Claire's Song Read Online Free

fragile body since Jamie died. I’m anything but fat, but…even so, the barb does its work and spreads it poison deeper, weaving false truths where they should not live, where they should not foster and grow, but in this broken mind and shattered heart, they do, they do grow and they take over everything as the music hits its crescendo, as everything falls apart, and I can no longer hold myself together.
                My parents aren’t home and I think things through. This is not new. This has been going on ever since Jamie’s death. I should tell someone, but I’m paralyzed by fear and instead I do nothing. The words, all of them, echo through my mind, throbbing and pounding until finally I go downstairs. I search through the drawers until I find what I’m looking for. I grab the knife and carry it back upstairs into my room, lit only by the white Christmas lights that Jamie and I hung a year ago, and the candle that flickers off his photos, and that hellish computer light, the taunts staring back at me. I click away and go back to Jamie’s page. I want his face to be the last thing that I see before I leave this place. After all, what’s left for me here? I wonder what went through Jamie’s mind as he took those pills, as his mind, his heart slowly stopped working. My breathing hastens and my heart feels like it’s going to jump out of my chest. The tears mix with my sweat, the two indistinguishable as they rush down my face.  My grip on the knife handle is slippery, and I fear that I’ll drop it, but then why do I care?
     I sit down on the bed, the knife carefully placed next to me, my glance going between the weapon and Jamie’s face. What would he think of me now? Would he think me weak?
     I can almost hear his voice and I know exactly what he would say, he would smile at me with that sad smile. “Claire Bear,” he’d start, using my mother’s nickname for me. “What are you doing? You’re better than this, much better.” He said that to me when I tried to smoke cigarettes, when I tried alcohol for the first and only time.  I know he drank often, but what breaks my heart even more is that he never even told me that he did drugs. Not ever. Another stab to my heart. We were best friends and we were supposed to know everything about each other, yet Jamie left this life not knowing that I was crazy in love with him, that I would've done anything in the world if he'd asked me too, and he left without telling me about the pills.
    Those brown eyes bore into me and it's like he's here. I can hear everything play out in my head, him telling me to stop this. Not to let them get to me.
     I pick up the knife and look at my wrist. "You left me," I cry, the words choke me on their way out, gurgled and troubled like the deepest parts of my soul. "YOU LEFT ME, DAMN IT!" I cry louder, the words stronger as my grip on the knife tightens and in that split second I think I'm going to do it, that I'm going to slice my wrists and bleed myself dry right here on my bed, the same bed that I got my first and only kiss, the same bed Jamie used to sit on when he came over, the same bed I slept in for days after I found out that he was dead, gone forever. This would be the only fitting place to end it all.
    My breathing is uneven still and I raise the blade, but my eyes meet Jamie's again, and something there in that picture, in the fact that even just a picture of him is looking at me, that he could be looking down on me, that he could see this, shames me.
    The knife slips from my grasp and falls onto the floor. I slam shut the laptop and fall apart, scared to death that those thoughts even flitted through my mind, that I let those idiots get to me. I can't do that again. I just can't. And I promise myself, right then, in the pain, in the tears, in the din of my heart shattering that I would NEVER let this happen again. I refused to let them win.
    I finish up on Jamie’s page as the memory haunts me. I get ready