Signed, Sealed, Delivered

chapter one

The last thing Buffy's mom ever gave her was a round hatbox, the kind that had, once upon a time, held something expensive. It was covered in deep purple velvet, a satin ribbon of the same color tied around the lid. Growing up, she used it to hold things she collected—seashells from the family's stay in France when she was three, rocks from the mountains in Germany when she was six, dried out flower bulbs from Denmark when she was seven. Usually these were things she wanted to keep up out of any prying eyes, but the older she grew, the less interested she became in collecting those kinds of things.

As she grew older, she stopped saving rocks and seashells and started collecting love letters. They weren't the kind that she had received from someone, because even though Buffy read about romance more times than she could count, she had yet to be in a serious relationship. No, these were love letters she'd written; her heart pours out over thick, fancy writing paper in swirling black gel pen. These letters were her love folded into words that she carried with her every time her family moved, and they moved a lot. Or at least, they used to.

As of her sixth grade year, her family moved to Virginia, and promptly stopped moving, for a variety of reasons. The biggest of them being this—her mother was buried in Arlington, and there was no way her father could move again without feeling guilty, even just a little. The least of them was this—her father really hated packing, and wasn't going to even think about it if he didn't need to. As it were, they stayed.

The letters started as an outlet—not necessarily in a romantic sense. After her mother passed away, the entire Driscoll family was thrown off its axis. Her father struggled to handle working a full time job and raising a pre-teen, and Buffy struggled with...everything.

Buffy felt like she was sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool, the world around her hazy and muffled. She acted out at school, got into fights with her friends, drove her father up the wall. She broke down at night, her heart aching for her mom every time she woke up from a dream. Eventually she shattered completely, her tears blurring the worksheet on her desk, her heart a torn up mess at her feet. Her English teacher scooped her up and lead her towards the counselor's office, depositing her unceremoniously onto the old couch tucked away in the corner.

The counselor, a plush old woman named Mrs. McPhetridge whose frizzy grey hair and kind eyes reminded Buffy of pity, let her sit on that old couch and cry until she was empty. At the end of it all, Buffy wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and said, "I'm so sorry."

"There's nothing to apologize for." Mrs. McPhetridge had said, passing her a box of tissues, "Your feelings don't need to be categorized." Then, after Buffy had torn her wet tissue to shreds, after Mrs. McPhetridge had filled a paper Dixie cup with water and Buffy had gulped it down, Mrs. McPhetridge produced a faded piece of lined paper and a nubby old pencil, and passed them both over to Buffy.

Writing it down, she had said, would make the pain ache less. It wouldn't take everything away, but it would help Buffy to work through it. And it did, even though she was skeptical to start. But then she wrote, and she wrote, and the ache did lessen.

She started keeping those letters in her hatbox. And then, when she met a boy, and her twelve-year-old brain thought he would mark her demise, she wrote him a letter, too. Something that would let her work through how she felt about him in the moment, so that once she was done, her feelings would be gone.

Those letters, five in total, were never supposed to be sent out, never supposed to belong to anyone's eyes but her own. But then one day during her junior year of high school, all of the letters were dropped into the hands of the US postal service, and her world turned on its head again.