Depression

Depression is portrayed as a recurring, individual experience entangled with grief rather than as a single condition with a simple resolution. Kelly’s previous crises, Ava’s numbness and fog after Kelly’s death, and Gideon’s attention to depression triggers give the subject different forms across the story. Ava’s eventual calm does not mean that grief has disappeared: the narrative presents ongoing support and choices about how to live with pain as part of moving forward.

Symptoms and the Weight of Bereavement

After Kelly’s death, Ava finds school difficult to endure. She struggles to pay attention, sometimes avoids attending, and resents classmates who assume that their own losses mean they know what she feels. Her friend’s death is not interchangeable with the death of a relative or pet; the loss leaves Ava with what she experiences as numb sadness and a sense that ordinary schoolwork has no point. Six months later, she feels that time itself has slowed and fears that she may feel this way for the rest of her life.

The news arrives at 5:37 in the morning, when Kelly’s and Lincoln’s father calls Ava’s home phone. Seven minutes later, Ava’s father comes to her room and tells her that Kelly has died. Ava remembers the precise timing and the delay before the news is spoken; she later counts thirty-one Sundays since the death, each one recalling the day she learned of it. The repeated counting gives grief a calendar of its own, while the remembered call marks the rupture against which Ava measures her life afterward.

Ava’s account of her state is not limited to sadness. In therapy, she struggles to name what she feels and describes an inability to think clearly or make decisions, as though everything were foggy. She recognizes that speaking about the experience helps her navigate it: acknowledging what is happening makes strategies possible, and strategies can create forward movement. The narrative thus treats difficulty speaking as real without presenting silence as the only response.

Kelly’s Crises and Ava’s Search for Meaning

Ava recalls that Kelly had previously been hospitalized twice after episodes involving suicidal feelings. One hospitalization occurred in Year 9 and lasted about a night. Ava resented the expectation that Kelly should tell an adult and return to hospital if those feelings recurred, seeing it as placing too much responsibility on Kelly for an illness that others, including professionals and family, did not fully understand. This memory establishes that Kelly’s distress had a history, while also showing the limits of Ava’s knowledge at the time.

In retrospect, Ava studies an ordinary afternoon for signs that she missed. Kelly declines chips, says she will never forget a photograph, and repeatedly erases and redraws a heart on Ava’s mirror. Ava had regarded these habits as familiar, but after Kelly’s death she wonders whether the heart was a way of communicating love. She also tries to understand Kelly’s final night and whether overwhelming pain had narrowed what Kelly could imagine doing. These are Ava’s attempts to make sense of the loss, not certainties about what Kelly thought or intended.

That search affects Ava’s understanding of her own pain. She considers the possibility that distress can become so consuming that it obscures other options. By the end of the story, she draws a distinction between Kelly’s wish to end pain and the loss of Kelly’s life, and takes that distinction as a reason to keep living. The conclusion does not claim that Ava can know exactly what Kelly would have wanted; it shows how Ava uses her continuing bond with her friend to orient herself toward the future.

Relief, Recurrence, and Support

Ava sometimes finds temporary relief in company. Being with Lincoln makes the school day and the prospect of her father’s reaction recede for a while, and lets her feel something other than misery. She recognizes the complication in that comfort: it resembles the feeling she had when Kelly was alive, even though their closeness would not have developed in the same way had Kelly survived. Relief therefore coexists with grief rather than disproving it.

Ava also looks back on a night of drinking and risky decisions with embarrassment and gratitude that she avoided one particular choice. Her father had been trying to discuss grief-related decisions and self-care, but she had tended to tune him out. The episode illustrates how distress can shape behavior and judgment; it does not turn every action into evidence of depression or imply that a single reprimand resolves the underlying pain.

Gideon’s experience adds a distinct thread. When he tells Annie that things are improving, he stresses that this period is different from the previous times, while acknowledging that he is still struggling. Later, following a week involving conflict and a breakup, he and his mothers discuss the possible effect of his triggers on his depression. They consider contacting his former therapist, finding a therapist locally, and changing his medication. Gideon asks to be listened to and trusted when he says he is fine, while his family explains that their fear reflects their knowledge of how serious his earlier crisis became. Their conversation holds both his growth and their continuing concern in view.

Living With Feelings That Remain

Ava continues therapy with Nola every fortnight. Nola’s box analogy gives Ava a way to think about feelings that may be present without filling her whole field of attention. Ava says that sadness, hurt, anger, confusion, grief, and love remain, but she can feel calm; the feelings are not necessarily gone, yet at that moment they are not greater than the whole of her. This is a change in her relationship to distress, not a claim that it has ended.

Ava rejects the expectation that she should simply move on from Kelly. She understands their friendship as a lasting bond, and believes Kelly’s death will continue to shape her. At the same time, she distinguishes moving forward from leaving Kelly behind: she can make choices that allow her to live, seek help, and consider possible futures while continuing to grieve. Depression and bereavement are therefore not resolved by forgetting or by a final cure in the narrative. Their management appears instead as an ongoing practice of naming feelings, accepting support, and acting without demanding that pain vanish first.