It had been three months since that night in the car. No one believed me when I tried to explain what had happened. It made sense from an outside perspective: We were alone, I had spoken to my mum before we left the airport. They knew he was with me. How the hell could I have explained him magically disappearing without either sounding insane or like I was terrible at covering up what ‘really’ happened?

There were two main explanations that people had come up with for the disappearance of Charlie Booker. The first being simple: That I had killed him, dumped his body, and drove home pretending some magic made him vanish. The second was that we were both on drugs whilst I was driving and he managed to get out of the car without me realising.

Most people wrote off the second explanation as it didn’t make sense for me to be driving for multiple hours at night whilst on drugs. This left the first explanation as the most commonly agreed upon series of events amongst people who discussed the news at the dinner table.

There was a complete lack of evidence to convict me other than the mere fact that I was the last person known to be with him before he disappeared and my run-down of events sounded like a load of crap.

At first it had felt like I was in some kind of limbo. I was merely an observer in my own body as my world crumbled around me. Most of the people in my life who didn’t know me very well thought I had killed Charlie. My parents thought I was insane, having seen me raving like a lunatic about some ‘blue light that took him away’.

I had even started to doubt myself, especially a month ago when I was admitted to a psyche ward for teens. I hadn’t spoken that much since the incident in the car, my relationship with my parents grew to be practically non-existent, and my relationships with the other people in my life had faded completely. Since I couldn’t be convicted due to a lack of evidence, my parents had thought it best to admit me to a psyche ward.

Spending a month in a room specifically designed to make it so you can’t kill yourself ironically made me want to kill myself. The fact that people who I’d known for years thought of me as a monster made me feel subhuman. I felt guilty even though nothing that happened was my fault.

I was tired. I had been abandoned by the world. It was complete and utter indignation – the fact that people thought I had done something to my best friend killed me inside.

So I decided I was done with this shit. I was going to end this life on my own terms. Not out of sadness, but out of anger. A flame began to burn from the depths of my being. My eyebrows furrowed and I gritted my teeth.

Grabbing my chair from behind my desk, I lifted it over my head and smashed it into my window. My room was on the fifth floor so I figured this would be the best way out. Surprisingly, the chair bounced off of the window as opposed to going straight through it like I thought it would. Despite that, I could make out a small crack. Sharpening my resolve, I hit the window again, and again.

The glass from the newly broken window showered the street below. Looking out from the window I began to doubt myself again. I was worried the fall might not kill me and I would end up paralysed for life.

Forcing myself out of the window was like trying to intentionally kick a wall. My body was refusing to do what my mind was telling it to. I was on a time limit as the wards had definitely heard the shattering glass. If my vision wasn’t so focused on the ground directly beneath the building, I might’ve noticed the small gathering of people watching as I began to climb through the small aperture.

The scraping of shattered glass on my skin made me feel alive again for the first time in several months. Some small part of me was screaming at me to stop what I was about to do, but I quickly squashed it and took one step forward into the open air.

Seconds were dragged into minutes as I fell. Finally realising there were onlookers, I felt a tinge of joy – happy to traumatise people in a world that kicked me down at my lowest. I realised the sadistic nature of that thought and became ashamed: In my last moments I was not feeling fear or sadness, but contempt and rage.

All it took was a millisecond of the worst possible headache of my life.

Then, there was nothing.