“I can’t believe it’s been two years,” I said, feeling the effects of the whiskey as it heated my skin and dulled my senses.

Perfect.

“Two years without you,” I continued. “Two years of thinking about you every single day.”

I chuckled. “Two years of sitting up here talking to myself and pretending like you’re still here.”

“Oh, sorry, Jackie,” I noticed the slur in my own words. I was well past the point of giving a shit that I’d drank too much.

Two years past the point, to be exact.

“I haven’t offered you any,” I continued. “You remember this?” I pointed to the label. “This stuff here is the gross shit we used to drink after a game. You remember? It’s the cheapest crap Donna sells at the Go-Mart but she would sell it to us for three times the price because we were underage. What a scam.” I laughed, remembering how Jackie was an expert at getting people to do her bidding for her. It may have come at a price but she always got the job done one way or another.

I tipped the bottle over and poured a generous amount of the cheap booze down the slide watching it twirl around and around the graffiti covered plastic until I heard it leak onto the concrete of the empty pool below.

“Drink up.” I saluted the air with the bottle and swallowed down the last of the contents in several large gulps.

My eyes watered and my throat burned. I coughed and whiskey dripped down my chin. I wiped it with the back of my hand.

“I guess whiskey was never meant to be chugged,” I said with a chuckle. “It never stopped us though, did it?”

I tossed the empty bottle into the air and watched it spin around and around and around until I was rotating the upper half of my body to spin with it. The sound of shattering glass echoed all around me when it crashed to the ground five stories below.

“You know. I kind of fucking hate you,” I said, sniffling hard. The weather must have shifted because the air was growing thicker and more humid than when I’d first arrived. “We were supposed to do…we were supposed to do a lot more than we got to fucking do is all.”

I lit a joint. “Josh told me a while back that I haven’t properly grieved you.” I scratched my forehead with my thumb. “She’s wrong, you know. All I feel is grief. The only thing I’ve done wrong in this whole process is recover. Get over you. Can’t seem to wrap my head around that concept. Josh may have a dude’s name, but she’s all woman and wrath and things I’m not going to get within ten feet of.”

I pounded my closed fist roughly against my chest, growling out my frustrations.

“You know, it fucking hurts,” my voice grew scratchy. I cleared my throat.

“It still hurts just as bad as it did two years ago. If you were here right now I’d…” I could feel the pang in my chest at the sound of my words. “Doesn’t matter,” I muttered. “Because you’re not here.”

My heart sputtered out a few irregular beats and I coughed. After it calmed down to a regular pace I took a long hit from the joint and blew the smoke out into the empty space next to me. It was Jackie’s spot. It’s where she should’ve still been sitting.

If it weren’t for me, she might still be.

I held up my joint. “It’s not the shit I used to get from Miller, but it does the job.” I sighed.

“You know, I haven’t seen him in a while. Or Josh. After you died, I couldn’t face them. They gave me the space I wanted and now it’s become this big crater between the three of us. I can see them on the other side, but in order to get to them I’d have to jump in and see what’s sitting there at the bottom of it all.” I shook my head. “I’m not ready. I don’t know if I’ll ever be. They just remind me of how things will never be the same again. It was too fucking much to lose you. I just can’t have even more reminders that you’re not here,” I explained.

My eyes watered. I must have been blowing the smoke too close to my face. “Every building in this damned town. Every back road. Every drip of moss and every single song reminds me that you’re not here.”

“It should have been me.” I pushed up to my feet and hung onto the railing for support. “It ain’t fucking fair.” The railing gave way and suddenly I was gazing straight down five stories at the ground below, falling forward.

At the bottom, I saw Jackie smiling up at me. Perfect blonde hair and matching smile. She was waving up at me.

Waiting for me.

Jackie disappeared when I was yanked back onto the platform with such force I landed on top of the person who’d done the yanking.

“Jackie?” I asked in my confused, drunken, high, and somewhat delirious state.

I was pushed over and then lifted off the ground. My arm was hoisted across a set of broad shoulders that assisted me down the rickety metal steps while a deep voice muttered every swear word in existence.

“Jackie, is that you?” I asked, unable to focus on the person’s face while the background of trees and swamp were spinning all around us. “Have you been working out?”

“Jackie’s dead, kid. She’s been that way for a long while now,” the deep voice rasped.

“Yeah, I know that. But I still talk to her…” …hiccup… “sometimes.”

“It’s good to know you’re talking to someone these days. Why don’t you try and focus on the people still breathing? Might do you some good.” I couldn’t place his familiar voice.

Then again, I couldn’t place anything, including one foot in front of the other. I stumbled but was held upright and urged to keep moving forward.

“Okay, Jackie. Whatever you say,” I slurred as I was loaded into a vehicle.

I didn’t know if it was a car or a truck. It could have been a school bus for all my inebriated brain knew. All I wanted to do was sleep. My eyes grew heavier and heavier under the weight of my drunkenness. “I love you, Jackie. Always have. Always wiiiiiiiillllllll.”

“Stay out of the damned water park or you’re gonna end up dead too,” the voice said, starting the engine. “Then there will be a lot more people who feel the way you do now. Like they were left behind.”

“Nooooo, they can’t feel that way,” I argued.

“Oh yeah, rock star? Why exactly is that?”

“Because, I’m already dead,” I explained, although the point of making any sense had long passed as I dropped my head against the window and closed my eyes.

“You can try and pretend you’re dead all you want, kid, but you ain’t foolin’ anyone.” I felt the sting of a slap against my cheek and lazily swatted the air in retaliation. “It’s best you start acting that way.”

* * *

I woke up in the driver’s seat of my Bronco with my seatbelt fastened feeling as if I’d spent the last several hours standing directly next to the speakers at a death metal concert…during the drum solo.

It was still dark out and I was parked in front of the house I hadn’t lived in for years. “How the fuck did I get here?” I grumbled, starting the engine.

It was the very last place I wanted to be.

I checked the clock. It was ten p.m. I vaguely remembered going to the water park earlier in the day.

Jackie.

The memory of why I went there hit me like a hammer to the heart. The anniversary of her death.

I turned up the radio to drown out the memories that always came when I thought of her. I lit a joint and put the Bronco in drive.

I’d just turned onto the highway, still in a Jackie and alcohol induced daze when I almost didn’t see the RV in the middle of the road.

Or the girl.

She was staring at me as I grew closer and closer with a panicked expression on her face. She was probably wondering why I wasn’t stopping.

She had a good point.

I slammed on the brakes, or at least I thought I did.

My brain was sluggish in sending out the message to my foot. When it finally cooperated, the stop was sudden. The brakes squealed as metal scraped against metal. I yanked on the wheel and my truck turned sideways and started to spin.

I glanced up through the open roof to the stars rotating above me. I wondered if tonight was the night I’d finally be able to stop missing Jackie.

Because there was a real possibility I’d be seeing her again soon.