Page 105 of Your Fault

I couldn’t listen anymore. I hung up and tried to take a few deep breaths to calm down. How the hell had this conversation turned into another damned fight?

I grabbed by leather jacket, put on my boots, and walked out to the living room, where my roommate was watching television. Our place was cozy, with two bedrooms, a shared bathroom, and a living room with a studio kitchen. I couldn’t complain—William hadn’t slacked too much on the accommodations. My roommate’s name was Briar, and after a few weeks living with her, I could say honestly she was a bit of a bimbo. She didn’t dress especially provocatively or anything like that; it was just that there was something about her that made any guy with eyes want to get her in the sack, and she was generally happy to oblige. She had dark red hair, almost scarlet, and her eyes were green and exotic. Her parents were famous Hollywood directors, and she knew she’d end up working with them sooner rather than later.

There were no surprises there—if I had that face, I’d have become an actress, too—but Briar had ato hell with everythingattitude that I found unsettling. She was chatty with me, nice, too, but there was something about her I couldn’t quite get a handle on.

“Lovers’ spat?” she asked indifferently while she inspected her nails one by one and painted them the same bloodred color as before.

I went to the fridge and took out a can of Coke. Not that I needed caffeine—it would probably give me the jitters—and I wasn’t even thirsty, but it was a reflex. I just couldn’t stay still. That last conversation had cut me to the core.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I responded a little nastily. Briar shot an angry stare at me, and I felt immediately guilty.

We weren’t friends or anything, but she’d been too nice to me for me to treat her that way. So I sighed and told her my story with Nick. Honestly, I needed more friends anyway because Jenna had been doing her own thing ever since we started school, and she lived on the opposite end of campus. I didn’t tell her aboutmy psychologist, of course, but I did mention the tattoo and my reaction to it.

“Damn, a tattoo. You’ve really hooked him, right?” she said, sitting on one of the stools around the kitchen table. I spun my can of Coke in my hand, trying to decide how much to tell her.

“What we’ve got is different from anything I’ve ever felt for any other guy. It’s intense, you know…? One word from him can send me rocketing up to heaven or bury me six feet underground.”

Briar was listening attentively. “I’ve only felt anything like that with one other person, and he turned out to be a manipulator who was just playing with me…” Her words were sincere, and as she uttered them, she pulled off a silver cuff she always wore on her right wrist. “I know what you’re saying about intensity.”

Opening my eyes wide, I looked at the two scars on her wrist. In her eyes, I saw many of the things I saw in myself when I looked into the mirror. She smiled.

“It’s not such a big deal. It’s funny the way people look at you when you tell them you tried to kill yourself,” she said, putting the cuff back on. “It’s a sign of weakness, fine, but whatever, it happened and I’m still here, talking to you, no remorse whatsoever. Sometimes life is shit. We all handle it the best way we can.”

Marks on the skin…infinite memories of moments you wish you’d never live again.

“I like your tattoo,” she said, and I realized I was touching it. I did that sometimes without realizing it.

“There are times when I ask myself what was going through my mind when I got it.”

Briar smiled, pulled up her shirt, and showed me her ribs. In black ink, in beautiful calligraphy, I saw a message that touched my heart:Keep Breathing.

I grasped intuitively the meaning behind those words.

“Now’s the part where we hug and swear we’ll be friends forever,” she said, lowering her shirt and laughing blithely.

I could tell I wasn’t the first person she’d told about all that. We didn’t know each other well, and the way she talked about her past made it clear she wasn’t seeking sympathy from anyone. She had no problem revealing her demons, but I saw that was a way of keeping people from knowing her too well. I knew she was hiding many things and that her life had been anything but a bed of roses.

“You in the mood to go out?” I asked, without even thinking about it.

With surprise, she replied, “Well, Morgan, that’s not the usual reaction when people hear my story about attempting suicide.” That was a thing of hers, for some reason, calling me by my last name. I had yet to hear her utter the wordNoah. “Usually people just look away or change the subject, but I guess you want to buy me a drink?”

I shrugged. “I’m not like other people. Anyway, I didn’t say I’d buy you a drink.”

Briar laughed and got down off the stool. “I like you… Let’s go out, then.”

I smiled and went to my room to get ready.

She had made me see I wasn’t the only person with problems or the only girl in the world who had been hurt. Talking with her had made me feel way better than I could have imagined.

“Which of those dudes would you pick up for a roll in the hay?”

We were at a club close to campus. Briar was like a passport for getting a VIP booth. One look always got us past the doorman without even needing to stand in line.

“I’ve got a boyfriend, remember?” I responded, taking a sip of my drink through a straw.

We’d been drinking for free, thanks to the server, ever since we got there.

Briar waved me off. “Fuck boyfriends. We’re speaking hypothetically.”

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