Neither of us says anything. Because of course, that’s exactly what Meg did do.
“At which point I told her that she should stop moping and get to the campus health center for some Prozac already.”
A friend told me to go to the campus health center to get some meds.
“It was you,” I whisper into the phone.
I can hear her surprise crackle through the phone. “Me?”
“She said a friend talked her into going to the campus health center, and I’ve talked to dozens of people, and no one ever mentioned a thing, no one thought to suggest it. Except you.”
“We weren’t friends.”
“Well, we were. We were best friends and not only did I not suggest this, I didn’t think to.”
“Then we both failed her,” Tree says. And there’s such anger in her voice. And it’s then I get it. The animosity. It’s Meg. It’s the tentacles of her suicide, reaching out, burning people who barely knew her.
“Sorry,” Tree mutters under her breath.
“She listened to you. She went to the campus health center and got some meds.”
“So what happened?” Tree asks. “Didn’t they work?”
“It’s my understanding that you have to take them for them to work.”
“She didn’t take them?”
“Someone talked her out of it.”
“Why would they do that? Those drugs saved my mom’s life.”
I think of all the stuff on the boards, about the drugs numbing your soul. But that wasn’t it. It was because someone convinced Meg that her life wasn’t worth saving. That death was a better option. It was because, at the very end, when it should’ve been me whispering in her ear, telling her how amazing she was, how amazing her life was and would be again, it was All_BS doing the whispering.
Tree is right about failing Meg. But it wasn’t her that did. It was me. I failed her in life. But I won’t fail her in death.