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It had been suffocating in the hospital.
The fact that she was even there was a ridiculous concept to her, because she wasn’t crazy.
The explanation that her family was given was that she was a danger to herself and to others. That’s what they told the other parents, and her boyfriend during the meeting they had called in her living room.
She wasn’t there. She was supposed to be in her room, unaware of what was being discussed below her, but she had been sitting at the top of the staircase, listening to them
She had scoffed from her hiding place when she heard her boyfriend express his sympathy. As if this wasn’t his fault in the first place.
Not that anyone would have believed her.
The ride to the hospital wasn’t a ride. It was imprisonment before she even got there. She had been dragged out of the house and taken to an ambulance. She had been strapped down to a stretcher and injected with something that rendered her unable to fight back.
She made up her mind then and there: she would never forgive her family for doing this to her. Ever.
The nurses and the doctors thought she was crazy. She disagreed. No one cared what she thought. That was just the way things went.
As for why she was there, it was entirely her boyfriend’s fault. He didn’t like her friends.
She had three friends and their group was incredibly closely knit. She was the savage one, the gossiper, the one you knew not to mess with. Her friends consisted of the one who was chaotic and weird, the one who was kind and vulnerable, and the one who always took care of them.
Her boyfriend was jealous that she spent more time with them than with him and he felt like he was entitled to her full attention. So she tried to show him that he didn’t deserve anything after the way he had been treating her.
And look where that got her.
Despite the hospital’s suffocating nature and cold atmosphere, she had managed to make the best of her time there; that being that she had pretended to get better so she could leave while also sending the therapists on a confusing spiral of the conflicting emotions she faked during one-on-one sessions.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to get better. It was that she didn’t care. The damage had been done. He was consuming every part of her and no amount of outside intervention could reverse that. No doctor could help when she was lovesick. At least, that’s what she believed. If she was being honest, she was beginning to doubt her judgement, just like everyone already had.
So when she managed to sneak out one night, she didn’t call either of her three closest friends. She called the man who was responsible for the events that led to her hospitalisation in the first place. He was horrible, but he was also intoxicating.
How could a lovesick girl like her possibly stay away?
But before that, the first thing she did was go to her own house. Not to see her traitorous family though, she hated them now. She climbed up the structure along the side until she reached her bedroom window, a route she had been using to sneak out at night for years, and slid the window pane up.
She changed out of the scrubs she was in and put on a black outfit that was much more her style. She took her phone, which had been forgotten on her desk, barely charged.
She texted her boyfriend to meet her a few blocks from her house and when he responded, not questioning why she was out, she left and made her way down the side of the house again.
He had only pretended to be concerned in front of her family. In private, he didn’t care about her mental health, he just wanted to use her. In the state she was in, she craved his toxicity and it was the only way she felt she could escape everything that had happened recently.
She walked the few blocks to the meetup point in the chilly night air and ignored what she shouldn’t have. The rational part of her brain that was still buried somewhere in her head. The many text messages on her phone from her friends who hadn’t even known of her hospitalisation. The memories of how her boyfriend had treated her…
None of it mattered now. All that mattered was the escape.
When she spotted his car, exactly where she had told him to meet her, she ran up and opened the door.
The man she had made the horrible mistake of entering a relationship with started up the car as he joked about how he had always supposedly known that she was crazy with a cruel chuckle that made her hit his arm in retaliation. She told him to just drive already and he did.
The two front windows were down and he had his arm draped over the frame while she let her tied up hair flow in the wind. They cruised in silence and she enjoyed the break she got from her imprisonment.
That is, until her companion decided to open his mouth again.
They fought, to say the least. He always seemed to have the talent of nagging her to the point of an emotional explosion that made her wonder why she even bothered with him.
He was cruel, crude, and we wouldn’t stop making jokes about her being a crazy girl and about how that was just his type. As she gradually began yelling at him, she found that she had rolled her eyes more times than she could count on her two tensed hands.
And then he brought his hands into the mix. Before she knew what was happening, they were pushing and shoving each other. The roads were empty, so there wasn’t much of an indicator to signal either of them to the fact that they had veered off the road.
They were screaming and hitting and her mind was blank. Her only thought was to fight and to claw and to make him pay for what he had put her through, all over petty jealousy.
