Chapter 1 #2
A blur of movement caught my eye as a boy about my age with black hair darted in front of me.
Bethany folded her arms across her chest and stepped forward, clearly ready to confront him.
As she moved, the boy stuck out his foot, sending her tumbling forward, crashing into the wood chips below.
The sunlight caught on the glittery sandals of her friends as they gasped and scattered in a flurry, racing back toward their mothers.
Bethany scrambled to her feet, little sticks clinging to her knees, and shot me a venomous glare.
‘You’ll pay for this!’ she yelled before stomping off after them.
The boy helped me up, then grabbed the fallen scissors, turning them in his hand for a moment. Without a word, he snipped a chunk of his hair, mirroring my missing lock.
“I needed a haircut anyway,” he said with a smile that lit up his face.
That was the moment I knew this messy-haired boy was my favorite person in the world. When I met Jamie, my entire life flipped on its axis and lost all direction. That moment changed my life forever. If only I had known then just how much.
A few minutes passed before my mother finally noticed the chaos and rushed over to Jamie and me.
After examining my new scrapes and the uneven haircut, to my surprise, she didn’t yell or scream.
Instead, she looked at us with the biggest smile.
Her greatest wish had finally come true: I had made a friend.
She quickly pulled out the disposable camera she always kept in her purse and snapped the first picture ever taken of Jamie and me.
“Why the hell hadn’t Mom removed this picture?” I muttered to myself as I squinted at the old photograph, feeling a pang in my chest as I traced the edges of our smiling faces.
I tore my eyes away from the photo.
“Keep moving,” I whispered, a plea to my feet, urging them to take me toward my old bedroom.
I opened the door and found the room half-filled with boxes—my parents had finally decided to turn it into a puzzle and craft space.
I couldn’t blame them. After all these years, why not?
But standing there, seeing everything packed away, it felt like walking through a graveyard.
The walls were the same soft purple, but the paint was now faded and chipped beneath the yellowing crown molding.
My bed was still pushed against the far wall, but my once-black comforter had been replaced with a vibrant pink one featuring yellow watercolor daisies along the edges.
The desk I used to do homework on was gone, and a long craft table cluttered with old papers and books stood in its place.
I walked over to the window and looked outside at the backyard, which used to have a trampoline and swing set before Lucas broke them both.
Apparently, playground equipment couldn't handle a lightsaber battle between my six-foot brother and Jamie.
Laughter had once filled this room, but now emptiness echoed through these ghostly walls.
As I wandered around, a small, faded black door in the corner caught my attention.
A smile spread across my face. It was my old hiding spot—my imaginary castle as a child and dungeon as a teenager.
Mom let Jamie and me turn it into our secret clubhouse, where we discussed important things such as the best pizza toppings and what was better, Star Wars or Star Trek.
Kneeling at the door, I pushed it open to reveal a small, cramped space that had once seemed massive.
Crawling inside, an overwhelming scent of forgotten youth—A.K.A.
the Justin Bieber perfume phase—smacked my nose.
Everything remained exactly as I had left it: vibrant tapestries draped the walls, stacks of magazines and comic books littered the blue carpet Jamie had picked out, and two five-year-old Coke cans rested on the wobbly shelf we used as a table.
I'd like to think my cleaning skills had improved since childhood, but one look at my Boston apartment said otherwise. Top of Form
I sank into the old beanbag chair only to get jabbed in the spine by a pointy edge, most likely something I'd hidden from Lucas, or a fossilized slice of pizza Jamie had stashed away. After unzipping the bean bag chair’s cover, my fingers brushed against a rigid rectangle covered in soft leather.
I swiftly pulled the object from the chair’s grasp, revealing a thick, well-worn journal—my high school diary.
Flipping through the musty pages revealed secrets and stories that had been kept hidden from everyone, even myself.
The taste of salt passed my lips as tears trailed down my cheeks, and my chest heaved with a mourning cry.
The diary held memories in its pages, memories I didn’t want to remember yet desperately wanted to hold onto.
Memories of Jamie, my first friend, my first kiss, my first love, my first heartbreak.
I wanted to leave the diary right where it was, to let it sit in the chair as nothing more than a forgotten artifact.
Burying it back into the silence of the room felt easier than facing the pain it had promised, but the harder I tried to ignore it, the louder it screamed.
Crawling out of that little room of forgotten happiness, dashing down the stairs of memorialized youth, and running as fast as my legs could carry me out of that town filled with flashbacks wouldn’t erase the past, no matter how far I tried to escape.
I had already tried that once, and five years later, I was a twenty-three-year-old woman just as broken and terrified as the day she left. The thing about the past was that no matter how far I ran from it, it always followed me like a somber shadow, a stalking ghost, a wound that would never heal.
So, instead of burning the journal and watching every particle of the past go up in flames like I had wanted, I opened the diary to the first page.
Less than twenty-four hours remained until I had to confront the stark reality of who I was. In just twenty-four hours, the past and present would collide in a morbid dance at our high school reunion. Twenty-four hours before my eyes would meet Jamie’s for one last time.