Hello again! I come bearing fanfic...and this time it's serious. I myself rather enjoy stories like this but I've found that most people don't, which is why I don't tend to write them very often... This story, however, I have high hopes for, and I'm pretty excited about this one.

I hope you enjoy this first chapter! Well...enjoy might be the wrong word, but you know what I mean. Let me know what you think. Reviews are a girl's best friend.

It's Tuesday and all eyes are on me the second that I walk into Sikowitz's room. I ignore them but I know exactly why they're staring, and I'm starting to think that maybe they're right. Maybe I shouldn't have come.

There are too many empty chairs in the room and I struggle with choosing one. I usually sit in the center at the back of the room, but today there's a cluster of five empty chairs there and I don't particularly feel like singling myself out like that. I drag one of the chairs across the room and set it down next to Robbie. He doesn't have that stupid puppet sitting in his lap today and I almost ask him where Rex is, but I don't care enough to actually open my mouth. He looks at me sympathetically and I scowl at him, but a tiny part of me feels bad. Nobody in this room has a clue how I feel right now, except for maybe him.

Everybody is still watching me, so I pull my phone out of my pocket and focus on it, rather than my staring peers. The screen freezes when I try to unlock it, but my frustration is covered by the sound of Sikowitz's voice as he tries to start the lesson. I haven't looked at him yet and I'm only partly paying attention to what he's saying, but I can tell he doesn't want to be here either.

I try unlocking my stupid defective pearphone one more time and it slowly comes to life. A notification informs me that my phone was unable to send my last text message – one I'd tried sending Beck yesterday morning. It would have been nice to know that sooner. I hit resend, and I start pressing down on different icons: email although I know that my inbox is empty; the weather app although I know it's raining and cold. A few seconds pass and now I'm just staring at the home screen, trying to pretend that I'm not here. I don't know what I'd rather be doing – would I feel any better if I was at home right now? Doubt it. – but I really just don't want to be in class today. I'm tired and my head hurts and I just can't think today.

I close my eyes and figure that maybe falling asleep would be my best choice, but my phone vibrates and I make myself look at the screen. It's another notification, and this one is telling me that I missed a call – at 11:34 Thursday night. Yet another delayed notification. Before I can press down on it to see who I supposedly missed this call from, another notification pops up, telling me I have a voicemail. This one displays the name and number of the person the voicemail is from, and I stare at it for a moment in disbelief before I'm able to get up out of my seat and leave the room without bothering to give Sikowitz an excuse.

I sit down on the floor with my back to a locker just a few feet away from the door and hold the phone up to my ear with my trembling hand. A robotic voice takes its sweet time telling me all the details of my new message, and then there's a pause before the recording starts to play. I can't even listen to a complete sentence before I completely lose it and throw my phone across the hall. It hits the lockers on the other side, the back flies off, the battery pops out, and all the pieces go in different directions. I pull myself up, kick a locker as hard as I can, gather the pieces of my stupid cell phone and leave school, trying to convince myself that I'm not actually crying.

…

It's Wednesday and I decide not to go to school. I shouldn't have gone yesterday. Maybe tomorrow.

…

It's Thursday and I skip again. Cat has apparently decided to go, but she soon realizes that the rest of us aren't there and texts me. My phone seems to be working today so I actually receive the message on time.

"Why aren't you at school?"

There are a thousand reasons why I'm not at school right now. It's too empty, it's too different, I'm too crazy. My bed is far more appealing.

"I'm not ready." I text her back and set my phone down gently on the nightstand beside my bed. It's being nice to me so I figure I should return the favor. That would have been a nice lesson to learn sooner.

"We should go to lunch then!" Her exclamation point bothers me. In my head I can almost hear her squealing little voice shouting this. She sounds excited in my mind, and although I know that she's not, and her punctuation meant nothing, I still want to yell at her for not being as miserable as I am right now.

"I don't think so."

"Come on Jade, what else are you gonna do today?" She's right but I don't want to admit that. I woke up two hours ago and I've been lying in bed with the lights off ever since. I suppose I'll probably stay here for the rest of the day. I'll probably sit here and stare at the ceiling and the shadows and think and think and gradually make myself even more sick if I don't get out of here soon.

"Where?"

"Where what?" I'm pretty sure there's nobody on the planet more forgetful than Cat.

