A group of friends tries to piece itself back together after losing its glue.
*****
It's a quiet October morning in Palo Alto, California, when the news break out--June Beaumont was...
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SOFIA
Back in Palo Alto, I picked up the pieces—everyone's, and then mine.
I wasn't surprised by how easy it was. I was used to it by now, knowing people needed me and depended on me, and I wasn't going to make the same mistake twice. If they needed me, I needed to be there—I wanted to be there.
Letting go of the fiasco that had been San Francisco wasn't easy for any of us. Even though things could have certainly taken a turn for the worse, a sharper turn than it actually was, it had still been pretty rough on everyone. I supposed part of it was my fault, considering I had been the one to hype it up and advertising it as the only way of finally getting some answers, and everyone had been disappointed.
I'd let them all down. That was a recurrent situation in my life, one I hadn't managed to break out of, and people were getting hurt over it.
I had already lost June.
By the time April rolled around and I was nineteen, I felt unbearably close to a meltdown. It started off quietly, a small rumble of thunder in the back of my head, something I learned and managed to ignore and push it even further back, and, for a while, it worked.
It culminated in me losing hours of sleep, struggling to keep up with schoolwork and meeting deadlines for the school newspaper. I struggled with focusing on class and with not being benched during volleyball practice. I struggled with not feeling like everything inside of me was crumbling down, slipping right through my fingers.
To put it simply, I'd failed miserably at going back to normal. I'd failed at not letting myself down.
"Got you a cappuccino," Felix said, pulling me out of my misery, and approached the table we were occupying. The cappuccino he'd brought was so hot the porcelain mug burned the palm of my hands as I accepted it, the waves of steam heating up my face. "You look like you need it."
I sighed. "Do I?"
"A little bit. I just wanted to be nice." He sat back down, opening his laptop. "Have you made any progress?"
"No, not really. I don't think I had ever felt this uninspired."
He pulled my laptop towards him, without waiting for my permission, and prepared himself to judge the pathetic excuse for an article I had spent the past hour and a half working on. During that same amount of time, he'd had time to finish his own article, edit another, and buy me a cappuccino. Needless to say, I wasn't feeling too positive.
