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“Maybe she follows you under a different name, and you just don’t know it,” Mia suggests. “Maybe she’s stalked you too.”
“Holy shit!” I exclaim, grabbing my phone. I open Instagram and find it’s still on the account she’d set up for me. There’s only one follower on the account, and it’s just a bunch of numbers and letters. I tap into it, and the first image I’m drawn to is a close-up of Jamie’s face. Behind her is the RV, and in front of it is a hammock chair beneath twinkling lights.
“Gosh, she’s prettier than I remember.”
I tap into the picture. “Yeah, she’s beautiful.”
“Beautiful?” Mia asks, rearing back in surprise. “What? Not hot? Sexy? F-f-f…” Her eyes pinch shut. The girl’s always hated cursing.
“Fuckable?” I say through a chuckle, nodding. “Yeah, she’s all those things.” I look back at my phone. “But mainly, she’s beautiful.”
“Awww,” Mia coos, ruffling my hair. “Little Holdy Woldy’s all growed up.”
“Fuck off,” I laugh, going through more pictures.
Mia scoots closer so she can see my phone. There aren’t a lot of pictures of Jamie’s face. They’re mainly shots of her RV and the places she’s traveled. “What’s that one?” Mia asks, pausing on a picture of an elderly couple standing side by side, smiling directly into the camera. I tap into it and read the caption. It’s the story of a couple she met in Idaho with grown children who have their own children. They spend their retirement traveling like Jamie does, moving from state to state, and visiting each of them. The man’s favorite childhood memory:eating ice cream in the rain while puddle-jumping barefoot.
I swipe across to the next slide—a brief clip of Jamie doing just that, her childish laughter loud and free. The sound alone detonates my heart, leaving splinters in its wake.
“Holden?” Mia whispers, and I try to steady my breath before looking at her. She reaches up, both hands on my face as her eyes search mine.
I sniff back my heartache. “I’m so fucking in love with her, Mia.”
“I can tell,” she says, nodding and lowering her hands. “We’re going to fix it, okay? Keep going.”
Mia gets on her phone, too, and we get an insight into the past few years of Jamie’s life in pictures and captions and three-second videos. And while Mia’s purpose might be intel, mine is filling in the missing puzzle pieces, each one repairing the holes in my heart.
“Holden…” Mia says, and I stop scrolling and look at her phone she’s holding up for me. “Look at this comment.”
I read it out loud. “So a friend sent me a link to your blog two days ago, and I’ve spent almost every waking minute wrapped up in your world. I feel like I’ve watched you grow from afar, and even though we’re strangers on the internet, I just thought you should know that I’m so incredibly proud of you.” I lift my gaze to Mia’s. “What blog?”
We go back to our phones, searching. “There’s no link in her bio,” Mia states, more to herself than me. She’s much better at this social-stalking thing than I am. “Wait. Her Insta name.” I look at the name:Dear Younger Me. “Let me do a search,” Mia murmurs. Then, only seconds later, she almost squeals, “Got it!”
It’s a standalone website with no pictures, just posts. I watch Mia go through at least a hundred entries until she finds the first, written almost three years ago, and starts reading it to me.
“Dear Younger Me. If I could go back in time, the first thing I would do is hug you.” Mia pauses, frowning as she checks in on me. She asks, “Do you want to be alone?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to keep going?”
“Yes.”
Mia nods, focusing on her phone again. “Dear Younger Me. If I could go back in time, the first thing I would do is hug you. I just want to hold you and tell you that it’s not your fault. Because there are going to be times when you question that. When the people around you are going to make youbelievethat. It is not your fault. You’re a child. The sweetest, most innocent form of existence, and you don’t deserve what happens to you. It is not your fault that you were forced to learn too young that evil exists in the world, and it’s not in the form of monsters or demons. Evil exists and stands on two legs, and no matter how much they try to blame you,it is not your fault…”
Mia reads every entry in order, one after the other, never breaking, never stopping. I listen intently to every word she breathes, every pause she takes when things get too hard to read, to continue. I listen to her sniffles, to the cries shed for a twenty-year-old girl reaching out to her younger self. The warnings. The advice. The sympathy and regrets.
Jamie writes about Zeke and Gina and Esme and even Dean. She doesn’t mention them by name, but I know who they are.
For hours, Mia reads out loud the words of the girl I’m hopelessly in love with, changing from sitting to lying to pacing to stomping, her emotions switching with every new story or recollection. And I’m right there with her, riding the rollercoaster, wishing Jamie was beside me so I could hold her hand through all the ups and downs, the twists and turns.
At some point, Jamie writes aboutme. Like the others, she doesn’t mention me by name, but I know. So does Mia. Because she sits beside me and takes my hand in hers. Twenty years of friendship, and it’s the first time she’s ever needed to console me.
The sun’s almost set when she turns to me, her phone to her heart, her eyes brimmed with unshed tears. “This is the last one.”
I clear the lump in my throat. “When was it written?”
“This past Tuesday,” Mia says, glancing up at me. “She’d already left by then, right?”
