1
Hannah
Thebonfireburnshotteras I toss another piece of Riley into the flames. I mean, nother, specifically, but memories of her. I have no idea wheresheis, and to hell if I care.
The fire warms my front while the late October chill drags its fingers down my spine, the temperature dropping as the sun dips below the horizon. I’ve reduced three boxes of Riley’s belongings to ash, from clothes to love notes to the toothbrush she kept in my bathroom, and I still can’t figure out why she dumped me.
My whole body wants to sink into the earth as her soccer jersey ignites. The memory of her wearing it, grass-stained and sweaty as she picked me up and spun me around after her last game, barges into my mind. Then the smell of her lilac detergent dissolves into the acrid scent of burnt material. My eyes water—from the smoke, obviously—and I blink to clear them.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Han, but this isn’t the most conventionalway to process your feelings,” Dean says from his perch on my back steps. His long legs are folded awkwardly, and his pale face is rosy from the cold. He sips the pumpkin spice latte he brought me, which is probably iced after sitting in the wintry air for an hour.
I shrug. “This is cheaper than therapy.”
And more effective. One cathartic night of burning everything, and then I’ll move on.
Anyway, between my pitiful wage at Book Nook and saving for university, I don’t have the budget for therapy. Believe me, I looked into it long ago.
The flames swell, casting writhing shadows across my flat, square yard. The world looks extra dreary and colorless tonight, with the gray sky pressing down like a wet blanket and the forest behind the fence, where I’ve spent countless hours alone since I learned to walk, buried in decaying brown maple leaves. The neighbors have gone into hibernation for the winter, leaving the dead-end street so quiet that all you can hear are crows.
Perfect night for burning the last of my ties to the girl who pulverized my heart, I guess.
“And I’m not just randomly torching things.” I poke the crumbling logs with a metal broom handle. “I’m conducting an investigation.”
“Into…which materials burn the fastest?” Dean asks.
“Into why Riley started acting like I had the plague before dumping me via text.” I shake back the sleeves of my oversized black hoodie and pick up the book she left behind,The Encyclopedia of Herbs.“Something was going on with her in the last couple of weeks.”
Dean’s footsteps squelch closer on the wet grass. “What d’you mean?”
“She changed. For starters, she suddenly became interested in stuff she didn’t care about before. Asked me to dig up books from work about folklore, local history, and…” I show him the encyclopedia. “She started collecting herbs and crystals. It made her bedroom smell like the forest. One night, she showed up with scars on her hands and arms. She said they were from work, but…”
Dean furrows his brow. His many piercings glint in the firelight. “But she works at a coffee shop.”
“Exactly. The most dangerous thing there is the espresso machine.”
“Steam burns?”
I lift a shoulder, at a loss.
I can still feel the texture of those dark scars under my fingertips, raised and rough against the smooth brown skin I’d memorized. When I’d traced them, asking what happened, she pulled away so fast I was left grasping at nothing. And when I offered to help, she rolled her eyes and snapped, “You’re overreacting to a few little bumps. Stop making everything a big deal.”
Her cold dismissal still stings. She acted like I was a nuisance for caring.
“The thing is, the scars looked old,” I tell Dean, “like they’d been there for years. But…” But I knew her intimately. I licked and kissed her from head to toe every night. “Those scars weren’t there before,” I finish simply.
“Okay, that is pretty weird.” Dean’s breath mists, and he wraps his scarf one more time around his neck, hiding the lower half of his face so I can only see his narrowed brown eyes.
I flip through the book, scanning one last time for anything strange. No hand-written notes, highlighted text, or dog-eared pages. So I chuck it onto the flames, where it lands with a heavythumpand begins to smolder.
A shame. I liked that book. But I want to move on properly, which means I can’t keep anything that reminds me of her.
As the pages curl and blacken, my heart flutters nervously. What was Riley hiding from me? Did she meet someone else who’s into herbs and folklore? Or is she just changing as we get older, getting bored with the girl who was nothing more than a post high school fling?
My stomach clenches at the prospect that that’s all I was to her.
I nudge the final box with my foot, rattling its dwindling contents. “I’m giving myself until this is empty, and then I’m going to stop analyzing what happened. No more caring about her and trying to figure her out. No more torturing myself over someone who didn’t think I was worth a real explanation.”
In my periphery, Dean studies my face. “It’s okay to feel hurt—”
