The Edge of Never (The Edge of Never, #1)

by J.A. Redmerski

So often I sit around and think about life and wonder about every possible aspect of it.

What compels any of us to do the things we do when deep down a part of us just wants to break free from it all?

“Just you and a backpack with a few necessities. No bills. No getting up at the same time every morning to go to a job you hate. Just you and the world out ahead of you. You never know what the next day is going to bring, who you’ll meet, what you’ll have for lunch or where you might sleep.”

“No, I’m still on. Next week I’ll be out of my mom’s house and living with a slut.”

Natalie’s bedroom is the complete opposite of OCD clean. And this is yet another way she and I are so completely different. I hang my clothes up by color. She leaves hers in the basket at the foot of her bed for weeks before throwing them all back into the laundry to be washed again because of the wrinkles.

The moment you tell someone else is the moment you become a whiner and the world’s smallest violin starts to play.

The truth is, we all have problems; we all go through hardships and pain, and my pain is paradise compared to a lot of people’s and I really have no right to whine at all.

Parents have this twisted belief that anyone under the age of about twenty simply can’t know what love is, like the age to love is assessed in the same way the law assesses the legal age to drink. They think that the ‘emotional growth’ of a teenager’s mind is too underdeveloped to understand love, to know if it’s ‘real’ or not.

The truth is that adults love in different ways, not the only way. I loved Ian in the now, the way he looked at me, how he made my stomach swim, how he held my hair when I was puking my guts up after eating a bad enchilada.

I can’t put my finger on it, but that Monday and the rest of that week when I woke up, got dressed and walked into that store, something was itching the back part of my consciousness. I couldn’t hear the actual words, but it felt like: This is your life, Camryn Bennett. This is your life.

I could see was the negative: snooty noses in the air, carrying expensive purses, buying pointless products. That was when I realized that everything I did from that point on produced the same results: This is your life, Camryn Bennett. This is your life.

I always thought that depression was so overrated, the way people toss the word around (a lot like the L-word that I will never say to a guy again for as long as I live).

Depression to me meant three words: sadness, sadness and sadness.

Little did I know that depression is a serious disease. Those girls at school had no idea what it really means to be depressed.

Depression is pain in its purest form and I would do anything to be able to feel an emotion again. Any emotion at all. Pain hurts, but pain that’s so powerful that you can’t feel anything anymore, that’s when you start to feel like you’re going crazy.

Tennessee slips by my window in a blur. Night falls and I eventually fall asleep, too. I don’t have any dreams; haven’t had a single dream since Ian died, but it’s probably better that way. If I have dreams they might provoke emotion and I’m done with emotion.

I’m starting to get used to this feeling of not caring about anything. Aside from a few shady bus station dwellers, I’m really not afraid of anything anymore. I guess when you just don’t care it kind of makes fear your bitch.

And unfortunately, you can also smell the people that don’t wear cologne or deodorant at all and their clothes probably haven’t been washed in several days. So

Finally, an under-populated bus I might actually get some deep sleep on. It’s all I really want to do. The longer I stay awake, the more I think about all of the things I don’t want to think about. I don’t know what I’m doing, or where I’m going, but I do know that I want to do whatever it is and get there soon.

“My granddad could fall asleep in two seconds flat after closing his eyes.”

“You want to wait until I’m asleep to turn the music back up so that you can wake me up again?”

“Well, it’s good to meet you, twenty-year-old Cam short for Camryn heading to Idaho to see her sister who just had a baby.”

I should’ve known that time alone with my thoughts would be unhealthy. Already I’ve decided that my life has been pretty much wasted and I’m going through all the eye-opening emotions: What am I here for? What’s the point in life? What the hell am I doing?

but face it, sometimes girls let that overly sympathetic gene get the best of them. And that few seconds is really all it takes.

She got pissed when I accused her of having Bieber Fever (it pisses me off that I even know what the fuck that means—I blame that on society)

No, Andrew Parrish is far from being anywhere near the Ugly Tree.

Truthfully, he lives right next door to the Sexy Tree and I think that’s the only thing that bothers me about this whole situation.

You know damn well that it doesn’t really matter what’s going on in your life, who you just lost, how much you hate the world, or how inappropriate it is to have an attraction to someone before that mending phase has reached the acceptable zone. You’re still human and the moment you see someone attractive, you can’t help but make note of it. It’s human nature.

“Don’t worry about me. I’m confident in my ability to scream really loud if I get attacked.”

“Dad wanted us to be fighters—.” He glances over. “Not boxers or actual fighters, though he probably wouldn’t have minded that so much, either. But I mean fighters in general, you know, in life. Metaphorically.”

“Just that dwelling and planning is bullshit,” he says. “You dwell on the past, you can’t move forward. Spend too much time planning for the future and you just push yourself backwards, or you stay stagnant in the same place all your life.” His eyes lock on mine. “Live in the moment,”

And when you’re thinking more about the positive aspects of a bus ride, instead of the negative, it’s easy to forget that there’s anything negative about it at all. There is a guy sitting next to me with beautiful green eyes and a beautiful sculpted face and a beautiful way of thinking. There’s no such thing as a bad bus ride when you’re in the company of something beautiful.

after all, it is the last time we will ever see each other. It’s not like we’re in love or something crazy like that, but something weird happens when you spend several days with a stranger on a bus, getting to know them and enjoying their company.

“Well, Camryn Bennett, it was a pleasure to meet you on the road to nowhere.”

“I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

“It was nice meeting you, too, Andrew Parrish,” I say, though I don’t want to say it. I want him to ride with me just a little farther. “Do me a favor if you don’t mind.”

“let yourself cry, OK? One of the worst feelings in the world is being unable to cry and eventually it…starts to make things darker.”

I’m alone again. Over a thousand miles away from home. No direction, no purpose, no goals other than to find myself on this journey I never imagined I could bring myself to begin. And I’m scared. But I have to do this. I have to because I need this time alone, away from everything back home which brought me here in the first place.

“That’s almost as creepy as suck-my-dick-for-$500-guy, don’t you think?”

“The Notebook,” he says so low that I didn’t quite catch it.

“Everybody starts out as strangers, Andrew,

I’m totally leery of this whole idea. I still trust him, I admit, but I’m also a little terrified now in a worried-I’ll-wake-up-with-a-Sharpie-moustache sort of way.

His smile just gets bigger. I think he loves torturing me.

I should never have let her leave with me, because now, I know that I won’t be able to let her go.

“Everybody’s in too much of a hurry. God forbid you drive the speed limit or you might get lynched.”

Everybody was staring at me as I walked through the halls. Some couldn’t look me in the eye.

I didn’t know what was going on, but I felt like I had walked into some freaky alternate reality. No one would say a word to me, but it was so damn obvious that everybody in that school knew something that I didn’t.

when the iconic second chorus comes around and the song slows and becomes more haunting, we get serious again and sing every single word together, looking right at each other.

A part of me feels like I can tell him anything and I sort of want to, but the other part is telling me to be careful. I haven’t forgotten that his issues outweigh mine and I would feel stupid and whiney and selfish telling him anything at all.

“I’ve let you get away with not telling me anything for a long time,” he says.