Page 29 of The Silent Waters (Elements 3)

I’m so sorry, Brooks. I’m sorry you’re hurting.

“Yeah, me too. I liked her, you know? Lacey was great. But…” He frowned at the words on the dry-erase board, then took the palm of his hand and erased them. “See? With one swipe of the hand, the hurting is gone.”

He stood up and started walking around my room, running his fingers across the spines of all of my novels. I knew the hurting wasn’t gone, because another thing Brooks did when he was sad was pace and thumb through my books.

The tiny bookshelf I’d had since I was a small kid was now stacked high with novels, and those that didn’t fit on the shelves were standing up around the perimeter of my bedroom.

Unlike most people, my books were not grouped together by genre or author name. My books were placed together based on the color of their binding. All reds sat beside one another, while all the purples stayed close together. So, when one walked into my bedroom, they saw a rainbow border wrapping around the space.

“What’s this?” he asked, picking up a small notebook with leather binding.

I shot up from the bed and hurried over to him.

He smirked wickedly. “Oh my…could this be Magnet’s diary?”

I leaped for it, and he held it over his head. I leaped again, and he moved it behind his back. My arms were wild, trying to rip it away from him.

“What kind of stuff do you write in here, huh? Your dirty little secrets? I can’t help but wonder…” He smiled wider and his grin made me happy, and mad, and excited, and scared all at once. The more he leaped up to avoid me getting the journal from him, the more I leaped up to try to snatch it. Every time our skin brushed against one another, I wanted to move in closer. Every time he touched me, I wanted more. He kept laughing and laughing. “I’m sorry, Maggie. I know you’ll never forgive me, but I gotta. I just gotta read one page to see what kind of thoughts go through your—”

He opened to the first page.

He stopped moving.

He stopped talking.

He stopped laughing, too.

“Maggie’s to-do list?” he asked.

My cheeks felt warm, my stomach knotted. I walked back to my bed and sat down.

He followed, sat, and handed me the journal.

It was reading’s fault.

Reading was both a gift and a curse for me. Those books made me able to escape into a world I’d never experienced, but at the same time, they reminded me of all the things I’d been missing.

So, I made a list.

A list so that if somehow, someway, I became able to step outside that front door of mine, I’d have things to do, to see, to explore. Wishful thinking, maybe, but if books had taught me anything, it was that dreaming was always a worthy cause to take part in.

My list grew each day, too. Every time something exciting happened in one of my novels, I added it to my notebook, along with the name of the novel where I got the idea. Horseback riding, thanks to National Velvet. Going to a ball and dramatically running away, due to Cinderella. Standing in two places at once, because of A Walk to Remember.

There were hundreds of items on my to-do list, and some days I wondered if I’d ever get to cross even one thing off.

“It’s a list of things you want to do?” he asked knowingly.

I nodded.

“You can do them all, you know.”

Maybe.

Then, I erased the word.

He wrote: Definitely.

Then, he erased the word, but it stayed in my mind.