Young Writers Society

How was it that bad things happen to good people? My boyfriend was a good person, a great person. He never did anything he knew his father – who his family had lost in Iraq two years prior – wouldn’t have approved of. His brother was the reckless, wild definition of the teenage species. Not Liam. He was quiet and soft spoken, shy yet outgoing, hardworking and smart.

Why was it him who was hurt the most? After losing his father, worse upon worse had been stacked upon him. He just shrugged it off and focused on the silver lining, which was sometimes me and sometimes his brother Gio.

All he needed was a smooth ride out of high school and he’d tell us every time we’d get worried. He made big plans to go to Harvard, which he was in line for a scholarship there, and to take me with him. I was gonna go to Cambridge University for my counseling degree and share an apartment with him. We were going to work after school and come home each evening to each other. He was going to marry me right out of high school but we agreed to not have kids until we’d at least gotten our masters degrees.

But things changed after his accident. He’d been driving and his mother had been killed. It was a collision involving a drunk driver but he took all the blame. He pushed me and Gio away and locked himself inside his own mind – never speaking, hardly coming to school, and running away from foster home after foster home.

I, Nicole Forester, was out of Liam Gray’s life. He disappeared and didn’t come back. Gio vanished soon after, trying to find him, and I was left all alone and cold in a world that used to be so bright. I didn’t get married right out of high school, didn’t go to Cambridge, and didn’t have kids with the one person I dreamed of having them with. Love was just a word, a forgotten memory.

When I finally had gotten over Liam, he was dropped right back into my life. A letter had appeared in my mail from a mental institution addressed to me. I opened it, puzzled, and racked my mind for recognition of who I knew in a place like that. That’s when my eyes set on the familiar, sloppy cursive. My heart fluttered and my eyes burned with sorrow.

My Nikki,

I apologize, firstly, for ever leaving. We could have had everything, the world in our hands, and I just ran away from it. I threw my life away and I hope that I didn’t damage yours. You deserved better than me anyway. You deserved to go to Princeton, not Cambridge, and to have control over your own life, instead of letting me dictate where you should have gone.

Did I ever tell you that you always looked best, natural, in sweatpants and that baggy sweatshirt that you always seemed to steal from me? You were so beautiful and the thought of you being my girl made me scared. I was afraid that I would say the wrong thing, or push you away. And I did, at the very end…

Though I would be overjoyed if you wrote back, I don’t believe that it would be best. I don’t want to take up any of your time or get my hopes up again. I just wanted you to know that I’m sorry and that I’m okay. You were my everything and I shouldn’t have given you up.

Apologies and Love,

Your Lost Liam

The paper was splattered with my tears before it fluttered like a leaf to the floor. I took the envelope and looked up the return address. It was the depression and emotional trauma branch in New York, a thousand miles away. Before I knew what I was doing, I had the airline on the phone. What am I doing, I thought. I’m over him. He doesn’t want me to write back, not to mention flying out there.

I hung up the phone and sighed, breathing in the scent of Old Spice, which he and his brother never went without. A smile stretched thinly across my lips as I remembered all of the times we laughed, held each other, kissed, and cried together. The smile faded when I realized that it would never be like that again, not with him. Liam was right in the last words he’d written; he was lost but I wasn’t.