Haunt Me (Heartbreaker Duet #2)

six

It’s years ago. I’m me, but also not me. Issy Woo doesn’t exist yet.

I’m just Isaiah, trapped inside the most boring prep school in New England, having just buried my father. The blue sky is quickly becoming populated by clouds so perfect they look like a child’s drawings, the trees have turned yellow, and I’m feeling like a failure.

I am being a failure.

Of course, according to my professors, I am excelling at everything, but that’s not true: I am excelling in everything but music. And I don’t care about anything but music. I feel empty all the time. I feel empty right now.

It’s just another normal day at school.

Well, as normal as any day at a boarding prep school can get. ‘Normal’ here is a day filled with bullying, grade-comparing and tedious, unnecessary classes. Meanwhile, all I want to do is play the crap music I’ve been trying to compose, but I have forbidden myself to do that anymore.

It’s the second week in October and already I am bored out of my mind.

It’s also two days after Dad’s funeral, and I’m back at school, more determined than ever to make him proud. It has not yet sunk in that there is nobody to make proud anymore. He is gone. He is never coming back .

I know that. Of course, I do. But I push it to the back of my mind and try to forget it until I begin thinking that he’s on one of his trips again, off to New York or Vienna, and that I won’t see him again until Christmas break, like last year and the year before that, and the year before that... Like always. Yeah, that’s easier. Why didn’t I think of this solution before?

Pretending is so much easier.

In fact, it’s so much easier that I end up having a panic attack during algebra.

My professor looks freaked out and just stands there, my classmates begin to snicker or, worse, look at me with pity— pity —in their eyes, and I run out of class, chest heaving.

I run and run, but there is no relief like usual. I run straight through the campus and jump the back fence, lungs bursting for air that won’t come.

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.

I have to get away.

Get away, but go where? There is no place where my dad will still exist.

Still, I run.

Suddenly, I find myself inside the forest, running for my life with nothing but a book of Greek poems in my pocket. Poe and Lovecraft just don’t do it for me anymore. No one can talk about death like the Greeks; the Greeks understand me. So this morning, I stuffed the first cheap translation of Eleni in my back pocket on my way out of the dorm.

Now, as I stumble between roots and dead leaves, eyes blinded by tears, chest tight with a breath I just can’t draw in, all I can think of is that I need to find a tree and fling myself under it just to read a few lines about Helen of Troy. Maybe that will help me breathe.

I end up nearly dropping to my knees, the world beginning to fade. There is only so much time one can go without breathing. I sit with my back against a tree, my shoes buried in yellow-brown leaves, my head tipped up to the clouds. I try not to think about my dad. I try to breathe.

I fail at both.

I look around frantically, thinking that I might actually need help or I’m not going to survive this. And that’s when the world slams to a stop.

There is a girl sitting under the tree next to mine.

Her body is curled up in a ball, bent up at an almost unnatural angle, as if she is trying to make herself take up as little space as possible without breaking any bones. I sit up, trying to see if she is alive. She is, barely. Her breathing sounds chopped and labored. I stand up to go to her, and everything nearly goes black.

I fight against unconsciousness, fight to clear my vision.

I see her, actually see her, and when I do, I take my first real breath. It’s as if time has stopped, giving me room to breathe, to exist. Or maybe it’s the shock that snatches me out of the panic attack.

Because the girl is crying.

The sound is so quiet, it’s almost silent, yet my ears, trained to discern the third violin in the midst of a crescendo that could shatter glass, can hear it. Her face is hidden behind a curtain of black hair, and all I can see, aside from that, is that she’s wearing socks too big for her and a skirt too small. Her narrow frame is swallowed by what looks like a man’s sweater.

Then I see the blood.

Her legs are gathered to her chest, and I try to peer past her long hair to see her face. That’s when I notice she is resting her chin on her knee, where blood is flowing from a deep gash.

“Hey! Are you ok?” I call out.

No answer.

“Are you lost?”

Nothing. The crying doesn’t stop either. Now I’m kind of scared, kind of curious, and fully invested. I step up to her slowly, and it only now occurs to me that not only can I breathe, but I can speak as well. The panic has all but disappeared–and so has the crying. Well, mine.

I was crying as I ran. I kind of am crying still. My cheeks are still drenched in tears. I ignore them.

I won’t admit I was crying even to myself, so we’re moving past it. Now I’ve stopped; it’s just her crying. And I want to do something about it—I want to save her from whatever is hurting her, the way that no one was there to help me when I was crying this morning. And last night. And last morning. And right now. And in general.

“Hey,” I whisper, towering over her.

This can’t possibly help. But I see now that I’m closer that she is not a child. This is no kid. She must be fifteen or teen like me.

“May I see your face?” I whisper, or I just think it.

I don’t know which. My whole body is frozen.

