It wasn’t until I overheard Adam mentioning something about Julian’s parents coming to the campus, that I finally found my voice again.

I was sitting at the table with them, sipping hot tea since it was the only thing I could stomach. All three of them had told me that I was losing weight and needed to eat but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to eat. I looked up at Adam when he mentioned Julian’s parents as if I had been awakened from my absent stare. I spoke for the first time since that incident and it felt like a thousand needles puncturing my throat.

“I want to see them,” I said.

Everyone looked at me in shock.

“I want to see them,” I said again. “Julian’s parents. I need you to bring them here.”

“Okay,” Adam said. “I’ll make sure they come.”

I got up from the table and went back to the bedroom. I had been wearing the same shirt for days.

“Tell me when they get here,” I said without turning around.

When Rob came into the room later, I expected him to tell me that Julian’s parents were here, but that wasn’t why he had come.

“Lisette,” he said. “I’m—”

“Don’t,” I interrupted. “I don’t blame you, Rob. It wasn’t your fault; it was David’s fault. I don’t want to talk about it though, not with anyone. I can’t talk about it.”

“Okay,” he said as he looked sadly at me.

He got up and left without saying anything, then returned back to the bedroom within moments with things in his hands. Without speaking, he sat behind me and brushed my hair. He braided it into a long braid and then slid my shirt over my head. He lifted the fresh shirt he had brought in and slipped it over my arms.

Then, without any words spoken, he kissed me on the top of my head and left.

13

Grief is a strange beast. It tears you apart with its sharp claws until you are nothing but shredded bits of fleshy emotions. And just when you think it can’t destroy you any further, it does.

But then, it does something else.

It starts to taunt you with memories that you can’t bear to remember; pictures and feelings and scents and sounds, things that threaten to break you all over again. But grief has a method about it, even when it seems to be nothing but despairing confusion and chaos. With each excruciating memory, it forces your body and mind to rebuild. I remembered that much from when my mother was killed. I remembered feeling like a piece of broken machinery that kept having to replace its parts. But every time a piece of me broke, I repaired it with something stronger, something that would hold together more in the future and would last longer and wear tougher. I remembered at one point after my mother’s death, thinking that I had rebuilt myself so strongly, with so many replaced and refortified parts, that I would never feel anything enough to be broken again. Boy was I wrong.

And so here I was again, shredded and broken, nothing but a damaged pile of pieces that weren’t as unbreakable as I had thought them to be. Sitting in the repair shop of my mind and shaking my head over how I could be right back here in this same place where I had lost everything that mattered to me, again. I looked at myself from the inside out, like an old car that would always have that nagging reminder that it didn’t run quite as right as it used to. But this time I knew what it took to make my own repairs.

And when someone came to my room again, it was Adam.

“They’re here,” he said. “Julian’s parents are here, I mean.”

I stood up, with my unwashed hair in a braid and nothing but my T-shirt on, and went out to see them. The parents of my best friend who had been the one constant throughout my whole life, and who had been stolen from me.

I walked out and saw them sitting there on the couch and saw them stand when they looked at me come into the room. I saw Julian’s mother’s plastic smile and the wet stains of tears against her eyes. I saw his father’s stoic look of politically correct condolence.

“Oh honey,” his mother said as she walked toward me with outstretched arms.

This woman who I hadn’t seen since we were kids and even then, who we rarely saw at all.

Just as she got close enough to touch me, I reached out my hand to stop her from getting any closer. I looked her in the eyes as she waited for me to accept her hug or to say something about how much I shared in her grief with her over the death of her only son. She hung on my words as I opened my mouth to utter a sentiment to her.

“This is all your fault,” I said.

“What?” she asked in shock. She turned to look at Michael. “What is she talking about?”

He couldn’t answer her because he didn’t know.

“Don’t talk to him,” I said as I reached forward and grabbed her wrist. “Talk to me.”

“Let go of me!” she squealed.

Her husband stepped forward to pull her hand away from me.

“What are you doing?” he asked. “You were our son’s best friend.”

“And you were his parents,” I spat back at them. “But you chose my treacherous father over your wonderful son. You don’t even know what kind of man Julian was, do you? No need to answer, because I already know you don’t. I knew him, better than anyone, and he deserved much better parents than you pieces of shit.”

“That’s enough,” his father said as he yanked his wife by the arm to go. “We’re leaving.”

Rob stood and blocked their way out. I’m not sure how he even knew to do that, but he did.

“I don’t think Lisette is done talking to you yet,” he said with his arms folded across his chest.

“This is insane!” his mother shouted. “What do you want from us?”

I didn’t skip a beat. I was done with skipping beats. “You chose to aid my father and you helped to create the monster that now rules over this school. You helped the Butterfly King rise to power.”

“She’s lost her mind,” his mother said with a look of fear in her eyes.

I laughed at her. “I wish,” I said. “But unfortunately, I still have to deal with being quite sane, no thanks to you.”

“Just tell us what you want,” Julian’s father said. “You want money?”

What pathetic excuses for humans they were, thinking again that money was more important than anything else. Their lives weren’t worth a cent of the money they had amassed.

I shook my head. “No. I want something more. Something much more than your pathetic green paper. What I want is for the two of you to distract David so that we can all leave this hellhole.”

The three guys exchanged glances and I could feel Michael’s stare boring into my head as he tried to figure out what I was doing.

“Distract him how?” Julian’s mother asked.

I scoffed. “I don’t care how you do it. But you will distract him long enough that we can get away from here without him seeing us leave. And if you screw up and he catches us, I will make it my one singular purpose in life to pull every organ out of your bodies with my bare hands.”

I saw Adam’s jaw drop from the corner of my eyes.

I snorted without even looking his way. “What? Too dark?” I asked.