Bury Me

I can already feel my head buzzing from the shots of whiskey flowing through my body. I don’t dare move from the floor in fear I’ll get the spins and puke it all up. It will only give Axelle something to laugh about and she’ll tease me for it for the rest of my life. She’ll make jokes about how I can’t hold my liquor and she’ll bring it up five years from now when we are all on a family vacation.

I feel a smile cross my lips as I think about the last time Jared and I were on vacation in Germany with Axelle and Shannon. We pretended they weren’t famous for a whole two weeks and every second of those two weeks we lived in complete bliss with no worries of the outside world. I missed that. I missed him….I miss curling up on the couch with him. I missed watching him run around the house like a mad man trying to keep his mind busy and fulfill his random desires. I missed my study buddy…I miss my best friend and my soul mate.

A small pit of sadness rests in the pit of my stomach, maybe drinking wasn’t the best idea. I’m going to turn into an emotional nutcase and make Axelle even more annoyed.

I softly turn my head. I can feel the cold wooden floor against my cheek. I see Axelle slowly sit up and she takes in a deep breath and without warning she lets out a loud scream. I feel my body tense shocked from the loud noise that came out of her tiny body. “What the hell was that!?”

She shrugs her shoulders like it was nothing out of the ordinary. She grabs another bite of her ice cream and points her spoon at me. “Sometimes it feels good to scream. You should try it. I bet you’d feel better.” She grabs the two shot glasses and begins to fill them up. “Ice cream is such a good chaser…you know who hates when I eat ice cream?” Her voice slightly slurs. “Shannon. He’s the worst!” Axelle lets out a playful laugh.

We clink our glasses together and down the shot. I set the shot glass back down and instantly I can feel it go to my head, as if I wasn’t drunk enough. Here’s the shot that’s going to set all of my bad decisions into place. I wipe my mouth and begin to speak. “He’s looking out for you. You’re lactose intolerant in case you forgot.” I can’t tell if I’m slurring or not but I know she understood what I said. “He just cares.” I lay flat on the ground again. I stretch my legs and arms out and I imagine I might look similar to a start fish sticking to a rock.

Axelle mimics my actions except she rolls onto her stomach. “This is nice. We haven’t had a chill drinking night for a while.”

I nod my head. She’s right. We’ve been busy trying our best to just finish these classes we haven’t really had a lot of time to just hangout and usually when we do hang out it’s us studying and cursing at the gods for not letting us retain all the information needed for the tests. But that’s not where my mind is staying.

In a drunken haze I can still only think of Jared and it makes me wonder how Axelle does it. How
she’s continued to do it for this long. I don’t understand. Is it me, or do other people struggle this hard? Is it that I’m too ‘young and naïve?’

I slowly sit up making sure I won’t get too bad of a head rush. “How do you do it?” I fill up our shot glasses and wait for her response.

She raises an eyebrow at me and I realized I didn’t ask her the full question. I only asked the base of what I was thinking.

“This…everything. Life with Shannon. I don’t get it. I struggle with Jared being gone and you…” I take the shot before continuing. “You do it like a pro. You don’t get mad. You never complain. It just seems so easy for you and not to be a bitch but I’m drunk and I’m going to be honest, it pisses me off.” I admit.

She shrugs her shoulders like she’s never thought of the question before and for some reason it makes me a little more angry that these things never go through her head.

“It still bothers me. I feel like he rips my heart out and stomps on it every time he leaves, but I guess it’s different for me.” She pushes the half empty ice cream container towards me. “I met Shannon when I was fifteen. I lived with them in the same Podunk town and I went down the same road they did. You know? I was in and out of rehab three times by the time I was eighteen.” She pauses for a second. “When Shannon decided him and Jared were leaving he also decided he wasn’t going to leave me behind. It might have been out of fear or love…But I know he saw hope in me. He saw a girl who desperately wanted change just as bad as they did but didn’t know how to do it.” She scoops more ice cream in her mouth before continuing. She swallows it and looks back at me with tired eyes. “He saved me. If it weren’t for him I would have never gotten off drugs and I would have never been where I am today, I couldn’t have paid for law school…Shannon did all of that and when you find someone who you mesh with so well, you don’t give it up. I can’t fathom the idea of him not being in my life…that’s something real.” She leans against the gray couch. “I was also a part of his life before they got famous and I think that’s a huge reason we still work. Our lives are very private from the media and from all that bullshit. They know who I am but they know nothing about me. Just like you and Jared…accept Shannon and I both have always wanted that.”

