Kill the Lights

“Al, I have to tell you something,” Thalia stated, her beautiful blue eyes dark and stormy as they met my own vivid green orbs.

I nodded my head in her general direction, signalling that she should continue speaking though I was still focused intently on the game that I was playing on my phone.

“I promised Jace I wouldn’t tell anyone this, but I just... I don’t know how to keep this to myself. And you’re my best friend...” the blonde haired girl trailed off, eyes pleading with me to give her permission to tell me exactly what it was that was on her mind.

The tone of her voice, mixed with the desperate look in her eyes was enough to capture my full attention.

“Of course Thalia, what’s going on?” I asked, keeping my voice gentle.

“Well... Jace told me something really terrible about Sean. I don’t want to believe it, but I can’t help but think that there’s a slight chance it could be true.” Thalia exasperated.

Thalia has been my best friend for approximately a year and a half. We actually had met through Jace, my sorta-kinda-not-really brother. I liked Thalia the moment I met her, but how could you not? She’s one of those people who is genuinely good and kind. Her blue eyes are positively enchanting, and when she smiles you can’t help but smile too. It’s no wonder Jace is so completely in love with her, hell I’m in love with her- in the most sisterly of ways. If Thalia has any flaw at all, it would have to be her willingness to help any of her friends out of any situation, but unwillingness to let anyone help her with any of her own problems. So when Thalia is asking for help, you know it has to be serious.

“So you know how Jace and Sean are best friends? Well Jace no longer wants anything to do with Sean.”

I opened my mouth to cut her off, but Thalia shushed me with a wave of her hand.

“Sean's been cheating on Zena.”

The sentence Thalia had just uttered hung heavily in the air, the silence creating an unpleasant weight on my shoulders.

A million thoughts raced through my head, not a single one of them seeming to make any sense. And while I wished with every fiber of my being that it wasn’t true, there was a little voice in my head filling me with doubt.

Sean Larkins was too good to be true. I had always thought that. And if there was anyone in the world who deserved a boy like that, it was Zena Hart.

Zena and I had met in kindergarten, and immediately become friends. I suppose it could have been considered one of those easy friendships that children so often fall into, where one asks if the other wants to be their best friend. Of course Zena didn’t ask me, she told me that I was going to be her best friend. But that was the kind of person Zena is, she calls it like she sees it. That day, she wasn’t being pushy she was being honest; and she was also right.

I always consider myself incredibly lucky when it comes to friendships, because Zena and I stayed friends from that fateful day in kindergarten, later adding Thalia into our friendship and becoming the three musketeers.

It was in our freshman year of high school that we all met Sean Larkins. He was enchanting, and charming in a way that most teenage boys were not. When he asked Zena out, Thalia and I couldn’t have possibly been more thrilled. Our group of friends expanded, and Sean quickly became a staple in our everyday lives. He was too good to be true. He protected Thalia and I like an older brother, and did everything he possibly could to keep Zena happy. They vacationed together with each other’s families, and spent every waking moment of every day together. And Thalia and I didn’t mind that we could never hang out just the three of us without Sean anymore, because Zena was so sickeningly happy all of the time.

So when those earth shattering words fell from Thalia’s lips, I couldn’t understand why a part of me believed them. It seemed so absurd all things considered, but at the same time for some reason I could envision it having happened.

“Wait, what?” I whispered, hardly daring to speak above a whisper. It felt as though if I spoke any louder our whole world might shatter into a million pieces.

Thalia shrugged her shoulders looking every bit as conflicted as I was feeling.

It was of course at this particularly opportune moment that Jace returned to the room, with a stoic Beckett in tow.

It took a single look at my face for Jace to groan out, “She told you didn’t she?”

I didn’t have to answer, Jace knew me as well as anyone possibly could.

“With who?” I asked, knowing that Jace wouldn’t lie about something this serious.

It wasn’t Jace who answered however. Beckett shook his black hair out of his face, fingers gently re-positioning his fringe so that I could see his sincere and electric blue eyes.

“There are at least six girls that we know of.” came his monotone response, and though he sounded disinterested, his eyes told a different story.

I choked on the breath I had taken, and my eyes nearly bugged out of my head.

Six girls.

And when Jace listed the girls names, I began to feel physically ill.

Six girls that he’d slept with.

Six girls that all had dared to call themselves Zena’s friends.

Six fucking girls.

My heart began to race, and I immediately placed my right hand over my heart which was the signal that we had created for when I was going to have/in the middle of having a panic attack.