It was when he threatened her friends, the most precious people in her world, that she had finally had enough.
She grabbed the wheel and sharply swerved the car. He yelled and she screamed and they fought until she saw the wall.
All she saw was the white of the car lights.
All she heard was the crash as the car collided with the wall.
All she felt was pain.
All she thought of were her girls.
But what can she say?
She longs for love even though it hurts every time.
She didn’t know a lot but what she did know was that Jennie was gone.
That was it. She knew that her friend was gone but she didn’t understand. She didn’t understand any of it.
Jennie had snuck out of the psychiatric hospital that she had apparently been staying at and had gone joyriding with her boyfriend, which she knew wasn’t actually the full story. And then they crashed into a wall.
A wall. That’s what took Jennie away from her. A wall.
Her own boyfriend was there for her; he always was. It was one of the things that Jennie would always bring up when she and her own boyfriend had been fighting. But she just never felt like they clicked.
She knew she should have been more grateful to have a kinder boyfriend, especially because she and her other two friends had known what Jennie’s boyfriend was really like.
They had tried to protect her, but how could they when they hadn’t even been informed of Jennie’s hospitalisation. They had just been left to wonder where she was, why she wasn’t answering her phone, and why her boyfriend seemed so smug.
And their parents knew. All of their parents knew and none of them told. Needless to say, she felt incredibly betrayed, as well as guilty for not being able to do more
She felt like she couldn’t breathe at the funeral.
She knew that her remaining two friends felt the same way. She knew that the adults were acting so sympathetic for Jennie’s family and that they were sending pitying glances towards the remaining three. She knew that they didn’t actually care.
If they cared, they wouldn’t have kept everything that had happened a secret from them. They would have noticed what Jennie’s boyfriend was really like and they would have done something sooner.
They wouldn’t have had a joint funeral for Jennie and the horrible man that all three of them just knew was responsible for her death.
During the reception, the adults gathered around food while speaking about the two deceased lovers like they were already gone in their minds, as if Jennie wasn’t a core piece of the other three’s souls that had recently been shattered.
She hated them all. They didn’t deserve to mourn.
She made that much clear to her friends and the oldest of them, who was always taking care of the younger three, put a hand on her shoulder and tried to calm her. It didn’t work as much as she wished it would have.
Her other friend, who was closer to her age and certainly the most sensitive of the group, was still staring at Jennie’s casket with tears streaming down her face and her arms wrapped tightly around herself.
The oldest of their broken group pulled the two younger girls into a hug and comforted them as best she could. It didn’t feel right without Jennie and her absence was impossible to ignore.
They didn’t want to separate. Why would they want to be apart after one of their own had died? That logic was clearly lost on their parents, who insisted that their daughters return to their houses with them.
She spent that evening pacing around her room, practically wearing a path into the floor, with her mind flooding with thoughts and emotions.
She went from angry to her parents and Jennie’s boyfriend and the world to bordering on sorrowful over her loss. It was a self-destructive spiral, she knew that. But she was nothing without her pain. It had always been that way.
Maybe that’s why she had never broken up with her own boyfriend, who was kind, sweet, gentle, and always considerate, but who she had never fully connected with. Who was always there to lend a hand or listen to her vent. Whose concerned texts she had been ignoring since Jennie died.
She knew that he deserved better and that she would never be able to give as much as he gave back to him, and for that she felt eternally guilty. She didn’t want to break up with him because she didn’t want to hurt him. She loved him as a friend but nothing more.
Deep down, she knew that he would be supportive of whatever she wanted, because of course he would be. She also knew that he would be very sad but would never show it.
And once again, she felt her anger towards the world surging and before she knew it, she was in her garage, standing face-to-face with the car that her parents owned. Holding a baseball bat in her hand.
She breathed heavily in front of the car as her hands nervously wrung around the handle of the bat. She licked her lips, closed her eyes, and swung. Hard .
Again, she told herself. They deserved it. Again, and again, and again. Until what’s left is unsalvageable. She threw the bat to the ground and went back inside to leave through the back door of the house. She didn’t care about being caught, she just needed to get out.
As she walked along the sidewalk of the neighbourhood, she took her phone out of her pocket and opened up the chat she had with her boyfriend. She stopped walking and considered texting him. She had been debating on whether she should be doing that for days, but she decided to just give in and ask him to meet with her at their usual spot.