Lower goes the head, and she gathers her knees closer to her chest, making herself even smaller. I didn’t know that there was a piece of my heart that was still whole enough to be shattered, but I swear I break a little bit more as I watch her.

“Don’t be scared,” I say impulsively, taking a step back. “I’m just a student here. Do you go here?”

She is not wearing the school uniform, yet the woods are miles away from the neighborhoods of white, two-story houses and expensive cars. She looks like she came straight out of one of these houses. What is she doing all the way over here?

She must have walked. And with her knee hurt like that? The blood is still wet. I can’t stand to look at it.

“Do you need help?” I ask her. “Hey, wait.”

She wasn’t going anywhere anyway, but it doesn’t look like she can afford to wait any longer. A thick ribbon of blood is spilling down her bare calf, then soaking her sock and dripping to the ground. I don’t know how much blood a person has to lose in order to bleed out (not to be too dramatic or anything), but I’m not waiting to find out.

I drop to my knees. I reach out to wipe the blood, but I stop. You shouldn’t touch blood with your bare hands, right? I read that somewhere, I think. I need something, a rag, or… Oh, I know. I take off my sweater and quickly untuck my white shirt from my pants. I grab the soft fabric of my T-shirt underneath, ripping the bottom half in one swift motion.

It's like something out of a movie, except it’s like nothing out of a movie.

It’s messy and the rip is uneven, with threads sticking out on all sides, and I’m shaking so badly I don’t even know I managed to rip out a huge chunk of cloth so fast. Maybe my fingers have gotten stronger due to all that gripping of the strings of my guitar and violin I have been doing secretly at night.

I quickly tear a smaller piece to wipe the blood with, so that I can see the extent of the gash. I don’t touch her skin. I’m careful not to touch her, except with my fingers securely wrapped inside the white piece of my torn shirt.

She doesn’t react at all, as the ripped cotton soaks up the blood, turning crimson red within seconds. It’s as if she doesn’t even realize I’m there.

I rip out more pieces of my shirt and just keep working quietly, kneeling next to her, while she hides behind her hair. At one point she stops sobbing, but I can still feel her shaking. I can still see the fat drops of tears falling from her eyes to her clasped hands. I don’t talk to her. I barely breathe so that I won’t scare her .

Then I stop trying to mop up the blood: it’s too much. I’ll just have to concentrate on binding her knee.

“I’m going to touch you now, is that ok?” My voice is shaky.

She doesn’t reply, she doesn’t move, she doesn’t do anything.

But.

She stops trying to make herself smaller. She stops hugging her knees. She goes still and lets me touch her.

She lets me help her. Which is all I need.

The minute I touch her bare skin, I’m jolted with a rush of electricity. It’s so sudden, I fumble and nearly drop the piece of clean cotton to the ground, but I catch it at the last minute. I take a shaky breath.

I wasn’t expecting that she would be trembling so much.

I wasn’t expecting my skin to go white-hot just by coming into contact with her.

I wasn’t expecting that just touching her skin would affect me so much.

“Sorry,” I mumble.

If I get this piece dirty, then I will have to tear up my uniform’s sweater. And this is so not a Billie Eilish song. Well. Not yet.

What am I thinking?

I fumble a bit, but then quickly tie the bandage around her knee tightly, so that it stops bleeding. She has stopped crying completely now, stopped moving. Almost stopped breathing. She’s still hiding behind her hair.

I can only see the tips of her fingers—they are thin and delicate. Clean fingernails, not painted. Her skin is porcelain-white, like the skin of a princess who has never seen the sun in a fairytale. Why on earth am I thinking of fairytales and princesses right now? The chick is weird and obviously more than a little messed up.

My hands drop from her knee.

The urgent need to touch her has overtaken my entire body, paralyzing me momentarily, but I resist it with everything I have. I did not even get my fingers dirty—I was careful. I don’t need to wipe them. I don’t know what to do with them. With myself.

With my suddenly 0n-fire body.

We just sit there, suspended in time, breathing in tandem until both our hearts calm down. Together.

Are you lost? I think at her. Are you as lost as I am?

She can barely look at me from behind her black hair; I have no idea what she is thinking .

If you are lost, then I can’t get you un-lost, but we can be lost together , I think at her, but the words can’t come out of my mouth.

“Are you ok?” I ask her instead.

She shakes her head and I shiver. She replied to me. Kind of.

I reach out to fix the bandage on her knee, and my hand accidentally brushes the bare skin of her leg. I go hot all over, then immediately light-headed.

I think I lose sense of where I am for a second. What just happened? Did I almost just faint while touching her skin? Except this wasn’t fainting.

I am flushed and hard and hot all over, all within the blink of an eye.

