was something I had to get instinctively.
There wasn’t an alarm on the bookstore, and the lock on the toilet window that faced Charmers Street was broken. After Lola and I climbed through, we listened before we left the bathroom to make sure no one was in the store.
It was dark but the streetlight helped us see. I’d written the letter before I left home – my hands shaking as I put the words onto paper. It was mostly I love you – a little go fuck yourself. The perfect love letter, according to Lola.
I didn’t hide it in a book he never read and leave it to chance. I put it in T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations. Even more dangerous than leaving it in his favourite book, I’d left it on the page of his favourite poem: ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’.
I decided that if I was doing this, I was really doing it, so I climbed silently upstairs to Henry’s room. He was still out with Amy but his book was on this bed, his page marked by a folded corner. I left a note in it –
Look in the Prufrock tonight – Rachel.
Lola and I went back out the bathroom window; laughing as we hit the air. It had been a hot day but now rain covered the street. ‘It’s the end,’ I thought, but I wasn’t thinking the end of the world. I was imagining the end of Henry and me, the moment when he read the letter, and everything changed. We’d be a different Rachel and Henry. I saw a couple kissing on the other side of the street, John and Clara from school, and felt rain hiss on my skin.
We hailed a taxi and dropped Lola off first. I was checking my phone obsessively by the time I reached my place. I imagined Henry’s voice and how it would sound with the knowledge of me in it. I fell asleep waiting.
Lola woke me around three, asking if he’d called, which he hadn’t. He hadn’t called or come around by the time we left at nine, later that morning. At ten, when we were on the road to Sea Ridge, he sent me a text: Sorry I overslept!! Will call soon.
Henry doesn’t use exclamation points, I thought, staring at them. He doesn’t like the look of them unless they fill a whole page, in which case they look like rain. He especially hated when people used two, and at that moment I understood why. Two is trying too hard. Two is false.
Amy loves exclamation points. I read a short story of hers once and she used them every time someone spoke. She wrote the text. I imagined her reading my letter over Henry’s shoulder and telling him how he should reply: ‘Ignore it. She’s leaving anyway.’
Henry never mentioned my letter and what I’d told him that night, not once, in all the letters he wrote. They were full of Amy. I ignored every one.
Henry doesn’t know about Cal. If he’d heard, nothing would have kept him from the funeral. But I haven’t told him and neither has Mum. Rose can’t say the words without crying and she never cries in public. Cal wasn’t on Facebook. He had an account, but he wasn’t interested.
Tim Hooper, his best friend from Gracetown, moved to Western Australia a couple of months before Cal died, so I wrote him a letter with the news. I didn’t need to tell him not to post it on social media. I didn’t have to say that I couldn’t stand the idea that Cal’s death would be gossip for people to comment on. Tim just knew.
‘Henry used to tell me we were so close we could talk by mental telepathy,’ I say to Woof and the night around me. I only read the start of the letter before I fold it up, dig a huge hole, and bury it in the sand.
Dear Rachel
Since you never write, I can only assume you’ve forgotten me. Again, I refer you to the blood oath we took in Year 3.
Henry
second-hand books are full of mysteries
I wake Friday morning to see my sister, George, standing next to the fiction couch, where I fell asleep last night, and where I plan to keep sleeping all week.
Not surprisingly, I haven’t taken the break-up well, and I have no intention of taking it well in the future. My plan is to stay on the couch, getting up for toilet breaks