“No! No. I just want you to know that you can talk to me, if you want to.”

“Well, I don’t. Not about that. We can talk about something else.”

She looked like I’d stabbed her in the heart when I said it.

“Fine, Mom. Look. When we were supposed to go to the movies, mostly we didn’t go. May was seeing an older guy. And she went off with him. She thought I went to the movies with this friend of his who was supposed to take care of me, but I didn’t go, either, because the friend molested me instead, and when I tried to tell May that night, she was already drunk, and then she was so sad, and when she got up, she started pretending to be a fairy, and she slipped or tripped or fell off the bridge or something. There you go. You can go back to California now.”

I got up from the booth and walked out. I was crying in the parking lot, and hating myself for crying, and for being so mean to Mom, and for everything. It’s supposed to get easier when you say it out loud. But it didn’t feel that way. I was searching the sky through my bleary eyes, trying to find you, to find May, to find some sign that things weren’t as lonely as they seemed.

Then Mom walked out. She was crying, too, but I could tell she was trying not to. She put her arms around me. “I’m so sorry, Laurel. I’m so sorry I let that happen to you.” And I don’t know what it was, the way that she smelled like Mom or the way that she stroked my head like she had when I was a kid trying to fall asleep, but I felt little again, and I put my head against her chest and just sobbed. I wasn’t the same person she’d left. But she was still my mother. And the memory of the way that felt, to have a mom, it took me over.

People can leave, and then they can come back. It sounds simple, like an obvious thing. But when I realized that, the truth of it seemed important. My mom wasn’t perfect. And she didn’t even always take care of me. But she wasn’t gone forever.

When I finished crying, I looked up at the sky and pointed to the star in the middle of Orion’s Belt. “That one,” I said to Mom. “That’s the Judy Garland star.” And then I pointed to the one at the handle end of the Big Dipper. “And let’s give that one to May.”

Yours,

Laurel

Dear Kurt, Judy, Elizabeth, Amelia, River, Janis, Jim, Amy, Heath, Allan, E.E., and John,

I am writing to say thank you, to all of you, because I think this will be my last letter. It feels right like that. Yesterday was our last day of school. When the final bell rang, the halls filled up with woohoos. I walked past the screams and cheers and out to the alley to meet my friends. The air hung open in that way where we weren’t sure if we should be somber or celebratory, but when Tristan got there, he walked up to Kristen and slapped her butt and said, “How’s my New York babe?” She smiled. It was their last day of high school, forever. Tristan said that this called for a ceremony, and Kristen agreed.

So we all drove up to Kristen’s house, and Tristan made a tent of little sticks in the yard that he lit up with his kitchen lighter. It would be like New Year’s, but this time we were supposed to burn things we wanted to let go of. Tristan pulled the contents of his emptied locker out of his backpack—algebra quizzes and lab reports and tests with red 68s circled on them—and he started putting them in the fire. Then he pulled out his English paper, one he had gotten an A on, called “I Lost Paradise,” but before he could throw it in the fire, Kristen grabbed it and said, “I’m keeping this.”

“You want my English paper, babe?”

“It was really good.”

He looked at her for a moment and smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Well, who’s next then? I can’t be the only one with something to burn!” The little fire was getting hungrier, eating up the pages. The sun was low and miming the blaze.

Hannah threw in her tests, and then she threw in her dried flowers and cards from boys, and she looked back over her shoulder at Natalie. The fire lit up both of their faces, and Natalie beamed back. Kristen threw in her locker pictures of New York, because now that she’s really going there, it’s not just a dream anymore.

I wanted to take a turn, and I thought about my notebook filled with my letters to all of you. I thought about how they would look, burning in the fire. I wondered if the flame would carry them up to you, wherever you are.

But when I reached for my notebook, I couldn’t do it. Somewhere, it seemed, in my letters to you, was a story I had told. Something true. So I decided that I’m going to turn all of my letters in to Mrs. Buster. School is still open for a few days for teachers to finish their grades, so tomorrow or the next day, I’ll go and leave them in her teacher’s mailbox. For some reason, maybe because she gave me the assignment in the first place, I want her to read what I wrote.

So instead of burning the whole notebook, I took the last blank page out and threw it into the fire. I watched the white page, with its fine blue lines, as it burned. It made me cry for all of you who should have had more time. And for May.

After the fire was done eating my blank page, everyone was looking at me. “I miss my sister,” I said simply, and it was nice to be able to just say it out loud. Hannah put her arm around me as I wiped the tears from my eyes. “She would have loved you guys,” I added.

“If she was anything like you, we would have loved her, too,” Tristan said, and smiled.

When the moment was over, we looked down and noticed that the fire was still getting bigger, so Tristan went to get the garden hose to put it out. He squirted Kristen and made her squeal, and then he squirted us all, and we tackled him for the hose and squirted back. All of our clothes were wet after that, but none of us cared, because it was summer-night warm out.

As the sun fell over the horizon, we went to sit on the deck, and I texted Sky to ask if he would come and meet us. When I saw his truck pull into the driveway, my heart leapt. He walked up wearing his same leather jacket, even on the brink of summer. He looked as beautiful as he did the first day I saw him, but more than that even, because now I knew him.

He came up to sit with us, and the sky opened wide, the way it does in summer, to let a lightning storm in. We all watched it for a while, and Kristen brought out a bottle of her parent’s champagne and popped it, and we toasted each other. I took a sip, but I gave the rest of mine to Tristan.

Then I said, “Hey, Tristan?”

“Yes, Buttercup?”

“I think that next year in college, you should start a band.”

He smiled a soft sort of smile that didn’t go with his normal pointy edges. “You’re right. I should.”

“You could name it the Regular Weirdos.”

He laughed. “I love that.” It was quiet a moment. Then he said, “Well, no need to wait for college, right?” He turned to Hannah and said, “Are we going to do a song together, or what?”

Hannah got a spark in her eyes. This was maybe going to be the first time that she would sing for people, other than me or Natalie. She swallowed and nodded. We followed Tristan as he went to get his guitar and set it up in the living room and pulled up a stool for Hannah to sit on. “What do you want to sing?” he asked. Hannah wiped her palms on her dress and thought about it for a long minute. She said, “‘Sweet Child O’ Mine,’” which was all of our New Year’s song. Tristan grinned and started right away with the first strings of the guitar that vibrate through your body. Hannah’s voice shook for a moment, coming out quiet, but as she kept singing she got louder and louder, until the song was pouring out of her. She looked at Natalie as she sang. Tristan looked at Kristen as he strummed the guitar hard and mouthed along with Hannah. And I looked at Sky.