Elizabeth Malley

598 Words

9/11/07

10/4/07

Imagine

I told her not to do it. Now she's lying there with a tube down her throat. I swore I told her to stop. Unmoving her lips sigh in misery. Her parents visit, her mom, Carol wails like a banshee. I try to tell them I'm sorry but they won't listen to me, they never did. I'm sure that I told her not to do anything stupid, but Sarah never listened. Hello, my name is Kaylee and I am Sarah's best friend. Have been for years, since we were younger.

I would jump the fence showing her how to break past the barriers that held kids out of Miller's Quarry, an enormously wet cavern with deep blue water so deep that neither of us could reach the bottom. I used to jump from the highest cliff, plunging deep but never quite touching the jagged crystals that shone up from the depths. Sarah would tread near the surface calling out my name, her bright blond hair plastered to her face, slick with wet. I was the wild one. I would surface and flip my jet hair back in mermaid fashion and giggle slashing about. "Relax Sarah, nothing bad is going to happen to us."

When Sarah started school something changed, after a while she wouldn't hang out with me, but I was still there, in class, and when she needed me, to help study for a spelling test or with her math homework, I was there.

Last year she went to University, I helped her pack and naturally I went with my best friend. And in my opinion her roommate was a bitch and she turned Sarah from my friend into a person that was unrecognizable to me and to her parents.

This past summer she partied a lot, I would go, just to make sure that she got home alright, because I was her best friend, and she remembered that.

Her second year she lived by herself but kept a blanket and a pillow on her couch for me. We went to class and she never really saved me a seat, so if there wasn't any space next to her or near her I would just try to find a space near the back, or I would just stand near the door, in the shadows, taking notes, listening in on the lectures that Sarah was missing because she was listening to her mp3 player and texting her "friends" frantically, popping on her gum as well. What happened to my best friend? One night, she was partying. It was the night before a test, when she should have been studying. I offered her my notes and my help but she ignored me. I pleaded with her to go back to her room, but these fell on deaf ears.

She drank too much. She got behind the wheel. Now her parents are angry. Where did their little princess go? Their tall, All-American vegetable was all that remained. Everything compared to her best friend, the short, dark exotic girl. Her only true friend. Her conscious, will make the sacrifice, because I would rather have my best friend alive and thinking for her self, than pretending to be someone that she isn't and killing herself every breath. As I lay next to her on the hospital bed, crushing myself against the rails uncomfortably, I allow a small tear to fall, landing on Sarah's face.

Sarah's eyes flutter open and she looks around bewildered before frowning deeply in mourning, "thank you Kaylee," she said allowing a single tear to disappear down her cheek.