(c) Seventeen Forever [PG]

by nimrod. Sun 05 Oct 2008, 5:24 am

Title:Seventeen Forever
Author: Me.
Fandom: Green Day. Trillie.
Type: Oneshot.

We were young, pretty, and reckless. We truly believed that the rules didn’t apply. And, most of all, we were seventeen.

Now I’m old – maybe not truly old, but I aged all I would that night. That night I learned I wouldn’t be seventeen forever from someone who would be.

I remember him. Some say faces fade with time, but not his.

Oh, not his.

I thought he was beautiful – so beautiful that all the ugly had gotten jealous and started fighting against him, hurting him. That’s why there were small external flaws – like the bags underneath his eyes and the nicotine stains on his fingers. That’s why he had a permanent scowl on his face and why his hair frizzed out in the summertime. This ugly, ugly world had tried so hard to get him, and while in the end I suppose it did, it never took away that shining golden beauty he had.

But then, just like the poem – nothing gold can stay.

I told him all that once. I’d just gotten my license and had driven him shakily out to the town limits, to where all the traffic and noise faded and there was nothing but green Californian woods. I told him all that as we were sitting on the roof of my car, the sunlight settling across his profile and – I swear – for a minute, he really was glowing.

He simply smiled at me, unsure of how to respond to my eccentricity, to my quite sincere compliment. I smiled back, knowing that he would never understand just how golden he truly was.

I miss him. I really do. He was my life – he still is my life. I don’t have a meaning, passion, or purpose anymore – it’s just… this bland, mundane routine. The last excitement I experienced was that night, the night I aged, the night I lost my love, the night I lost my passion, the night that Billie Joe died.

It could be my fault. It could be his fault. It could be the sun’s fault for setting so beautifully in the west – I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s not really anyone’s fault. I used to think it was my fault, but that was before the dreams started.

The dreams are always the same. Billie’s walking towards me, dressed in a plaid shirt and black jeans, hair stuck up on the side of his head and Converse dirty and untied. He’s at one end of a long, dark corridor – there’s a pocket of light surrounding him, especially bright on his head, a pretty halo highlighting his light brown hair and rough, unshaven cheeks.

He’s even more beautiful in my dreams.

As he gets closer and closer, he starts shaking his head, and the light follows his motions, leaving that black inky darkness behind him visible just for a second.

“Not you, Trè.”

That’s the only thing he ever says, because I always wake up then, before he reaches me. I can interpret it in different ways – like he's trying to tell me it’s not my fault what happened, but what I truly think he was trying to tell me was to stay alive, for him. For a very long time, I wanted to die. I didn’t want to be without him – I still don’t, but that dream has kept me around. Billie doesn’t want me to die, so I won’t.

Maybe I should talk about what happened.

We were drunk. Or ‘highly intoxicated’, as the police report read. We were lying on our backs in Billie Joe’s backyard, staring up at the sky, giggling once in a while for no particular reason. The peacefulness of the situation was like a woolen blanket, warming me from my head to my toes, and the stinging aftertaste of the alcohol was on my breath, coating my throat. His head was on my stomach, and my arms were underneath my head.

Eventually, the sky darkened. It happened so fast we barely realized it. There we were, two gangly gay seventeen year olds, heads fuzzy. I don’t remember whose idea it was to go out to our spot at the edge of town – could have been either of us. That was where we went when we wanted to be alone, and I believe were both equally sexually stimulated.

He drove. I almost tried to stop him.

“ ’Illie. You’re plastered!” I giggled.

“We’re young, Tree.” We both stared at each other in silence as we slowly realized that he had pronounced my name as if I was shrubbery before exploding in slurred, drunk laughter.

“We won’t be seventeen forever!” I agreed loudly, slinging my arm around his shoulders. He looked at me for a moment.

“You’re fucking right! We’re young and we should fuck it all the fuck up!” He yelled, and I pulled him in for a wet, over zealous kiss. His fingers started clumsily pulling at my jeans – not fumbling with the zipper, just pulling at my crotch so hard I yelped in his mouth and broke the kiss. He smiled cheekily at me and I stuck my tongue out at him.

“Less go!” Now he was more excited than ever.

“’Sides, lookit that sun. We gotta see that up close, baby.” I looked out the windshield and had to agree. The sun was a breathtaking mixture of colors, lights, and as it felt at that moment – emotions. It seemed like every emotion I was feeling at the time – love, happiness, excitement, nervousness - had rooted itself in the sky.

I sat back and let him start the car.

The streets were deserted. The streetlights were burning over us dimly as he drove up curbs and screeched around corners – I just laughed and set my feet up on the dashboard.

Finally, we arrived at the one long, dark road out of town. About three quarters of a mile up the road, there was a sharp turn that led to a clearing – our spot. There were reflectors set up along the side at one time, but now they were knocked down and discarded, either by others or us. He slowed down a little, but not much, leaving the needle hovering around 65 miles per hour.

