A/N: So, I finally finished the alternate ending to Sweet 16! This takes place right after the end of chapter 2. The title comes from the song"Almost Lover" by A Fine Frenzy, which I highly recommend as it is the inspiration behind this piece.

.MMXXXVI

The first thing I registered when I woke up was pain. All of me hurt, from my throbbing head to my tingling toes. The next thing I became aware of was the obnoxious beeping of the heart monitor next to my bed. No, that wasn't right. Why was there a heart monitor? Groaning, I dragged my eyelids open and was greeted not by the soft turquoise of my bedroom walls, but the stark white of a hospital room. Wincing, I turned my head to the side.

"Hey, Little Duck." Came a voice from beside me.

"Dad." I croaked. "What happened?"

He brushed my hair out of my face. "There was an accident." He said with practiced simplicity. "Someone in the other lane swerved and hit you guys."

Flashes of the accident surged to the front of my mind. The headlights that had torn me from my sleep, Kyle throwing his arm out in front of me, the squeal of the brakes and the way time seemed to stop as the two vehicles collided and the glass of the windshield shattered.

Kyle.

"Where's Kyle? I want to see him." I said, ignoring my pain as I pushed myself into a sitting position.

"No, you need to stay put." He said gently.

"I'm fine." I insisted. "Where is he?"

"Morgen, Sweetheart, you have a pretty serious concussion. You need to lay down."

"No," I replied stubbornly "I need to see Kyle."

He took my hand, cradling it between his. "Morgen, when the other car hit you guys… most of the impact was on Kyle's side." He looked down at our hands. "He was in really bad shape when the paramedics arrived."

I swallowed down the lump in my throat. "But he's okay now, right?" I asked, fighting the panic rising in my chest. "Kyle's really strong. He'll be okay, right?"

He looked me in the eye then and I knew the truth. "There was nothing the doctors could do."

I felt like the world had fallen out from under me. "No." I protested, drawing my hand back. "No. That's not true. Where is he?"

"Morgen, he didn't make it." He said.

I wasn't listening though. Throwing the covers off my body, I threw my legs over the side of the bed and stood up. My muscles screamed in protest and blood dripped down my forearm from the place my IV had been, but I was dead set on getting the hell out of there and finding my best friend, because he wasn't dead.

"Morgen, you need to lie down." Dad said, blocking my path.

"No!" I screamed, fighting against the arms wrapping around me. "Let me go! I want to see him! Let me go!"

Two nurses came scrambling into the room, trying to calm me down. I lashed out, landing a blow directly to the nearest nurse's throat with my elbow. It wasn't enough. Everything hurt and I couldn't see straight and the world was collapsing in on itself.

Later, when I could think straight, I would feel ashamed for making such a scene. I would feel embarrassed for collapsing onto the floor of my hospital room, sobbing and fighting and screaming at the top of my lungs for someone who couldn't hear me.

.MMXXXVI

They let me out of the hospital two days later. I hadn't spoken a word since my breakdown the first day, and that didn't change as we drove home in silence. I went straight to the bathroom, not bothering to grab a change of clothes. Once I had stripped away all of my clothes, I turned the shower on and stood under the hot spray. I had expected to cry, to let my tears and the water of the shower fall together on the tiles, but no tears came. I stayed there, staring at the shower wall until the water ran cold.

IX.

I stayed in my bed all day. Mom brought me breakfast and Cordelia brought me lunch, both of which sat cold and untouched next to my bed by the time Lyla came to check on me.

"I know it hurts." She said, resting her hand on my shoulder. "It'll get better."

I didn't want it to. I didn't want the pain to go away because it was the only indication that I was still alive. My body didn't work without Kyle. Without him there were no jokes to draw laughter from my lungs, no smiles to make my heart flutter, no songs for my fingers to strum along to, no cryptic comments to send my brain racing with possibilities. I was a ship with no sail, and no harbor in sight.

.MMXXXVI

It had been two days since I had come home, and my family was clearly starting to worry. Lyla was the only one who had had any success in getting me to eat, patiently sitting next to me to make sure I ate all of the banana she had brought.

"Hey." She said quietly, walking into my room. She perched on the edge of my bed. "Aunt Kensi called. She asked if you would speak at… at the funeral."

