Between the Stars and Sky Read Online Free PDF

childhood.
    I wonder why.
     
    *   *   *
     
    I feel like singing. If only to break the silence of night. Everything is too quiet now, too alone. Only the crackle and pop of the beach fire keeps the darkness alive, keeps the sun on my skin even though it’s gone. And all I want to do is sing or scream or make some kind of noise into the night so I break it into a thousand sounds so I don’t feel so alone with it.
    A sad, sad song-
    and the songbook is this: My mother’s journal. A piece of her. Life. A little bit of who she was hidden in something she loved. Like me. Like my dad. Like our family.
    And I can’t open it. I can’t.
    Instead, I watch as my grip loosens, the leather slipping slowly from my grasp, falling down and down and down like a bullet until it jumps from my hand completely and hits the water.
    Gone.
    Destroyed.
    Liquid burns the pages, cuts them. Makes the ink bleed into the lake like blood from a body.
    I am the bullet.
    I am the gun.
    I have killed everything but silence still.
    Until-
    “Jackson?”
    I turn and see sunshine.
    “Sarah?” I say her name because I don’t know what else to say. I was going to sing, but now all I want to do is taste the quiet syllables of her letters. “Sarah.”
    She smiles. “You said that already.”
    “Oh,” I say. I panic. “It’s so dark I couldn’t see you so I wanted to make sure it was you.”
    I am failing.
    “It’s me. I remember .” She sits beside me on the log. The fire burns her hair gold and lights her skin so it sparkles. “I remember you just the way you were. Want to touch me to be sure? Just in case?”
    “I-”
    She is shaking.
    She is laughing.
    And suddenly I can take on the world. Suddenly I can say anything to anyone and especially to her. So I say, “Touch me instead.”
    She does. Her hand presses against my shoulder, down my arm slowly, stopping every inch every little moment to kill me, and finds my hand and stops.
    Just stops.
    I whisper, “Sarah.”
    She is not smiling. “You already said that.”
    “I know,” I say.
    “Say it again,” she breathes.
    I do.
    But now it is not her name; it is a door, a window that looks out onto our future. A word that means a thousand. A breath.
    I want to kiss her.
    Consume her.
    But I don’t.
    Because she isn’t here she isn’t here she isn’t-
    here is a dream.
    And when I wake, the morning is as golden as her hair. The journal still whole in my hands. The lake as calm and quiet as her name.
    I have a secret.
    Let me tell it.
    Let me whisper it.
    I remember.
    A girl is opening my eyes. Already, I am healing, beginning to hear the poetry I once did; I can’t help but focus more when I think of her. I can’t help but remember the good instead of the bad. It’s as though the world explodes around her and dulls everywhere else.
    Who are you? I ask myself.
    I answer, I don’t know.
    But I think knowing may begin in the place where dreams and reality collide, in the form of a girl named Sarah Blake.
     

Chapter Six
     
    THIS IS A FACT: Without coffee, I die. It hasn’t been proven, but I’m not sure I want to risk it. So, when someone knocks on the front door at seven in the morning on Saturday, I run into the walls four times on the way there and answer in a grumble of words that aren’t really words but sounds strung together with sleep.
    “Modest, aren’t you,” a voice tells me.
    “What?” I rub my eyes, groan.
    “Nice boxers,” Sarah says, pointing down. I think I see a smile on her face, red and yellow paint flying across her brow, but my vision is blurred. “The smiley faces are cute. And apparently, it is a very happy morning.”
    “Shit,” I mumble and move so the wall is blocking most of my body. She blinks into focus and the very sight of her causes me to blush. “What do you want?”
    For barely a second she pauses, but I can feel it break our conversation in two; it’s as though Sarah is waiting for something, or wondering if I’m good enough for