His Dark Words

23 | The Hardest Thing

I can't tell my friends about any of it. I've been so careful to make sure no one knows the truth. I'm not really sure why. Maybe it's because any time I'm at school or with them it means too much to me. I don't want to ruin it by seeing the pity in their eyes.

I don't want them to feel pain. 

I don't want anyone to feel the pain I feel every single day. 

An ocean of pain. Too many dry beans. An overflowing, drowning something, too much to bear...

I want to die.

The first passage I read. The only passage I remember word for word. I whisper it over and over to myself... Too many dry beans... Too much to bear... I want to die... This is all I have left. The first and the last of the Book-Boy's pain. Even my note to him is gone... tucked away inside the book.

I'm still outside when Mom comes back. The book is gone, destroyed by now, I guess. I'm limp, still exactly where I fell, all my energy drained away. She half picks, half pulls me up and helps me back into the house. She makes me soup, heating it up on the stove, but I can't eat, so she makes me drink some water then puts me to bed. I don't say a word the whole time. She silently looks over the papers taped all over my wall then takes them down one by one. I don't even try to stop her. What's the point? I have no source material to match it with. There's no finding the Book-Boy, no saving him, now. All is lost, and I with it. After staring at my now blank, too-bright, yellow walls for some time I drift off into a fitful sleep.

I dream of my Dad. It's a vivid, oh too real dream. I see him right there ahead of me and the ocean, grey and ominous, crashes behind him. We are running through the surf together. I can feel the water on my bare feet and the grit of sand beneath my toes.

"Look at the water, Harlow! Isn't it lovely?" I hear him say.

His voice is too distant, his face too indistinct. I feel a pang of fear: the fear of losing what's already lost. I look down at the waves lapping at our feet. Pages and pages of notepaper float on the water's surface. The pained words of the Book Boy and hundreds, thousands of others, all in pain, all at sea, all adrift. I try to pick them up, but they're soaked through, the letters smudge and the paper melts away in my hands. I look up into my Dad's face, in tears. Pleading for him to help me make sense of them all.

"I can't save them Dad, I can't!"

And in my dream, he reaches out and takes me in his arms. He holds me as I've always wanted him to, as I've always needed him to... But he feels just like paper.

"You're dead." I whisper and awake instantly to the cold light of morning filtering through the open shades of my yellow room.

My mom is sitting in my desk chair, watching me with this far-off, wistful expression. As I open my eyes and raise my head it's like a shadow falls over her features and that softness is replaced by something else... 

False bravery? 

Forced brightness? 

I don't know, all I know is that she's leading up to say something that I don't think I'm going to want to hear.

"I made pancakes." She stands up, absent-mindedly putting down the old plush rabbit named Rollie that I used to adore when I was five.

I blink at her. I guess she's building up to the big reveal. She heads downstairs and I just sit in bed, wondering what she's going to say to me. Probably a long lecture about how ridiculous I've been behaving. I can't stop replaying what I said to her in my head... You did nothing to help Dad when he needed you...