Page 39 of Irreversible

As she continues, there’s a dreamy quality to her words that doesn’t belong in this hellhole. “Annie played the guitar. Music was her passion, her love language.”

I suppose her fairy tales are preferable to our reality. I can almost believe it could have belonged to a girl named Annie.

Except…

As her story goes on, I get an image of brown pigtails and crystal-colored eyes, always sparkling with life, understanding more than was natural for her age. Especially when it came to music.

“I think she wrote her own songs. She was a skilled lyricist. Some people have the power to make you come alive with just words, but that wasn’t good enough for her. She needed melodies and harmonies. Annie sang symphonies for the soul. Everyone stopped what they were doing the moment her favorite guitar pick glided across strings. Heads turned, conversations melted away. She sang like an angel.”

That, she did.

“She always played the best songs…the ones that give you that achy chest feeling. You know what I mean?” Her voice is full of warm, fuzzy memories and hopes for a bright future—a future some girls with angelic voices and stars in their eyes will never see.

Because they’re gone now.

“Yeah.” For the first time, I notice the way my hand rests absently over my heart, fingers twisted in the tattered material of my T-shirt. “I know what you mean.” The words come from somewhere dark and hollow.

Everly makes a sound like she understands.

She doesn’t.

9

Avision pops into my head of Allison and me, waiting in line for a ride at an amusement park when we were sixteen. The soles of our shoes were sticky with spilled slushies and gum that had melted on the pavement from the hot sun, and my baseball cap was doing little to protect my pale skin from the angry sunburn I’d inevitably be tending to on my nose and cheekbones.

At our most miserable—when the line seemed never-ending, the funnel cake was making our bellies churn, and the heat was doubling as a crematory—I heard it.

My favorite song trickling out of the earbuds attached to the man in front of us.

I was bold, tapping him on the shoulder and asking him to turn the volume up. Allison swatted my arm, her pearly cheeks pink with embarrassment as she hid behind her hands.

“You like this song?” the man inquired, his eyes twinkling through narrow spectacles. His receding hairline and age spots told me he was at least three decades my senior.

“It’s the best song ever. I don’t even know why.”

I honestly didn’t know why at the time. While other teenagers my age were listening to Taylor Swift, I was slowdancing in my bedroom to Coldplay with a confused tarantula as my audience.

“You got it, kid.” He pulled the cord from his phone and cranked the volume as loud as it would go until the theme park chatter was drowned out.

My heart swelled. I pulled Allison into a clumsy hug, moving our bodies back and forth while we stepped on each other’s feet and I sang through a big smile, “Tell me youloooveme!”

“I completely hate you.” She laughed instead, her arms circling me tighter to counteract her claim.

As we lazily danced to “The Scientist” in line to ride the Dare Devil Dive, three hours away from home on the hottest day I can remember, dozens of other people in line danced right along with us. People sang the lyrics, mostly off-key, as a little girl bounced on her father’s shoulders, her chin propped atop his head, and couples twirled and swayed to my favorite melody.

I feel like the simplest moments in life are the ones we take for granted. We don’t appreciate the power in them until they are nothing but soulful memories.

And maybe that’s exactly where their power lies.

I careen back into the present moment. “Sometimes you don’t just hear a song…you feel it,” I carry on, swiping a fallen tear from my cheek, missing so much right now. My heart feels heavy, my soul itching to be relit. “Songs that make you physically feel something become more than words and measures, more than notes. They become a part of you. Engrained. That’s ‘The Scientist’ for me. And I think…Annie and I were a lot alike.”

Out of all the people who have come and gone on the other side of the wall, it’s Nick who gets me purging this emotional release. Closed-off, stone-cold Nick.

The irony.

Heaving in a shaky breath, I close my eyes.

I wonder what he’s thinking. If he agrees.

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