I sat in Cherry’s room, holding Lily’s hands tight while Frank sat there. I didn’t understand why he even showed up. He’s fucked up his relationship pretending that he was a good person, and the kids could tell he was upset.

Cherry woke up, after three days in comatose. She had broken both her arms and one of her legs. My perfect baby was hurt. She looked up at me and smiled slightly.

Frank brushed his hair behind his ear and ran down the hall. “Nurse?! Cherry’s awake!” Lily walked up to Cherry and hugged her as best she could in the circumstances, which was unusual considering that the two could never get along. They avoided each other most of the time because their classmates thought identical twins were creepy and they didn’t want to get picked on. Lily stuck with her friend Cassy while Cherry and Bandit were best friends. This was one of the first times since they enrolled in school that they didn’t try to forget they were twins.

A nurse came running into the room after Frank, quickly noting Cherry’s heart rate and blood pressure. It was all going by so quickly and it became such a blur. All I was able to take from it was that my daughter survived a deadly car crash. Frank hugged her as soft as he could since she had broken her arm and he didn’t want to hurt her.

Cherry had to stay in the hospital for two weeks and Lily and I visited her every day. After a week, Frank stopped visiting, and it made me curious. What was so important to him that he had to miss the visitations? I decided to drive over to his house, Lily and Miles stayed at home with a babysitter. His house was 20 minutes away from mine, so I drove.

Once I got to the house, the door was open one of the dogs was in the window, tired and hungry looking, so I decided not to knock. I opened the door and all of me puppies looked tired and worn down, and then I noticed Frank was on the ground, he looked tired as hell, probably drunk or high or something along the lines. He didn’t seem to notice me so I walked into the kitchen where the floors were covered in the remains of poisons—cocaine, alcohol, Xanax, weed, cigarettes, anything he could get his hands on.

I wanted to cry, not for my ex husband, but for the man I met in high school—the boy that had so much potential and was such a genuine person, I wanted to cry for the fact that he was dead and gone. Frank was still alive, but Frankie, my high school sweetheart, was not. He’d drowned that boy in desperation and medication that he didn’t actually need, and somehow, I knew who’s fault it was.

It was not just my own fault, it was my fault and Gerard’s equally. Gerard and Frank were toxic, and they split. Just like Frank and I were toxic, so we split. Gerard and him knew each other so well though, he did the same thing when My Chem first had broken up. He lost control because he was so in love with Gerard and Gerard was so in love with his little family. Frank self-destructed without Gerard, but they were toxic as a couple.

I found some dog food in the cabinets and found a stack of paper plates. He only had three dogs since we split up, since we split the custody of the dogs. I fed all of them and poured water into a huge metal bowl and decided to remind Frank that I was here, at his house, at 7 at night.

“Frankie, get up, c’mon.” I said, shaking him awake.

“Leave me alone, Gerard!” He cried.

“It’s not Gerard, it's Jamia.”

He opened his eyes and tried to stand up, quickly stumbling back to the ground. After he fell about 3 times, I decided to help him up. “C’mon Frank, you can make it to the couch.” I commented, lifting him up by his arms. How the hell did he weigh 200 pounds at this height? I helped him to the couch and he had trouble opening his eyes. I wanted to help him but it was hard to see him like this.

“Why are you here? You never cared before.” He choked out.

“I don’t care about you as much as I care about the man I met in high school, Frank. You’ve pretty much destroyed all of your ambition, I mean, when was the last time you picked up a guitar? Or a bass? Or played a show? You haven’t played a show in almost a year and a half! i haven’t heard about you playing any instruments since that tour either.”

He stared at the floor. “Do you think I’m proud of this?” He groaned. “I can’t fuckin’ see shit. I’m so fucked up right now.” He started dozing off and I decided to grab him blankets and pillows and I ran to the kitchen and grabbed some DayQuil from the cabinet.

“Open up, or you’ll get sick.” I said, feeding him medicine as if he were a baby. It sort of reminded me of how he would always be really sick, and I always had to help him out with things like this when he got sick off tour. He had the Eipstein Barr virus and he was always sick when he wasn't on tour.

I tucked him into his bed that I had made him on the couch and walked into his bedroom, which seemed to be the only clean thing in this entire house. I decided to call Lily and Cherry's babysitter.

"Hello?" She asked.

"Hi Alexa, I was wondering if you could stay overnight to watch the kids? I'm stuck over at a friend's house for the night and I don't want the kids alone..."

"Yeah, I could watch them," She said. "I'll just get my stuff from across the street and it should be fine."

"Thank you so much!" I said, hanging up the phone. I decided to sleep in Frank's bed since it was already almost 10:00 at night. I fell asleep under the covers of Frank's bed.

---

The next morning, I woke up around 6 to the alarm on my phone, since I didn’t have work, I decided to check up on Frank. He was lying down on the couch, clearly hungover and half-asleep.

“Jamia, what are you doing here? In my pajamas?”

“I’m cleaning you up because your daughter wants to know where her Daddy is, and you obviously want your little boyfriend back, so cleaning yourself up can’t hurt.” I replied.

“Will you stop calling him that?”

“Why should I? Doesn’t it kinda make you sound like a couple of lovestruck teenagers?” I joked. “C’mon, go take a shower, you smell like weed!”

“Fine!” He grumbled. “Are we going to check up on Cherry?” He asked.

I nodded my head. “I left the other two with the babysitter overnight, in case you were wondering.”

Frank paced towards the bathroom while I walked towards the kitchen. I searched the cabinet for coffee grinds and coffee filters. I cleaned out the old coffee maker, which clearly hadn’t been used in a few weeks, and brewed some coffee.

I heated up the stove, grabbing bread, measuring cups, sugar, cinnamon, eggs, milk, and vanilla and making French toast from scratch. Since Frank always took half an hour to shower, I finished making them and mixed milk and sugar into his coffee by the time he came into the kitchen. I handed his a plate with two slices of French toast, a cup of coffee, and migraine medicine. I then served myself the other two slices along with half a cup of coffee and sat down across from him at the small table.

“Thanks, but why are you doing this?” Frank commented, breaking the silence. “I mean, you put my boyfriend into a panic attack, and now you’re making me breakfast and checking up on me rather than the kids?”

“What happened to you?” I said, changing the subject. “When I met you, you had so much potential, you were so dedicated and then around 2006, you just—I don’t know.”

“People lose their hopefulness after a while. You’ll just have to get over it. I’m sorry I lost my flare.” He spoke, an empty voice filling his words.

“You had something in you that only you could take away, Frank. I know you aren’t choosing to always be exhausted and hurt, but you just used to get over it and everyone really loved you.”

“It was an act. Don’t you get that?” He groaned. “Everything that made me seem happy was just me, trying to impress you, trying to impress Gerard and Ray and Mikey and Bob.” He stared into my eyes. “This is the first time in my life everything has felt so real offstage.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I finished my food and got back into the clothes I’d worn the day before. “We have to go visit Lily, do you need more medicine?”

“No, the coffee did the trick.” He stated. “I’ll be right out.”

Notes

Here it is! I'm back in Colorado so my anxiety's calming down. I'm trying to fix the story up, since the original plot required Lindsey to die so I had to come up with an alternative, Jamia and Frank being friends Anyway, chapter title is from "Famous Last Words" by MCR. Thanks for reading, I hope this chapter is a little better...