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Dear Ben
When will life stop being cruel?
Dear Ben,
I know you said you never wanted to hear from me again. I can still picture your face, how your features twisted as you looked at me — and I want to sob all over again because I never thought I’d see hatred in your eyes. Not directed at me. Never at me.
But I guess life’s full of surprises — even bad ones. We live and learn, right?
Mr. Ferguson said we had so much ahead of us. Remember when he told us that in third period English our sophomore year? You were scribbling ballpoint-ink tattoos over your left hand while I doodled patterns on a scrap of notebook paper. Everyone else had still been working on their pop quiz about The Count of Monte Cristo. We were a dream team that way, and everyone else knew it. You and me, we had always thought we were going to be artists living out our dreams in some European city away from the dregs of small-town life. You and me — we could have been forever once upon a time, you know?
But then things changed when Mia became a freshman. My little sister became the third wheel in our high-school life even though we were seniors ready to blast out of Harrington as soon as we could. You and me — we had big dreams, we could have gone the distance, we could have become the ones who got away and never came back.
