He remembered the day of the accident; how soulless her eyes had become. Even as tears ran like mascara stains down her cheek — bruised from being rubbed in the dirt by her upperclassmen — a vacancy had erased the desperate sadness he’d felt from her several times before. If he’d reached out to her in those weighted seconds before her fatal decision, he could’ve stopped her death.
The day after the accident, there was only a timid susurrus of speculative voices. Suddenly, schoolmates who’d never cared about her and had only been entertained by her misfortunes as the bullied target, spoke of her and her family in penitent undertones. That she’d had a mother and little sister. How, when she was much younger, her father had died during a factory incident that had made newspaper headlines. It was funny the way death could spark such noble interests in the deceased’s life. Noble? He grit his teeth and clutched his books tighter to himself. These were some of the same students who’d mocked her for being fatherless.
“It’s really sad.” The rueful murmur trickled through the crowd of students in the hallway to him. A grating chord of feigned emotion. And he became so overwhelmed with rage that he dropped his books and whirled on them, ready to lash out. But as he looked at those faces, vague expressions of supposed sympathy, he saw his own reflected there. What right did he have to condemn them as hypocrites, when he’d only been a bystander? Just like them. He had turned away from her, though he’d understood the agony she had suffered at the hands of those third year bullies. Too afraid that by helping her, he’d have become the next target. So he’d lowered his eyes that day he saw hope fade from her eyes like a whited-out dream.
Had he been braver. Had he cared more about satisfying the near nauseating urge to help her fight that final day, then maybe she’d still be here. If only he’d reached out, maybe they could have been friends.
***
Photo credit: Avogado6
Nomad Writer 
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