Page 62 of Jayson
My heart skips.
I pull it out slowly, like it might burn me.
The cover is battered—cheap cardboard, edges frayed from being shoved in backpacks and passed between hands under desks. The front has doodles scrawled across it in pen. I’d know that handwriting anywhere.
Riley.
Her name is still there, carved into the top corner with my stupid glitter pen.
There’s a heart next to it. My initials beside hers.
I feel the world tilt just slightly.
I’d forgotten about this. I must’ve stashed it here years ago.Before she… vanished. Before the nightmares started. Before the guilt turned me inside out.
I sit down on the edge of the bed, the bag forgotten at my feet.
My fingers tremble as I flip it open.
There are pages of nonsense—bad poems, notes we passed in class, stupid little sketches of our classmates we used to laugh about. But then I turn the page and find something that punches the breath out of my lungs.
“I wish I knew what it felt like to be someone’s safe place.”
Written in her handwriting. No context. No date. Just scrawled across the top of a page in angry, jagged ink. My blood goes cold.
I don’t remember ever reading this. Or maybe I did and chose to forget.
Something deep in my chest coils tight, panic blooming like a bruise across my ribs. The air feels thinner now. Like the room is shrinking.
It’s as though she tried to tell me. Not out loud, but in her own words, now buried in a notebook we thought was just for jokes and secrets and songs we wrote about boys we’d never meet.
But this? This wasn’t some silly secret scrawled in a notebook. It was a warning. A quiet scream written in ink. A premonition dressed up as teenage fear. Because Riley never had a safe place. She never stood a chance.
I stare at the sentence, reading it over and over until the words stop making sense. My hands won’t stop shaking. I press the book to my chest, eyes burning, heart screaming. I want to scream with it. But there’s no one to scream to. No one to hear me.
The notebook feels heavy, as though it’s soaked with ghosts. Its pages hold Riley’s words. And I never heard them.
I stare down at it, at another place where Riley’s writing ends mid-thought, like she was interrupted—like someone reached into her life and just cut it off. No warning. No goodbye.
Tears slip down my cheeks before I realize I’m crying. Quiet and steady, they fall onto the page, smearing old ink. I press my palm against them, trying to stop the damage, but it’s too late. Just like with her.
You were trying to say something, weren’t you, Ri?
And I never heard you.
I was right there, and I never fucking saw it.
My shoulders tremble, my breath hitching in the silence of the room. And then I feel it. The air shifts. A floorboard creaks behind me—soft, intentional.
I don’t turn. There’s only one other person in the house, and it could only be him.
He doesn’t say a word at first. I can feel him standing there, his presence like a storm creeping in through a cracked window—heavy, watchful, restrained. I can only imagine what I must look like to him. Curled forward, gripping a stupid notebook like it’s the only thing holding me together. Tears streaking my face. Breath shuddering.
Weak. Exposed. Raw.
But I don’t care right now. Not when everything inside me feels like it’s breaking.
His footsteps approach, slow and deliberate. And when he reaches me, he doesn’t speak. He doesn’t try to fix it. He just stands beside me—close enough that his body heat brushes mine.