"Where do you want to have lunch?" I press down hard on my touch screen as if she can somehow feel my frustration on the other end.

"Oh! How about inside out burger?" Cat knows I don't really care for Inside Out Burger, but I lack the energy needed to come up with a better idea and agree to meet her there in an hour. The only problem is, it takes me an hour to get out of bed. I have a hard enough time just throwing my blankets off, so I don't bother with trying to look halfway decent and simply change my clothes before leaving. It's just Cat, after all.

Only it isn't just Cat.

I walk into the stupid Inside Out Burger and see Cat sitting at a corner booth…with Beck, Andre, Robbie, and Rex. I almost turn around and walk out right then. I didn't know it'd be the whole group. Well…almost the whole group. I thought it would just be Cat and I. Just Cat is bad enough – sometimes she irritates me to the point of wanting to gouge my eyes out. She's my friend and all, but she drives me insane. I agreed to this lunch, however, because I figured that if I was with Cat, then she would talk and talk about nothing and never shut up and I wouldn't have a second to think about anything. I can usually count on her for things like that.

I start to turn around to leave, but they all see me right away and wave me over. I sigh and slowly walk over there, sliding into the space beside Beck without a word. They all stare at me for a moment, before exchanging glances.

"You look like barf." Rex insults me right away. I don't know how it hasn't gotten through to Robbie that he never gets away with insulting me and therefore it isn't a good idea to do it.

"Rex!" Robbie chastises his dumb puppet as usual but it's useless. I glare at them for a moment, but then I realize that Rex is right, and suddenly I don't feel so much like hurling him across the restaurant.

"This is weird…" Andre spits out a watered-down version of what I was thinking.

"Yeah…" Robbie mumbles, coupled with everyone else's nods.

"It seems…wrong…for us to be here." Beck confesses as he puts his arm around me. That seems wrong too, and I move away from him. Everybody notices and suddenly they look even more uncomfortable.

I don't want to be here. I really don't want to be here. I'd rather go home and think about it by myself. Being here with them makes it even more real and I can't even hope to think about anything else.

"I just can't believe Tori's…" Cat drops the end of her sentence, unable to say the word out loud before her eyes fill with tears.

"Dead." I finish it for her. Everybody looks at me, shocked. Somehow the words that come out of my mouth still manage to surprise them after all this time.

"Jade…" Beck softly says my name and rests his hand on my shoulder. I move away from him again, this time climbing out of the booth.

"What?" I ask. "She's dead. She's dead. She died. Tori is dead and that's not going to change. We can sit here and all have lunch together without her like we did for two years before her, but things aren't like that anymore. She was here and now she's not, and this lunch thing isn't going to work out." I grab my bag from the seat beside Beck and try to leave before I make a fool out of myself and start crying, but Andre stops me. I want to keep walking but my body involuntarily turns to face him.

"Are you seriously gonna talk to us like that?" I don't move. "Did it ever cross your mind that maybe you weren't exactly nice to her? You treated her like crap. She came to us so she could complain about you. You've got no right to talk to us like you're the only one grieving. We know she's dead. We don't need you to remind us." They all stare at me, except for Robbie, who is looking at Andre, completely horrified.

"You're right." I admit, scrunching up my face in an effort to stop myself from breaking in front of them. "I'm going home now."

As soon as I turn around the tears break free and I leave the building as fast as I possibly can without running. I can tell when I reach the door that Beck is behind me, but some part of me kind of hopes he'll just decide to turn around and go back to the table and not bother with talking to me.

"Jade." Great. "Jade wait a minute." I stop by my car and turn to look at him, suddenly conscious of my hideous crying face. "That was kind of harsh, but you know he's right… You didn't need either of us to tell you that though."

"Oh great observation, Beck. Really, you know me so well." I spit out the words with heavy sarcasm and immediately regret it when his face drops.

"Come here." He holds his arms out and I just stare at him. "Come here." He repeats himself.

"No." He shrugs and moves toward me, wrapping his arms around me so tightly I can't move to get him off of me. He smells so strongly of laundry detergent, and it reminds me of my bed, where I would rather be right now.

"Beck!" I struggle a little but he doesn't let go, so I give in and just bury my face in his shirt and cry like a pathetic loser in the parking lot of Inside Out Burger.