It was the roof of some random building that she never thought to pay too much attention to. The two of them had been exploring the building out of pure boredom about a year prior, before they became a couple and everything became complicated, and found out that if they took the elevator to the top floor, they could then use the fire escape to reach the roof.
She had been strangely blacking out quite a bit since Jennie died. Similarly to when she was in front of the car before she knew what was happening, she suddenly found herself on the roof, with her boyfriend’s arm around her and her head tucked in the crook of his neck.
He was rubbing her back and talking about grief strategies and how he would always be there for her and she just quietly listened.
This went on for a few hours and she had time to get lost in her thoughts again. They were much calmer now, but not in a good way. She just felt so tired.
It wasn’t just because of Jennie. It had been building up for months because of her relationship. It wasn’t personal, but in her pained state, she hated him no matter what their status was, no matter how kind he was.
After all, she was a lovesick girl.
She loved him in every way but romance and it had been taking a toll on her for a long time.
As the night wore on, he eventually left. He had to get back before his parents realised he was missing and he trusted her to be responsible after he left her alone.
That was his biggest mistake.
All she could hope for was that her body would be removed by the time he made it out of the building.
She thought they were lying when they told her.
Jennie’s The funeral had only been yesterday and now Lisa was gone too? She felt like she couldn’t breathe. This had to be a nightmare that she would wake up from. Losing one of them was bad enough, but two of them…
Her hands shook as tears filled her eyes and she dialled her boyfriend’s number. Her voice trembled as she told him that Lisa was dead what happened. Her breaths came in as ragged gasps and through her sobbing, she hadn’t registered that enough time had passed for her boyfriend to have reached her house.
That was all she remembered from that week, other than flashes of pitying faces and a general timeline of events leading up to the funeral, where her last friend had apparently been hugging her tightly for the duration.
Thinking back on that in the month that followed, she felt guilty for not comforting her friend, who had lost just as much as she had. Her friend had always been the caretaker of the group, the one who always put her own feelings aside to be there for the rest of them, and that had once again been proven true.
They had spoken a lot since the accidents, which they knew weren’t accidents, as they knew how horrible Jennie’s boyfriend was and how Lisa didn’t return the feelings of her boyfriend.
She had also been spending more time with her own boyfriend, who she had previously believed was getting bored with her. That terrifying thought had become infinitely worse after what happened.
Of course, she knew that he was just pretending to want to be there for her because her friends were dead something bad had happened and she was struggling to process it. But whatever would keep him with her, she would take.
She couldn’t lose anyone else.
One day, her boyfriend brought over his guitar when he came over to her house. She knew why.
She was the musical one of the group and she always had been. But since her entire life was shattered twice, she hasn’t so much as listened to a song. He was trying to cheer her up, but she knew that her friend told him to do it.
He didn’t care about her and she didn’t want to sing while he played his guitar but if it made him stay in her life, she would do it over and over.
As tired as she was, she had to admit that they had sounded really good together and that she had missed these kinds of hangouts with her friends. Although she would never get to do that with them again.
Things went wrong when she sighed and slumped against the window they were sitting by. He rolled his eyes and set the guitar down with a scoff. This sent her heartbeat into a racing panic.
They began to argue. He felt as though nothing he was doing was enough for her and she desperately didn’t want him to leave but needed space at the same time. Her conflicting needs annoyed him further and the argument turned into a screaming match.
Before she could process what was happening, the door slammed and he was gone. His guitar was still there.
Her emotions were overwhelming her. She was sobbing and breathing heavily, but she also felt so angry. Anger was a relatively unfamiliar emotion for her, but on the rare occasion she did get mad, it was bad.
Her face felt like it was on fire as her anger rose and seething, she grabbed her boyfriend’s guitar by the handle, swung it in the air, and smashed it against the table it was left on.
She fell to the floor along with the pieces of the destroyed guitar and her sobbing grew stronger as she curled up on the floor, realising he was finally leaving her.
She was wrong. Shockingly.
She actually hadn’t told him about the guitar and had thrown out the remains thinking he wouldn’t come back. But he did. With paint.
He said that the two of them could try out some new things with her room the space to take her mind off of things. The paint that he brought was pink, because it was her favourite colour and he said that he remembered her mentioning it once.
