Haunt Me (Heartbreaker Duet #2)

Eden’s Email

Hi, sisters,

Still a coward—still haven’t met you. Well, I have been in a rehab center, where they are trying to treat the effects of long-term malnutrition on my body, and my severe panic attacks at the same time. Turns out, I can’t sleep, I can barely eat, plus I nearly die every couple of months due to nightmares and panic attacks while I’m asleep. My heart is irreparably damaged, they say.

Fun, right?

At this point, I don’t know when I will get out of here, so I think it might take a bit longer to meet you. Dad is very disappointed about that. But he comes to visit me every weekend, and that is the best therapy.

Shall I bless you with more of updated weirdness since my last email (which I never sent)? I shall.

I have been to more of Issy Woo’s concerts. No, his fame did not stop. Ha. I was such an idiot, seeing as the guy won a Grammy a few nights ago. What a na?ve fool I was, thinking it would blow over. I mean, I know his talent is enormous—I saw it, I heard it. I was there. But he was planning to go to Yale. What the hell happened? (Yes, I can say that word now, and not worry I’ll end up in it. Well, I still worry, it’s ingrained in me. Whatever.)

One of the biggest changes I am still getting used to is my hair. It used to be black for years, but now it’s reddish brown. I am not a ginger per se, even though I do get freckles in the sun. Dad says I have your our mom’s hair. He called it red, and I was so happy. My natural hair color is red, but Solomon had been dyeing it black since I was a baby. It makes me shudder to think about him dyeing the hair of a baby black, but I was a baby. Then, I was a child, and I thought I had to endure. By the time I was a teen, I had gotten used to it. I thought it was normal. The smell of the dye still makes me sick though. Growing up, I loved Anne of Green Gables because she has my real hair color. And she hates it, the idiot. I have wanted to wear my real hair, undyed and naturally curly, for so long. And finally, I can. I LOVE IT.

I am now going to nerd out about Issy Woo’s style of music. Feel free to skip the next bit. I have been listening non-stop to his songs. Some songs are like operettas, then some are indie pop or rock ballads. No one can pin down his style, they say his songs are a new genre by themselves . ‘He is the Elvis of our time, if Verdi had been a member of his band’ . That’s a direct quote. A bit too cheesy, but where is the lie?

Now that he’s grownup, Isai Issy looks different, and also the same. It’s strange to see him wearing all black clothes, but even so, his build stands out. It’s like he is sculpted out of pure muscle—and bitterness. There is something sharp, sour and sad about him that wasn’t there before. As if the grief that tormented him when I first met him has crystallized into this unsmiling, stone-like expression on his gorgeous face. It is the same, yet completely unrecognizable. The kindness is gone. The softness, the vulnerability. The humor. There is no emotion there. Just concentrated pain.

I wonder what caused him to change. Me leaving him can’t have had that much of an impact, surely. I don’t flatter myself that I was that important to him—especially given that he has not reached out. No, it must be something else. But he is so private; he doesn’t give interviews, doesn’t say anything about his private life or himself. No one knows anything personal about him. How will I ever find out what’s been hurting him so much?

I first found his songs online (btw, WOW, have you been online? How cool—so many books are onlin—ok, I need to stop) by pure chance, well, they were everywhere. My heart just stopped. I recognized his voice from the first syllable, and I stopped the video. But then, I put it back on. And, there he was. I couldn’t believe I had found him. I could have him again, even like this. It felt like the first good thing that had happened after the night of blood and bullets.

His voice found me. I could still have him, even like this.

But after a point, the Internet was not enough. The songs are not enough. I miss him like air. When I stood outside his first concert, I told myself it would be just this one. But this proximity to him, even if there were walls and distance and bleachers full of people separating us, was intoxicating. Before I knew it, I was following him around the state, listening to his voice as if it was my own, personal drug. Dad always came with me, until my panic attacks got to be too much and I was admitted in here. That put a stop to my following Issy’s concerts.

Now, I just sit here, in my room, and listen to his beautiful voice. It seems that’s how I spend my days, listening. Always listening to him sing, unable to do anything to stop his pain. (Is he singing about me sometimes? No, that’s absurd. Stupid.)

I have been thinking about ‘F’ and all the texts I sent her (to myself, I mean). I now want to have real friends to chat with. Real sisters. Am I allowed to think that? To want that? My head says no, but I know not to trust my head, because the monster is inside it. The thoughts are not mine—they are thoughts Solomon put inside it. I need to remember that. I need to fight them. I need to fight. Every day is a fight, and I will keep fighting. I will win, I promise. I will win.

You’ll be wondering how a sane, perfectly normal (I kid, of course) person as myself ended up texting her own self. Well, I was lonely. That’s it. But maybe creating entire conversations out of nothing was what made me start thinking about writing. About making things up and then making them real with words.

Then I met this boy, and I had so much to text myself about. I would send all these walls of text to ‘F’ talking about how I was going to eternal damnation because I was in love with a boy. I would sneak out of the house every few days, and pretty soon, every day. Because of him, I did all the forbidden things: I talked to someone, I touched someone, I looked at someone… I tried so hard to act normal, so that this normal, god-like boy wouldn’t see I’d never even been outside before. But I needn’t have worried. Isaiah would never judge me or mock me. I remember, we would sit under the trees and stare at each other like a couple of loons. I remember just smiling, staring at him. He smiled too. He looked like he felt like dying. I felt it too. I can’t explain it. Looking at him… it made me feel so much it was like constantly dying. And from the looks of him, he felt it too. Sometimes I would look at him, and his face was twisted in pure agony. In pure torture.

But all we did was smile.