The laughter echoes in my memory—the mean girls, their cruelty, their delight in my pain.
"I heard she writes letters to an imaginary friend. How sad is that?"
Did they do this?
Or was it someone else—some other enemy I've accumulated in three years of surviving this nightmare?
Does it even matter?
The result is the same.
My sacred things, profaned.
My heart, ripped out and pinned to strings for everyone to see.
The first real drops of rain begin to fall.
Not mist anymore—actual drops, fat and heavy, splashing against the stage floor and the hanging pages. The cream paper starts to darken where the water hits, ink beginning to blur at the edges.
They're going to be destroyed.
The thought cuts through the shock like a knife.
The rain is going to destroy them.
I should move.
Should run through the display, ripping down pages, trying to save what I can before the storm claims everything.
But I can't.
I can't move.
I can only stand there—frozen, trembling, watching five years of love and loneliness get slowly, systematically erased by the rain that's finally,finallybeginning to fall.
A drop lands on my face.
Then another.
Then more.
I can't tell anymore if the wetness on my cheeks is rain or tears.
They took the post office, I think, and the thought is distant, dissociated, like it belongs to someone else.They took the auditions. They took everything. And now they've taken this.
The only proof that I'm not completely alone.
The only record of someone choosing to know me.
Gone.
A page falls.
The string holding it must have weakened in the damp, because it detaches from the rigging and drifts down like a dying bird, landing at my feet with a wet splat.
I look down.
The words are still legible, even through the rain damage:
