I was ripped awake by a large amount of extremely cold water hitting me in the face.

"What the fuck?" I spluttered, jerking upright. Throwing back the soaked covers and sliding to the floor I l looked down at my sodden t-shirt and shorts. The clock said three in the morning,

Amber stood in front of me holding a now-empty vase, still in her party clothes though she had kicked off her shoes.

"What the hell?" I shouted again, shivering as a breeze from the open winder hit my wet skin. Goosebumps erupted on my arms and legs.

"You need to get your shit together," she said. Smudged make-up around her eyes made her look even angrier.

"What is your problem?" I snapped. The rage had momentarily distracted me from the churning in my stomach and pounding headache, but now they hit me full force. I put a hand on my bed to steady myself.

Outside, someone was singing the National Anthem loudly and off-key.

"I don't know what the hell happed with you and Tyler, but drinking yourself to death is not the answer," she yelled, stabbing a finger at the empty wine bottle on the floor and the half-full one on the bedside table. "And I'm sure as hell not driving you to the hospital in the middle of the night. So figure it out!"

"You don't get to tell me how and when to solve my problems," I said, stomping over to grab my towel from the back of the door.

"I do when I come back to find you passed out drunk. I get it's a Friday night, but you do this during the week too," retorted Amber. "So find a different coping method before I call someone."

Too infuriated to respond, I yanked the covers off the bed, grabbed my shower caddy and stormed down the hall. I threw the comforter into the dryer before going to the bathroom and picking the least gross shower on the end, trying not to think about the fact I was standing in a communal bathroom in bare feet. With the shower on as hot as I could stand, I stood under the jet for a long time, trying to get my intoxicated brain to process what had happened.

A prickling sense of guilt and shame crept its way up my spine and around my throat until tears burned in my eyes. As much as I would have preferred the wake-up to be in the form of something other than ice water, Amber was right. The answer to my problems wasn't at the bottom of a bottle. And the fact that I needed Amber to tell me that meant something had to change.

Kevin's voice from the beginning of the year floated around my head.

"Alcohol is the thing that makes time worse not better."

Vanessa's voice followed. "We don't need to add alcoholic to your current list of ailments."

I needed to let go and I knew that. But after all this time, I still didn't know how. I thought I had begun to with Tyler, but the hole I was continuing to dig just proved that I had only latched onto someone else, someone who also happened to be sinking.

I stood in the shower for a long time watching the steam coalesce around me, but my brain produced nothing nearly as substantial. It was as though it was shying away from the task because deep down I knew I didn't want to separate myself, cut ties, and never look back. With either of them.

But I couldn't do this forever either. I wouldn't make it.

****

Any type of solution continued to evade me, and the more I tried to find an answer only to hit another wall, the more anxious I got. The nightmares were at their highest volume yet and the dark circles under my eyes got darker as the days got longer and the number of hours I slept grew shorter.

Whenever I woke up, I would list the reasons why medicating myself back to sleep was a bad idea and instead, would lie with my mind spinning until the sun came up and my alarm went off. After two weeks of this routine, I was so jittery from exhaustion I could barely function enough to sit through class or get food from the dining hall. All I wanted was an off switch for my brain.

Finally, I gave in and called Chris.

He showed up within the hour and pulled me close when he got a good look at my appearance.

"I don't know what to do," I said, my words broken and spaced too far apart as I struggled to bring them from my head to my lips.

Chris looked around the room, lingering on the twisted bedsheets, the overflowing laundry bin, and the to-go food containers stacked in my trash. The desk was littered with more sticky notes, pens, and highlighters than any college student needed, along with dozens of crumpled papers of notes and open books layered on top of one another.

"Danny?" he guessed, turning back towards me.

I nodded. Chris was blurry a bit around the edges, but his hand in mine was warm and solid and there as he led me to the bed and coaxed me into sitting down.

"He's everywhere," I blurted out. "All the time." Even to my ears, I sounded near hysterics. "The more I try to forget, the more I think about it. I can't-I can't stop."

Chris stared down at our interlocked fingers when he spoke. My blue nail polish had been chipped at so much there was more nail showing than color. "Maybe, it's time you went back to the therapist..." he began slowly.

I ripped my hand away. "I called because I needed your help, Chris."

He tugged at his sweatshirt sleeves, a sign that he didn't know what to say. "Dash, I want to help you, believe me. But I don't think I'm qualified..."

"I need your help to-" I struggled to find the words. Let go? Forget? "Move on," I finished, pacing back and forth. "You're the only other person who knew Danny like I did," I said, stopping to look him full in the face. Guilt hovered in the air between us for all the things left unsaid.

Chris exhaled slowly, looking around at the picture of Danny on my wall and desk. He rubbed the blonde stubble along his jaw line.

"Once, in the beginning, I asked Danny is he ever got scared. He told me he was frightened all the time, but facing his fears was so much better than letting them control him. Maybe-maybe that's what you need to do."

I shook my head, not understanding. "This isn't a phobia of spiders or a belief that pickles are the spawn of the devil. I'm not trying to overcome a fear."

"Sure you are," he said. "You're afraid of forgetting Danny, you're afraid it's your fault-which it's not. You're afraid of your nightmares, of all this never going away..."

I cut him off, still agitated. I resumed my pacing of the small room. "I can't just face my fears like Danny did. I can't-it's not like I can relive the car crash to get it out of my system-" I barely suppressed a shudder at the thought. "And I-" I swallowed hard, cursing my emotional state. "I can't just sit and pick apart my nightmares. They're bad enough the first time around."

I lapsed into silence, feeling even more lost then before. Chris got to his feet and placed his hands on my shoulders to stop me from pacing. Under the pressure of his hands, I could feel my body shaking slightly.

"What do you think Danny's greatest fear was?" I asked.

Chris caught my eye, his mouth quirked up in a wry smile.

"Failure," we said at the same time. I bit my lip and looked at the picture of Danny on the wall for the thousandth time.

"Not finishing a challenge always seemed worse to him than anything he actually had to do," added Chris.

"Yeah," I said, but my mind had kicked into gear again and this time, I could feel something different. Suddenly, I could feel a kind of purpose to my thoughts rather than the chaotic jumble of words they had been for the last two weeks.

"I guess it says something about determination. As far as I know, he never left something incomplete," Chris went on.

"Yeah," I said again, but I had stopped listening. Everything around me seemed to be muffled, from the music down the hall to the soft whirring of the mini-fridge. Thoughts were forming, turning over slowly in my head, spooling into ideas.

Chris was right that, once started, Danny never let anything go unfinished. But there was something he never completed-something we both failed to do.

We never made it to jump off Needle Rock Ridge.

_______________________________________________________

Hmmm...predictions anyone?

Thoughts on Dash's situation?