ANGELA ROBB

HAZEL DIED on a Tuesday, which was kind of bizarre because until then it was the most boring Tuesday ever. We’d just been for hot chocolate at the doughnut place down the street from our school, because we had double maths last thing and figured we deserved it just for not sticking pencils in our eyes an hour in. Hot chocolate with Hazel was always interesting because for some reason that’s when she got super philosophical, thinking way outside the box, I mean not even in the same room as the box.

On that Tuesday afternoon, Hazel was spooning whipped cream into her mouth and staring at me with her emerald eyes in the way she always did, like she was simultaneously lost in her own thoughts and reading all of mine.

‘What do you think makes us free?’ she asked.

Pretty random, even for Hazel. I knew how much she loved these conversations, even if I couldn’t understand why, so I tried to engage my brain.

‘Um … I dunno,’ I said. I nearly said, ‘Doing what you want with your life,’ but then I remembered the careers fair we’d been to the month before, and hearing how everything that sounded even remotely interesting is stupidly competitive to get into. So I took a reality check. ‘Finding a job that’s semibearable must be part of it.’

Hazel narrowed her eyes as if she was giving this some thought, when it was obvious she totally disagreed. I was still feeling hacked off after double maths, so I just said, ‘Well then, what do you think makes us free?’ Because actually, that’s what she really wanted to talk about.

‘I think the whole point of a job is that you’re not free,’ she said. She looked at me even more closely, if that was actually possible. ‘Feeling loved, and in love – that would make us free, but we have to feel so many other things at the same time that it’s just not possible. Love has to, like … compromise with all the crap in life.’

‘So we’re screwed,’ I said. Hazel licked her spoon. ‘You are spot on, Megan. It’s double maths till the day we die.’

I wouldn’t be a stupid passive fluffy cloud. I’d make it four o’clock forever, she’d be here still, we’d be drinking hot chocolate till the end of the world

I find it hard to be deep when I’m slurping marshmallows, so that’s pretty much where the discussion ended. As we left the café and went our separate ways, I found myself watching after Hazel. Her chestnut hair was shining in the sun as she stepped lightly along the street, and she looked pretty free to me.

Later that day I got a phone call from Hazel’s mum. Hazel had collapsed and died while she was walking home through the park. Something called a ruptured aneurysm, a thing in her brain that just popped. The first people to come along found her lying by the path, on a layer of white blossom that had fallen from the trees.

Blackness. I’d never thought of it as something you could actually feel; something that could drown you from the inside, that could spill out of you and block out everything else, the sun outside your window. I had two days off school. I could barely talk, or think, or move – but I could cry. Hot, salty tears that burned my eyes but couldn’t flush out the blackness. What had happened just didn’t compute. All I could think of – and it was weird, because how could I be obsessing over this when all my other thoughts had completely seized up – was how much human beings need to make sense of things. How we lose our minds if we can’t, because how can we possibly keep it together in a world that doesn’t make any sense? In the whole universe of things that don’t make any sense, Hazel dying was the ultimate. She was barely sixteen. I’d just had hot chocolate with her. And now she was gone. She’d been yammering on about life’s profound questions. Well if anything ever proved that life is pointless and meaningless, this was it. No sense, no order. No reasons.