white walls and the incessant beeping of machines and the distant crying of Kellys mother and it’s been two hours since Ryan pulled me up out of my chair.
It’s been two hours since we wandered in, our eyes squinting against the bright lights, staring directly at the small gurney.
It was hard to even see her, her skin as bleach-white as the sheets she was buried in.
She was sitting beneath two florescent lights that the stinging in my eyes turned to twenty.
She looked like she was sleeping.
I doubt that she looked like she was sleeping when she died. Ryan goes to med school, and he told me that everyone shits themselves when they die. It seems much kinder to show the family the bodies looking like they just slipped away, peaceful and slow. But all of us here know that everyone will fight death. That Kelly would fight death.

It’s been fifty minutes since we stood out front of those automatic glass doors and it’s been forty seven minutes since I began to drive and thirty two minutes since Ryan began shouting, loud and angry and pounding the dashboard, and twenty seven minutes since he yelled “It’s not ok Steven!”, and twenty seven minutes since he was absolutely right.
.
I remember seeing her mom there, in the hospital. She hasn’t spoken to me since I was 16, and began to blame me for her daughter’s entrance into the world of drug experimentation, and now she probably blames me for this too. For the overdose, for everything. I don’t blame her.
“She’s in a better place now” she said in a shaky voice as I began to make my way out of the hospital and if I hadn’t been so dumbstruck with grief and shock, I probably could have replied, or reacted in some way to the first words she’s said to me in seven years, or even laughed because if she was talking about heaven Mrs. Aschel knows better than anyone that girls like Kelly are too much for heaven. All loud and bright with a voice on fire.
Twenty minutes ago we got out of the car, and nineteen minutes ago I could feel his chest shaking as he wrapped his arms around my shoulders, his ruddy stubble digging into and scratching my neck.
And I am nineteen minutes away from him whispering “She’s gone, man” and when he did I almost laughed.
“She’s gone” sounds like she’s left, like she’ll be back.
He sounds like Kelly’s mom, all hopeful and broken and empty. I don’t speak out of the fear that I will sound the same.
She will never, never be back and neither will the sharp angles of her bones and neither will the sound of her bare feet hitting warm, wet cement, and I would never again look in her eyes and know that she was a flame while I was a fluorescent light.
We wander like we’re sleepwalking, my shoes and Ryans bare feet sinking into the soft sand of the beach.
I can’t help but wonder if the heroin around here has gotten crazy, or if she suddenly got very bad at using it.
I turn to Ryan to ask him what he thinks, and he laughs like he would at a dirty joke, all shocked and too loud. Shaking his head as he shoves my shoulder slightly, and I laugh back, and it turns out that these are the beginning steps to make a couple of emotionally stunted boys start sobbing uncontrollably.
Flames go out, but fluorescents shatter.
We are ten minutes away from the sunrise and I am one foot away from Ryan and 15 miles away from the Hospital and I am four hours away from the call that told me that my friends body was colder than the sand we’re sitting under now.
What her mom said is beginning to make more sense to me now. She’s probably is in a better place, because any place is better than here. Where we are stuck, drinking and smoking and leaving our imprints in the sand, hoping that a wave will come and wash us away.