“I love you!” He yelled across at me suddenly, over his stuttering motor and turning wheels. He wasn’t looking at the road, he was staring at me. I know everything spells total disaster, but at that moment, I noticed nothing. I noticed nothing but the shine of his eyes and the fluttering inside my chest. I noticed nothing but Billie Joe, his glow. I felt nothing but sheer happiness and, of course, I felt very, very much seventeen.

“I love you too!” I yelled, and he broke out into a grin so wide I thought his face would split open.

It was the first time we’d ever said that to each other, you see.

The next few second are sort of lost. All I know is that I saw our turn, pointed and screamed – You’re going to miss it! – and Billie whipped the wheel to the right. The police told me later that he had missed by a mere three feet.

The road was raised above the ground by about five feet. The car veered off the side, flipped, and the left side was smashed in by the impact. The windshield shattered from the force of the hit and I remember hearing shattering glass, twisting metal – and, worst of all, a kind of underlying silence. Billie wasn’t screaming, yelling, or crying – it was total silence, from the time the car first went airborne from the time it rolled to heaving stop. My breathing was heavy, laborious, and I had fallen out of the seat in such a way that my feet were against the driver’s seat, my back on the roof of the car, and my head in the window. I say in the window because it was – the top of my head had smashed through it, and glass shards were sprinkled like fairy dust across my eyes. The window left a bloody ring that wrapped around my forehead.

And, most terrible of all, there was nothing but silence, yet again.

I started screaming his name and twisting my head around, deepening the wound but not caring. I kicked my feet around, twisted my sprained back, and basically worsened each injury I had already received. I would be in the hospital for a week, for both my injuries and because I was considered a suicide risk.

Eventually, I propelled forward with all my might, breaking the entire passenger side window and inhaling glass and cold night air all in one terrifying, painful breath. The moment I got out, I crawled on my bloody hands and knees to the other side of the car, coughing deeply and spitting out blood and glass. I pulled open his car door with extreme difficulty and screamed his name once again.

Billie was alive, that was the first thing I saw. The second thing was that he was upside down. The tree had smashed the front of the car, breaking both his outstretched legs and simultaneously trapping him. The pain must have been unbearable. Tears were falling out of his eyes and running up his forehead, splattering on the car roof.

“Billie? Billie Joe?”

“Trè? Trè, baby?” He turned his neck, and the movement looked so exquisitely painful that I wanted to tell him to stop.

“Yes, yes, I’m here, I’m here, Billie, Billie.” I repeated myself in my haste to answer, my haste to assure my presence. I wiped the tears off his forehead with my bloody hand, and he took it in his. I was kneeling next to him, and his arm was dangling downward to me. He pulled me closer – or tried to – and told me to listen, because there wasn’t much time left.

“You… you won’t be seventeen forever.” I was already crying, but when he said that, the crashing reality fell down on me, and I cried the worst, most painful sobs of my life. He was right. We might be able to get away with stupidity at seventeen, but I would eventually have to grow up, and it was going to be without him.

“Live, baby, live.” I chanted under my breath, and he shook his head, grimacing in pain and hastily trying to speak while he could.

“Trè, I love you. I always have, okay? I – I want to spend the rest of my life with you.” The words were so horribly ironic because it sounded like such a big commitment - but we both knew that wasn’t long at all.

“Stay with me ‘till then. Listen ‘till then. Kay, baby?” I realized, with a sinking horror settling over my tumultuous insides that his voice was fading.

“Kiss me ‘till then, kay?” I didn’t waste a second. I bent into the steaming wreck and pressed my lips to his. He was suspended upside down, and it was awkward, especially when he dropped his jaw and I felt the warmth of his tongue for the very last time.

I recently went to see that new Spiderman movie, where he kisses Mary Jane in the rain, upside down – I had to leave the theater. The memory was so strong – the relentless passion we both gave out, even in those last moments, the love. I can still feel it sometimes, I can still taste him.

“Be okay.” I said it for both of us.

“I love you.” He closed his eyes.

“I love you, too, Billie. I always will.” He nodded, another painful gesture, and turned his head away.

I knew it was time, but I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready for him to leave.

“Billie? Billie? No. No! Talk to me! Talk to me! Don’t fucking leave me!” I grabbed his face and pulled it to me, and I saw the very last flutter of his eyelids, the very last gesture he ever made. He died right there, with my hands all over his face and the blood from his broken legs dripping down.

So did I.

I aged, I died, I lost, I cried. I passed out.

They found me the next morning, my hand still in his. His cold, dead hand – they said I had been there for close to fifteen hours, but he still felt warm to me. Still felt alive.

The age on his gravestone is seventeen and it'll be that way forever.