"He has to."

  Those were the st words before a long silence.

  Almost three years of empty pages. No dates, no entries, no ink pressed urgently into paper at two in the morning. Just bnk page after bnk page, the way certain periods of a life refuse to be recorded — too chaotic, too consuming, too raw to be reduced to sentences.

  And then it all fell at once.

  June 7th, 2010

  I'm exhausted.

  like properly, deeply exhausted. the kind that's just. there. every morning when I wake up it's the first thing I feel.

  I've tried everything. I really have. I've poured everything I have into making him see me. into making him feel even a fraction of what I feel. I've bent myself into so many different shapes trying to be whatever it is he needs.

  and he doesn't even look at me anymore.

  why.

  WHY.

  why why why why why why why

  why do you hate me so much. what did I do. when did I become someone you can't even look at.

  I'm so tired of this. so tired of holding everything together while you just. don't care. so tired of waiting up just to see your face for two seconds before you disappear again. so tired of knowing where you've been and pretending I don't.

  I wanted a family. that's all I wanted. something real. something that felt like home. I wanted you to look at us the way I look at you.

  was that really too much to ask.

  I don't even know if any of this was worth it anymore. all the waiting. all the hoping. all the times I told myself things would get better.

  was loving you a mistake.

  I genuinely don't know.

  I really want to know.

  ( She & Him )

  And then nothing.

  No more entries. No more dates carefully written at the top of a page. No more urgent handwriting pressing hard into paper because the feeling was too big to come out slowly.

  Just the st line, and the music she had been listening to when she wrote it, and then silence for the rest of the pages.

  The girl who had stood outside a boy's door rehearsing her confession for three weeks — the girl who had watched a movie alone in an empty theatre just to make sure he would enjoy it — she was gone. Somewhere in those three years of bnk pages, she had quietly stopped.

  I closed the diary.

  I sat in the dusty storeroom for a long time, holding it in both hands, not quite ready to put it down and not quite sure what I was holding onto.

  Then I set it back on the shelf.

  Exactly where it had fallen from.

  I left some parts of myself there with it. Parts that had been mine when I reached for it, that weren't quite mine anymore now that I had read what was inside. I couldn't name which parts. I only knew the weight of me felt different walking back down the stairs.

  What I felt, sitting with it, wasn't sadness exactly.

  It was rage.

  Quiet at first. The kind that doesn't announce itself, that builds in yers the way sediment builds — slowly, invisibly, until one day the ground is entirely different from what it used to be and you can't remember when the change began.

  Rage at my father. At the specific, mundane cruelty of a man who came home just often enough to keep hope alive and never often enough to justify it. Who had taken something from my mother so gradually she probably hadn't noticed it leaving — her certainty, her brightness, the version of herself who had pressed her hand so hard into a diary page that the impression showed through to the next one.

  He had taken winters from her. The kind you spend under bnkets listening to someone you love tell you stories. The kind I had never had.

  Men, I had decided somewhere in the years between understanding and accepting — men were the worst version of what a person could be. Soft on the surface, all careful smiles and gentle words, and underneath something that took and took and took and called it love.

  I had kept that decision close ever since.

  Never get close. Never let them in. Never give them the chance to take something you won't get back.

  Never.

  And then I met Rio.

  His first day, he stood out the way wrong notes stand out in a familiar song — immediately, unmistakably, in a way that made you look twice without meaning to. He was quiet in the middle of noise, still in the middle of motion. Girls circled him the way they always circled something rare and uncertain of how to approach it, and he responded to all of them with the same unhurried, unperformed kindness.

  That was the part that irritated me most.

  The kindness.

  It was too consistent. Too even. The kind of thing people rehearsed in front of mirrors, I told myself — a mask worn so long it had started to look like a face. I had seen enough of that particur performance to recognize it on sight.

  I didn't speak to him that first day.

  Or the second. Or the third.

  I watched, the way you watch something you haven't decided about yet. Day after day, the same soft smile, the same unhurried patience, the same willingness to give his attention to whoever was asking for it.

  By the end of the first week it was genuinely getting on my nerves.

  It was lunchtime. The cssroom emptied in waves and he stayed behind the way he sometimes did — sitting with the particur stillness of someone who had learned to value the moments when nobody was asking anything of him. I understood that, at least.

  I sat across from him.

  "Can you just drop the act?"

  He looked up slowly. And I — I had seen him from a distance for a week. I thought I had accounted for all of it.

