Hearts, Scars & Horseshoes

Chapter 9 - Toby

"Are you going to write them back?" Lars asked, the letter from my donor family still in his hand.

I shrugged, I wasn't sure yet. What was I supposed to say? Hey thanks your son died, I get to live now?

"So what are you gonna do then?"

"I found his obituary."

After I got the letter I had stayed up until two in the morning searching every combination of "Elijah", "14 years old", "Michigan" "obituary" and the dates surrounding my transplant. It hadn't actually taken that long to find. Maybe only 30 minutes or so. The rest of the time I had spent reading and rereading his obituary. I could recite it by memory now.

"How?" Lars asked, handing the letter back.

"Google." I stared at the letter in my hand. I had that memorized too. "They sort of gave me a lot of information."

"I guess. So now what?"

I knew Lars wasn't understanding. I hadn't told him how disconnected I felt from myself. How I felt like I was the long lost brother of Nebula from Guardians of the Galaxy; made up of random bits and pieces of other things.

"I wonder if they're on Facebook." I said.

Lars shrugged, standing up and grabbing his Mac book. "Let's look."

He fired it up in a matter of seconds, opening up Safari. He passed the computer off to me. I opened up his Facebook not bothering to log him out. If I accidentally clicked something I didn't want anyone to know it was me. I typed in "Elijah Delaney" first, four profiles popped up. None of them had profile pictures so I clicked through each. Between the few pictures I could access and the content I gathered none of them were the Elijah I was looking for.

"Try the sister. Everyone our age has Facebook." Lars suggested.

So I typed in "Faith Delaney". I hit enter watching five or six peoples profile's appear. I clicked on the top on. The girl was a brunette. I scrolled down her page, finding her info.

"Not her, she's in college." I said, clicking the back button.

I went through two more, about to give up on the whole quest to find the Delaney sibling's Facebook. I clicked on the next one, the page opened up, the cover photo of a young boy with wheat colored hair and blue eyes. There was a bible verse,  Isaiah 49:14-16, in block letters on the pictures. I made a mental note to look it up later.

"This is her." I said. I didn't even need to look any farther.

"How do you know?" Lars asked.

"The letter said they're into God or whatever and come on there's a picture of a kid and bible verse. Pretty much sums it up don't ya think?" I said as I clicked on her profile picture album.

There was only two pictures I could look at, her account set to private. The first one was a sunset, the second one I was guessing was her. I clicked on it to make it larger. She had a heart shaped face, light blond hair framed her face and accentuated her big gray eyes. She had the biggest smile spread across her face and even through the picture you could see the joy in her eyes. I wondered if that joy still existed now that I had her brother's heart.

"She's cute." Lars said, distracting me from my thoughts.

"Yeah." I agreed.

"Where's it say she's from?" He asked.  I clicked off her picture, finding her information. "No way. She's practically our neighbor."

My stomach twisted a little. What were the chances that she'd live in the same 40 minute radius of me. What if I had seen her before? Or worse yet what if I had seen Elijah?

"Hey it says she goes to Saint Mary's. That's only like 30 minutes from here." Lars said.

"Yeah." I mumbled, still trying to process the information. "That's crazy."

I couldn't stop my mind from trying to replay my life, wondering if I'd ever come across Elijah before, at the mall, at a restaurant, while I was skateboarding. It was amazing how many people you could see in a day and never even think about them.

"Click on that girl." Lars told me, pointing to a comment by a girl named Tori Anderson. "They look like they hang out a lot."

Her page loaded, it was way more active than Faith's. She updated her status constantly, her wall covered in selfies. I scrolled down, passing status after status, selfie after selfie.

"So what's your plan? Just Facebook stalk them?" Lars asked after a minute as I stopped on a picture of Tori and Faith.

That currently was the ultimate question. I could send her a message on Facebook but really what would I say that would be any different than writing her parents a letter back through Gift Of Life.

"Have you heard of that place?" I asked Lars, ignoring his question because I didn't have an answer. "The Grounds?"

"No. Google it."

Tori seemed to hang out there a lot, tagging Faith in all the posts. I opened up a new window and searched for it. A website popped up for New Hope Community Church. I clicked on it, searching through the navigation bar until I found The Grounds. The paged open, a display of kids at an outdoor recreational area covered the screen.

Without thinking it through I said, "We should go."

Lars stared at me for a moment but I just kept my eyes trained on the screen.

He shrugged his shoulders. "Alright, I have Saturday off."

Saturday. What if she was there? I mean the whole point was to see her. But what were the chances that we were there at the exact same time, on the exact same day?

Probably pretty slim.