Attention Spoiler !!!
I feel sick. I’m not even fully awake. “Charlie.” I knock on the door. Total silence. I attempt to get in, but he’s blocked it with something. “Open the door, Charles. I’m not joking. I’ll break the door.” “No, you won’t.” His voice is dead. Empty. But I’m relieved, because he’s alive. I turn the handle down and push with my whole body. “Don’t come in!” He sounds panicked, which makes me panicked because Charlie is never panicked and that is what makes him Charlie. “Don’t come in here! Please!” There’s a clattering of things being frantically moved around. I keep heaving my body onto the door, and whatever is blocking it begins to move away. I make a gap large enough for me to slip inside, and I do. “No, go away! Leave me alone!” I look at him. “Get out!” He’s been crying. His eyes are dark red and purple and the darkness of the room drowns him in a haze. There is a plate of lasagna on the kitchen table, cold, untouched. All of our food has been removed from the cupboards and the fridge and the freezer and set out in order of size and color in various piles around the room. There are a couple of bloodstained tissues in his hands. He’s not better. “I’m sorry,” he croaks, slumped in a chair, head rolled backward, eyes vacant. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.” I can’t do anything. It’s hard not to throw up. “I’m sorry,” he keeps saying. “I’m so sorry.”
It hits me, then. I haven’t ever known what I wanted out of life. Until now. I sort of want to be dead. MY FEET DRIFT absently closer to the edge. My feet peep slightly over the concrete roof. If I fall accidentally, the universe will be there to catch me. He holds out an arm to me. “Please!” The mere sight of him makes me want to die even more. “The school’s burning down,” I say, turning back the other way. “You need to leave.” “Turn around, Tori. Turn around, you absolute twat.” Something wrenches me around. I take out my torch, wondering briefly why I haven’t used it until now, and I shine it upward. I see him then, properly. Hair all messed up and dusty. Patches of soot smothering his face. A burn mark on his outstretched arm. “Do you want to kill yourself?” he asks, and the question sounds unreal because you never hear anyone ever asking that question in real life.
L’année Solitaire, Alice Oseman, 2014