Krystal Ambrose {district two}

There was never a meeting. Not a time that I remember locking eyes with him and there was certainly no exchanging of names, no nice to meet you or how do you do. He was simply there one day and it was if I had known him my whole life, knew him as well as the skin stretched across the back of my hand. I knew him perhaps even better than I knew myself.

But that's where we went wrong. What we had wasn't healthy, it was something the both of us acknowledged that night I got drunk and I kissed him and soon enough his palm was flat across my cheek and my face was on fire. He didn't want me, not in that way. But he needed me as bad as I needed him.

Somewhere along the way, we had lost ourselves. Somewhere along the way we ended up needing each other to keep from falling apart.

I guess we were destined to self destruct anyway.

Taylor was handsome, there was no denying it. He was big and strong, comforting to someone who had never fit into much of anything but children's ware his whole life. Or perhaps it was cheaper than the fancy laces I so often lusted after, the ones my parents could never hope to afford on their teacher's salary. I'm sure I would have been beaten to a pulp if I wasn't his. Taylor's Krys. The one who trailed behind him like a lost ducking most of his child. They were never seen without each other, they were. Peas in a pod.

Bullets in a chamber.

In the end, I guess I was always destined to hopelessly fall for the boy. It sounds like something that should be printed in the pages of cheesy romance novel. Friends since who knows when, best friends. Ones who had seen the other at every single high and low, who had held their hand through the thick of it. They should have ended up kissing and falling in love, one should have ended up on bended knee and in the end they would ride off into the sunset. That's how all the stories ended. That's what I wanted.

But he was straight. I suppose my tongue down his throat was about as appealing as his eventual girlfriend's was to me.

The both of us were dating her, in a way. She certainly didn't have much free time with him. I was a condition, a line in the contract she signed. Taylor could never stand having me too far away for too long.

Her name was Christine, something Taylor often ranted about on our drunken escapades, when the air was too quiet and thick and he just needed to break the tension. He was never good at being serious. (Life is too short to spend it fucking yourself with a branch, Krys.) "You're Chris, he's Krys, it's fuckin' funny! The two most important people in my life, Chris and Krys. Ahh I love you guys. I loveeeee you."

In the end, I really grew to care for her. Even if I was only in the next room when Taylor lost his virginity to her. Even if it felt like acid upon my flesh every time he brought it up. And there were no secrets in between two people who were basically one.

Codependent, that's what we were coined. I often heard my parents complain to his the nights the both of us burst through locked doors in a fit of laughs and screams as we held up a Christine who had given into her high hours before we decided to call things quits. They shouldn't let us hang out so much, they chided, no they should quit while we're ahead. Before something bad happens.

I think even Taylor and I knew it was a good idea, to put some distance between us, not that we ever gathered the willpower even try.

Parties were never much fun without him, not without his constant wolf-whistling at Christine as she danced about the room and the way he crushed me into his side the drunker he was. If I was his moon then Christine was his sun and his stars and his heavens above. There were hearts engraved into the irises every time they fell upon her. Her skin was a milky brown, not dark enough to be black and not light enough to be white. A stunning, smooth in between that reminded me of coffee with a dash of cream. It wasn't as though I couldn't understand what he saw in the beautiful girl with a heart as big as he.

I grew to love the both of them eventually, no matter how envious I was.

Once I realized that he was not mine, that the boy I had been so in love with for so many years belonged to a girl who was damn near made to be his match, I began to search for my own. I was never like them, my kindness never stretched far beyond my own personal gain. I was selfish.

"You're the worst kinda snake, Krys. You're quiet, don't even gotta rattler to warn no one. And when you strike, you strike to killll." Taylor scolded me often, telling me to open up my heart for a change. To let someone in. He said I'd find a nice boy who would make me happier. Make me nicer.

Instead I lost my virginity on a drunken bet with taste of about six other guys in my mouth.

The only lover I ever needed was in a bottle anyway. Everything felt better with poison pressed into my veins. It burnt even the worst of my pain away, the scared screams of my parents and a love long since lost and forgotten. For once, I wasn’t in pain. There was no world around me to crumble and even if there was, I couldn’t feel it.

I’m sure some people saw that it was a problem, perhaps even Taylor grew worried the nights that he was forced to drag me out from under a bed with drool dripping off of my chin and an empty bottle in my hands. If he did, he was too scared to say anything. To ruin our friendship with something as serious as my addiction. He always hated being too serious.

He’d rather let me kill myself than dare be without me. And I guess that is why I loved him. He and Christine were no spring flowers, no I remember nights we placed rainbows on our tongues and watched the world melt around us in harmony. There was never a bad high tucked in between them. But I think they had each other to stop from digging themselves in the same hole I had.

They were going to get married someday. I remember the long conversations we wasted our precious lucid moments on, arranging color palettes and themes. They fought over whose side I would stand by, best man or maid of honor. I think they settled with sharing. They were always so good at that. At not fighting. At working things out.

