I would’ve too, if not for the nasal voice that raises itself above all else. The one that I hear in trigonometry class every week and in our one-on-one sessions.
Mrs. Miller.
“I’m being a bitch, Poe, because a student is missing. And if a student is missing, Wyn, then she has no privacy and yes, Callie, this is absolutely necessary. Especially when we’ve just found boxes and boxes of letters addressed to whom I can only deduce is the principal’s son. Who also happens to be the coach. And I know that you three definitely had something to do with her disappearance. Which means you’ll all be getting detention along with her. The girl cops are looking for right now, Salem Salinger.”
My name goes off in the corridor like a bomb. That grenade in the song that I’ve been humming for the past two days.
Maybe it should freeze me in my spot. Maybe it should chill me to my bones and make me pass out with shock.
But it doesn’t.
Because they’ve got my letters.
Just then a gap opens up in the huddle and I see Miller. I see her with an orange envelope, and I see her retrieving a folded page before reading, out loud, “My Darling Arrow…”
And then, the envelope in my hand, his belief in me, slips out and falls to the floor and I’m running again.
I’m running down the hallway and I realize that the thump of my feet is the loudest in this space of chaos, even louder than Miller’s nasally voice, reading out my letter.
The letter that belongs to me. The letter I wrote for him. And I need to get it back.
That’s the only thought in my mind. Get that letter back.
I realize that girls have started to turn away from Miller and focus on me. They’re gawking at me.
Gawking at the crazy girl who not only wrote these letters but was also missing. Who’s now dashing toward a teacher with red eyes, screaming, “Stop. It’s mine. It’s mine. Mine. Mine.”
But I don’t care.
I need that letter back.
It’s mine. It’s fucking mine.
I’m so close to it. So close to that piece of paper, the only thing that I can see right now, but something jars my body.
Something binds itself around my stomach and stops me in my tracks and that gets me so enraged, so angry, so devastated that I kick my feet.
I claw at the band around my waist, all the while screaming and staring at that letter, clutched within foreign fingers. “Let me go. Let me go.”
But they don’t.
They don’t let me go and that’s when the explosion hits me, the explosion that happened two days ago and the one that occurred just now.
It all hits me like an earthquake and everything goes black.
I’m not leaving.
I can’t. I can’t leave.
Because I have to tell her.
I have to tell her that the guy she was talking about, the guy who can be angry and mean and fucking sweet, the guy who inspired her, that guy didn’t exist.
Not before her.
Not before seeing her at the bar, looking so luminous and stunning. Not before she marched up to me and changed my whole fucking life.
She brought him into existence.
Her.
She built that guy. She created his wildness, his temper, his needs, his wants.
She created his longing.
His cravings.
Such deep, great cravings that when I saw her walking away last night, I realized something.
I realized that the pain I’d been feeling, the hurt that wouldn’t stop pressing into my body ever since that night in LA was want.
It was the result of my newly born cravings. Something that I’d never had before.
Something that made me call out her name, howl it out like a wounded, desperate animal but she didn’t stop.
She kept running, filling me with such panic, such terror…
And I know now that I never would’ve been able to leave. I never would’ve been able to board that plane and leave her behind.
Because all my life I’ve only ever wanted one thing – soccer – but she made me want something else.
In the time she was with me, she taught me to want something other than a trophy, a goal or a game. She taught me to crave something more than cold and lonely perfection.
Something warm and cozy and sweet. Something wild and savage and provocative.
Her.
I crave her.
I crave her laughs, her voice, her challenges and dares. I crave how she breaks the rules, how she scales the fence to come see me. I crave seeing her drowning in my leather jacket and sitting on the back of my Ducati.
I crave taking her to the Lover’s Lane that she’d talk about, but never got the chance to go. I crave teaching her all those moves I had made a list of: Elastico, Maradona, Forward Pull, V-Pull.
I crave her notes. Her letters.