Page 29 of Ghosts Don't Cry

Just like seeing Lily again, everything about this feels like being thrown into the deep end when I don’t know how to swim.

And just like that my thoughts circle back to her.

The girl who kept me alive when I should have died in that abandoned factory. Who loved me despite every reason not to.

She’s out there somewhere in this town. Maybe a few streets away. She could be close enough that I could walk to her door if I let myself. While I’m here, with instructions from beyond the grave to build a life in a town that will wonder why this exile dared to return.

Tomorrow, I’ll have to start making this happen, and turn Edwards’ plan into something real. I’ll go to the hardware store, and face people who remember me. I’ll hear the whispers, see the stares, and feel the small-town judgment following me down every street.

But for now, I stand in this kitchen, and write lists that grow longer with each line in handwriting that gets shakier, because it’s either that or think about her and the question she asked me.

Why?

Chapter Eleven

LILY

Sleep comes in waves.My sheets are twisted around my legs, damp with sweat despite the cool air filtering through the window. Every time I close my eyes, I see him standing there on Main Street, shoulders rigid, fingers clenched into fists, looking at me like he was seeing a ghost. Or maybe I was the one seeing ghosts.

My alarm clock glows 4.47 A.M. The muscles in my neck ache, and my eyes burn with exhaustion and tears that won’t stop falling.

The box of memories sits open on my nightstand. I’ve arranged and rearranged the contents too many times, trying to create a pattern that might make sense of what I’m feeling. Notes in chronological order, then by type, then by the intensity of the memory they evoke. I reach for it again, dumping everything onto my lap. One of the notes flutters to the ground, and I lean down to pick it up.

Books are better company than people. They don’t expect anything from you, except time and attention. They don’t care if you’re broken.

I trace the words with my fingertips. I remember finding this one tucked into my calculus textbook. It was after the incident with Dan Hartman. I didn’t see it then, but it’s clear now that he was warning me that he was already broken, even then.

His copy of ‘The Grapes of Wrath’catches my eye, and I open it. I’ve read this book twice since finding it in the factory. Once right after, when I was desperate for any connection to him. Once during my sophomore year of college, when I thought enough time had passed. I was wrong.

The margins are filled with his thoughts, handwriting smaller here, cramped by limited space. Observations about class warfare, about the way the Joads were treated as less than human because of their poverty.

Near the famous‘I’ll be there’speech, his writing changes.

Some people live in the spaces between. They’re there in the hunger, in the fight, in the desperate scramble to make it one more day. Nobody sees them until they become a problem.

The pen pressed hard enough to leave impressions on the next page. I can feel the indentations beneath my fingertips, the ghost of his anger made physical.

I wonder where he was when he wrote this. The factory? The library? Some corner of the school where he thought no one would find him?

I close the book and set it to one side, then pick up one of the notes. It’s the last one he ever wrote me.

Some stories don’t get happy endings, Phare. Some people aren’t meant to be saved. Don’t waste your light trying to guide this shipwreck home.

Phare. Lighthouse in French. He’d started calling me that after my first note, because of the lighthouse drawing I’d added. Then later, he’d whisper it against my skin. I thought it was romantic. A secret name, something just for us. But really, it was another warning, another way of telling me that he was the danger I should be warning others about.

I’d read it a dozen times that first day, trying to decode it and find some hidden message that said he loved me, that it wasn’t really goodbye. But there was no hidden message, just the truth, plainly written. He was telling me to let him go.

I never understood what changed and made him pull away. Afterward, sitting in my bedroom with this note and nothing else, I wondered if he knew what was coming, and was pushing me away so I wouldn’t be standing too close when everything imploded.

It hadn’t worked. I was still destroyed. The only difference was I had to piece myself back together alone, without him.

My phone buzzes against the nightstand. Once. Twice. Three times in rapid succession. I’ve been ignoring it for the past hour, watching notifications stack up on the screen. But Cassidy isn’t the type to give up, and the buzzing is relentless.

I pick it up, squinting against the sudden brightness.

Cassidy: Are you alive? Because if you’re dead, I need to know who gets your shoe collection.

Cassidy: Also your Le Creuset. I’m calling dibs on the Dutch oven.