"Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid" ~Langston Hughes
Here's how I imagine it.
The hospital doors crashed open as a young girl was rolled in on a stretcher. The mud from her shoes slipped onto the floor, leaving a legacy of dirt for someone else to worry about. Doctors swarmed her like bees, sprinting to keep up with the flying gurney. Her gorgeous blonde locks pulled from the gates of heaven themselves had returned home a couple months ago, leaving her with a shiny head to reflect the bars of light above them as they blurred into a horrible mess. Every time the beaten wheels of the stretcher hit a bump, her eyes would flutter.
She was flying. Like a butterfly.
"We're losing her!!"
Perhaps Icarus was flying a tad close to the sun, but our small little friend was already further away than she could comprehend. She was in our little forever, the Hideaway. The ruffled sheets of the hospital bed beneath her made perfect blades of grass, and who wouldn't mistake the glorious sun for a lamp staring her dead in the face?
Only a few rooms away, while our little girl was fighting for her life, a woman in her mid-40s was desperately trying to catch her breath at the front desk. A girl decked out in sports gear stood next to her, looking much too old to be clutching her mother's hand the way she was.
"Where is she?" the mother puffed.
"Ma'am, I'm going to have to ask you to calm down-" the secretary began.
"WHERE IS MY DAUGHTER!?"
The secretary's eyes widened. Maybe it wasn't too late to start a career in photography.
"What's her name?"
~
I'm sure you must be quite confused, but I promise you haven't missed any chapters yet.
My name is Harper (Harper Hathaway if you want to be technical) and the girl with the shiny head and filthy shoes is my best friend, Bethany Kruger. Her trip to the hospital happened a long time ago, but today is Beth's birthday. She's not exactly here to celebrate, but the above chapter was not the end of her story. Not for a while, anyway.
While most of my childhood memories either involve or contain Beth, I wish she was in all of them. I wasn't even in the hospital room during the escapade above. I was in the waiting room next door, too scared to follow Beth through the double doors because I would finally be admitting that things were going downhill. Sometimes when I go to sleep, I hope that I'll dream about her, so I can make up the lost time for moments like these. So I can feel her eyes staring into mine just for a few more seconds.
The story you're about to follow does not have a happy ending, but that doesn't mean you should stop reading. This is the story of how Beth changed my world.
And eventually how she left it.
YOU ARE READING
The Hideaway
Teen FictionWhile Beth may have been Harper's neighbour, she was never the girl next door. She was a dancer. She was a friend. She was the kindest, bravest girl Harper had ever known, and meeting her on that rainy day all those years ago was the best accident s...
