Luca: Thank you. You take care, too, Griffin.CHAPTER 29
LUCAI picked up the framed photo on my nightstand, the one I’d taken out of my drawer a few days ago, and ran my finger along Isabella’s face.
“Hey, Izzy. I’m sorry I put you away for so long. It’s not that I didn’t want to see you. Trust me. I love your smiling face. It’s just . . . it’s hard, you know? Remember when you went out with Tommy Nystrom our sophomore year? You guys were so cute together. Then his dad got relocated for work, and he moved to Arizona. You had pictures of you two together all over your room. And you were so sad for months after he left. I talked you into taking them down and within two weeks you met Andrew Harding. It wasn’t that you didn’t like Tommy anymore—he just wasn’t there, and the constant reminder was making you sad. Well, that’s sort of like why I had to put away your pictures. I didn’t put them away so that I can meet a new best friend, just the same as you didn’t put Tommy’s photo away looking for a new boyfriend. But sometimes we need to stop living in the past to allow ourselves to be happy.”
I didn’t realize tears had been rolling down my face until one hit the glass of the frame in my hand. Wiping them away, I set the photo back onto my nightstand. The last week had been brutal. When we first got back home from Chicago, I was okay. Sad because I didn’t think Griffin and I would make it, but the situation I’d experienced with the fire alarm really hadn’t hit me. Until it did. A few days later, I woke up in the middle of the night hyperventilating. I’d heard fire alarms blaring so vividly that I ran out of the house in a panic at two in the morning. It took a solid twenty minutes to talk myself into going back inside, even after I realized that no alarm had really gone off. Things started to spiral out of control after that—a meltdown in the pet store, profuse sweating while trying to write, and a constant feeling that something bad was looming. On top of that, fear of having another vivid nightmare had turned me into an insomniac.
Doc said my delayed physiological response was a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. We spent a few days talking about the night of the concert, something we hadn’t actually done in a few years. Yesterday he’d had me write down the details of what happened that night. The process was supposed to help examine the way I thought about the trauma so that we could come up with a new way to live with it. Basically, I’d taken a step back in my therapy—and it felt about three years back in time.
The one good thing was that writing about the events of the fire made me want to remember the good times with Izzy, too. So today I’d dug out my storage box from the attic and gone through some of my keepsakes. There were birthday cards, photos, videos of us acting silly together, and even a sketch of a tattoo that Isabella had wanted us both to get of the sun, moon, and stars.
I took my yearbook out from the box and turned the pages until I got to her photo. She was so pretty and smiling so brightly. The universe hadn’t given her an inkling of what was coming when that photo was taken. I was just about to put the book back into the box when it slipped from my hands and landed upside down with the inside cover open. Isabella’s handwriting was splashed all over the pages. I’d forgotten about the long letter she’d written inside my yearbook.Dear Luca,They say your two best friends are supposed to write inside the front and back covers of your yearbooks. I want you to know that my back cover will remain blank. Because I only have one very best friend in the world and that’s you, Luca Vinetti.It feels like yesterday that it was the first day of kindergarten and we met. I stood at the bus stop waiting for the school bus to come. Man, was I shitting a pickle. I mean, what if everyone hated me? What if I couldn’t make any friends? What if everyone thought I was a weirdo?Now, granted, that summer I’d been very frustrated with the big cowlick that always stuck up on the right side of the front of my hair, and I’d had the bright idea that if I cut it off at the base of the roots, no one would notice. So I was waiting for that bus while missing a good chunk of hair on one side of my head. Basically, I was a weirdo, so any of our classmates would have had a damn good reason to keep away.