When I get out of the car, it’s so quiet in the parking lot I can almost hear my own heartbeat. The bleached white skeletons of the trees stand stiff against the gray afternoon sky like ghosts, which seems appropriate. It’s creepy enough to make me question what I’m doing here alone. I could just as easily hole myself up in my room to read the rest of the journal. But like yesterday, something in me wants to see the place Julianna wrote about—where she once swam in a sparkling lake, lay under the midday sun, and fell for a boy she wasn’t supposed to.
But it’s so different here from how she wrote it, and it makes me a little sad as I look around at the emptiness. It’s dead. A shadow of what it used to be. I wanted to see this place the way she did—beautiful and dreamy, and romantic. I thought maybe there would be something of that left. Some little piece of her world that’s been here all this time, like another secret I might be let in on. But there’s no life or beauty or magic up here. There’s only whitewashed trees and a sky that’s getting darker by the minute.
I came to see the lake, so I grab her journal and a sweatshirt just in case the clouds in the distance move in, and I head across the parking lot. The sign at the trailhead says it’s a mile up to the lake, but as I step onto the trail, I remember her journal entry and feel like I’m closer than that. Like I’m right there with her, climbing the steep hill, maybe to end up at something I didn’t see coming. The trail is narrow and twisty like she said, and between the gnarled roots pushing up through the dirt and the loose rocks all around, I have to keep my eyes on the ground directly in front of me to keep from tripping.
As I walk, a sound like a soft, continuous exhale moves through the trees high above me, and I pause for a moment, startled and unsure of what it is. But then I feel the stray wisps of the breeze that made it; they reach down through the branches, lifting a few strands of my hair, making them dance around me. And I remember what she called this place. A dream world, she’d said, where two worlds meet. She’d been talking about herself and Orion. Today, it feels like her world and mine. It seems perfectly fitting that I should read her journal in this spot. There’s something poetic about it. But more than once on the way up, I have to convince myself that Julianna didn’t somehow, from beyond, put her journal in my hands for me to find, that the place is not haunted, and that I am not crazy for coming up here to do this.
After what seems like farther than a mile, the trail opens up to a rocky white beach, where the lapping of the water on the shore is the only sound besides the constant shush of the breeze. That part is just like she said. And the lake. Tucked down against sheer gray rock on the back side, it still sits perfectly calm and blue. Even in the pale afternoon light I can see straight through to the bottom, where so many dead trees have fallen in it looks like a forest has grown beneath the surface. I turn around to look for a decent place to sit, and that’s when I see the letters carved into a tree, just a few feet from where I stand.
I WAS HERE.
Chills shoot down my back and out through my feet. In that instant it feels like she’s talking to me, telling me I’m in the right place. It has to be the carving she mentioned in the journal, that Orion drew before he drew her. Which means she really was here. They were here together. So close. Maybe in this exact spot. It does feel like knowing a secret, and I sit down right there to read.
June 3
Shane gave me a gift today and I could barely look him in the eye. We sat in his Jeep at the edge of the creek, and when I opened the box from the jeweler, and it sparkled in the sun, I should have felt happy. I should’ve felt lucky that he’s so sweet and giving and the one person who knows me best of anyone. But the only thing I felt was something heavy that started to twist, deep and tight, in my chest.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
And it was, but it wasn’t anything I would’ve chosen for myself. Inside the box, on a layer of white satin, was a lacy silver snowflake, intricate and inlaid with tiny diamonds over the entire thing. The perfect necklace for his ice princess. He took it out when I didn’t and held it up so it spun in the sunlight at the end of its delicate chain.
“I thought it looked like you. Here.” He undid the clasp and I automatically swept my hair to the side so he could hook it at the back of my neck.
“It’s perfect,” he said. And he sat back and smiled, and the thing in my chest twisted even tighter, and the front seat of his Jeep felt ten times smaller, because at that moment the only thing I could think about was Orion. And of how much more I’d felt like me at the lake with him yesterday than I did in Shane’s car right then.
I brought my hand to where the necklace hung on my chest, felt the new weight of it around my neck. “It really is beautiful, but you didn’t need to do this . . . . I don’t . . .”
I searched his face, nervous all of a sudden about what he might be able to see written on mine. It seems ridiculous, but I was worried he’d look at me and know something was off. Maybe even be able to see that since the day at the lake, I haven’t stopped thinking about Orion, and it’s made a mess of me. Nothing happened between us. Nothing physical, anyway. We never touched, and after a while, we hardly even spoke. But I felt different. Torn. And today I was afraid Shane would notice. It made me want to hide.
“Why did you do this?” I asked him. It was heavy, the guilt of feeling what I did, and it came out more as an accusation than a question.