Page 46 of The Rebel of Raleigh High

“She grabbed hold of my ankle. Wouldn’t let me go. She was so fucked up, but it was surprising how tight she held onto me then. I turned her onto her back, and that’s when I saw that most of the left side of her jaw was missing. She couldn’t speak. She tried,” he says, nodding, “but she couldn’t. So, she told me what she wanted by pointing at the gun. I didn’t want to give it to her, but I could see that she was in so much pain and I didn’t know what else to do, so I got it for her. I gave it to her. I did.”

I cover my mouth with my hands, my eyes burning like crazy. I’m too scared to breathe for fear that I’ll end up bursting into tears. Alex looks at me. Looks hard. Doesn’t waiver. “She couldn’t close her hand around the handle. She kept on trying, and she kept on dropping it. In the end, she started this…awful wailing. I’d never heard anything like it before. She was suffering. She wanted to go, and she couldn’t fucking do it, and I knew what was going to happen next, but—”

“Oh, Alex.”

“The gun was fucking huge. I think it was a desert eagle or something, must have been to blow half her face off like that, but I wasn’t really looking at it properly. At the time, all I knew was that it was heavy and I couldn’t hold it straight, not even with both hands. She helped me. She guided it to her other temple. The one she hadn’t already ruined. She closed her eyes, sighed, and it was like this…this wash of relief came over her. She nodded, squeezing her hand around the top of my thigh, digging her fingernails into my leg, and then I remember her jerking, the sound of the gun firing, the small room filling up with this horrible smelling smoke, and there being blood running down the wall. And…that was it. I called nine one one. Told them what had happened. There was a second there where they thought I’d just straight up fucking killed her. Took two days for the coroner to confirm that my story was probably the truth. They kept me in a psyche ward, locked inside this room with three fully grown crazy motherfuckers who kept trying to touch me. And then it was the system. Foster care. Bumped from home to home.”

His skin has taken on this deathly hue, like a part ofhimhas just died in the retelling of this dark, fucked up story. “If I’d come home earlier, I probably could have stopped her.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Alex. None of it.”

He looks down at the food in front of him, then back up at me again. He shifts a little, laying his hands flat against the top of the table. I don’t think he knows what to do with them. “You’re right. I know,” he says. “She did it to herself. Even in the end,shemanaged to pull the trigger. But I held it for her, Silver.I fucking held it.”