17 Things I Found In Your Bedroom

Chapter 5 Part 2

I don't think much about it. I just rip the key from the diary, shove the diary in my jacket pocket, stand from the bed, open the window and hope the drop isn't too far. I don't hurt myself, so I figure I'm fine. Either that or I'm just too numb to feel anything.

After reading the first two carefully written pages of the notebook, that's all I feel; numb. I stumble down the drive towards his house, my eyes fixed on where is bedroom window will be when his house comes in to view, and after five minutes of clumsy stalking, it finally does.

His house is one of the many houses which line the street of the town. It's a seaside village, so whenever we get tourists in the summer, they describe them as 'quaint'. Quite a few of the houses on that row are holiday cottages, and as far as I gather, they've never been complained about. But none of the tourists ever complain anyway; they came for the sea, and there are masses of it just a window away.

Ace's house is painted a pastel blue, and made of limestone from the nearby cliffs. Most of the buildings here are, and painted with layers of assorted pastel colours, from pale pinks to the lightest of yellows. It makes everything look vintage and chilled. His house doesn't stick out, but you can tell it's different from the others. When Sasha's husband left them, she lost interest in the garden. And although there are still trees and the odd surviving flower, it's bare compared to the other houses.

Theirs is small, with three windows and a door on the front wall. It's weirdly shaped, too, with two of the four bedrooms sitting downstairs, and the kitchen right near the back, where the garage would be if they had one. The sitting room is a big space, and there would be plenty of room to move the kitchen and build a garage in its original place, but Sasha doesn't have the desire or money.

Ace never pushed for anything, and the house had been the least of both their worries. His room is downstairs, as is his mum's.

I look up at his window, the pane of glass mocking me in its stillness. My body starts moving without my permission, and I walk to it. Locked.

But you knew it would be, didn't you, Ace?

The window is a strange one, with a lock on the outside. It's as if he knew this was going to happen. Well, I guess he did, since he wrote a diary about it in advance.

I insert the key into the lock and twist it, affectively opening the window. It lifts easily after that, so I pull it up and crawl inside.

My body is so in control of my actions, I barely take in the messiness of his bed, or the half-finished homework on the desk. No, I hardly even look at his hoodie lying stranded on the duvet, or the photo frame with a picture of us in, which has been on his bedside table since we got together two years ago. I don't take a minute thinking of how the pale green colour of the walls hasn't changed since he was a kid, or how the posters on the wall are covering up drawings from when he was little and cracks from where it needs re-plastering.

I just walk straight to the dresser in the corner of the room with the IPod speaker and CD player on it, and open the first draw down. And then I pick up the square shaped photo album from where it's lying on its own, and walk back out the room, locking the window behind me.

My legs take me straight to the Bench. And then they almost fail on me when I get there to find bright yellow and black tape bordering the stream.

What?

"Honey, there's no one left to confront." I stare at her with blurry eyes as she takes a deep breath. "His body was found in a stream in the forest earlier this morning... all evidence points to... suicide."

Ace died here.

Of course he died here, everyone practically told me he did.

I collapse to a sitting position on the floor about three metres away from the edge of the caution tape, the photo album falling next to me. As the tears pour from my face and onto the front of my tank top, I pick it up and open it to the first page. A neatly cut picture fills it. Actually, it looks like a screenshot of someone's Facebook profile. And I understand exactly why Ace would put it in there when I read the name.

Sheila Coals

His grandmother.

The reason his cold-hearted man of a father left him. He said it himself in the diary that if he hadn't have gone, Ace might still be here.

The first picture on the profile is Sheila and Ace, standing in front of the Wembley Stadium, with the caption 'that's my boy'. I smile through the tears and look up at the stream again, wondering how Sheila would react if she knew about Ace. I met her a few times at Ace's family dinners and parties, and she was so carefree.

I turn the next page, but find it blank. And the next, and the next, and the next- blank.

What's the point in using one page in a scrapbook? Why not just frame the photo and kill fewer trees?

Shaking my head, I wipe some of the tears on my face. It's five in the afternoon, and I'm sitting on the floor in the forest, not wanting to bring myself to sit amidst the Bench full of flowers, crying because of the stream that killed my boyfriend.

I see the front cover of the diary lift in the wind, as if inviting me to read it. I let my hand grasp the book and pull it towards me. In a way, I don't want to read anymore. It's too hard. But now I know what caused the start of it, I need to know more. I need to see if I could've stopped it somehow. If his death was my fault.

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Song: Always the Quiet Ones, VIGR (Brad Kavanagh)