Chapter 5
Chapter Five
LILY
The Jittery Squirrel is packed with the Saturday morning crowd. I join the line, still riding the small victory of surviving the grocery store without losing my mind. After navigating the produce section’s particular brand of chaos and not committing cart rage, I deserve a latte and a croissant.
Ahead of me, Amy Wilson and Kate Peterson are talking. They don’t bother lowering their voices, and it’s hard not to overhear their conversation when they’re standing less than three feet away. They’ve always been the same. Even back at school, they were the loudest girls in the class
“I’m just saying.” Amy lifts her cup, lipstick staining the rim. “Prison did him good. He filled out in all the right places, if you know what I mean.” She waggles her eyebrows and smacks her lips.
My spine snaps rigid. I don’t even need to hear a name to know who she’s talking about.
“You’re terrible.” Kate smacks her arm, laughing.
“Rachel said when he walked into Mitchell’s office yesterday, she almost didn’t recognize him. All muscle, covered in tattoos, with messy black hair.”
The air in the coffee shop turns thin. I focus on the menu board above the counter, even though I already know what I’m going to order.
“I never did understand what Lily Gladwin saw in him back then. She could have had any of the boys in our class.”
My nails dig crescents into my palms, and I welcome the sharp bite of pain because it gives me something to focus on besides the heat crawling up my neck.
“Right? Valedictorian sneaking around with a guy who lived god-knows-where. I’m not even sure he washed that often. My mom said she thinks he was sleeping in an old building over on Maple.”
Unlike them, I did know where he was sleeping, and how obsessed with washing he was. I knew things they never bothered to learn, and never cared to understand.
The line moves forward. I don’t.
“Maybe she liked bad boys. The whole dangerous and mysterious thing. Or maybe she could see what he was going to grow up and become … because I’d be willing to climb that man like a tree.”
Kate snorts a laugh. “He wasn’t dangerous back then. Just … intense. Do you remember all those times in English when—”
“Oh my god, yes! When he went off about Steinbeck and class divides. Mrs. Preston looked like she was going to cry.”
I remember that class. The way his voice had cut through our comfortable analysis, sharp enough to make everyone shift in their seats. He’d talked about the Joads like he understood them personally. As though their hunger and desperation weren’t just themes to analyze but lived experiences.
Mrs. Preston had tried to redirect the discussion, but he wouldn’t let her.
His hands had gripped the edge of his desk hard enough to turn his knuckles white, and his voice had shaken with something more than passion.
Rage … at being surrounded by people who read suffering in literature and dismissed it, while he lived it.
“Think that’s why Lily liked him? Maybe he was Heathcliff to her Cathy?” They both laugh. “All that seething passion under a brooding exterior.”
“More like she thought she could save him.” Amy’s voice turns smug, satisfied in a way that makes my jaw tighten. “My cousin was on duty the night they arrested him. Said when they found him, he was—”
“Maybe if you’d put as much investment into your own relationship as you seem to be putting into what happened seven years ago, you wouldn’t be in the middle of a divorce.”
Both women spin around, eyes wide, mouths forming perfect Os of shock. I walk out before they can say anything. Before I say something worse, and tell them exactly what I think about people who turn someone’s suffering to gossip over overpriced coffee.
The cold air hits my face. My chest is too tight, ribs compressing around lungs that won’t expand properly.
They don’t get to reduce what we had to their small-town theories or pretend they understand anything about him. About us. My hands shake as I fumble with my car keys. They slip through my fingers twice before I manage to unlock the door.
I sit in the car, unable to make myself start the engine. Someone glances at me through the coffee shop window. Their gaze lingers a second too long. I start the engine, not wanting to become another piece of gossip.
Three blocks later, it dawns on me that I’m heading toward school. Wrong direction. Wrong day. I pull into an empty church parking lot, fingers gripping the steering wheel until my knuckles turn white.
Kate and Amy’s conversation loops through my head.
The old building on Maple. The arrest. Prison did him good.
The way they talked about him turns my stomach. Like he was a story they could tell, a cautionary tale or a redemption arc, depending on their mood. They have no idea what it’s like to see someone drowning and be powerless to pull them to shore.
The dashboard clock blinks 11:47 at me. I need to go home and put away the groceries melting in my trunk.
I pull back out into the traffic, driving past the high school with its empty parking lot where I’d first spoken to him.
Past the library where he used to hide during lunch, tucked into the back corner with whatever book had caught his eye.
I'd catch him there sometimes, so absorbed he wouldn't notice me until I sat down across from him.
He'd startle, then relax when he saw it was me.
That momentary softening of his features, the way his shoulders would drop half an inch, the ghost of a smile he never quite managed to complete … I'd lived for those moments.
When I do eventually make it home, the silence inside my apartment hits me the second I let myself in. I dump the grocery bags on the counter in the kitchen, then stand there staring at the contents.
I pick up the ice cream three times, reading the label each time like it might tell me something I don’t already know, before setting it on the counter. It’s already soft, the container sweating condensation. I should put it in the freezer. I don’t.
Last night’s dishes are waiting in the sink.
Next week’s lesson plans sit on my desk, half-finished.
The calendar on my wall shows three upcoming birthdays, each one marked in my neat handwriting.
All signs of the life I built after everything fell apart.
All proof that I survived, that I moved on, that I’m fine now.
Except I’m not fine.
I never have been.
My phone buzzes in my back pocket. I take it out and open the text.
Mom: Are you still coming tomorrow?
I set it down without answering.
Another buzz. This one from Cassidy.
Cassidy: Have you seen him yet?
I ignore that one too. Cassidy knows. Of course she knows. This town is too small for secrets that size. By now, everyone will know Ronan Oliver is back. By tonight, they’ll all have theories about why.
The kitchen walls are pressing in on me.
