Free Blue Rose (A Flowering Novel) by Sarah Daltry Page A

oxygen. I can’t lose Jack. I can lose fucking Jack, because that’s always been a separate extension of myself, but I absolutely cannot lose my best – and currently only – fucking friend on this whole stupid planet.
    “Fuck you, Jack. Really. Fuck you.”
    “Why?” he asks.
    “You’re my best friend. You’re my only fucking friend. You call me all the time, needing me, and I run to you. I told you what it felt like to think I was going to lose you. And you just sit here and tell me it doesn’t fucking matter. That the last few years – all my sacrifices, all my putting you first – it means nothing because some girl fucked you a few times and got bored. You are such an asshole.”
    “I never want to be alive,” he says. “I’ve learned how to get by, except for once in a while like the other night. But I never want to be here; I just don’t want to leave you behind. I don’t want you to feel like I do all the time.”
    “What are you saying?”
    We ’ve never really talked about his suicide attempt. Like everything between us, we keep the hardest parts of our pasts, of ourselves, hidden, and wonder why no one can save us. I realize, looking at him, that we need to stop. We need to open up, to each other and to others, because we’re both going to destroy ourselves. Together, we’re just a disaster waiting to tear the world apart.
    “ I love her,” he admits. “I fucking love her. And I was going to tell her tonight.”
    It hurts, but I know, and now I know that, somehow, he needs to be able to love her. Maybe not her , since she appears to have left him to fall apart, but he needs someone who isn’t me. Someone who can make him feel like he belongs to a world he always thought he deserved. Jack is far from entitled, but I think he always wondered what he did wrong to earn such a crappy draw. And I don’t really know the answer. I don’t know what I did, either.
    I hold him close to me. Jack and I have grown into two fairly hardened people, who hide our pain and survive in spite of it, but I will never look at him and not see that boy with the train shirt. I’ll always see the kid in the rain, or the guy who made love to me like I was a work of art when we finally had sex for the first time. I know that he’s a desperate mess now, but before the trial and the aftermath, before his suicide attempt, Jack was still the man I’m holding right now. Those things didn’t break him, as they would most people. They just changed him a little.
    He sobs and I just keep on holding him. At least once a week, I wish I could reset my life. I would take Jack back to that summer afternoon, to our first kiss at the town common, and I would freeze time there forever. I would always be the girl with hope, and he would always be the boy who gave it to me.
    “Where do you wanna go?” I ask him.
    “Take me to see my mom,” he says.
    ****
    We go to his mother’s grave, but I give him space. He doesn’t like being here with anyone and I don’t really blame him.
    The trial took up most of our sophomore year and it was terrible. It was on the news every night, so even though he’d moved to a new town, it wasn’t hard for people to place the name. Sure, Connelly is a fairly common name, but our town wasn’t that big, and the media kept saying that the son of the victim as well as the suspect was local and had recently changed schools. So basically the media was just asking for the few kids who didn’t know already to jump on the bandwagon. Jack was never given a chance.
    People would come in every day and ask him things like, “Did your mom scream when she died?” or “ Does Alana know the guys in your family get off on killing women?” He never said anything. I don’t know how he stood it. He would punch the hell out of the walls as soon as they left and his bedroom had started to become more plaster than drywall, but he never said a word to them. Until one day, when some guy came over to our lunch table