We were all so close, you know? I just didn’t see it coming until I read your – I’m sorry, Anna.” “I was in love with him forever – since I was, like, ten,” I confess. She’s quiet as I digest her story, putting the pieces together to form a complete whole from the missing half that’s haunted me since that night – how did he really feel about me? Was it just one stupid moment, perpetuated a little too long, only to be forgotten as quickly as it came? As soon as he went away to school? All the times he’d ask me about who you liked at school, or who wanted to take you to whatever dance.” And I believed him, all the way up until the day I read your journal.
He said it was nothing – just that he had fun at the party.
He jumped a little, not knowing I’d been watching him smile there like a goofy little kid. He was sitting on his bed, playing with that blue glass necklace he always wore, a big smile on his face. “After I brushed my teeth, I walked into his room. “Wait – let me get this out.” She looks at me hard, her broken wing eyebrow trembling to keep the tears back. I can’t believe I didn’t figure it out, but of all the things that he could have been thinking about, you were the last – I mean, my mind just didn’t even go there. Matt was acting like such a space cadet that night after we got home – like he was floating. When we first got to California,” she says, “you asked me if I remembered your birthday party.” I nod, picking at a thread on her comforter. Matt looked down at the glass, his hair falling in front of his eyes. “I still can’t believe you made that,” I said, not for the first time. “Come here,” he whispered, his hand still stuck in my wild curls, blond hair winding around his fingers. They lived silently on my bookshelf, like frozen pieces of the ocean I had never seen. Frankie and Matt brought them back for me in mason jars every summer. I loved all the colors – dark greens, baby blues, aquas, and whites. To date he’d found only one red piece, which he’d made into a bracelet for Frankie a few months earlier. According to Matt, red glass was the rarest, followed by purple, then dark blue. He’d made the necklace the year before from a triangular piece of glass he’d found during their family vacation to Zanzibar Bay, right behind the California beach house they rented for three weeks every summer. “I felt the stupidity rising in my throat and bit down harder, staring at his collarbone and the small piece of blue sea glass he wore on a leather cord around his neck, rising and falling.
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