Both Jace and Thalia jumped immediately into action, throwing their arms around me as tightly as they could, and holding me there until it stopped feeling like a fatal heart attack. Beckett stood to the side, arms dangling awkwardly at his sides. He had never had to deal with one of my panic attacks before though he was aware that I had them often.

As my heartbeat returned to normalcy, my mind continued to race. We would have to tell Zena.

How was I supposed to break my long-time best friends heart?

***
It took a lot of effort to pry Zena away from Sean for long enough to have what we informed him would be a long overdue girls night.

I assume he was suspicious, because he had found my text to Zena from the previous day informing her that I had to tell her something. Beyond that, he had known that Thalia, Jace, Beckett, and myself had been hanging out when I sent the message.

We were sitting on my livingroom floor, Thalia and I cuddled together as we often were while Zena the most independent and self sufficient of the three of us sat across from us.

It was silent for what seemed like an eternity, before Thalia spoke.

“Zena we kind of need to talk to you. It’s really important...” she trailed off, her eyes desperately connecting with my own.

“Please,” I interjected, “believe that we wouldn’t tell you this if we weren’t genuinely concerned.”

I sounded pathetic, like I was pleading. And in a way I was. Over the thirteen years that we had been friends, there had never been a point in time where I was concerned that I would lose her forever. But here I was, about to tell her something so horrific, and seemingly impossible that I was sure she would hate me forever.

Zena giggled, a noise I recognised as one she made only when she was truly nervous. “Guys you’re kind of freaking me out.”

“God I’m sorry.” I blurted, “I just don’t know how to say this you know? Like it’s really bad and I don’t want to hurt you but I have to tell you because if it’s true you need to know. And I just. I don’t know how to speak right now honestly. And I know I’m babbling aren’t I?”

The two girls looked at me, smirking slightly at my nervous habit, though both looked fairly frightened themselves- though for vastly different reasons.

“Well the thing is, Jace told us some things about Sean. Like that he’s been cheating on you. With like six different girls. At least. And the thing is they’re your friends Zena. Like they are all your friends. And I didn’t want to believe it but it just, didn’t seem like something that I couldn’t tell you because Sean was there when it happened and god this is fucking hard.”

Once I started talking the words came flying out uncontrollably, like vomit. I told her the names of the girls, and how they had all apparently tried to say no to him. I told her that I was scared of what her reaction would be. I told her that I loved her and didn’t want any of it to be true. But I also told her that Jace had no reason to be making any of this up, and that Beckett too had confirmed the things he’d said.

Zena was silent the whole time I was verbally vomiting out all of the horrible things that had to be said. I wasn’t sure what it was she was thinking, as her fingers flew across the tiny keyboard on her phone.

Minutes passed and I felt like I was drowning in the silence, but neither Thalia nor I dared to break it. The silence was like limbo, the stretch between heaven and hell; the moment that would most certainly define all of our futures.

It wasn’t until a harsh sob wracked Zena’s body, shoulders slumping and head hitting the knees she had drawn to her chest, that any of us moved. In an instant my arm was around Zena’s shoulder on one side, Thalia’s on the other. She held her phone up between us for both of us to see.

It was a message from one of the girls confirming that she had slept with Sean only a couple of months beforehand.

We had conversations with three of the other girls, who too confirmed that they had slept with Sean. One willingly, one drunkenly, and one who fought back but couldn’t stop him from stealing her innocence.

I could count on one hand the number of times I had witnessed Zena really and truly crying over the nearly thirteen years of our friendship. But throughout the night as the proof piled up, she cried more times than in our longer than a decade friendship.
***
I woke up the next morning, stiff and wildly uncomfortable. It seemed that Thalia, Zena, and I had all passed out in various incredibly awkward positions on the couch where we had spent the majority of the night debating all of the possibilities. None of us wanted to believe that any of it was true.

But the question remained; why would Jace make it up? He and Sean were best friends, and he and Zena and I had become friends long before any of us met Sean.

And what would any of these girls gain from hurting Zena or Sean?

If they wanted to hurt either one of them wouldn’t they have just come out and told Zena that they’d slept with her longterm boyfriend?

But why would Sean cheat on her? Zena is perfect, she’s beautiful, funny, artistic, and kind. She’s a fiercely loyal friend too. I’m not even biased because of our friendship, these are just facts.

I glanced at my phone out of habit, grunting when I realized how disgustingly early it was in the morning. It wasn’t even six o’clock yet, and the last time I remember checking the clock before I passed out had been around three AM.