I’ve always been too cynical to believe in something as wonderful as soulmates. Two people who had found their other half. Perfection. But if I was something better, more pure and willing to believe, I would say that Taylor and Christine were made for each other.

As destined to die together, old and weathered as I was to young and drunk.

That is, until they weren’t. I don’t think he ever told her, perhaps he would have hidden the truth from me had I not been his nurse since the beginning. (He insisted upon it as soon as my internship started. I’d always had good grades, somewhat of a scholar, really.) I was in the room when the doctor delievered the news, face grim and voice soft. Oh, the amount of false alarms I had heard. The smiles and the thank gods, some even hugging the doctor while their eyes leaked such pure happiness. It was so overwhelming that sometimes, I smiled too.

It wasn’t like that, this time.

It was terminal.

He begged me not to tell her. He said that wasn’t going to let her see him in a bed, withering away into nothing. It wasn’t him, he shouted, pushing me back against a wall while tears fell onto the tip of my nose and whether they were his or my own I don’t think I’ll ever know.

He held me for hours in that hospital room until the both of us were red in the face and our hair was matted with warm salt water. And then he told me to stand up. He told me to dress in something nice because there was a party tonight and he wanted to go and get wasted.

That’s just what we did, too. But even alcohol couldn’t take away this pain, not this time. I drank until I couldn’t feel my face but the pain was still there. It burned into my flesh without mercy or remorse. There weren’t any pretty boys attached to me by the hips that night. I was pressed back against the wall, sobbing and screaming into a bottle and not one damn person asked what was wrong. We’re all selfish like that.

And then he grabbed the collar of my shirt, slamming me back against the wall and bringing his palm across my cheek. “Kill me.” His voice was soft. Urgent. “Krystal, I need you to kill me. I’m not… I don’t want to die like that. In a hospital bed. I can’t do this all on my own goddammit Krys please. I want to go out like this.”

There were needles in his hand. I couldn’t count how many, I was too numb and in too much pain to care. I told him I couldn’t. I screamed that he couldn’t make me and then I stuck a needle in his vein and I emptied its contents there. And then another. And another. And if he regretted it, I don’t think he had time to realize. I don’t think he felt much of anything when he died.

It looked like he was sleeping.

And a part of me died right there with him.

I guess I caused a bit of a scene crying over him like I was, telling him I was sorry and trying to wake him up. Somewhere in the pit of my stomach I know it had to be me because Taylor wanted to die guilt free. And if he was murdered, then well it wasn’t his fault. And he knew I’d do fucking anything for him. He knew.

They’d have taken me away. I’d be in jail if not for that guy. The one with an annoying smirk and the eyes that set my blood to boiling heat. He saved my life and in exchange, I traded one debt for another. This one I was not so willing, he wanted more than my company. More than just to be close in exchange for loyalty.

He wanted the drugs hidden away in the basement at the hospital. He wanted everything I had to offer.

I certainly wasn’t in any position to say no.

Christine held me and she cried at Taylor’s funeral. I don’t remember much past that, the months after his death are little more than a drunken haze. My lucid moments simply spent trying to find another bottle and another way to take the pain away. His death was ruled an accident. He was painted out to be a junkie in desperate search for a high. A junkie who took too much. Accidental overdose.

And no one said anything about the cancer slowly taking hold of his body. No, that was a secret.

Taylor was my soulmate.

I guess it just so happened that I was not his.

I haven’t been to his grave since the funeral, I cannot stand to see the stone laden with those pink flowers that were always her favorite. The same pink petals and green stems he always made me pick up on my way home from work so that he could present them to her in the morning. And she would bury her nose in the petals and she would fling her arms around him and smile and tell him they were perfect.

Taylor knew I would do anything for him. He knew that well enough to turn a sixteen year old into a murderer.

I was only a few months without him when my parents kicked me out, hands on the small of my back as they physically threw their son turned drunkard onto the street and locked the door behind him. Without Taylor I guess I was something worthless. Lost in some downward spiral that would no doubt end in my own stone planted in that graveyard.

I don’t think she would leave those pink flowers for me. No, I haven’t so much as talked to his girlfriend since we both saw him lowered into the ground.

Because her pain is my fault. Because I killed him.

And only one other person knows that, one who brandishes it above me as though it is some kind of prize to be won.

On my seventeenth birthday I smashed them all. The bottles stacked in my cupboards and left out on the counter. All of my money spent on the liquid more precious than gold was down the drain in just one instant. The pain, that was something potent. Physical anguish as I writhed on the floor and emptied my innards into a dirty porcelain bowl. If I wasn’t such a stubborn asshole I think it would have killed me.

It was certainly a close call a couple of times.

Almost a year had gone by before my cravings for the poison subsided. And sometimes I’m not even sure why I quit. Life is just as unbearable without it.