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We took our time turning the corner into our shared community as my pounding heart drowned out the sound of nearby cars. We were hanging on to something life-altering, and I wished she would just say what I had a feeling she’d say, not knowing at all how I was going to react when she said it. I couldn’t even begin to plan for something like that.
“I … I knew it was you,” she finally replied quietly. “When Connie told us that a man named Soldier was moving into town, I looked you up. I thought it might be a crazy coincidence, but then I saw you at the grocery store and … the scar on your face, and … I just knew.”
She was too short to see as we walked toward our homes, but I was grinning so wide that my face fucking hurt.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked, afraid the stuff I was carrying would fall—my arms were shaking so much.
“Because I was …” She sighed and shook her head. “I was scared.”
That wiped the dumb grin right off my face. “Wait. Youwere scared ofme?”
She stopped walking and turned to face me, shaking her head adamantly. “No, no, no! Soldier, I was never afraid ofyou. But I was afraid that if you knew I knew you from your life back there, you wouldn’t want to knowme. And Noah loves you, and I …”
I raised an inquisitive brow at the abrupt halt to her words. “You what?”
She released a sigh as her eyes lifted to meet mine. “I really, really like having you around.”
“I like being around too,” I replied softly, staring down atherand holding on to my books and grocery bag for dear, sweet life.
I felt like a kid, carrying my stuff home from school, staring down at the prettiest girl in my class. It was a moment, a pivotal one, and I knew it despite never having a real moment before in my life. And that wasn’t for a lack of experience with the opposite sex. I was far from inexperienced, far from a virgin. But my experience with girls had come with the territory of the things I used to do. They’d been with me for the status of being with me. They’d been with me for the connections, the things I could give them. Honestly, looking back, I wasn’t sure any of those girls had ever truly liked me, and it had never occurred to me how fucking sad that was—until I was inthismoment. Staring at Ray—Rain—while clutching my grocery bag and books and wondering if her hair was as soft and smooth as it looked.
“I just didn’t want you to cut us off or … I don’t know … regret being here or something.”
I couldn’t help but laugh, looking toward the sky and thinking about the things she didn’t know. Embarrassing things. Things I never would’ve toldheror anyone had this odd turn of events not happened.
“What’s so funny?” Ray asked, a little defensive.
“Okay. I’m going to tell you something that’s probablygonnasoundweird, buthear me out.”
She furrowed her brow and nodded. “Okay …”
“So …” I cleared my throat as the bag of groceries began to slip from my arm. I hoisted it back up as I thought about some of thelettersI’d never sent but kept as a scrapbook of some kind. “You know what? Hold on. Stay right here.”
I hurried past her toward my house as she nervously said, “Um, all right …”
I fumbled to hold on to the books and bag as I dug into my pocket for the keys. I had to be quick. I didn’t want too much time to pass with her wondering what crazy shit was going on after she’d just dropped a bomb on me.
Holy shit. I can’t believe this isactually happeningright now, I thought as I dumped everything on the table and ran to my bedroom, where I knelt on the floor and dug a box out from beneath the bed.
In it was a stack of letters I had written to a girl who existed for the most part in my head, where I had imagined what incrediblethingsshe might’ve gone on to do after I rescued her from a violation I never would’ve forgiven myself for had I allowed it to happen under my watch. I pulled out those letters, holding them in my hands for the first time in months, unable to believe that the person I had written them to was standing right outside. Ihesitatedonly a moment before climbing to my feet and running back through the front door, where I found her still waiting by her steps.
“Okay,” I said, holding the letters tightly in my trembling hands. “So, when I was locked up, I had nobody. I-I mean, I had some friends inside, but from my life before, I had nobody. Not a single person gave a shit about me. Fuck, even my own mother only visited me twice in the entire time I was there.”
Ray’s face fell with a sweeping rush of sadness. “She only saw you twice … in nineyears?”
“Yes,” I replied simply, afraid that if I said anything more, the hurt and anger and everything else would overshadow what I needed to say.
“God, that’s awful.”
“Yeah, well, you never met my mother … or … I don’t think so anyway …”Another time, man. Tell her what you need to say. “Anyway, I had nobody to really talk to outside of the guys I knew at Wayward, is what I’m saying. No letters, no phone calls, nothing. And it sucked. It was lonely, and I hated it. I hated that …” I looked away and stared at Eleven, sitting behind the screen door. Waiting for me to stop being a bumbling fool and feed him. “Ihatedthat I had been such a fuckup that nobody wanted to stay in touch with me. I hated that I had hurt everybody who had once cared or that they were dead—or both.
“But then, one night, while I was lying in my bunk, I started thinking about this girl …” I turned back to Ray, hardly able to believe that she washer. Unable to believe she was here, right now, looking back at me, all these years later. How the hell had I not noticed it before? “The one person I hadn’t hurt at all. And I began to wonder what had happened to her, where she had gone, what she had done with her life … I thought that maybe she might be the only person I had made a positive impact on and maybe she could be the only person to ever think of me and remember how good I was.”
Ray’s eyes held mine with an unexplained intensity and sadness as I clutched the bundle of rubber-banded letters. She stood there, frozen, clutching her book to her chest like she was afraid to let go, to do anything else but stare and wait with bated breath.
“So”—I held up the bundle in one hand—“I wrote letters to her. Whenever I had something to say or something happened, I would write these letters to Rain, thinking she’d never read them—but that was fine. She was just someone to talk to, you know, even if she only existed in my head. Like, uh … an imaginary friend.”
Ray’s lips parted with a whispered exhale as she lifted the hand not holding her book and hesitantly reached out to take the bound letters from me. “You … wrote these tome?”