Abruptly I take the remote from her hand and switch the song to an avenged sevenfold song. I couldn’t resist and yes it might make our drunk go from chill to aggressive but hey, we’d have fun either way.

“Is it wrong that I want more? I don’t want to be in the shadows? I want people to know that Jared is mine?” I smile when my puppy Rex comes over to me. He makes himself comfortable on my lap and I can’t help but let out a small awe escape my lips.

“It’s not weird. It’s part of your personality. You want everyone to see that you are happy and you want the world to know when you fall in love. You’re sociable. We’re just two different people who handle situations differently.” She takes another sip of her whisky. “Also our relationships are very different . I could never be with Jared so I often wonder how you do it, you know? He’s out of his fucking mind. He’d make me insane.” She pulls out her buzzing phone and a smile falls on her lips. “Shannon is Skyping me…should I answer it?”

I nod my head yes. “Go for it. I’m just gonna go and-” I’m cut off by her loudly answering Shannon’s call. I stand up and walk over to my fire place. I look at the pictures sitting on top of the shelves. I grab the frame that holds the first picture Jared and I ever took together. I wanna smile but inside I feel empty. I can’t look at them anymore. Instead I loudly smack them over face down. I stop for a second when I catch the one that my dad was looking at when he last visited. Jared’s medium length hair was bleached out his blue eyes pierced me. I sat on his lap and kissed his cheek while he held me close to him. I had to of been about twenty two. This was only three years ago. He had the biggest smile on his face and we looked in love, we were in love…we are in love, right?

Out of the corner of my eye I see Axelle jump at the sound of me banging things around. “No, I’m at Willow and Jared’s house.”

He mutters something that I can’t hear. I don’t care though in my hazy mind nothing matters right now. I take one of the pictures and drop it on the ground. Glass shatters on the floor the picture falls out of the frame and I could care less.

“No, she’s fine. She’s just uh rearranging things...” She looks back at me with worried eyes but doesn’t tell me to stop.

“Willow! No, I’ll spank you!” I hear Jared’s playful voice from her phone and it instantly makes me feel guilty but I don’t stop. Instead I walk into the dining room and start tearing other pictures off of the walls. Fuck it.

“I gotta go Shan. I love you.” She hangs up her phone and tosses it on the couch. She walks over to me, confusion resting in her eyes. “What are you doing?”

I shrug my shoulders and grab the bottle of whisky from her hand. I down another large gulp not even tasting it anymore. “I don’t know.” I walk over to the table and set the bottle down. I stop when I see the vase of fake roses that Jared had gotten me before he left. I reach out my arm and swipe it off of the table like an angry child. “It feels good.”

“Dude.” Axelle rests her hand on my shoulder. “You’re being crazy.” She’s laughing but I know she wants to join in.

“Go in my room and grab that stupid pillow I was telling you about.” I grab the bottle of whiskey again and start rummaging through my kitchen drawers looking for scissors.
“Did he really get you a pillow of himself?” She bursts into laughter. “What are you doing with those?”

I grab my scissors and walk over to her. “Hold it still.” I pop a hole in the corner of the pillow and drag it down the middle. “There.” Will I regret this in the morning? Yes. Definitely, but do I care? No, because the Jack has taken over and I am no longer in control.

Axelle laughs and pulls out some of the pillow stuffing and tosses it up in the air. “Well, this is the first time I’ve seen it snow in California.”

And after that, I don’t really remember what happened.