I go weak in the legs just thinking of how I put the bandage on her knee a minute ago, just the memory of the brush of my fingers against her skin sending jolts all through my body.

“What’s your—?”

I don’t even get a chance to ask her name.

She jumps to her feet and turns around. She starts running like a scared doe, but she is too badly hurt to run. She sways and nearly falls in her hurry to get away from me, and I leap after her, grab her arm to keep her upright.

Big mistake.

The minute I touch her, the same weakness overtakes me, the same electricity. Her wrist is like a twig in my hand, thin and fragile, but there is strength to it too, as she pulls it away from me. I let her go at once, and she runs away as fast as her legs can carry her.

I don’t stop thinking about her all day. And the next.

…

I meet her two days later at lunch break. The minute I’m free from classes, I run to the woods. She is sitting under the same tree, her hair pushed back into a thick braid—almost tamed, but not completely—strands escaping to trail around her slender neck, eyes huge and golden with honey.

She is not crying now. Her face is sculpted out of angles and looks white as marble. Perfect as marble too. A bit too perfect. I can’t put my finger on it.

There is something cold about her that sets me on fire.

“What’s your name?” I ask her .

“Eden,” she replies calmly—you wouldn’t think she was the same girl who nearly bled out in this same spot yesterday. “But some people call me Pet.”

Her voice is deeper; she must be older than I thought. My body stands at attention at the sound. It’s hoarse and velvety smooth, but there is a huskiness to it that makes me want to capture the timbre and listen to it over and over again. I want to make it into a song and play it into the night.

I look at her carefully, fighting the same dizziness as yesterday.

If just hearing her voice once did this to me, then I’m a lost cause. This girl is trouble.

“Pet,” I say. “That’s cute.”

“Is it.”

There is a sharpness to her tone now, a harshness. Her eyes get hard for a second, as if filled with something poisonous, but quickly they soften again. They go back to sad.

Ok, she doesn’t like that. I won’t ever call her that , I decide.

“Eden,” I repeat. Like paradise.

It sounds like music. Like my own personal paradise. By some miracle, I keep that part to myself. I’m still too dizzy. I lower myself to the ground, trying to make it look intentional.

“We’ve established that,” she says. There is that harshness again. “Now you.”

“I’m Isaiah,” I reply. “Everyone calls me Zay, though. It’s a handful.”

“Isaiah,” she says, testing the syllables out in her mouth. More music. My name had always sounded weird on the lips of teachers, friends, adults, kids. But in her mouth, it is perfection.

She is the source of the music, I realize. Not her voice or her name.

“I seem to be having no trouble, Isaiah,” she says.

I think she’s laughing at me—even though she isn’t even smiling. I let her.

“Is your knee ok?” I ask her.

“Is your panic attack ok?”

I just stare at her. I can’t believe these words just came out of her mouth, and in that calm, deadpan tone. Her eyes are serious.

“You saw?” I ask, clearing my suddenly clogged throat.

She nods. “I saw, Isaiah.”

“Call me Zay,” I say impulsively. “It’s what all my—” I can’t continue .

I can’t utter the words ‘my family’. I can’t say the word. The air tightens in my chest and it starts again. Another panic attack. Life is nothing but an endless loop of panic attacks.

“Sorry,” I wince at her, rubbing my chest. “I can’t seem to go on. I can’t… I can’t.”

“It’s ok,” she says, and I’m so surprised at this answer that it snaps me straight out of my grief.

“What did you say?’

“I get it,” she says as if it’s no big deal.

And then. She waits. She gives me time. She gives me what I need.

Later, I will think that this is the time I gave her my heart.

But in the moment, I don’t know what is happening inside of me. I only know that I can breathe, finally.

So I breathe.

And she does too. The trees rustle overhead, and not a word is uttered between us. But both of us are alive and breathing. And, for the first time in weeks, that is good enough.

….

The school wants to call my family because of my panic attack.

I say it was no big deal and to call no one.

Inside, I think: Who are you going to call? My brother has been having much more serious panic attacks. My mom is grieving and let’s just put it this way: I will murder with my bare hands anyone who dares put an ounce of additional emotional burden on her right now. Including any of my professors. Including myself and my stupid panic attacks.

So who are you going to call?

But I don’t say any of it out loud, so they call home, and in two hours, my grandpa shows up.

What fresh hell.

“Hi, Grandpa,” I greet him.

He smiles, but it comes out as a wince.

“Is mom ok?” I ask Grandpa.

Grandpa folds his tall body on a chair at the principal’s office and I do the same. We have the same height, him and me; we are a few inches taller than my dad. James is slightly taller. It’s as if he’s doing it on purpose—then again, he’s always been an ass, so maybe he is doing it on purpose .

“She’s fine, son,” Grandpa says. He’s lying. There’s been a lot of that going on lately. But what are we going to say? The truth? “I thought… I thought I’d better come here myself to see what all the fuss was about.”

