Do you know what it's like to hope that you're going crazy? Or worse, to hope that your probably fucking dead girlfriend was crazy? Because I'd rather be crazy than this actually be fucking happening. Jess didn't just get sick in America. She got crazy. She must have gotten crazy because there is no other logical, scientific, reasonable damn explanation for what's supposedly going on. She must have gotten some mind-rotting crazy virus thing and I must have caught it off her because I'm going nuts, too.

God, I'm starting to sound like I'm blaming her again. I'm so crap.

When we were planning our trip through the USA, she specifically asked if we could avoid Mississippi, the state where she had lived before moving to the UK. So we did, and I didn't think much of it. If I was doing a round trip of Great Britain, I'd probably avoid this dull county I've barely left. I was meant to be going to university in Newcastle. I don't know if that will happen now and I'm scared.

No, I need to focus on Jess. Not my own selfish dreams. Jess. Beautiful, lovely Jess. Jess, with her open mind and her whole-face smile and her dreams. Jess got sick. I don't know who else knows the exact details – probably her parents, and any doctor they took her to. She never told me. It started as a cough, so according to my GCSE biology it was probably some kind of infection of the lungs. Can an infection make you withdrawn? Paranoid? Cold?

I should be objective. Jess wasn't perfect. In those last months she didn't call me as often as she used to. We stopped talking as much. She stopped playing lacrosse. There isn't a lot to do in this town, but what few things she did do, she quit. The more I think about it, the more it was like she was isolating herself. I should have noticed the warning signs and reached out to her, and I remember briefly wondering why she never reached out to me – she knew about my history of depression. There were a couple of times where we'd meet up at the park or go for coffee or something and she'd just suddenly stand up, whisper half an apology and just – leave. I tried to think nothing of it, but I can't get her face out of my mind. If I'm being rational, she was depressed and had some kind of freaky mental breakdown and ran away. If I'm not, it was something else. I googled the pictures and and I'm trying not to imagine what it means if it's something else.