His scowl is hot, and I can see his jaw flex. Yeah, he might be eighteen and perfectly able to squat wherever he likes, but that doesn’t mean he’s up for any attention, either. Maybe his parents are looking for him. Maybe a foster family.

Maybe the police.

Not many kids transfer schools six weeks before the end of their senior year, after all. He’s running from something.

He shifts the gears again and finally speaks. “I’ll bring it tonight.”

“You’ll bring it now.”

He turns to look at me. “If you have me picked up, you’ll never get it back,” he points out. “I got shit to do. I’ll see you tonight.”

Dear Ryen,

I hold the pen over the paper, frozen, the millions of things I want to say to her every day lost once I sit down to write. What did she always tell me? Just start. Don’t worry about what I’m going to say. Just start, and everything will open up.

I couldn’t write lyrics before Ryen. And now, since that night three months ago, I can’t write anything.

I stare out into the empty warehouse, black soot from past bonfires coating the walls and the warm breeze whipping through the broken windows and hitting my back.

A chain hanging somewhere in the vast space above me blows in the gust and bangs against a rafter while a shiver creeps up my spine.

It feels different here. At night this place is packed, but during the day it’s quiet and empty. My favorite place to come when I need just that.

I stare down at her name, trying to remember how easy it was to always open up to her.

I hate this, I tell her. Everything fucking hurts. They weren’t supposed to bury her. I shouldn’t have let him. She saw a movie when she was a kid, about a woman buried alive, and it scared the shit out of her. She didn’t want to go underground, but my father said we needed a place to visit her as if her wishes weren’t the most important thing.

I close my eyes, wetness coating the rims of my lids. Anger churns inside me, and it flows down my arms as I carve the words into the paper.

I can’t write you. And when I can, I can’t send the goddamn letters. I want to hurt you. I don’t know why. Probably because you’re the only person I have left to hurt. Every letter you send that I don’t answer is the only thing that makes me feel good anymore. You want the truth? That’s it. It feels good to play with you like this. It gives me pleasure, knowing you’re thinking about me but wondering if I’m thinking about you.

I’m not. I never do.

I keep writing, letting every ugly thing spill out, because she loves me, she wants me to be happy, and she wants me to smile and do mundane shit like talk about Star Wars and music and what I’m doing for college. Who the hell is she to assume there aren’t more important things than her going on in the world?

All your letters, over all the years, immediately went into the garbage after I read them. Didn’t you see how pathetic you looked? Sending five letters for every one of mine? I’ll bet you deluded yourself, too. Did you fantasize I kept them? Maybe with a little red bow tied neatly around the stack as I jerk off to them, because I love your pretty words so much?

No. Because after I eventually fucked you, I’d get bored. That’s all it was about.

I draw in air through my nose, locking my jaw together as I press the pen into the paper. Guilt creeps in.

Ryen.

The liar. The poser. The superficial bitch who’s no different than all the others.

But then I drop my eyes, remembering...

Ryen.

The kid who slipped five bucks in a letter in fifth grade when I told her my dad took away my allowance.

The girl who makes me smile when she argues about how sausage overpowers the taste of pizza and sent me a Veggie Lovers Pie for my birthday to prove me wrong. She didn’t. Meat Lovers is way better.

The girl who gets all my movie references, knows when something’s wrong, tells me everything I need to hear, and stops the world from spinning around me.

Ryen. The beautiful, perfect girl who’s so different from all the others.

I run my hand over my forehead and through my hair, my throat tightening into a knot and my eyes burning.

Fuck. I put the pen to the paper and scrawl what my goddamn heart can only whisper.

I miss you every day, I write. You’re my favorite place.

And then I drop the pen and tear the paper out of my notebook. I dig a matchbook out of my jeans, the one I use for lighting my lamp in my room at the Cove, and strike a match, watching as the tip glows orange and yellow. I bring it up to the letter, setting the corner on fire. Quickly the edges burn black as the flame spreads across the paper, eating every single word as the blue lines slowly disappear.

I let out a sigh, pulling my lip ring in between my teeth. The girl I saw yesterday in the classroom—she disappointed me. My Ryen, the one I thought I knew, would never treat someone the way she treated that kid, Cortez. The way she just stood by and let that cocksucker mess with him. I waited for her. I sat there and waited for her to stand her ass up and speak up for him, to say something, to do anything, but…

Nothing.

Everything makes sense now. The cheerleader she talked about in her letters and everything she hated—she was talking about herself.

I drop the small fire in my hand to the cement floor and stand up, grinding my shoe into the dust, stamping it out.

I look at my watch and see it’s after seven. I’d stopped by my house after school, before my dad got home, to check my mail and pick up some things, and then I grabbed some food and came here. I remember Ryen saying in her letters that she teaches swim lessons Tuesday thru Thursday nights at the school’s pool. That’s where I’ll probably find her now.