Page 14 of Ghosts Don't Cry

And how do you describe the way love turns to grief when the person is still alive, still breathing, still existing somewhere in the world but completely unreachable?

My phone rings with Mom’s ringtone. The sound echoes through the apartment, shrill and insistent. She’ll know he’s back. The whole town will know by now. She’ll want to make sure I’m keeping my distance, protecting myself, and learning from past mistakes.

I could burn the letters, and throw out everything else in the box. It would be the healthy thing to do.

But I can’t make myself let go. These scraps are all I have left of something that mattered.

Some things are meant to be kept, even if they break you all over again.

The light shifts through the window as afternoon slides toward evening. My legs have gone numb beneath me, pins and needles spreading through muscles that have been still too long.

The phone has stopped ringing. The ice cream will definitely be ruined by now.

I unfold one of the notes from the box. His handwriting stares back at me, beautiful and poetic, despite the life he was living.

You asked why I read so much. The truth is, other people’s words are easier to live in than my own head. In books, everything makes sense. Causes have effects. Problems have solutions. Nobody starves, or freezes, or disappears.

In books, people get saved.

My chest aches. He’d written this on a scrap of paper torn from a notebook, the edges rough and uneven. I’d asked him the question one afternoon in the library, watching him devour page after page, as though he was afraid someone would take the book away.

Do you ever stop?I’d asked.Do you ever just … exist without words.

I hadn’t understood then, not really. But I do now. The words were his lifeline, his link to a world that had given him nothing but reasons to let go. And when the words weren’t enough, when reality crashed in too hard and too fast, and survival became more than he could manage …

I fold the note carefully and place it back in the box. Tomorrow, I’ll clean up the melted ice cream. Tomorrow, I’ll answer my mother’s texts and Cassidy’s questions.

But tonight, I’m going to sit here on the floor, holding onto pieces of a boy who became a ghost long before he disappeared.

Chapter Six

LILY - AGE 17

“CanI borrow your notes from yesterday?” Cassidy drops into the seat next to me before history class, already reaching for my notebook. “I swear Mr. Edwards talks faster every day.”

Laughing, I push the notebook closer to her. “Maybe if you weren’t texting Mike?—”

“Iwasn’ttexting Mike.” She pauses, lips curling. “Much.”

I hide my smile and continue unpacking my bag. Cassidy has been my best friend since preschool. Now, she copies my notes for history, she helps me with math, and somehow we both keep our GPAs high enough to make our parents happy. It’s a system that works, even if my mom occasionally mentions that I’d do much better in calculus if I spent less time ‘helping everyone else with their problems.’

She’s not wrong, exactly. But there’s something about seeing people struggle when I can help that I can’t ignore. It's always been this way—since elementary school when I'd stay after to help kids who couldn't tie their shoes yet, through middle school when I spent lunch periods tutoring anyone who asked. Mom says I need to focus on my own future, my own college applications. Dad just sighs and tells her to let me be.

Sometimes I wonder if she’s right, though. If all this helping is just me avoiding my own problems, and my own uncertainties about what comes after graduation. It’s easier to fix other people’s struggles than to face the blank space of my own future.

“Ah! You must be the new student.” Mr. Edwards stops mid-lecture when the door opens. I’m still helping Cassidy find the right page in her textbook, the one that’s somehow missing half its table of contents despite it being new. “Class, this is …”

“Ronan.”

The name barely registers. We get new students regularly, usually from Bankwell or Carrington, the next towns over. Their parents get jobs at the local manufacturing plant, or their families split up, and suddenly they’re here, sliding into our routines like they’ve always been part of them. Most leave again within a year or two, transferring back out when circumstances change again.

I don’t look up until Cassidy elbows me.Hard.

“What?”

She jerks her chin toward the back of the room. I turn slightly, expecting to see another kid with a too-new backpack and an uncertain smile. Instead, I see empty eyes, dark hair, and sharp edges.

He’s sitting by the window, half in shadow, almost as though he’s trying to fade into the wall. His hoodie is worn thin at the elbows, and his backpack looks like it’s been through a war.