  I hadn't accounted for up close.

  Up close he was something different. Something that made the word beautiful feel like it was being used correctly for once — not as a compliment but as a simple, observable fact. Like something delicate that the world hadn't managed to harden yet.

  I pulled my composure back from wherever it had gone.

  "You don't have to pretend," I said. "You can just be yourself."

  "I'm not sure what act you mean," he said, genuinely.

  "You don't have to answer every girl who talks to you. You don't owe them that."

  He considered it.

  "Isn't that just basic courtesy?" he said. "It's difficult to ignore someone when they're asking something with that much eagerness. It feels wrong to just — not respond."

  He said it simply. Like it was obvious.

  Something moved through me that I hadn't expected.

  My father's face surfaced without invitation. The careful smile. The performance of gentleness in the service of something else entirely. The way men moved through the world taking what they needed and leaving the wreckage to figure itself out.

  I felt it rise before I could stop it.

  I stood up.

  Crossed the distance between us in three steps.

  My hand moved before my mind caught up with it — fingers closing around the colr of his shirt, pulling him forward off his chair just slightly, enough that he had to grab the desk to keep his bance. It wasn't hard. It wasn't meant to hurt. But it was enough that his eyes went wide, enough that the air in the room changed immediately.

  "Quite straightforward for a boy," I said, my voice low and tight. "Others might take advantage of that." My grip tightened fractionally. "And at the end of the day you'll do what they all do — py with their feelings. Take what you want. Then sit in the corner looking like the victim when it falls apart."

  A beat of silence.

  "Hey." His voice came out quiet. Careful. "Can you let go, please."

  Not a question. Not panicked. Just — a request. Steady and pin, the way someone speaks when they're trying not to make a situation worse.

  It was the steadiness that broke through.

  I released him immediately. Stepped back. My fingers were shaking — I pressed them against my sides so he wouldn't see.

  The crity of what I had just done arrived all at once. The grabbed colr. The pulled forward. The way his hand had shot out to catch the desk.

  I had physically grabbed a male cssmate.

  In school.

  "I'm sorry." My voice came out unsteady. "I don't — I don't know why I did that. Please don't tell anyone. Please...they'll suspend me. They'll—"

  I was staring at the floor. My chest was caving in on itself. Four years of carefully maintained distance from anything resembling vulnerability and here I was, shaking in an empty cssroom, having just assaulted the one person I had decided I didn't want to know.

  "Hey."

  Soft. Unhurried.

  "It's okay."

  I looked up slowly.

  He was straightening his colr with one hand, watching me with an expression I didn't have a category for. Not anger. Not fear. Not the indignation I deserved and had fully expected. Something quieter than all of that. Something that looked, almost impossibly, like he simply wasn't going to make this worse than it already was.

  "I know I seem strange to you," he said. "Different. Weird, maybe. But I'm not trying to be anything other than what I am." He smoothed the front of his shirt once, then let his hands fall. "I mean no harm. I promise you that."

  He said it without wanting anything back from me for saying it.

  Something in my throat tightened.

  "I don't know what made me seem threatening to you," he continued, "but whatever it is — I'm not that thing."

  I felt water on my cheeks before I registered I was crying.

  Something shifted in his expression — not arm, just attention. Focused and careful. He was startled seeing me crying.

  He quickly came close.

  "I won't report you," he assured quickly. "I promise. Don't cry."

  Which was exactly the wrong thing to say — because his saying it made the dam crack completely in the way that only kindness can crack things that anger never could.

  I don't know how it happened. I don't remember the space between standing in front of him and being in his arms — only that one moment I was barely holding myself together and the next my face was pressed against his chest and I could hear his heartbeat.

  Calm. Steady. Deliberate.

  Like something that had decided it wasn't going anywhere.

  I had grabbed this boy by the colr five minutes ago.

  And now he was holding me like it hadn't happened.

  I didn't understand him at all.

  "It's okay," he said quietly, above my head. "Let it out. I'm listening."

  And softer, almost to himself:

  "Being strong is the heaviest thing a person can carry. You don't have to carry it every single second."

  I had not been held like that since I was small enough to not remember it.

  And standing there, in an empty cssroom, in the arms of the person I had decided I would never trust — I felt it move through me like something returning after a very long time away.

  Alive.

  For the first time in longer than I could measure — simply, completely, undeniably alive.

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  AnnouncementSorry guys for the dey. I will be posting two more chapters today. I hope you enjoy it