Page 161 of Tell Me I'm Enough

It all feels so different now, and it scares me how much I like it, because I know I can’t keep it—can’t keep him.

38

Simone

I’m lying on my bed when I getthetext.

Lani is on the floor, laptop out, scrolling through the classes she wants to register for in the fall.

It’s a normal night.

Normal.

Wasnormal.

Now…now nothing feels like it’ll ever be normal again.

When my phone lit up and I saw Lydia’s name…I don’t know, I thought it was good. I thought she’d text me something funny or cute—our way of always apologizing to each other. I thought maybe she’d be telling me she was on her way back to the dorm, where she hasn’t been in two days now.

Fuck, I don’t know what I thought.

But I didn’t think it would bethis.

Lydia:I love you, Simone. I’m sorry. For all of it…

The message is long, way too long. It keeps going, line after line, and my brain refuses to process any of it because my brain knows what a goodbye text looks like, and I can’t accept that that’s what this is.

My whole body freezes, but I keep reading it. Ihaveto. I can’tnotread it. Because Lydia is Lydia. She’s dramatic sometimes, and she spirals sometimes, and she says things she doesn’t mean sometimes, and I need to be able to tell myself this is just another one of those times. But it isn’t. I fucking know it isn’t.

This isn’t her being dramatic or her trying to hurt me; it’s her apologizing for leaving me. Apologizing like she’s already gone.

“Simone…“ Lani’s voice sounds distant even though she’s right beside me.

“Stop,” I whisper, like it’ll make the words disappear. Like it’ll stop my best friend from doing the one thing I’ve always been scared of.

But it’s already here. It’s already happening. It’s already stabbing me in my chest with no warning.

My eyes blur from tears, making it almost impossible to keep reading.

You were my home when everything else burned down.If there are angels on earth, you are the proof.Please don’t be sad when you think about me.

The sound that comes out of me is so foreign that I don’t even recognize it was from me at first. It sounds like something between a gasp and a sob, and a scream that’s stuck in my throat. It hurts as badly coming out as my heart feels right now.

Lani reaches for me, but I jerk away without meaning to. I don’t want her acknowledgment to be what makes this real and not just a nightmare I’m stuck in.

“No,” I say. “No, no, no—she’s not—she’s not doing this.”

“Simone—”

Lani stops when her phone buzzes, too. She looks down at the screen and then back up at me with an even more horrified look than just seconds ago.

I snatch her phone, unable to stop the panic, and read her screen too.

None of it is fully registering. Everything feels like it keeps slowing down.

I can’t believe she’s actually doing this.

Lydia: Thank you for loving me loudly. For calling me out and calling me in. I know I’ve made it hard to be my friend sometimes, yet you were brave enough to try anyway. You saved me more times than you know. I’m sorry. I love you, always