Scared to Death ✧Liam Dunbar✧[Book 1]

✧Letters From Isaac✧

Chapter 23 ✧Letters From Isaac✧

I had gone to sleep last night without ever reading the letter. I don't know why but I was too in awe that Isaac had remembered my birthday and actually wrote me a letter. It was almost like old times again. Not that old times were good but Isaac and I had made the best of things with little things like this.

For our birthdays, Isaac and I always had a tradition. Since I had horrible anxiety and Isaac wasn't much of a talker, we'd write to each other instead. It's not like we couldn't talk- Isaac was actually the one person I could talk to- but that didn't mean dad liked it when we did talk. That horrible man never celebrated our birthdays after mom's death. So that meant Isaac and I liked to keep our celebrating to a minimal, which also meant that for a little while we had gotten up the nerve to rebel against dad. Of course it wasn't much but it was still something to us. For the five whole days before my birthday, Isaac would write me a letter -sometimes containing a happy memory while other times it was just a simple I love you- and each morning I would have to find it. Sometimes he would sneak into my bedroom when I was asleep and leave it on my bedside table while other times he would slip it into my locker while other times he'd place it under my dinner plate so dad couldn't see it. Then his birthday would come around and I would do the same.

Needless to say, it was the highlight of both of our birthdays.

But this morning I woke, remembered the letter, and then I turned over in bed and immediately ripped it open. I unfolded the paper as quickly as I could without ripping it before reading what my brother had written.

Little Lahey (that's what coach calls you, right?),

If you're reading this then that means Scott put this on your bed like I asked him to. Thank him for taking such good care of you for me please.

I miss you Char. Not a day goes by where I don't think about my little sister and her big blue eyes that people say are identical as mine. I don't think that's true though. Not entirely. I know you don't remember her very well but mom actually had our eyes. You're a lot like her in so many ways. She would love you so much, almost as much as I do. I wish I was there in person

Love, the bestest brother in the whole world (which I have recently discovered to be very big outside of Beacon Hills. I wish I could show it to you)

PS I bet you thought I was going to forget about this, didn't you? :P

I giggled some as I read that last line. After I read the letter a few hundred times so I had it memorized, I hugged the letter closely to me, pretending it was my brother and not some piece of light blue parchment paper- which happened to be my favorite color which I'm sure Isaac had planned.

After I settled down from being so completely overjoyed, I found my bookbag in the corner of my room and pulled my sketchpad out of it. From there I tucked away the letter in a little flap where I had all the letters from the past five years, which was how long we've been doing this. Some were little scraps of paper with a simple sentence on it while others were full of paragraphs but no matter the length of the writing they all meant so much to me.

Once I was done putting the letter in it's proper place, I officially stood up from my bed for good and started to get ready for school. Once I finished messing with my hair and pulled on a denim jacket that I'm pretty sure Lydia had picked out for me a few months ago when she dragged me out to the mall for the first time in my pathetic little life. It was her way of coping with the death of Allison Argent so I hadn't argued with her and just let her play dress up with me as the test subject.

I'd been in the middle of my mighty breakfast that consisted of toast and lemonade- we were out of orange juice- when Scott stumbled into the kitchen with his helmet under his arm, obviously ready to leave and get to school. I still hadn't talked to him but as he froze once he saw me I knew that I wasn't really all that mad at him anymore. Sure, I still had a lot of emotions jumbled up inside my head but none of them were strong enough to lead me to ignore Scott any longer.