Grandpa has been staying at our house since the night Dad, his son, died. I don’t know when or how he moved his stuff over from Maine; he’s never once been away from us. Now that James and I are finally back at our respective schools and away from home, I thought Grandpa would move back home. But he didn’t.

“I’ll stay on, Zay,” he says softly, as if he can read my thoughts. “I’ll stay in Boston, even after your mom leaves for her tour.”

If. If she leaves for her tour.

How will she go on tour without him?

How will she play her cello when she can’t stop crying?

“You don’t have to do that, sir,” I try to say past the lump in my throat. “I’m fine.”

“That’s not what they told your mom on the phone,” he says, looking at me carefully. He will never ask me directly about the panic attack. But his eyes… Deep blue, just like my dad’s, just like my own, are seeing everything. He sees me.

He can tell.

“I’m fine,” I tell him quickly. “I really am.”

“Are you going to apply for any schools?” he asks me, changing the subject.

But I know him. He’s not changing it. He’s continuing it. He’s asking me if I’m ok enough apply to Harvard. I swallow. I twitch and sit cross-legged on the leather chair of the principal’s office.

“Harvard,” I choke out. “It’s always been the plan.”

“Well,” he says slowly. Grandpa has always been a man of few words. I don’t remember my grandmother a lot—she died when I was two—but my dad used to say that she was super talkative and loud, like Dad, and Grandpa was the quiet force she would lean on. But I’ve only known him like this. Always a little too serious, a little too sad, a little too quiet. Reliable.

Kind of exactly like James, if you add arrogance to the mix.

But Grandpa isn’t arrogant. He’s smart and he’s strong.

“Would you consider applying to another Ivy? Yale?”

I purse my lips. “Sure, I’ll try for any Ivy I can,” I reply, “but as far as my grades go, I can get into Harvard.”

“Maybe it would help you to live somewhere away from Massachusetts for a bit,” he says .

He himself moved to Maine after my grandma died. My dad was born and bred in Boston. But Grandpa had to move away from the memories—and he is now gently suggesting I do the same. I wasn’t prepared for the wave of relief that slams into me at the mere idea of moving away from my hometown. From the memories. From the pain.

“I’ll think about it,” I tell him. “But Dad would want me to go to that school.”

“Your father…” for the first time, Grandpa’s voice shakes. “He would want you to be happy, Zay,” he says softly.

“And I want him.” I sound like I’m two.

“I know, son. I do too.” He sits back. “Take your time, do what you have to do. Are you still playing your music?”

I look him straight in the eye. “Who for?”

He holds my gaze, smiles faintly. “For you, son,” he says quietly. “For you.”

I shrug, looking away. I try to hide my tears, but he sees them.

“For me, too,” he adds quietly. “Look at me, boy. Are you ok?”

“Yeah, she—someone helped me. I wasn’t suffering for long.”

“Good, I’m glad. A classmate of yours?” he asks and I shrug. “Who was she?”

“You know what, I have no idea,” I say.

And I don’t know how it happens, but pretty soon, we’re chuckling together.

…

Back in my room, I think about her. I play a tune on the violin, inspired by her.

I open the metronome app on my phone, which I use to write songs or music in general. Music that no one will ever hear—I am not a composer like James. But this time, the music flows effortlessly as I think about this girl.

It was such a small, insignificant thing I did for her, but for me it was huge. I found out today that I am not as helpless as I thought. The song for her turns into a song about hope. I don’t even know her, will probably never see her again, and yet here I am writing a song about her. About hope.

It will turn out to be one of the most celebrated songs of my career, but I don’t know that yet. All I know is that I am stupid and sad and nothing makes sense in this world without my dad in it. Except for what just happened. What happened made sense in the most not-making sense way ever.

If that makes sense.

I don’t even know what she was crying about. Maybe she is suffering mentally, or has some kind of problem. Or maybe her problem is grief, like mine. But somehow her pain did not seem similar to mine. I know grief, I know crying.

This wasn’t crying. It was drowning.

It’s not uncommon to find weird and broken teens at an expensive boarding school like mine. In fact, they make up the greatest part of the student body. Kids messed up by their rich parents, kids tortured by their own genius minds, kids abandoned here so that they are out of the way… I’m used to weird. I’m used to students randomly bleeding and crying and hiding behind their hair.

But this girl wasn’t a student, she was in the woods. What was she doing there? Who is she? And why can’t I get her out of my head?

All I actually know about her is her name. Eden.

Eden.

Oh . It quietly dawns on me. I know one more thing about her: She felt it too.

She went absolutely still when I touched her. She stopped crying; held her breath. I was so focused on the wave of emotions assaulting me that it barely registered, but now I remember.

She felt it too.