Oh, right. There would be a funeral. I nodded, because I owed Kyle that much.

.MMXXXVI

It was disgustingly sunny the day of Kyle's funeral. I borrowed a dress from Lyla and let her and Delia arrange my hair in a neat braid that they wrapped into a bun at the nape of my neck. Nobody commented on the heat as we drove to the cemetery and gathered around the big wooden box hat was supposed to be the permanent resting place of my best friend. Nobody complained about the sun in their eyes as Aunt Kensi tried to give the eulogy she had prepared. And when it was my turn to stand before my family and friends and say goodbye to my best friend, one thing became increasingly clear.

"I was in love with my best friend." I said, my voice ragged from disuse. "And I'm probably supposed to feel embarrassed to admit that in front of all of you, but it's the truth. I loved him, and I was in love with him, and I don't know if he knew the difference." I glanced down at my shaking hands. "Before now, I had only spent 381 minutes alone in this world, but then he arrived and we became two halves of a whole. I don't know what I am without him, and I see now the gaps he left in his wake; the gaps that he left in all of our lives. I wish I knew a way to fill them, but I don't. I'm sorry." I finished, before returning to my seat. The rest of the service passed in a blur of solemn voices and even as they lowered the coffin into the ground, I couldn't cry.

The reception was at Kyle's house- Aunt Kensi's house, I reminded myself. There was food laid out on tables and pictures of him everywhere. I realized with a jolt that I was in most of the photos, and had taken at least half of the remaining ones.

"That was a lovely speech you gave." Came a voice from behind me. It belonged to an impossibly small woman with large glasses perched on the bridge of her nose.

"It wasn't." I said bluntly. "But, it was honest."

"When you've lived as many lies as I have, honesty like that becomes all the more beautiful." She said. We stood together in silence for a moment before she spoke again. "You've grown so strong since we last met. You remind me of your mother."

"I'm sorry, have we met?" I asked, mentally chastising myself for not making introductions sooner.

"Oh, yes." She said. "But that was a lifetime ago, and now I have no further reason to monopolize your time, other than to tell you to be brave. If you'll excuse me." She said, moving soundlessly away from me.

Be brave. Nobody had used that one yet. I'd heard everything from "It get's better" to "I'm sorry" and none of them had had much effect, but this did. This made it real. "Be brave" meant that I was on my own now, and there was no going back, just fighting forward.

"Hey, how are you?" Lyla asked, coming up behind me.

I couldn't answer her though. All the air seemed to have been sucked out of the room and the need to get out was suddenly overwhelming. Without my head's consent, my feet had me flying up the stairs and into the part of the house that had been my safe haven so many times before- his room. I was vaguely aware of my hands locking the door behind me before I kicked my shoes off and fell onto the bed. The pillows still smelled like him, that unique combination of ocean and Kyle. It felt better for a moment- to lay in his bed and smell him on the pillows and pretend he was lying right next to me like he had so many times before. And then it felt so much worse.

He was never going to lay next to me on this bed again. No more ridiculous two A.M. conversations about nothing and everything at once, no more waking up at an insane hour of the morning to go surfing, no more shared meals at Marco's, no more us. Just me. That realization is what broke me. I cried gently at first, but soon the tears were streaming down my face and I was gasping for air as they fell onto the pillow.

.MMXXXVI

It was almost a month after the funeral that Aunt Kensi and Natalie walked into our house with teary eyes and some of Kyle's things.

"We put his board in the garage." Aunt Kensi said, setting a cardboard box labeled 'Morgen' on the counter. "I hope you don't mind." I shook my head. At least now our surf boards could gather dust together.

"We brought this too." Natalie said. In her hand was Kyle's guitar case. "He would have wanted you to have it."

"Are you sure?" I asked, looking between the two of them.

Natalie nodded. "It's what he would have wanted. Besides, none of us know how to play. At least with you it will get some use." I took the instrument from her hands, not telling her that playing Kyle's guitar would be about as painful as a knife through my chest.

"Thank you." I managed to choke out.

Mom made coffee while I brought the guitar and the box up to my room. I didn't want to open it in front of them. "How's school?" Aunt Kensi asked as the four of us sat together in the kitchen.

"Fine." I said. It was a lie. School had been hellish. Mom and Dad had finally made me go a few days after the funeral, and it had been a daily nightmare ever since. The teachers looked at me like I might fall apart at any moment, the other students seemed to lose the ability to speak when I walked up to them, nervous they might say something wrong, and I spent half my classes trying to ignore the empty seat that should have been his. It was no use. I found myself staring off into space a lot, not paying attention. I couldn't bring myself to enjoy school like I used to, but it helped create a steady schedule that I could adhere to without much thought: wake up, get ready, drive to school, go to class, pretend to eat lunch, go back to class, drive home, do homework, go to bed.

Weekends were worse. I had too much time to myself, and nothing to do with it. I couldn't play the ukulele or go to the beach or watch any movie I had ever seen with him because all I heard was his voice in the back of my head making little jokes and comments. Sometimes I called Lyla and she would tell me how things were going at Stanford. We had had a video chat once, but after she had commented on the way my cheek bones had started to protrude I decided I didn't want to do it again. Sometimes I would sit alone in my room and stare at the walls, trying with everything I had to remember the sound of his voice, his laugh. I wanted those engrained into my memory.

I didn't open the box until after dinner that night. The first thing I pulled out was his tablet, then a worn out sweatshirt that Kyle had been especially fond of, followed by a small stack of equally worn out books. At the bottom was a framed picture of us that had once sat on his windowsill. It was just over a year old, having been taken on our fifteenth birthday. We stood on the beach, with his arm draped over my shoulder and mine wrapped around his waist, both smiling at the camera as if there wasn't a single problem on the planet.

With everything else scattered out on my bed, I reached for the tablet. The password was easy enough to figure out, and soon I was staring a technological afterimage of my best friend. He had several apps for school, a couple of games, and a surf tracker on his home screen. The music library was full of songs we both loved, as well as the country music that had annoyed me so much, and his e-library was a mix of school-assigned literature and YA thrillers.

It took me a few minutes to work up the nerve to open his photo library. It was sorted into three folders: school, surf, and one labeled 'my favorite person on earth.' I had tapped on the third one before I even realized that I'd moved my hand. The folder opened, and a collection of fifty or so pictures formed perfect columns and rows across the screen.

Every single one of them was of me. There were pictures of me surfing, sipping on a milkshake at Marco's, reading in the hammock in the back yard, eating waffles in his kitchen, sitting on his bed with my ukelele on my lap. It wasn't like I hadn't seen him taking my picture, but I had figured he kept the snapshots for a few days, then deleted them. Obviously that wasn't the case.

I couldn't sleep that night.

Finally, at 4:30 in the morning I decided I wasn't getting any sleep. With a sigh I hauled myself out of bed and got dressed in a pair of leggings and his sweatshirt. I borrowed the keys to the mini cooper and pulled out of the driveway. Mom and Dad had been letting me drive it to school all year anyway, what were the odds they would need it on their day off at 5 in the morning?

I didn't really realize where I was going until I was standing barefoot in the sand, looking out at the ocean. Cold water lapped at my feet as I walked along the shore. I had only been to his grave once since the funeral. I'd felt like an idiot standing over that patch of dirt, trying to say to him the things I had been to scared to when he was alive. He wasn't there.

He was here though, among the salty air and crashing waves. So, I knew that he heard me when I said "I loved you."

By the time the water was up to my knees, I had started crying in earnest, and a tiny part of me was thankful that nobody was aroound to see the crazy girl screaming at the ocean. "I loved you, and you left me!" I yelled. "You left me alone!"

Something in me snapped, and I realized that for every bit of me that missed him, there was a part that was angry at him too. Before I knew it I was up to my hips in cold water, shrieking at the horizon. "You broke me! I can't do anything without you! How could you just leave me when I need you?"

I stood there for a moment, as if he where going to respond. He didn't. But as the last of my tears fell, the sun started rising. It wasn't one of those majestic, technicolor sunrises like you see on postcards and paintings. It was just a slightly less gray sky than it had been before. Maybe my life would never be colorful again, but I knew that if I could hold on until it became a slightly lighter shade of gray, I would survive. It was all I had left to do.