Summer

It's been a while since I used any of the prompts on writingexercises.co.uk

Many months actually. So I decided to skip the Reddit Writing Prompts and do something a bit more challenging, just to get over the writer's block I've been feeling for a while.

The Eight Words are: discredit overlook sicken screeching immense summer gift garlic

*****

Summer brought with it a feeling of dread like I had never felt before. It was hot in July, with a few showers of rain here and there, so I couldn't say it was the weather. But I knew within myself that Sarah wouldn't wake up from the coma she was in.

I knew this was the month we would lose her.

But I couldn't say it out loud when the rest of our quad went to visit her every Friday. Zoey, Mark, and I would go and change the flowers and tell her little buts about how our lives were going. We had been doing this for the past six months, none of us missed a single Friday for the world.

I didn't overlook any of the safety precautions that day, and her car was serviced. I was always the one to remind Sarah of these things. She was aloof most of the time. She dropped me off at the cafe where I worked to supplement my allowance, and she was supposed to meet up with Mark to finish up their project.

She never made it.

Sometimes, I could almost hear the screeching as she stepped on the brake a little too hard, sending her car somersaulting. I could hear the sickening crunch as her body snapped into two while the brainless rescue workers tried to pull her out of the burning car.

I can remember the immense effort it took me that night and the weeks that followed to console Zoey and Natalie, Sarah's younger sister. The effort being something of a Herculean task because U was grieving myself. Terribly. It would probably be discrediting myself - telling those girls to stay strong, to let it all out, and not to have any regrets about their time spent with Sarah.

But I had the biggest regrets of all since I never told Sarah how I felt about her. How I loved the smell of her hair and her cute little laugh. How her perfume intoxicated me, and her little randy jokes got me flustered every damn time.

How she always made her pasta with garlic, just like my mother did. We would seat that stuff and watch TV on Friday nights since she wasn't really a social butterfly. We were like besties, and though I wanted us to be more, I was okay with what we had. With what we shared.

How it pleased me to carry her on her back when her feet hurt because she wore heels. She never did grab the hang of wearing them, but she wore them to all the faculty dinners we attended. And I was always her date because she trusted me more than any of the other boys, or so she always said.

Sarah was like the gift that kept on giving, up until when she stopped giving.

She was 23 when she died, all full of big dreams and ambitions.

We were all in the hospital. It was a Friday, and I had just finished telling her what was going on in my life, and we were about to go. For a few seconds, the corners of her mouth crinkled, before she smiled and said weakly, "you're all doing so well. I'm prou-"

She never completed the statement. And we all knew she had passed on. Was it disheartening? Sad? Of course. Shocking? Not in the least. We knew it was bound to happen anytime soon. But it didn't stop it from hurting.

I broke the news to Natalie while we went to Sarah's favorite spot. A cliff overlooking the sunset. I think Natalie knew what had happened already. A single tear ran down her right cheek.

"She loved you, you know that right?"

"Yeah," I said. "I figured it out as they deposited her body in the morgue."

I hugged Natalie and broke down in tears for the first time in months. She held me tightly, patting my back because she knew. Zoey and Mark may have overlooked it, but she knew I was a mess inside. She knew what I was going through while I gave them all that advice and smiled those fake smiles.

"You were late on the first day of school. Late to your own high school graduation ceremony. Late to your first dinner night with her. And now, two years late to figuring out she loved you. Damn, you're something, aren't you?" she said, laughing weakly as the tears began to choke her voice.

Aye, summer brought pain. Pain that ate me up from inside.