about a boy,
who was lost,
and thought he was found,
until he meets a girl,
the same girl,
who makes him wonder
if there's more to life
than just getting by.
-
[a Jem-centered novella/sequel to The Girl Who Saw Through Jem]
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Chapter Thirteen
Right Where You Left Me
Jem
After the funeral, there was a wake.
Effy's wake was held at our high school gym. Being back at Fairview after two years felt like a beautiful nightmare, haunting and feverish. Not much has changed. The high school corridors of nostalgic sweetness, are empty without the sounds of shuffling New Balance sneakers, locker slams and the school bell rings. I pace the halls like a mournful ghost, touching the school walls with a fragile sweetness and a deep pain inside my chest.
Heath and I dropped everything to come by Caleb's side after we got the call about Effy's death. When we saw him, we gave him no wisecracks, no jokes. We just somberly nodded and looked at each other, with meaning in our eyes. We always thought that the next time we saw each other was a reunion in some foreign country, partying it up on some faraway island tucked within the Mediterranean. We never thought we would see each other for this reason.
The more I thought about Effy, the deeper the pit in my stomach grew. Every passing day since Caleb called me with that news, I thought about her in her gilded penthouse apartment, her glassy, empty eyes and the splatter of white dust across her newly constructed nose.
The more I thought about Effy, the more I wondered if I should've said anything. But what would there be to say?
-
After the funeral, the boys and I head to our old favourite local: Java Moose. Or what was left of Java Moose, as it was bought out by Starbucks and transformed into an ugly little corporate chain.
Without the romantic gleam of Java's old 1920s interior turning everything rose-coloured pretty, I felt hard and cold as I sipped my disgusting Americano and frowned at everything that had changed. The tackily decorated cafe of my hometown memories, the homage of days I've poured in here after football practice, has been reduced into a mockery of a memory.
I glanced around at the high school students, laughing and gossiping and clamouring, blissfully unaware of the holy ground they were standing on. My heart tightened. This was also the cafe that christened some of Ellis and I's first and deepest conversations, the foreground of our friendship and then later, our fragile little love.
I stared at the iconically green Starbucks couches scattered across the right wall, remembering how it used to be retro well-worn floral patterned booths with mysterious coffee stains all over. How Ellis and I used to lounge our adolescent teenage bodies across the booths as we owned them, lapping up their saccharine tiramisu and slurping their filtered coffees. The talk flowed and ebbed between the two of us, just a couple of intellectually bored teens talking shit.
Now it was gone, cauterized into an empty husk of commercialisation.
"Kinda busy," Heath mumbled, noticing the swell of the crowd in the packed Starbucks. Heath was surprisingly, soberingly serious. It was the most serious I had ever seen him, his perpetually goofy smile absent from his face.
