2) Visit a nearby town.
This one also had potential, even if it was a little less obvious. I’d have to make another list to whittle down my options: would I go with history or fun? Would I take a group with me or go alone? I thought about it. There was always King’s Island, which would have to wait until the season started up again. Somewhere, though. I would go somewhere. I looked around my room for inspiration, breathing in the too familiar smell of candy cane and old lady. My diffuser was really working in overdrive, suffocating any other potential odors with a misting of peppermint and lavender. As much as people liked to write essential oils off as pseudoscience, they really worked, and I had been noticeably more relaxed since I’d started keeping a steady flow of those scents in my air.
My room was not the most inspirational. I mean, I’d done the kind of stuff Pinterest had led me to believe would bring me inspiration: I had a chalkboard wall lined with song lyrics, a suitcase style record player that I used to set a very artsy aesthetic, and even some slightly played out fairy lights because even at 16, I couldn’t resist anything that felt like it had been pulled from a fairy tale. Then I saw it and as soon as my eyes caught on it, I knew: my antique gold jewelry box that contained one single item: a letter to my dad.
It had been a burn letter, which was an idea I’d gotten from a therapist that Mom had sent me to when I was having a hard time with my dad’s seamless ability to forget about me and Ari. In it I had said things that I had lied about feeling all those times when Mom asked how I was holding up with him being gone. I was supposed to burn it, but after I scrawled all my truth onto butterfly stamped stationary, the hot righteousness I felt had stopped me from destroying it. He needed to know how I felt, and I told myself that someday I would work up the nerve to mail it. I scratched the resolution down in my journal.
3) Mail the letter to Dad.
When I was seven and Ari was just a newborn, right after Dad left, he used to come around at least every couple of months to take me to do things, but he would leave Ari behind because she was breastfed and he said she wouldn’t know the difference between seeing him and not seeing him, anyway. I never thought that was fair, like somehow Ari was being shafted, but I didn’t say anything because I liked having all of the attention to myself again. Because I only saw Dad so rarely, the time we spent was always fun: we’d go swimming or to Camden Park. He’d let me eat junk food. Dad was like a big kid and even on the days when he’d just take me to the playground, the way he’d push me on the swings and then run underneath me or pretend to be a monster while I slid away from him on the slides made it all amazing.
But then Ari turned two and Mom said he should try to include her in his visits. Suddenly, the once every month or two became two total visits in the year and by the time Ari turned three, we hadn’t seen him for four months. When I wrote the letter, I was ten. I explained to my dad that out of everything, the disappearance, the inconsistency, the broken promises, all of it, the thing that he had done that was the worst was make me hate Ari. He left our house right after she was born and he stopped seeing me right after she started to tag along, so as a tiny kid, I blamed her for taking my dad away from me. I thought Ari was so awful that he couldn’t stand to be around us anymore. Luckily, I got past it, but part of me hated him for the year I had spent looking at my cute little chubby cheeked sister with resentment. As I thought about little scrawny Ari now, all legs and freckles, I knew it was time. I had to mail the letter.
There was one more item I wanted to add to my to-do list; one item that I had avoided committing to even though I had known since I sat down that I was going to add it. The last one was the one that gave me the greatest feeling of being torn because the draw was far too irresistible to ignore, but I so desperately wanted to be the kind of girl who could ignore the siren song of “love.” I hesitated before writing it down, something about the utter girliness of it feeling off-putting. In the end, in letters tinier than the rest of my list as though that would somehow hide it away, I wrote:
4) Go on a blind date.
Dating. Wasn’t that about as frivolous and every day as a drastic new hair color? When I thought it over, though, there was a lot that could happen, a lot that could change if the blind date went the right way. I’d dated before, I’d even had one girlfriend, but maybe, just maybe, if I went on a blind date, I would meet someone and fall in love. Maybe even get my heart broken. I could even kind of picture what a new relationship could look like: our hands intertwined as we sipped coffee and walked the annoying brick streets that lined my neighborhood. A crinkling smile as I told her a dumb joke. A slightly hysterical giggle as we pushed each other on the swings. Just me and someone else, in love. After all, was there even an experience out there more universal than that?
Chapter Two
Lennox
I never meant to talk to Hannah that day on the bridge.
Trudging through the woods wasn’t exactly my cup of tea; I wasn’t a nature person. If I’d had my druthers, I would stay inside basically all the time. But, I was starting to go stir crazy in my room because, since the move, the only people I had to talk to in the new, alien house I’d been imprisoned inside of were the two people I most wanted to avoid: my parents. Unfortunately, avoiding my parents meant that I was in my bedroom alone pretty much morning to night. The new room was cool: my mom said we had gotten a pretty sweet deal and that real estate was much cheaper here in Huntington than it had been in Columbus, but even an almost double sized bedroom couldn’t keep me from feeling like the walls were closing in. When my mom offhandedly mentioned how close we lived to a pretty sizable public park I thought, what the hell. At least if I’m outside, I won’t be here.
I had a vague notion of the park being pretty, but I was cold and all stuck-in-my-head and didn’t even quite know how I had ended up in the woods. I just knew that it was quiet and even though I’d been trying to escape my own angsty loneliness, I’d ended up alone again. Then I saw her.
She was sitting on the rail of a bridge—a bridge that didn’t really seem to serve any purpose—and totally lost in her own thoughts, too. Eyes glazed over, hair long and tangled in front of her face, she reminded me of something from a storybook and I felt the beginnings of flutters in my stomach before I remembered the last thing I could do was talk to some girl the first time I ventured out of my house alone. Girls were the reason we were here. Girls were the reason my parents had left the church I had grown up in. A girl was the reason for all of it . . . and if I was being honest with myself, that girl was me. I was the one who had destroyed my family’s whole world.
So, I really was just going to leave her alone. Keep walking through the woods, maybe exchange the classic head nod of acknowledgement if it came up and was necessary. As I got closer, though, I was hypnotized by her total lack of awareness of anything going on around her. We were alone in the woods and as my feet crunched on sticks and leaves, she didn’t even notice. Didn’t even glance my way. Suddenly, I got this idea that maybe I could startle her, and we’d share a laugh. I wouldn’t become friends with her; God knows I wasn't strong enough for anything that would complicate this one year I had to get through before I left for college. But maybe I could numb some of the loneliness and share a chat with someone.