The day I woke up to the news, I spent my first five waking hours trying to convince myself that I shouldn’t blow it out of proportions. I didn’t want it to drag me down again. I refused to let it drag me back down. So I shoved it out of my mind and repeated consecutive “It’s okay”s until I felt better.

But then I came to my senses and realized that my best friend had overdosed. And I realized that I didn’t know how to live through a week by myself.

The first day was strange. My mind faded in and out of denial, like when you get a test back and it’s got a huge 100% on the top which means you got every single question right, though you have no idea how. Disbelief, and raging thoughts of “that can’t be right” flooded the very air I was breathing. She overdosed. She overdosed. Yes, she was suicidal and made that very prominent in our conversations, but this time, she actually did it. She disregarded everything; her friends, her job, her family, in a split second of unconfidence.

It was the second day when I noticed that all my teachers were being nice to me. They knew, and were preparing for the worst-case scenario. “Let’s just be nice to her so that she grows accustomed to her favorite person’s absence.”

She had literally sent me a wakeup call which informed me why she would no longer be in school for a while and it was 6:30 when I got the message. I read the first few words before I had even rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, but I couldn’t register them because my heart was pounding so annoyingly and I couldn’t get it to shut up. I thought “Okay, okay, she’s fine now, she’ll be fine.”

I was in social studies when I admitted that I had been lying to myself for hours. She would come back to school maybe and pretend that nothing had happened and I would welcome her back and fill her in on everything she had missed. She would ask how many people wondered where she was. I would answer “two.” Or maybe I’d answer “everyone” to make her feel better.

She’d ask me to name all of them so she could sort out her real friends from her fake ones.

When my teachers constantly asked how I was doing or how my day went, I actually felt suffocated because if they were worried enough to inquire, it was most definitely a serious matter. Someone asked me where she was at lunch and some idiot replied “she died” to get a few laughs and I panicked too much, even though I was the only kid who knew where she really was.

Each day consisted of a chorus of “I don’t know, maybe she’s sick.” In her message she told me that she wasn’t physically sick, she was fine.

I got to thinking about the last time I saw her in person. Laughing the whole day, talking loudly and making jokes, very normal. We had spent the entire day together, mostly on our own, drinking green tea in antique bookstores like the hipsters we were. then two days later, snap, drugs. Drugs with no explanation, except that she had used the kind that were supposed to make her feel better.

Every day, I expected to hear her voice in my ear, but all I could hear was the whistling of the birds because the snow was melting so they were all coming back. They sang so loudly outside the classroom windows, taunting us at our captivity. They sang, and my mind would wander and I would find myself thinking about her, even though I didn’t want to. I didn’t want another thing to remind me why I shouldn’t get up in the morning, another reason why it just wasn’t worth the effort. I had banished most of that. I had stabbed depression in the throat and so far that visualization was working. I was growing out of the shell of sadness that I had acquired throughout the winter, and at 6:30 on Monday morning it all came flooding back. I was angry that I couldn’t find solace in another friend because it was a secret. My best friend’s pending destruction was classified. No one could know or help. I waited in silence for her return.

That happened on a Thursday.

It was really casual at first, “hey, I’m back,” and she’d be in school the next day, maybe. She wasn’t there in the morning, so people were starting to get really confused as to where she was. I repeated, “she’s sick,” but I don’t know if they believed me anymore because there were no major viruses going around, none that would keep her from her phone, anyway.

I saw her in the afternoon, just sitting. She said hi and I said hi and I put my bag down and we didn’t speak after that. I felt like I wanted to, but there were other students around and we were supposed to be quiet even though it was our free period so technically we could do what we wanted.
At one point during the day she disappeared and I couldn’t pay attention to anything because I was keeping track of how long she’d been gone. When it reached 20 minutes, I bolted out of my study hall to look for her and my teacher didn’t say anything because she knew what was going on.

People stared when I threw open the doors; there are a lot of exits at my school because it’s so large and the dorm students use a different door than the regular kids. I ran in circles around campus, searching in every corner and shadow. I found her slumped by some stairs looking at nothing. I asked her if...

“No,” she said.

“Right, well, the teacher just wanted to make sure you’re not buying drugs or anything.”

“Like I’d buy drugs.”

I led her back to class and when the bell rang she left, and I didn’t see her again that day, not even when I was waiting for my bus, though she usually says hi or something before she leaves. I wondered how she got home.

I asked her what it was like, being away by herself. She said the other kids there were great; very understanding and nice. She didn’t want to be hospitalized and her placement at the crisis center was consensual so she wasn’t kept there against her will. It was okay there. The staff was friendly and there were porn channels on t.v. Once some younger kids came, she got overwhelmed. That was the end of that.