Too many memories trying to force their way through the barriers I’ve spent years building.
Friday nights when I lied to my parents and said I was with Cassidy studying.
Parking my car in the shadows behind the old factory.
The way he’d always sat with his back to a wall, eyes regularly checking the exits, even in places that should be safe.
I find myself in my bedroom, standing in front of my closet. On the top shelf is a box hidden behind old yearbooks. I packed it away the day of the hearing, after I came home and tried to write my way through the wreckage.
I shouldn’t open it. But I’m already reaching up to take it down.
It’s lighter than I remember. I remove the lid and set it on the bed. On the top is a letter, the paper soft with age and tear-stained. My hand is shaking when I take it out and unfold it.
Ronan,
I’m writing this because if I don’t, I’ll break. Because there are words inside me that have nowhere else to go.
You didn’t look at me. Not once. Not when everything was falling apart. Not when they were reading the sentence. And not when I was right there, my heart breaking so loudly I thought everyone would be able to hear it.
I would have followed you anywhere. I would have done anything for you.
I saw you. I really saw you. I never saw the story they told, or the whispers. All I saw was you.
The words blur. I blink hard, forcing them back into focus. Tears spill over anyway, hot tracks down my cheeks that I don’t bother wiping away.
I’ve been thinking about all the words I want to say to you. All the things I wish I could make you understand.
But you’ll never read this. And you’ll never know how much I—
The words swim across the page, tears blurring my vision and making them impossible to read. Not that I need to see them to know what they say. They’re imprinted into my mind. I can see them on the inside of my lids if I close my eyes.
The lump in my throat makes it impossible to breathe. I squeeze my eyes closed, but the memories fill my head anyway.
The first time I saw him in history class, three weeks into the first semester. Mr. Edwards had told him to take a seat, and he’d headed to the empty desk in the back, shoulders hunched, head down. The look in his eyes that held experiences that no one our age should have known.
The whispers spread fast. How the town turned their backs before he’d been here for a month. He showed up in the same clothes three days in a row. He fell asleep in the library because he had nowhere safe to sleep. He read like other people breathed.
And no one but me ever noticed.
Even my mother warned me about him, not knowing it was too late.
Stay away from him, Lily. Some people can’t be saved. Trying will only destroy you too.
Maybe this is what destroyed looks like. Sitting on my bedroom floor with a letter I wrote to someone who never wanted to read it.
The letter trembles in my hand, and I place it back in the box gently, smoothing it flat with fingers that shake. My phone buzzes again from the kitchen. Another message I won’t answer. Another tether to normal life that I can’t deal with right now.
The box holds more than just the letter.
There’s a receipt from the diner, his coffee order still visible in faded ink.
Black, no sugar. A polaroid photograph of us both, his face captured with a smile that he saved just for me.
Folded notes he left in my locker, tucked into my textbooks, slipped into my jacket pocket. Words that made me feel seen.
And at the bottom …
My eyes are burning, and I sink my teeth into my bottom lip to stop it from wobbling as I take out the book.
His copy of ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ the margins filled with his thoughts, observations, arguments and pain.
I found it in the factory after the hearing.
I’d gone there one last time, crept through the empty hallways, and stood in the space where we’d built something fragile, and temporary.
I’d taken the book. Stolen it, maybe. Saved it, definitely.
My knees give out, and I slide down the wall, book crushed against my chest. In the kitchen, something drips. The ice cream, probably. Left on the counter where it doesn’t belong, where it will melt into a sticky mess I’ll have to clean up later. The sound that escapes is a half-laugh, half-sob.
Outside, the world moves on without me. Cars pass my building, neighbors tend their yards, children’s laughter drifts through the window. But I sit here on the floor, and cry.
I could call Cassidy, and let all these words finally spill out.
I could admit to her how deep this still cuts, how the wound never quite closed.
But how do you explain that kind of hurt to someone who hasn’t lived it?
How do you make them understand what it means to watch someone vanish, while you stand there unable to stop it?
And how do you describe the way love turns to grief when the person is still alive, still breathing, still existing somewhere in the world but completely unreachable?
My phone rings with Mom’s ringtone. The sound echoes through the apartment, shrill and insistent. She’ll know he’s back. The whole town will know by now. She’ll want to make sure I’m keeping my distance, protecting myself, and learning from past mistakes.
I could burn the letters, and throw out everything else in the box. It would be the healthy thing to do.
But I can’t make myself let go. These scraps are all I have left of something that mattered.
Some things are meant to be kept, even if they break you all over again.
The light shifts through the window as afternoon slides toward evening. My legs have gone numb beneath me, pins and needles spreading through muscles that have been still too long.
The phone has stopped ringing. The ice cream will definitely be ruined by now.
I unfold one of the notes from the box. His handwriting stares back at me, beautiful and poetic, despite the life he was living.
You asked why I read so much. The truth is, other people’s words are easier to live in than my own head. In books, everything makes sense. Causes have effects. Problems have solutions. Nobody starves, or freezes, or disappears.
In books, people get saved.
My chest aches. He’d written this on a scrap of paper torn from a notebook, the edges rough and uneven. I’d asked him the question one afternoon in the library, watching him devour page after page, as though he was afraid someone would take the book away.
Do you ever stop? I’d asked. Do you ever just … exist without words.
I hadn’t understood then, not really. But I do now. The words were his lifeline, his link to a world that had given him nothing but reasons to let go. And when the words weren’t enough, when reality crashed in too hard and too fast, and survival became more than he could manage …
I fold the note carefully and place it back in the box. Tomorrow, I’ll clean up the melted ice cream. Tomorrow, I’ll answer my mother’s texts and Cassidy’s questions.
But tonight, I’m going to sit here on the floor, holding onto pieces of a boy who became a ghost long before he disappeared.