Words in Deep Blue

by Cath Crowley

The water has the texture of sadness: salt and heat and memory.

He follows me everywhere since the funeral, a long line of black I can’t shake.

I’m currently mismanaging a hard-on. The mismanagement isn’t entirely my fault. My body’s working on muscle memory.

LOL PUT THAT THING AWAY

Girls knew, even if Amy was with some other guy at the time, that I belonged to her.

F Amy

He got small crushes on other girls but he didn’t act on them and they didn’t last and I was the one he sat with and called late at night.

:(

But by eleven that night, after a tub of ice cream, a bag of marshmallows, and three blocks of chocolate, this kind of madness hit and I decided to break into Howling Books and leave a love letter for Henry in the Letter Library.

It’s a section of books that aren’t for sale. Customers can read the books, but they can’t take them home. The idea is that they can circle words or phrases on the pages of their favorite books. They can write notes in the margins. They can leave letters for other people who’ve read the same books.

I could have left everything to chance, but I decided that if I was doing this, I was really doing it. I climbed silently upstairs to Henry’s room. His latest book was on his bed. I left a note in it: Look in the Prufrock tonight. —Rachel

Henry doesn’t use exclamation marks. He doesn’t like the look of them unless they fill a whole page, in which case they look like rain.

I explain the plan to her, which is basically to wait, horizontally, for life to improve.

“No one has anything to get up for. Life’s pointless and everyone just gets up anyway. That’s how the human race works,” she says, and hands me a coffee.

“You’re fermenting. Tell him he’s fermenting, George.”

“I don’t understand,” Dad says. “You were such happy children.”

lol

“The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day.”

Secondhand books are full of mysteries, which is why I like them.

Secondhand books have a way of traveling, sure. But what travels forward can come back.

That is exactly the plan. “That is not the plan.”

Lol

“How be life, Henry?” she asks, and I tell her, “Life be shit, Mai Li.”

The thing I love about George is that she takes ideas and books and the discussion of those things seriously.

“If we all gave up on the things we love when it gets hard, it’d be a terrible world.”

“I read an article that said secondhand books will be relics eventually,” I tell him, still trying to make excuses for how things went tonight. “Do you know what the word relic actually means, the dictionary definition?” he asks, offering me the prawn crackers. I take one, and tell him I don’t know. “It means ‘sacred,’ ” he says. “As in the bones of saints.”

“She’s my soul mate,” I tell her. “Then I am worried about your soul,”

haha

“Guys might like you. Many guys might like you, but you’re not good enough for Henry. You’ve never been good enough for Henry.”

<3

“You smell like apples,” he says. “Don’t smell me, Henry.”

LOL

“You’ve come back rude and gorgeous,” he says, and leans his head on my shoulder. “Not gorgeous,” I say, moving my hand over my hair. “It makes you look like Audrey Hepburn. If she’d been a surfer.”

“but unrequited love is just as shit in the morning as it is at night. Possibly more shit because you have a whole day ahead of you.”

“I wish I’d gotten the letter.” “Forget the letter.” “Okay,” he says. “But I want you to know something.” “What?” I ask. “I missed you,” he says, and then he kisses me on the mouth and falls asleep.

Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since—on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets.

There should be a disconnect button you can push when someone leaves: you’ve fucked me over, therefore I no longer love you. I’m not asking for the button to be connected to an ejector seat that removes them from the universe, just one small button that removes them from your heart.

walk downstairs and start to detach myself from the bookstore. I don’t look at the Letter Library on the way past. I don’t check Prufrock for strangers’ thoughts. I don’t look behind me to the reading garden.

It’s typical Rachel. She loves being organized. She loves stationery. She was the kind of girl who always had a never-ending supply of those little fluorescent sticky notes and she wrote on them, word for word, what the teacher said. Then, after she’d written on a note, she’d peel it off and press it to the appropriate page of her novel, like that solved the mystery of that word and why the author had put it on the page.

“How have you been able to read so many books?” he asks, and she looks up from Kafka, her thumb marking the page. “I’m a weird girl in high school. I’ve had some time to kill.”

Martin, Never write to me in this book again. George

“It’s that I don’t have patience for pointless stuff anymore.

I really like Gus. More than that, I respect him. But today I want to tell him to fuck off so badly I have to cover my mouth with my hands so the two words don’t escape.

I didn’t know that Cal had a crush on George, but he must have. He must have really liked her because he wouldn’t have given Sea-Monkeys to just any girl.

I don’t think I’m hot. I think I’m geeky. I think I’m a geeky guy who likes computers and wants to be a lawyer.”

“I should have stuck around. You know he used to dislocate body parts to impress girls. He told me in Year 9 that he could dislocate his penis.”

HAHAHA

“I believe I am adding up to something.”

There’s a tiny arrow pointing to the creature and three words next to that, written in small, neat letters, the kind of letters that Cal used: this I love. Without a doubt, it’s Cal’s handwriting. I know from the way the tail of his e kicks upward. I know it because he loved the octopus. I know because he loved this book. I know it in a way I can’t prove. It doesn’t make me sad, exactly. It’s a feeling I can’t seem to name.

The traces of them are hidden, small lines in books. In a library from which no one can borrow.

Dear Martin, Fuck off and stop writing to me. George

Dear George, I’m not fucking off. I’m your friend. Friends don’t fuck off. And by the way, friends don’t tell each other to fuck off, either. Martin

Tell her!

I never said he was perfect. He’s flawed. And you’re looking for a flawed guy? I could be. Who are you? Albert Finnegan. According to my ex-girlfriends, I am full of flaws. I’m one of your ex-girlfriends, Albert. I know you’re full of flaws. Jennifer? The one and only. You never told me you’d read this book. I’ve read many books. If you let me speak, you’d know.

“I love lying here with you, under the books,” he says.

“Secondhand books are haunted, according to him. Ghosts in the pages.”

“Sometimes science isn’t enough. Sometimes you need the poets,” he says, and it’s in this moment, this exact moment, that I fall in love with him again.

“I don’t like Amy,” Frieda says.

“Henry,” I say, just before he hangs up. “I want a do-over.” “A what?” “A do-over. On the fourteenth of February, this Sunday night. I want to spend another last night of the world together. I want you to promise me that whatever happens with Amy, you won’t ditch me for her. The end of the world will be at six in the morning on February fifteenth.

“It says I love him.” It’s such a huge thing for George to write. She doesn’t make a joke and say we’re shit at love. She’s taking the first real chance of her life, and the really terrible thing is that she and Cal would have been perfect for each other. I hold the letter. And I try not to cry.