Hey There, Delilah

Hey There, Delilah (36)

“He was so cute!”

Rex grinned at me, looking over my shoulder and down at the yearbook that I held in my lap. He had brought his eighth grade yearbook and let me look through it as I continued to sit in my hospital bed. He had flipped to the eighth grade section and I had found River’s picture. He looked so cute with his brown hair and his half smile.

“You could actually see his eyes,” Rex commented, chuckling slightly as he looked down at the picture. I smiled at the piercing blue eyes that seemed to stare up at me from the picture. River’s hair was light brown, and not in his face at all. It wasn’t exactly short, but it wasn’t as long as it was now.

“He was just so cute,” I gushed, almost clasping my hands together. “I can’t believe girls weren’t all over him!”

Rex looked at me in amusement, one eyebrow raised. “He did have girls all over him,” he informed me, now smirking at my shocked face. “He just wasn’t interested in any of them, besides Bekka, of course. All the girls kind of scattered away one he turned emo, though.”

The smile on my face immediately deteriorated into a frown. Why did people have to be scared of River just because of the way he looked? They just had to get to know him. He was the sweetest person on the whole planet. It didn’t matter if he was emo or not.

“Now that I think about it, he always kind of liked Bekka. I can’t believe I never even noticed it before. I might be an idiot, but now that much of an idiot…” Rex started, shaking his head. “That explains why he suddenly changed, though. He wanted to be like Bekka.”

I stayed quiet, still looking down at the old picture of my boyfriend. It barely even looked like the same person. The facial structures were the same, but other than that, nothing really was. The eighth grade River didn’t have a speck of black on him, but the current River would never be seen without the color somewhere on his body.

“I wonder why he stayed that way, though,” Rex continued, his eyebrows furrowing as he looked down at the picture once again. “I guess he just likes the style more. I could always tell he hated the clothes his parents always made him wear.”

I was about to turn the page to look for Rex’s or Seth’s picture, but was stopped when things fell out from the back. Confused, I picked the items that had fallen out of the book from my lap and into my hands. I was almost surprised to see that they were photos.

“Oh, I forgot those were in there,” Rex shrugged, sitting and leaning back into one of the chairs by my bed. He grinned goofily as he stared down at the photo that was at the top of the pile. I turned my attention to it, and I couldn’t help but smile when I saw it was of Rex, River, and Seth, all sitting in a line next to each other with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Rex was in the middle, River was to the left, and Seth was to the right. They were all actually smiling. Like I hadn’t ever seen before.

The background seemed like they were in some underground or something, which confused me a little. I looked over at Rex, who must have sensed my confusion. “That was taken by a parent on a field trip,” he explained, still smiling down at the photograph. “It was some old gold mine that they changed to a tourist attraction or something. I can’t really remember now. But that was sometime in the beginning of the year, before everything happened with Seth and Marnie and before River started changing. I wonder if they can even remember that… Seth hasn’t even smiled like that in forever.”

I continued to stare down at the picture, examining how happy they all looked. Best friends, all of them together. I then flipped to the next photo, and it caused me to frown. It was almost the exact same as the first, except someone else was in it as well.