Page 13 of Ghosts Don't Cry

Cassidy: Have you seen him yet?

I ignore that one too. Cassidy knows.Of course she knows. This town is too small for secrets that size. By now,everyonewill know Ronan Oliver is back. By tonight, they’ll all have theories about why.

The kitchen walls are pressing in on me. Too many memories trying to force their way through the barriers I’ve spent years building. Friday nights when I lied to my parents and said I was with Cassidy studying. Parking my car in the shadows behind the old factory. The way he’d always sat with his back to a wall, eyes regularly checking the exits, even in places that should be safe.

I find myself in my bedroom, standing in front of my closet. On the top shelf is a box hidden behind old yearbooks. I packed it away the day of the hearing, after I came home and tried to write my way through the wreckage.

I shouldn’t open it. But I’m already reaching up to take it down.

It’s lighter than I remember. I remove the lid and set it on the bed. On the top is a letter, the paper soft with age and tear-stained. My hand is shaking when I take it out and unfold it.

Ronan,

I’m writing this because if I don’t, I’ll break. Because there are words inside me that have nowhere else to go.

You didn’t look at me. Not once. Not when everything was falling apart. Not when they were reading the sentence. And not when I was right there, my heart breaking so loudly I thought everyone would be able to hear it.

I would have followed you anywhere. I would have done anything for you.

I saw you. I really saw you. I never saw the story they told, or the whispers. All I saw was you.

The words blur. I blink hard, forcing them back into focus. Tears spill over anyway, hot tracks down my cheeks that I don’t bother wiping away.

I’ve been thinking about all the words I want to say to you. All the things I wish I could make you understand.

But you’ll never read this. And you’ll never know how much I?—

The words swim across the page, tears blurring my vision and making them impossible to read. Not that I need to see them to know what they say. They’re imprinted into my mind. I can see them on the inside of my lids if I close my eyes.

The lump in my throat makes it impossible to breathe. I squeeze my eyes closed, but the memories fill my head anyway.

The first time I saw him in history class, three weeks into the first semester. Mr. Edwards had told him to take a seat, and he’d headed to the empty desk in the back, shoulders hunched, head down. The look in his eyes that held experiences that no one our age should have known.

The whispers spread fast. How the town turned their backs before he’d been here for a month. He showed up in the same clothes three days in a row. He fell asleep in the library because he had nowhere safe to sleep. He read like other people breathed.

And no one but me ever noticed.

Even my mother warned me about him, not knowing it was too late.

Stay away from him, Lily. Some people can’t be saved. Trying will only destroy you too.

Maybe this is what destroyed looks like. Sitting on my bedroom floor with a letter I wrote to someone who never wanted to read it.

The letter trembles in my hand, and I place it back in the box gently, smoothing it flat with fingers that shake. My phone buzzes again from the kitchen. Another message I won’t answer. Another tether to normal life that I can’t deal with right now.

The box holds more than just the letter. There’s a receipt from the diner, his coffee order still visible in faded ink. Black, no sugar. A polaroid photograph of us both, his face captured with a smile that he saved just for me. Folded notes he left in my locker, tucked into my textbooks, slipped into my jacket pocket. Words that made me feel seen.

And at the bottom …

My eyes are burning, and I sink my teeth into my bottom lip to stop it from wobbling as I take out the book.

His copy of ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ the margins filled with his thoughts, observations, arguments and pain. I found it inthe factory after the hearing. I’d gone there one last time, crept through the empty hallways, and stood in the space where we’d built something fragile, and temporary. I’d taken the book. Stolen it, maybe. Saved it, definitely.

My knees give out, and I slide down the wall, book crushed against my chest. In the kitchen, something drips. The ice cream, probably. Left on the counter where it doesn’t belong, where it will melt into a sticky mess I’ll have to clean up later. The sound that escapes is a half-laugh, half-sob.

Outside, the world moves on without me. Cars pass my building, neighbors tend their yards, children’s laughter drifts through the window. But I sit here on the floor, and cry.

I could call Cassidy, and let all these words finally spill out. I could admit to her how deep this still cuts, how the wound never quite closed. But how do you explain that kind of hurt to someone who hasn’t lived it? How do you make them understand what it means to watch someone vanish, while you stand there unable to stop it?