seventeen going under - jeremiah fisher

ch. 21

Tangible proof. Those words kept ringing in my ear. Jeremiah had written an entire book of tangible proof that he loved me and all I had given him was a summer of lies. Just listen my mom said. Just listen. Just listen. Just listen.

I rummaged through my room to find any tangible proof hidden in these walls. Something I may have forgotten about or deemed less important. I grabbed notebooks that I stashed from school, flipping through them to find notes written back and forth between us but all I found were niceties written by Conrad in between the margins of my Math and English notes. "You're gonna kill this test!" "Don't forget to hang the 1." "This note was so important." He would take my notebooks when I told him I was struggling and he'd make notes on the sidelines making sure I got everything I needed to get out of it. When I saw them over the next few days in class, I'd smile to myself. I always felt taken care of.

On my bookshelf was a book. The spine read The Outsiders by S.E Hinton. I grabbed it, the only copy I owed of it that had a broken spine and was well loved. It was the same copy I had in middle school that carried me to now. It was the only copy I read religiously. Next to it was a newer copy with the spine still intact and I grabbed that one, too. We all were forced to read it in middle school but it had quickly become my favorite book of all time. I scribbled down annotations in the margins and between the lines over so many years it was barely legible anymore. The new copy was from Conrad. He gave it to me one night while we sat in the basement alone. Jeremiah went to get more snacks and Conrad pulled it out of the couch cushion. "I annotated it with my thoughts. I don't know, I thought you'd like it," he said. I read it that night. This was his tangible proof, I thought. All the notes in the margins of my notebooks and this novel - that was his way of telling me he has loved me all these years, too.

Conrad once gave me a copy of Wuthering Heights. It sat on the top shelf, untouched, but he said it was one of his favorites and he hoped I would read it some day. I never did because classics weren't always my favorite but I grabbed it off the shelf and opened up to page 1 with a pen tucked behind my ear and a highlighter in the spine of the pages. I wrote in the margins and highlighted what I liked and wrote sad faces next to the stuff I didn't. I only got halfway through before the sun went down and my eyelids felt heavy. Mom went to Susannah's without me. No one texted.

The next morning I woke up so early the sun wasn't fully up yet. There was a dark glow to the Earth and the clouds looked pink. I grabbed the book off the nightstand and I finished it. On the very last page, I wrote a letter. My brain hurt. My heart hurt. My hand hurt. But I signed my name at the bottom with a kiss and then shut the book. My tangible proof.

There was a knock on my door. "Are you awake?" Mom.

"Yeah," I called back as I got up to open the door. She was in her pajamas, her hair in a messy bun, and bags under her eyes. "You look good," I teased.

She pushed herself into the room with a fake laugh and sat herself down at my desk. It was a disaster between me digging out every ancient artifact in the drawers and all the new supplies we got a few days ago but she poked at it all anyway. "What's with the mess?" She asked, holding up a notebook from the 7th grade.

"I was just trying to find something." She cocked an eyebrow up. "What? It's true."

"Find what?" I crossed my arms and shuffled on my two feet feeling uncomfortable.

"I don't know. Proof I love Jeremiah, I guess." When I said it out loud, it sounded stupid. Why should I need proof when I know it in my heart? My atoms were split from his atoms. I shouldn't need a piece of paper to prove that, yet, here I was searching. Her face said everything I knew: I was stalling. I was looking for a way out.