The Little Things Give You Away

James looked over at the two empty seats down the row from him, and his eyes tightened. One was for Mesh, who died when he wielded his car into a tree when he swerved after hitting Dezzy.
Hitting Dezzy. Killing Dezzy. What was the difference anymore? James took a deep rattling breath to calm himself down. Five chairs down was another empty chair for Dezzy. She was killed three minutes after she was hit, or so the doctors said. They promised she hadn't felt anything, but that was a complete lie. If James had known anything about Desirae Plunkett from the last year, it was that she would have felt plenty of pain. Pain about leaving her mom alone. James closed his eyes for a second. Pain about leaving him, maybe. He shook his head, his lengthening hair poking his closed eyelids. She wouldn't have felt anything like that. She had hated him, hadn't she?
But she hadn't. He knew she hadn't. He remembered how she acted around Kara. She had hated her, no doubt. But him? Doubtfully.
James opened his eyes and turned his head toward the left, catching Kara's eye. She stared at him with no shame, but her brown eyes were filled with pain, sadness, and mainly anger. She hadn't been happy about him breaking up with her, but what could he have done? Just ignored that the only girl he had ever loved was dead? Gone on like nothing had happened? James hated lies, but it seemed like he had lived a lie ever since he met Dezzy. His life was built on lies. He squeezed his hands into tight fist and popped his neck, the tassel on his hat brushing against his ear.
People slowly filed out, their voices light and carefree, their diplomas grasped in their fists. James drew out the two diplomas he had been given and stood up to his full height of five foot six. He walked out blindly, his hands shaking and his brain thankfully numb.
He hadn't realized it, but he had walked out of the auditorium and down the street safely. He hadn't ended up like a pancake, blood pooling around his head like Dezzy. He had ended up at her gravestone, which was just as bad.
It would have been better to just died then to feel this pain.
James closed his eyes once more, his breathing becoming more and more ragged. He was dying, wasn't he? He was dying from heartbreak, just like people did when their old spouse died. They survived for a while, didn't they? Long enough to make their final wishes, and then they perished, following their loved one.
But he had lived far too long, his heart always beating slowly, as if willing itself to slow to a stop. It would be nice if it did. Like a car at a stop light, it was slowing itself down so it would be prepared to stop completely. If there had been a heart monitor stuck to his chest, it would have been beeping irregularly and slowly.
James willed his eyes to open and he found himself on the ground, wrapped around Desirae's gravestone. Was he that unfeeling of his surroundings anymore? Was this how people who couldn't remember anything felt? That something happened while they weren't paying attention, and they couldn't figure out why they had done it in the first place?
Her grave was covered in flowers and letters, several of them from him. He wedged Dezzy's diploma between the headstone and a group of wilting carnations from him and Dreama.
Dreama had kicked him out right after the accident. She was sent to a mental hospital soon after that. It was just too much for her daughter to die; it drove her completely over the edge.
That was the reason he was thin and malnourished. He had dirty clothes. He wasn't buying food, clothes, or school supplies much anymore. He had spent his last three hundred on his graduation gown. He wasn't completely sure why he even went to his high school graduation, but he had the feeling that Dezzy would have liked for him to at least try to act normal.
James reached into his pockets and pulled out a well worn picture of him and Dezzy, their eyes large and wild, their hair static-y, and their smiles happy. It was the day from the mall, a couple weeks before her birthday and that awful night at the hotel. James wasn't even looking at the camera; he was staring lovingly at Dezzy. He had found the picture on her bed, and he figured she had been looking at it before she had left.
Had that picture driven her to go kill herself? Had he driven her to sneak out of the house and get ran over by Mesh's gigantic, moronic black Jeep?
He felt the tears. He felt the cold seeping into his frail, thin body from the cold ground. Darkness was closing in on all sides, and he didn't care that no one would come for him. He had cut off all ties to the world. His own mother wouldn’t care. She was off with some guy. Dreama probably didn't even remember him. Cyd and Josh, who had hooked up in their grief, was most likely partying. No one cared.
Was Dezzy this cold? She was under the crushing ground, so he didn't exactly know, to be honest.
James coughed and started to shiver in his thin green graduation gown. His tears were choking him up. He pressed the picture of them to his chest.
He was dying. No one had ever felt this way. They would have commit suicide.
Suicide. It was too tempting. He had spent months in rehab to avoid this, and yet it kept coming back. Was it so hard for the passion to cut and die to go away completely, instead of always clawing and burning at his pale skin? Did Dezzy know how much pain she had caused him? Of course she didn't. As nice as the belief of heaven and reincarnation was, he didn't believe in either. As if was going to hell or changing into a deer or something! He let out a gargled laugh and coughing racked his chest.
"Why… can't I… die?" he asked the cold.
Hands grabbed at him, and he couldn't realize if they belonged to Death or people. He let out a weak, nonexistent giggle and starting having coughing spasms. Was he going blind, or was Death just like this? He mentally opened his arms to greet Death, just as that guy in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows had. Ignotus? Was that his name?
But Death never came. He was ripped from Desirae's grave and was placed in a hospital.
Who had saved him? No one would tell him, but he knew one thing. Dezzy had saved him, Dezzy was killing him, and Dezzy had essentially saved him again.
And that was that.