“You want my English paper, babe?”
“It was really good.”
He looked at her for a moment and smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Well, who’s next then? I can’t be the only one with something to burn!” The little fire was getting hungrier, eating up the pages. The sun was low and miming the blaze.
Hannah threw in her tests, and then she threw in her dried flowers and cards from boys, and she looked back over her shoulder at Natalie. The fire lit up both of their faces, and Natalie beamed back. Kristen threw in her locker pictures of New York, because now that she’s really going there, it’s not just a dream anymore.
I wanted to take a turn, and I thought about my notebook filled with my letters to all of you. I thought about how they would look, burning in the fire. I wondered if the flame would carry them up to you, wherever you are.
But when I reached for my notebook, I couldn’t do it. Somewhere, it seemed, in my letters to you, was a story I had told. Something true. So I decided that I’m going to turn all of my letters in to Mrs. Buster. School is still open for a few days for teachers to finish their grades, so tomorrow or the next day, I’ll go and leave them in her teacher’s mailbox. For some reason, maybe because she gave me the assignment in the first place, I want her to read what I wrote.
So instead of burning the whole notebook, I took the last blank page out and threw it into the fire. I watched the white page, with its fine blue lines, as it burned. It made me cry for all of you who should have had more time. And for May.
After the fire was done eating my blank page, everyone was looking at me. “I miss my sister,” I said simply, and it was nice to be able to just say it out loud. Hannah put her arm around me as I wiped the tears from my eyes. “She would have loved you guys,” I added.
“If she was anything like you, we would have loved her, too,” Tristan said, and smiled.
When the moment was over, we looked down and noticed that the fire was still getting bigger, so Tristan went to get the garden hose to put it out. He squirted Kristen and made her squeal, and then he squirted us all, and we tackled him for the hose and squirted back. All of our clothes were wet after that, but none of us cared, because it was summer-night warm out.
As the sun fell over the horizon, we went to sit on the deck, and I texted Sky to ask if he would come and meet us. When I saw his truck pull into the driveway, my heart leapt. He walked up wearing his same leather jacket, even on the brink of summer. He looked as beautiful as he did the first day I saw him, but more than that even, because now I knew him.
He came up to sit with us, and the sky opened wide, the way it does in summer, to let a lightning storm in. We all watched it for a while, and Kristen brought out a bottle of her parent’s champagne and popped it, and we toasted each other. I took a sip, but I gave the rest of mine to Tristan.
Then I said, “Hey, Tristan?”
“Yes, Buttercup?”
“I think that next year in college, you should start a band.”
He smiled a soft sort of smile that didn’t go with his normal pointy edges. “You’re right. I should.”
“You could name it the Regular Weirdos.”
He laughed. “I love that.” It was quiet a moment. Then he said, “Well, no need to wait for college, right?” He turned to Hannah and said, “Are we going to do a song together, or what?”
Hannah got a spark in her eyes. This was maybe going to be the first time that she would sing for people, other than me or Natalie. She swallowed and nodded. We followed Tristan as he went to get his guitar and set it up in the living room and pulled up a stool for Hannah to sit on. “What do you want to sing?” he asked. Hannah wiped her palms on her dress and thought about it for a long minute. She said, “‘Sweet Child O’ Mine,’” which was all of our New Year’s song. Tristan grinned and started right away with the first strings of the guitar that vibrate through your body. Hannah’s voice shook for a moment, coming out quiet, but as she kept singing she got louder and louder, until the song was pouring out of her. She looked at Natalie as she sang. Tristan looked at Kristen as he strummed the guitar hard and mouthed along with Hannah. And I looked at Sky.
I grabbed his hand and whispered under the music, “I really want to kiss you.”
He took my face in his hands, and it was a different kiss than it’s ever been. I didn’t feel like a light that he was crowding toward anymore, like a street lamp, or even like a moon. I felt like we both had the sun inside of us. Our own ways to stay warm. So when our bodies came together, it was the hottest thing I’d felt.
As Tristan and Hannah got to the end of the song, we all bounced up and down and shouted along, “Where do we go now?” Hannah was beaming, and Tristan played the end again. I can’t describe how it felt, being there right then, so close together, on the edge between who we were and who we wanted to be.
Sometimes when we say things, we hear silence. Or only echoes. Like screaming from inside. And that’s really lonely. But that only happens when we weren’t really listening. It means we weren’t ready to listen yet. Because every time we speak, there is a voice. There is the world that answers back.
When I wrote letters to all of you, I found my voice. And when I had a voice, something answered me. Not in a letter. In a new way a song sounded. In a story told on a movie screen. In a flower shooting through a crack in the sidewalk. In the flutter of a moth. In the nearly full moon.
I know I wrote letters to people with no address on this earth. I know you are dead. But I hear you. I hear all of you. We were here. Our lives matter.
Yours,
Laurel
EPILOGUE
Dear May,
I had a dream about you last night. I watched you walk on the tracks, your moonlit arms balancing you like thin white wings. I saw you turn to look back at me. I felt your eyes catch mine. I saw you fall. And I saw you hovering there, midsky, like you were standing on air. I kept begging myself to move my feet. But I couldn’t. They were stuck. I kept thinking you were waiting for me. There was still a moment. If I could just walk forward, I could reach out and take your hand and pull you back across the tracks to the land. But my body was frozen. I tried with all my strength, but lifting my foot was as hopeless as shoving a mountain. It was the most awful feeling. I was in a panic, trying to get to you.
Then I heard you whisper, “Laurel,” as you turned your back to me. “Look.” And that’s when I saw it. I saw you take your wings out. I saw them, paper-thin but stronger than anything, glittering like water. They weren’t broken. They were carrying you into the sky. You got smaller and smaller, until you turned into a pinpoint of light, same as a star. And I knew you were there. And everywhere.