09

"I bet one-hundred dollars you are in love with your best friend."

I took that chance to look a little closer at Astrid's face. Her notable feature is her short, pink hair. Followed by her button nose. The mole under the left side of her lips. Astrid was pretty, but the kind of pretty you'd see in ballerinas. I thought it was hot of her to be as pretty as a swan as her mouth inhales cigarette smoke.

"It's the other way around," I replied to her.

"What?!"

"What – why are you so surprised?"

"Because!" She drank big gulps from her bottle. "In the movies, the losers are often the ones falling in love with their popular best friends."

"What do you mean by that? I'm not . . ." I thought maybe I was. "I'm not a loser."

"Whatever you say. So, why aren't you going out with her?" She sniffled. "Or rather, why didn't you?"

"Isn't it obvious?" I stared at my bottle of beer. "I just don't feel the same way."

"That's even more surprising."

I gulped down beer, then I sighed. "I don't know. Maybe I was just shocked? I remember saying some things that might have hurt her, and . . ." I groaned. "It's just that, she confessed so suddenly, it caught me off guard. And now I feel fucking guilty because the same day she confessed to me was the same day she was killed."

"Fuck."

"And the last thing she remembers from me was me walking away from her."

"I wouldn't want to be in your shoes right now."

"I don't want the position I'm in either."

"But I think you have nothing to feel guilty for. Like, nothing at all." Astrid ran her fingers through her hair. She looked up the ceiling. "It's normal to feel bad because you can't reciprocate someone else's feelings, but that's not something you should regret, you know? Like you're the one responsible for your feelings, and if you don't like her back, then you don't, right? You shouldn't feel guilty for something human."

A wild party was going on outside the bathroom and there we were, talking about my dead best friend. I touched the mouth of my bottle of beer with my lips.

"Also, it's not like you had a way of knowing something was gonna happen to her."

"Okay. Enough of this."

"It's true that you've hurt her feelings, but that's just how this bullcrap works. You either get it or you don't." She placed her right leg on top of the other. "I'm sure she isn't the type of girl who'd resent you just because you can't like her the same way she does."

"No, she's not."

"Then you should begin to accept that when she died, her last memory of you wasn't the image of you walking away," Astrid said. I looked at her when her hand touched my hair. "I'm pretty sure it's a nice thought of your smile."

"That's so fucking cheesy," I said. She slammed her palm against my arm as she laughed. "I'm pretty sure when you're being stabbed multiple times, the thought of your smiling crush wouldn't show up in your head."

"Well, would you like to test it?"

"What . . . ?"

"I'm just kidding."

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