Free The Story of Us by Dani Atkins

draped it over the newel post on the stairs.
    â€˜Caro, it’s me. I’m coming up.’
    As I got closer I heard music coming from the bedroom: it was a band the three of us had been obsessed with about a decade ago. Interspersed with the soundtrack of our youth were noisy gulping sobs, which were heartbreaking to hear. I gave a soft knock on the wood-panelled door and went in.
    Caroline was a mess, and even more tellingly her
room
was a mess, which if you knew her even a fraction as well as I did, was a definite sign that things were far from right. Her short blonde hair was sticking out at weird angles from her head, and her face was red and blotchy from crying. She was kneeling in the middle of their double bed, on a beautifully embroidered white duvet cover, only you couldn’t see the fabric at all, for the entire surface of the bed was covered in a sea of photographs. Dressed only in pyjama shorts and a strappy vest, my friend sat on an island in the duvet, surrounded by just about every snapshot that had ever been taken of the three of us.
    â€˜I just can’t believe she’s gone,’ said Caroline, her voice choked with pain. She ran her hands along the mattress, sweeping over the many photos, pieces of Amy, which were all we had left now.
    I gave a cry which sounded alien and anguished. ‘I know.’
    â€˜Why her? Why Amy? When there are so many terrible people in the world, why was
she
the one who had to go?’ Even through my tears, I could see the question in Caroline’s eyes, because it was the same one I’d been asking myself all day:
Why Amy and not me?
Survivor’s guilt.
    I cleared a pathway and crawled on to the bed to reach her, my arms going around her, and hers around me, like Hansel and Gretel lost in the woods. We cried for a long time, clinging together but saying nothing, because sometimes the pain is just too great for words to be of use, and the only thing you can do is hold on tightly to someone you love, until it stops trying to rip your heart out through your chest.
    I groped among the photographs for a buried tissue box, which was protruding from beneath a pile of pictures of us at primary school. I plucked one up and looked at it nostalgically. It was a photograph I hadn’t seen in almost twenty years, and had been taken after a school nativity play. Amy was in the middle of the frame, looking adorable in a long blue gown, the perfect Virgin Mary, until you panned down and saw she was holding the baby Jesus doll upside-down by its ankle. To her left stood Caroline, wearing a pair of large donkey ears fixed to a hairband on her head, and a goofy smile on her face. On the other side of Amy was me, bizarrely wearing a weird tinfoil contraption on my head, for if memory served me correctly I’d been cast as The Christmas Alien… I felt Caroline’s chin come to rest on my shoulder, as she too studied the photograph in my hands. Three faces, each so different, except for the undisguised look of happiness and friendship. I didn’t need to examine the hundreds of other photos I was surrounded by to know that I’d find that same look on virtually every one. It had been there too on the snaps we’d taken just the night before, at my hen party. Three heads squeezed together, while Caroline held the camera at arm’s length to take the shot. There might be make-up replacing the freckles, and styled hair instead of pigtails, but the same friendship had still shone from our eyes. And now those last photographs, which we’d thought were recording just one more milestone on the road, actually marked the final moments of Amy’s life. I reached for the tissues again.
    By my left knee a photograph I didn’t recognise caught my eye. I plucked it up and held it closer to the light. I guessed it must have been taken three or four years ago, for although Amy and Caroline looked much the same as they did now, Caroline’s hair