Simon dreams of Melissa, andit is always that day. That never-ending day.
Her walking into the school gates ahead of him: her brunette spiraled hair caught in the breeze, her hand going up to push it away, out of her bright hazel eyes, as she talks to her friends.
That smile, the conspiratorial narrowing of the eyes, her soft burst of laughter. It is how a class of twenty-nine kids, and a year of sixty, remember her still, though Simon sees none of them now.
This vision of her will play out in their minds, and his, on and off for a lifetime: when their own children head out to school, then their grandchildren, Melissa will appear like a phantom in their thoughts—a reminder to hold things close in case they are taken.
In his dreams Simon is back there in that day and the day that followed, always.
—
A large fire splutters and spits in front of him. He is tired, so very tired. The drive was long and filled with silence, only his thoughts for company, frantic, panicked thoughts and a weight of unearthly sadness.
On the drive, he tried not to think of her, back there in the boot, the once-soft give of her skin hardened and cool to the touch. She was a thing now. Merely a thing tying him to another thing.
The fire crackles in front of him.
He looks up as the smoke coils and tumbles up through the tree canopy.
He’s had to travel a long way to find somewhere this isolated. Ten hours in the secondhand car his grandparents passed on to him last year so he could go to his summer job.
Ten hours to think, and then the overnight hike.
More thinking time, planning time.
In the fire, the outline of her rucksack, the structure still intact, though now no more than ash.
Thishadn’t been his plan this morning.
He’d loved her, even though they say first love isn’t real love. She didn’t want anyone to know about them until after exams; her parents were against relationships. They were a distraction, apparently, although Melissa could have taken the exams while playing video games and got straight As.
They had met outside a bar. Melissa was at a friend’s seventeenth. He never met the friend. Thank God. He’d been working in the bar’s kitchen when, on a break outside, she’d bumped into him.
He’d noticed her before, at school, of course. She was considered, contained, perfect. Her laugh, her smile, the way she looked rightintopeople when she talked to them—it was all a lot to take in for him.
And she had looked right into Simon that night and seen something in him, too; she must have, he reasoned, because she’d given him her number. He let himself fall in love with her.
For two months, his world was magical. They would meet after school, or on study days when they should have been revising, instead talking, touching, laughing, telling no one their secret.
She was fun, she was beautiful, she listened to him when he talked, she liked the things he said. They shared everything. He told her his fears, his hopes, his dreams for the future; he gave her his entire self. For a couple of bright, intense, electric months it had been real and alive, true, incontrovertible love, the kind they wrote songs about, the kind people died for—and Simon would have died for her,for the ideaof her.
Everything had seemed so real, until out of the blue she told him it was over.
He listened to her excuses: she was worried about falling behind in her coursework and they would be going to separate universities soon. At first, he thought it was a joke, but her features didn’t burst into joy—they slackened, telling him it wasn’t a joke, it was real. A sickening humiliation bedded down inside him, as if the feelingwerehim,that he was only“something being left.”
He headed to the bathroom, the roaring rush of noise in his head threatening to topple him, as he began to wonder if maybe there was something wrong with him, deep down inside, deeper than even he could see, somehow, but she had seen it.
He braced himself over the toilet bowl, quivering, spittle stringing from his mouth into the porcelain as the sickness left him.
But the feeling would not go away; whatever he did, wherever he was, that sickly, sticky dread went with him. He thought of their phones: full of texts, full of photos, that he could not will back into nonexistence. He had loved her and she had ended it and everyone might find out.
Admissions, secrets, proclamations, images achingly full of desire before were now veiled in horror. Each one evidence of how easily he had given himself away, each one a nail in the coffin of his future, each sentiment gone rotten, like bruised and leaking fruit.
And that was before he considered the evenings they had spent together in his car, the windows fogged, how the thought of her beneath him had stayed with him through every waking hour since, her warm skin on his, the things she had said and done burnt into his brain, impossible to remove.
He would have to trust that she would not tell anyone; she alone now had that power.
He had done a stupid thing, trusting someone, loving someone, giving himself over to someone, and she had betrayed that, he concluded. He would need to fix his mistake; he would need to make her delete it all.