"Tori knew you didn't hate her." He tells me as he rubs my back. I've been trying to believe this. Tori was smart enough to realize that. She knew me. She knew this is just the way that I am. I'm a mean person by nature, but I never hated her any more than I hate anything else. She knew that. She had to. She just liked to play along sometimes and pretend that it bothered her…or at least that's what I've been telling myself over the past week.

"I know." I mutter, turning my face just as he loosens his grip on me.

"You don't need to feel guilty. It's not your fault."

"Beck." I sniffle and reach up to wipe my eyes. "Never be a therapist. You would suck at that." In reality he has been successful in calming me down, but I can't say that out loud, and I surely can't thank him.

"Well I tried…and it's true." He takes a step back and shrugs. "When are you going back to school?" He pushes his hair back as he asks me.

"Probably Monday."

"Me too."

"Ummm…" I tuck my hair behind my ear and suddenly words aren't coming out of my mouth. My hands shake a little as I try to find a way to say this without deeply offending him, because for some reason I care about hurting people's feelings these days. "I would really rather not see you for a while. I don't want to talk or look at you any more than I have to right now. Not just you…all of you." I look through the window of the restaurant at Cat, Robbie, and Andre, who are still sitting in the corner booth, watching us. "It just reminds me that there's only five of us…uhh…five and a half…now and I won't get over it if I have to look at you guys every day because there's just a big hole in our group now and I know we weren't really even that close, but the thought that she's not coming back just makes me…oh my god I'm losing my mind." The tears that have been fighting to return win again, and I start bawling my eyes out right there in front of him, with the others watching me through the window. He reaches out to grab my hand but doesn't hug me this time.

"I understand." He squeezes my hand in his and tries to turn me toward my car. "At least let me drive you home?"

"Yeah." I mumble, now just holding my wrists up to my eyes like they're drain plugs and will help in any way to stop me from crying like a little baby. I end up in the passenger seat of the car somehow and by the time Beck drives out of the parking lot, I've stopped crying, for the time being. My lungs are burning and I can't see a thing and my nose is running and I feel and look absolutely disgusting, but I set myself aside for a moment and look at Beck. He's keeping a straight face, but I can tell how hard he's trying by the way that he keeps scrunching his nose. I've been looking at him for maybe 15 seconds by now, and he's already done it twice. He's squeezing the steering wheel hard enough to turn his knuckles white. He always drives like that, but I can tell somehow that he's squeezing it a little harder than usual.

"Tell me a joke." I ask him softly, and he releases his grip on the steering wheel to look at me.

"A joke?"

"Yeah. A long one, a short one, a dirty one, a clean one. Just a joke. You can tell me a knock-knock joke if you want."

"Okay. Well, ummm… Why do ducks have webbed feet?" He looks at me as if he expects me to answer. "To stamp out fires. Why do elephants have flat feet?" He halfheartedly finishes, "To stamp out burning ducks."

"That's stupid." My voice comes out in a nasty tone I didn't intend to use on him.

"God, Jade, I'm an actor, not a comedian."

"Sorry." I mumble, looking out the window. "I was just trying to… Never mind. I don't know what I was trying to do but I'm sorry I did it." He's silent for a while as we drive down the road. I don't recognize anything we pass, but then again I can't really see it either. Everything is a giant blur, just like the last week has been.

"Actually, I'm sorry." Beck apologizes as he pulls into my driveway. "You were just trying to lighten things up a little… I shouldn't have been so defensive." I stare at him for a moment, but can't come up with anything to say, so I spit out another uncharacteristic apology.

"No, I'm sorry. It was my fault."

When did we get like this? We're talking like we're strangers who accidentally bumped carts at the grocery store, instead of two people who have loved each other for three years.

Do I still love him? Do I feel anything at all? I don't know. My head doesn't work anymore. I feel like my insides have been scooped out and replaced with sand. Like some redneck hunting enthusiast is about to mount me on the wall in his living room above the TV so he can admire his shitty work while he watches NASCAR and drinks a Bud Light.

I can't even get out of the car. My feet don't move. My mouth quit working so I can't even speak.

I'm tired and I want to go back to bed, but when Beck helps me inside I ask him to stay. I really don't want him to, but I have no control over my body anymore and I can't resist asking him. He says yes, he can stay for a little while, but I can tell that he'd rather not. He's never been a very good liar - that's why he never does it. I wish I had been cursed like that.