Page 168 of We Can't Be Friends

“And that makes it any better? I served my brother up to the drunk driver on a silver platter.” It comes out sharp. Gutted.

“It doesn’t make it any better. It makes it worse. Aaron was innocent. You are innocent.” Cal’s hands are firm on my cheeks. “You can’t control what other people decide to do. You could have never known that they would stupidly fucking decide to pick up their keys and get behind the wheel of a car that morning. You didn’t give him the keys.”

Firefighters begin to remove car parts. Working to get to Aaron.

He has to be alive. He has to stay. He can’t leave me.

Police and medics are checking on the other driver.

They are yelling and hurrying. A stretcher is being sprinted to my brother’s car. A body is being removed from the wreckage.

“But—”

“No. Not buts. No, nothing, Chloe. You did not kill your brother.”

“I—” I shake my head painfully side to side.

“Do your parents, does Miller, tell you it’s your fault?”

“They don’t know. . .” It comes out as a whisper. No one in my family knows the ten, maybe twenty minutes leading up to Aaron’s wreck. I deleted our phone call. Couldn’t delete from my mind, though.

They thought I was sick. That the crash woke me up.

They think he was driving to the rink for morning skate.

They don’t know it’s because of me he was on that side of campus.

His body is limp. Red. Dark red everywhere.

They have him on the ground, trying to perform—I stand on my toes for a better view—CPR.

He’s not breathing. My breath isn’t breathing.

Does CPR mean he has a pulse?

I move closer. More hands grab at me to pull me back—my jacket rips. “Get off me! That’s my best friend. My brother.”

I fall to the ground. Holes open in my leggings, the frozen ground seeping in and I can feel the gashes I just caused.

You also caused the crash, Chloe. A new voice speaks. I whip my head around, trying to find what asshole said that to me, but I realize I said that to myself.

If you’d learn how to be responsible with your calendar, then this wouldn’t have happened. There it is again.

Guilt.

“Chloe,” Cal sighs. His demeanor falls, and his blue eyes are midnight. They’re dark but soft, not pitiful, but pained for me. “Have you tried to tell them?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“They’d hate me. Aaron already left me. I couldn’t lose them too,” I admit my biggest fear. “I moved. Ran away to Chicago. Putting distance between us physically and emotionally.” I swallow down more guilt. “It didn’t work. I still feel just as guilty and to blame.” I pause, inhaling before saying the other four words I’ve never spoken out loud. “It should’ve been me.”

There’s a gash on his temple. His arm is unrecognizable, mangled.

The medics stop CPR. Mouths are moving, but I can’t hear anything at all now.

They move his body onto the gurney, covering it with a white sheet. Slowly wheeling it to the back of an ambulance, doors open, they transport him into the back.

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