Voices From Beyond

Chapter 9

Ryan's funeral is tomorrow. I'm at his house, his mother made me soup. She's a mess, much like everyone else. It's been only a few days since I had found his body, I don't know how I feel anymore. I feel numb, I keep searching for the feeling inside of me but I can't find anything. Every time I close my eyes, I see his face staring emptily. The autopsy showed that he died of frostbite, police say he must've had hypothermia and started to hallucinate things. I know that's partially true. There was no little boy in Sydney's basement, the police searched the whole house. We didn't tell anyone about what happened to Noah, we know it's not explainable to anyone who wasn't there with us that night when we played the ouija board.

Ryan's little sister runs into the dining room where Ryan's mother and I are stirring our spoons in our bowls. I look up to greet her. "Hey, Cora!" her hazel eyes are bulging with excitement but there's a glimmer of sadness behind them, her brown hair is curling in every direction. His little sister is about five or six years old, I don't think she realizes that he's gone. He's not going to come back from this one.

"Hey," I say quietly.

"Want to come play with me?" she smiles up at me, one of her front teeth is missing.

"Not right now, maybe some other time," I force a smile for her.

She runs off back to her room, Ryan's dog lays down at my feet. His mother and I talk for a while before I head back home, I tell her about quitting my job at Mitch's family's diner yesterday.

Kennedy and Sydney are already at my house, they're sitting on my front porch with their heads hung low. Sydney has been crying, Kennedy rubs her back.

"Hey, what did Ryan's mom have to say?" Kennedy asks, Sydney looks up at me with watery eyes.

"Nothing important, we just talked about some of our memories with him. I told her she isn't alone in this," I shrug, the emptiness swims through my bloodstream like a wildfire. They don't respond, everything goes quiet.

The snow has melted now, there's some slush here and there but the weather is slowly warming up. The sun shines in the distance as I take a seat on the other side of Sydney. I stare ahead at my mailbox. Birds chirp in the woods only a little ways down the road.

"You remember when we met Ryan? The three of us were together. First day of middle school, we were in the cafeteria getting ice cream and he just came up to us as if we had already met and started talking about basketball. We had no idea what he was talking about but we pretended to because he sounded so excited to talk about it," Sydney stops crying now, she's playing with her sweatshirt sleeves as she says this.

"We thought he was annoying at first, I remember the look you gave me the second he walked away," Kennedy looks up at me, I can almost see myself there now. I can almost see Ryan, I can almost hear his voice. It feels like a distant memory now. It's crazy to me how fast I start to forget him, I can barely picture his face without looking at a picture first and I can't hear exactly how his voice sounds in my head.

"We can still spend the night here, right?" Kennedy asks me.

"Oh shit, I forgot to ask. One second, I'll be right back," I shake my head, sprinting up my porch steps, boxing up the memories as I do so. I open my front door, it makes a creaking noise. My mother is in the kitchen cooking pizza, she's always been the best at cooking pizza. Her long brown hair sways as she hums music, blonde highlights snake down sections of it. She turns to face me, her green eyes shine into my brown with sympathy. Ever since Ryan's passing, she's treated me like I'm going to burst at my seams at any given second.

"Hey Cora," her perfectly straight teeth are plastered into a smile across her lightly make-upped face. My brother runs into the kitchen and wraps his arms around me, he and my mother have the same color brown hair, mine is a shade darker like my father. My father is who I got my brown eyes from. My parents are divorced, they have been since I was three. Custody is split evenly.