I had known she was at fault. From her fidgeting hands down to her shuffling, it was evident she had done something disastrous. If that hadn't already been a dead giveaway, her wide eyed panicked look assured me the matter was grave enough for her to lose her scholarship to McDrew, her dream university. I knew it because nothing ever made Claudia panic, not even her mother's death. She did shut herself away from society but then within a month she was back with a vengeance, working towards her lifelong goal of going to McDrew, something she had been working towards ever since her father had died. She had made McDrew her escape. Every time anything went wrong, she had McDrew to fall back onto. Nothing fazed her and she spent every waking moment doing whatever it took to get into McDrew.
Me? I was an average student, nothing compared to her 4.0 GPA since kindergarden, her abundance of extracurricular activities, her buckets full of medals, her endless amount of self-organized fundraisers. I wasn't even sure I wanted to go to college. I was never jealous of her, I couldn't be. I didn't want to be her, a shallow shell of myself who didn't know who she was. I had a favorite flavor, a favorite colour, an unlikely dream of being an author. People easily believed the rumours of her being a robot, because that was how she portrayed herself, a machine with a goal. However, having grown up together, I knew better than that. I knew she was just as humane as the rest of us. I knew that she was filled to the brink with emotions she had been suppressing since childhood, worried of being thought of as weak, humane, faulty. I knew she used her goals as a way of forgetting her past, her dead father who had cared more about the college she went to than her wellbeing. I knew about her spineless mother who never saved her from the abuse, who cared more about the faade of their perfect little family and their appearance than she ever did her own flesh and blood. I knew about her father losing all of their money to a gambling debt. She had no social life, she could not afford one. I knew that any day now she would breakdown from the pressure of it all, although I had hoped it would not have been anytime soon, especially now, when it was almost the end of high school.
She was the more clearheaded one amongst us. I was the one that lived in the present; made mistakes, messes she helped me clean up every time. She was the one with the solutions. We were the perfect balance a dynamic duo, a force that could wreck all other forces, forged by our neighbourly hospital beds when we were born. I knew that when it all imploded, she would make the mess of a lifetime and I had prepared myself to help her by whatever means necessary.
This was the moment, my chance to be there for her. So, I walked into the police station, stood beside her and held her hand as I stated, "It was me. I did it."
I hadn't known back then that it would have cost me my life, that she had committed the worst crime of all. That September, I was detained in the Mistletown Madhouse, erased from existence. When I speak my truth, I am said to be delusional, but then again, maybe I am. She always did seem more like a hazy dream than reality.