He brought the wrong kind of pink and she knew that her friend was the one to suggest the activity to him.
So they painted, and they laughed. She hadn’t really laughed in a while but he seemed to be in a good mood and was genuinely trying to cheer her up. It confused her, and she knew that keeping this relationship going wasn’t good for her.
But at the end of the day, she hated him and missed him at the same time. She was a lovesick girl after all.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to rid her of her grief. When was it ever enough? Although she didn’t voice it this time, he could tell that she was upset and that’s when he got angry again. She should have known it was too good mediocre to be true.
Just like the last time, they yelled, they screamed. This time, more things were thrown. She threw paintings that were resting against the wall and he threw words and insults.
History repeated itself as he stormed out with a slam of the door and she slid down the freshly painted wall while sobbing. She got the wrong kind of pink all over her from the paint and she couldn’t care less because there was a massive weight on her chest and she hadn’t breathed in a month.
She was drowning, she must have been. Why else couldn’t she just breathe? It was so much worse than it had been the rest of the month. Jennie and Lisa had left an always present ache in her chest that sapped her breath but her boyfriend, and the fact that she didn’t know whether she loved him or hated him, was only making things worse because he didn’t even love her.
She was drowning in what must have been the complete contrast to the correct colour of pink paint that made up her soul. Or maybe her soul was the wrong kind of pink because did it ever really belong to her? Maybe he was right.
As this realisation dawned on her, everything stilled. Her crying, her breathing, everything.
Almost robotically, she grabbed her phone and texted the one friend she had left because the others were dead. She didn’t call. She just texted one word and then put her phone down.
She stood up and walked over to her ensuite and turned on the bathtub.
The water felt like the black ink that now encompassed all of her soul, and now, all of her body. Almost everyone had left her but she had become numb to crying and could do little more than allow silent tears to stream down her face, reminding her of Jennie’s funeral. Jennie… and Lisa. She would be seeing them again soon. Just a bit longer with her head submerged in the ink and she would have them back.
She only wished that her final friend could join her, but as the door to her bedroom was forced open, the thought faded away and died with her.
When she had gotten a text from Rosé saying ‘Help’ and nothing more, she knew she had to act quickly.
She was the strong one, the one who took care of her friends and wiped their tears while holding back her own. That’s exactly what she had been doing lately, and she would do it for the rest of her life to keep the last of her girls with her.
She had been very worried over Rosé over the past month and she had been asking her boyfriend to help her out, but this text shook her to her core. She didn’t know why, but she knew that something horrible was about to happen.
So she ran. She ran faster than she has in her entire life, trying desperately to keep her tears from flowing. She ran the route that she had walked countless times in her life but for a very different reason.
Her parents weren’t home, and she opened the door with the key that she had. Not bothering to close the door, she raced up the stairs up to Rosé’s room and found the door locked.
She frantically pounded on the door and yelled for her friend but there was no answer. Without another thought, she backed up, ran forward, and forced the door open.
As she ran in, she registered an empty room with smudged pink paint all over one of the walls and the surrounding floor. She vaguely noticed that it wasn’t Rosé’s favourite kind of pink before she realised that she heard running water.
She raced to the ensuite and nearly fell to her knees when she saw the overflowing tub with a single limp hand with pink paint streaks sticking out of the water and hanging over the edge of the tub.
That was when the dam finally broke, feeling as though her tears were drowning her and electrocuting her at the same time, after years of being the strong one. There was no one left to be strong for anymore. She was too late. The last of her girls were gone and she was all alone...alone?
But the four of them had promised to never leave any of them alone. She didn't understand. She didn't understand how all of her girls were gone.
She should have known that she was born to be alone.
She held the magical looking hourglass with strong hands, stronger than they had been in weeks. Inside the hourglass were three souls.
The first soul, which was once a tranquil blue, was scratched and matted with red. A torn up soul for a torn up girl.
The second soul, which was once a vibrant yellow, had fallen into an empty, emotionless grey. A drained soul for a drained girl.
The third soul, which was once a soft baby pink, was being suffocated in black ink. A broken soul for a broken girl.
She would keep these souls safe with her until the time came to break the glass.
And then she would bring her lovesick girls back.