was beautiful. You’ll write like that. You’ll make things real with your stories.”
I felt my eyes go glassy, not because of the familiar ache in my chest that kept growing, but because it was like you had plucked out my future dream and said it aloud when I was too afraid to say it myself. You had thought a long time about what you were going to say. I could see that.
Henry sat in his seat next to me. The bell was about to ring and then I heard your voice go softer, go deeper, as if this was something you had waited even longer to say. “Besides, you know all about breaking things.”
28
Depression,
You liked to tell me stories. Tragedies. The tragedy of me. I stood staring in mirrors wondering where the bits of me had been left behind. When I looked into my eyes, they didn’t often seem like my own. You’d whisper the end to the story in my ear. A window. A rope. A cut. A pill. The method changed. But the ending was always the same: I would be gone.
Your stories scared me.
But I listened.
And they were a secret, because I was too afraid to say them aloud.
29
August,
The next day, you tugged on my sleeve when I was sitting down in Chemistry.
“What?” I practically barked at you.
“I’m sorry,” you said, hands up in surrender. “I shouldn’t have said what I said.”
Instead of accepting your apology, I asked, “Why aren’t you going to art school?” I still couldn’t force the disappointment out of my voice. I tried, but I failed.
You swallowed hard. “I—I just couldn’t ask my parents. I couldn’t tell them that I wanted to be an artist.”
I tensed. You couldn’t tell them? I breathed through my nose and tried to keep the annoyance out of my voice.
“Why not?”
“I mean, my dad is this business exec and my mom was a lawyer before she had me and it just felt, I felt…”
I waited.
“… that they couldn’t accept it.”
“Did you even ask?”
You raised your eyebrows as if the question never occurred to you. “No … They asked me what I wanted to do after high school and I was sitting there at the dining room table and I just felt so much pressure, you know? They let me do art, but I knew they thought I would give that up and grow up when I left for college. So when they asked, I just blurted out ‘business school.’” You sighed. “You should have seen my dad’s face, Ellie. He was so happy, so proud. I just … I don’t want to take that away from them.”
You were doing business because you felt you had to, as if you were cornered into it, as if you had no other choice. I knew what that felt like. I stopped going to the woods all those years ago with you because I felt I had no choice. But you did have choices, you were just afraid to make them.
“You shouldn’t do things you don’t want to just because you think that’s what other people want,” I said.
You ran your fingers through your hair. “I wish I could believe that.”
“You should.”
“And how would that story go? Son of business executive and former lawyer goes to the big city to become an artist and instead camps out in a box with his crayons because lo and behold, the starving-artist stereotype is true.”
I was annoyed. The August I knew, the August of lightning bugs and vivid brushstrokes, wasn’t this cynical people pleaser. He was a dreamer. He could paint magic doors to Anywhere.
“Once upon a time, there was a boy who could paint the world with his fingertips. He didn’t know that with every brushstroke he made, people felt more real, or that with every color, he made the world more vivid. He was bright and wondrous and while not all knew his name, they knew that they were home in his art, and that was more than enough.”
“Hi, Ellie!” Henry Jordan crammed into his seat.
I shifted out of the memory of the pencil drawing of the world you had drawn in sixth grade. I shifted out of feeling like I was writing a story that I could breathe into life.
“Hi, Henry!” It felt safer to look at Henry. He looked happy, as if it was a miracle that I gave him my full attention and another smile. He sat up straighter. He rested his hand on wrinkly jeans, seemed suddenly aware of