Page 95 of The Summers of Us

HADLEY REINHART

Touch the stars, baby girl.

I sit in front of Hadley’s headstone, hug my knees to my chest, rock against the ground that feels too freshly churned despite the weeds. A mason jar of white clovers rests before the headstone.

I let out a year’s worth of tears. The air does nothing to soothe me. It doesn’t bring Hadley back. It doesn’t make my reality any less real. She shouldn’t be down there, left to spend eternity in a dark, silent, dead home. Not while I’m up here. Not while the sun can still warm me and dry tears from my cheeks like just another patch of dew.

She deserved to feel the sun on her forever. She deserved to count the stars glowing for her every night.

She deserved to come back from the beach that day.

Why didn’t she come back from the beach that day?

Why did the ocean betray us?

Why couldn’t the ocean have taken me instead?

A long, constrained sob drains the rest of me. My eyes tremble close. My heart beats rampantly in my temples. A headache creeps up like a shadow. I close my eyes to let the tears stuck to my eyelashes trickle down and around my nose.

When I open my eyes, my vision is blurry with tears, so I wipe them with the back of my hand, see Sagittarius lying there. I must have dropped her. A purple centaur sits carved in the shell, wielding a bow and arrow.

The archer points its arrow at me. I glide my finger across the glossy top coat, begging it to let go of the arrow and puncture me with it.

It doesn’t let go.

She’ll never let go.

I scoop Hadley into my palm and place her next to a vase of daisies. I unclasp her necklace from my neck and wrap it around the jar, all of it glistening the same way in the sun.

But I know these things are not Hadley.

It’s just a gift shop shell. A jar of clovers. A blue heart necklace.

That’s all she is now.

“You deserved a rollercoaster.” My voice adjusts to the outside air, throat choking on words not even loud enough for me to hear.

My head pounds. My breathing levels out. The strengthening sun burns into my eyes, and I squint to kill the stinging. My shoulder throbs from the weight of my body. I’m sitting on the grass in front of Hadley’s headstone—on top of her patch of six-feet-deep soil, feeling every bit of the pain Hadley no longer can.

The irony finally hits me.

I’ve spent nine summers avoiding pain that’s only felt from the transfer of living nerves, the pain that comes after taking chances some never get the chance to take.

The pain that only comes from living.

Hadley was never afraid of pain and never let the possibility of pain keep her from living her nine years with no reserve. She never let fear get in her way. She chased bumblebees, threw herself down waterslides, lay in the aquarium tank dome, slept under the stars, and dreamt of soaring through outer space. She never took her chance on Earth for granted and never would have thought twice about boarding her rollercoaster.

She was never afraid to live.

But I was.

The ghost that hauntsmeis the past.

I could have been as carefree as the clouds, danced with the soul of a child, let the water hold me, loved with a whole heart, kissed with no scope of the future.

But I didn’t, even though no amount of living hurts more than the numbness of death.

August 12

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