I didn’t even have to turn my head to know that it was Zena who was responsible for me being woken up at that ungodly hour. But when I did sneak a peek at her, she was wide awake, silent tears streaming down her ridiculously gorgeous face. And though usually I would have picked a fight about being woken up so early, and she would have told me bluntly to get over it, I couldn’t utter a word to her, I was so shaken by her appearance.

“He’s here.” she sobbed, and I didn’t have to ask her who it was she was referring to.

“Oh Zena” I whispered, and though we didn’t have a touchy feely kind of relationship I pulled her into a tight hug, drying the tears on her face with the pad of my thumb.

I shook Thalia awake, giving Zena an opportunity to clean up a little bit before the three of us stumbled still drunk with sleep out the front door and into the offensively blinding sunlight.

Thalia and I stood a few feet away from where the couple we had once considered to be perfect was arguing fervently, swaying on our feet but too afraid to sit down. We knew that Sean had a bit of a temper, and though he had never lashed out at Zena before to our knowledge, we had no intention of today being the first time that it happened.

As I watched the meltdown of two of my best friends, it felt like the world was shattering and splitting open beneath me. If this was all true like the girls and Jace and Becket had said, this was the end of life as we all knew it. This would likely kill us all.

Zena did the majority of the speaking, her voice wobbly with the desire to break into a sob.

You reside in grand disguises,
Just to get, get away from it all,
Falsify the life you’re hiding,
Just to get, get away from it all,
But the truth we pursue as we all beg you to,

Kill the lights, kill the actor, kill the actress,
I’m afraid the spotlight dried you up, whoa, oh

***
Sean just stared at Zena, listening to her, not speaking a word in his own defense for who knows how long.

And then he just crumpled. His face scrunched up and for the first time I found myself thinking he was ugly. He cried and babbled about how they were all just out to get him. He said that they weren’t his friends, he secretly hated them all.

But none of it added up.

“Ask them if this is all just some kind of sick joke Alesana!” he commanded me, as though it was my duty to dig his sorry ass out of the grave he’d dug himself.

My stomach lurched, and I began to feel ill.

“He told all of us to say it was just a joke if Zena ever found out” rang one of the girls’ voices in my head, as I remembered our middle of the night conversation with her.

Shut your mouth, you make me sick with,
All the lies, all the lies you spill
Slip and fall, I’ll watch you drown in,
All the lies, all the lies you spill
***
“I don’t know what it is that I believe.” Zena stated, after nearly an hour of the two of them just going back and forth, Zena trying to get him to just admit to his transgressions as Sean begged her to believe him.

“Please, why would I ruin this? I’m so proud of our relationship.” Sean whined, having passed the point of pathetic about five minutes into their argument.

“I just don’t understand. Your story is the only one that doesn’t match up Sean.” Zena stated, her eyes harsh as she glared at him. I was so proud of her in that moment, seeing her standing strong and indignant when I knew for a fact that if I were in her shoes I would have been sobbing on the floor by that point.

As you’re tongue tied, did you believe it?
False pride never existed,
Now I am cutting ties clean off,
And I can breathe at last

So we all stand enthralled by this blind curtain call,
And the truth we pursue as we all, we all beg you to

Kill the lights, kill the actor, kill the actress,
I’m afraid the spotlight dried you up,
***
Another twenty minutes passed as Sean pleaded, not only with Zena but with Thalia and me too.

And while at first none of us had believed that such a perfect boyfriend could have so many skeletons in his closet, the truth was undeniable.

Everyone had told a similar story. Everyone except for Sean.

And while we all stood there, knowing the truth he still refused to admit it. It seemed like we were all missing something, a piece of the story that none of us could figure out.

Zena didn’t really say anything definite. She left her doubts hanging in the air, harping on the fact that he had been lying to her the entirety of their relationship.

It seemed that moment was the end of the world for us, that there was no coming back from it. And I’m still not sure that things will ever be quite right again. The world just didn’t seem to be right, with the most perfect couple I had ever met in shambles, and the friendships we had all so deeply valued destroyed.

Zena was furious.

Sean was indignant.

Thalia was distraught.

I was torn.

We were all a wreck, and there was only one person who knew the full truth of the situation and he wasn’t cracking.

Begging was of no use. The three of us girls all linked hands, turning away from Sean unable to look at him. We walked back into my house, all of our heads swirling with different emotions. The only common feeling between us all was an intense weight, that was pushing us down, strangling us, and leaving us with so little hope and faith in true love that we felt positively dead inside.

Don’t even think about it,
Don’t even think about it, no,
We’re begging you,
To kill the lights,
Kill the actor,
Kill the actress,
Or kill us all,
Or kill us all,
Or kill us all