Page 89 of Haunt Me

Well, it’s the only thing she remembers how to do. Except breathing.

Sometimes she forgets even that (they had to put an oxygen mask on me yesterday, because my heart nearly gave out.)

But she remembers that she loved Anne of Green Gables and her red hair.

And writing, she remembers writing. But now, she isn’t writing as herself.

She is another person now.

I don’t know this girl. I know who she used to be, but I don’t know her now.

Who will she be? No one knows, least of all me.

Probably no one worth anything.

Then again, maybe she will be a monster.

Just like Father.

twenty-four

After the funeral, I persuade everyone to leave and I stay at my childhood home by myself. I tell them that it’s just for a few days, until I figure out my next move.

As I move like a ghost through the haunted house, I discover some of my brother’s music. He must have composed these pieces when he was thirteen or younger. I play them on my guitar, just so that I can hear something other than the sound of my own breathing echoing off the walls.

The words just come on their own.

Saint Hope.

Heartbreaker.

The songs write themselves, as if they’ve been trapped inside me for days, itching to get out, to find a shape. And now they’ve found it: My brother’s music dressed in my heartbreak.

All my bitterness and pain finds an outlet, and I don’t stop writing lyrics to James’ music until the ink in my pen stops and my heart is all bled out.

I don’t know why I record myself singing them on my guitar. I don’t know why I post it on the Internet. Maybe because I think that I am truly a ghost. Invisible.

No one will see it,I think.

This pain inside of me needs an outlet; it’s eating me alive. The darkness begets more darkness until there will be nothing left but darkness. It needs out. And these songs are a way out.

Saint Hopeis the first. The one Eden and I started writing together. The minute I upload it online, I feel a weight whoosh out of me, a release, like a deep wound emptying of poison. I sit there, phone in hand, suspended in time. Within seconds, everything has changed: I feel like breathing for the first time in weeks.

Then, complete silence follows. Nothing really happened. A pebble dropped in a forest. No one will care.

No one will see it.

But oh, they do.

…

Saint Hopegoes viral.

It’s uploaded under the name ‘Issy Woo’, inspired by one of my Chinese names, and I’m shocked to see that strange name plastered all over the Internet within a few days. I’m relieved in a way, because I was this close to using my real name. But now that’s been erased too.

When the record companies begin blowing up my phone, at first I ignore them.

Then I get the one phone call I was hoping for—it’s from a job I applied to. They looked up my name (the real one, Isaiah Pan), and ran smack-dab into articles about the school scandal. They apologize profusely, but they ‘cannot hire me at this moment’.

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