Page 62 of Haunt Me

We don’t kiss.

It’s almost as if we take up where we left off. Except, it’s not.

…

“Isn’t that a song?” she asks me one day. I am playing R.E.M. on my guitar. I hadn’t touched it in five years before now. I don’t even know why I brought it with me. Dad taught me to play.

“It sure is,” I reply.

“Sing it to me, would you?”

I do. Just like that, I start singing, not even waiting for her to ask twice. I only stop briefly after the chorus to concentrate on some intricate finger placement for my chords, but when I look up, I stop playing. Eden has buried her face in her hands.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, dropping my guitar to the ground in my haste to reach her.

“Nothing,” she says behind her hands. “I just think I have fallen in love with your voice.”

She is crying. I freeze.

Love. She said it. She said ‘love’. About my voice, of course, but still. My heart starts beating so fast I can almost hear it. I don’t know what to do with myself.

Calm down, I tell myself.Calm down.

I don’t.

…

Little by little, I draw her out.

She tells me that it’s been just her dad and her for as long as she can remember. They used to have a housekeeper and a few live-in teachers over the years, but her dad didn’t ‘trust them’, whatever that means. He is apparently mega-rich, so I guess when you have a lot of money, you get paranoid over people trying to screw you over. Still, I get increasingly mad about how isolated she seems to be, how lonely. But she loves her dad fiercely, so I don’t say anything.

She asks me to talk to her about my dad, and I tell her the same stories over and over again. It’s healing for me, to hear the words coming out of my own mouth—proof that he was here, he was here, he was here.

He isn’t here anymore, but he was.

He was my dad.

Heismy dad, always will be.

So I talk to her about him and she listens. And the more I talk, the more the grief-monster inside me gets tamed. It transforms from a giant, ugly beast into a black dog, chained quietly in the back garden. It’s still there, but now it’s not choking me. Now I can breathe through the pain.

She does that for me.

I tell her how I always wanted to make him proud but kept failing. She laughs every time I insist that I am the least musically talented person in my family, so I end up telling her about the music I constantly hear inside my head. She tells me to put it to paper. So I write the melody and she hums along, and then we try to write lyrics together.

I stop myself from kissing her again, even though that’s all I want to do. Sometimes, when she leans over to look at my phone, I get dizzy with need. On days when it’s too cold or too rainy to stay under the trees, we take refuge in an abandoned shed, but I never warm her up. I give her my coat if she needs it, but I have stopped touching her altogether—I can’t. If I start, I won’t be able to stop. Sometimes she catches me staring.

She doesn’t ask me why. She knows.

…

One day, I ask her what she’s reading and I end up immersed in Jane Austen.

I think I’m looking for ways to tell her how I feel about her without actually saying the words. She has been so fragile after thatintense day of kissing and nearly dying, I think speaking about it will overwhelm her. Break her. Breakus.

And I can’t risk that—I can’t lose what we have. It’s the only thing anchoring me to reality, to sanity, to life.

I have tons of ‘friends’ back at home and here at school. I’m barely alone for a second, unless I want to be. And yet I can’t share my actual thoughts with anyone. I barely text anyone any more. Since tragedy found my family, they have been avoiding me as if I’m a bomb that could go off at any moment.

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