Words in Deep Blue(4)

‘You left out shithead,’ I’d remind him. ‘Henry who is a shithead.’

It wasn’t really a problem that I was Henry’s best friend and in love with him at the same time until the beginning of Year 9. He got small crushes on other girls but he didn’t act on them and they didn’t last and I was still the one he sat with and called late at night.

But then Amy arrived. She had long red hair and this impossible skin with not a single freckle. I’m covered in dust from years of summers at the beach. Amy was smart, too. We competed for the maths prize that year, and she won. I won the science prize. She won Henry.

She told me she would, at the end of Year 9, on the day before summer holidays. We’d been studying the writer, Ray Bradbury, in English. One of his short stories was about a couple on the last night of the world, and the idea had spread around that we should all imagine it was our last night. Really it was just an excuse for hook-ups; a free pass to tell whomever it was that you loved, that you loved them. I wasn’t planning on telling Henry, but since it was also my last night in the city, he said we should spend it together.

‘You like him,’ Amy said, looking at me in the bathroom mirror that morning.

Henry and I had met years ago in the primary school car pool. He was reading The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a beautiful book with soft pencil moons. I can’t remember that first conversation, but I remember the ones that came after: books, the planets, time travel, kissing, ghosts, dreams. I knew everything there was to know about Henry. Like just didn’t cover it.

‘He’s my best friend,’ I told Amy.

‘Well, I’m asking him,’ she said.

I knew what she meant, and I told her he was spending it with me.

Henry let me know that afternoon that he’d said yes to her. We were at the back of the school, hiding in the long grass, watching insects skate on lines of sun. ‘If it really bothers you, I can go back and say no,’ he said. Then he got on his knees and begged.

I closed my eyes and told him it was fine.

‘What else could I say?’ I asked Lola that night. ‘I’m in love with you and I have been forever and if there are two people who should definitely spend the last night of the world together, it’s us. Henry and Rachel.’

‘Why not?’ she asked, sitting cross-legged on my bed, eating chocolate. ‘I mean really, why not? Why not just say you my friend, are the person I want to kiss and I think we’d be great together and this girl Amy has a worrying habit of getting lost in her own reflection in the change rooms – why not say that?’

I didn’t bother answering. Lola was Lola Hero, the girl who wrote songs and played bass, the girl who people listed when they listed people they wanted to be. If she liked a girl, she asked her out the same day. The kind of love she wrote about wasn’t the kind of love people like me experienced.

Why not? ‘Because I am not a huge fan of failure and humiliation.’

But by eleven, we’d gone through a tub of ice-cream, two blocks of chocolate and a bag of marshmallows, and this kind of madness hit. I decided to break into the bookstore and leave a love letter for Henry in the Letter Library at Howling Books.

My world seemed too small that night. I’d never even hinted to Henry that I liked him, but with the clock ticking down it became the thing I had to do before that last second and the Letter Library was the perfect place to do it.

The Letter Library is 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 loved words or sentences on the pages. They can write notes in the margins. They can leave letters for people who’ve read and been there before them.

Henry loves the Letter Library. So does his whole family. I didn’t quite see the point of writing to a stranger in a book. There’s a much better chance of getting a reply if you write to them online. Henry always said that if I didn’t understand the Letter Library, then he couldn’t explain it. It was something I had to get instinctively.

There wasn’t an alarm on the bookstore, and the lock on the toilet window that faced Charmers Street was broken. After Lola and I climbed through, we listened before we left the bathroom to make sure no one was in the store.

It was dark but the streetlight helped us see. I’d written the letter before I left home – my hands shaking as I put the words onto paper. It was mostly I love you – a little go fuck yourself. The perfect love letter, according to Lola.

I didn’t hide it in a book he never read and leave it to chance. I put it in T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations. Even more dangerous than leaving it in his favourite book, I’d left it on the page of his favourite poem: ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’.

I decided that if I was doing this, I was really doing it, so I climbed silently upstairs to Henry’s room. He was still out with Amy but his book was on this bed, his page marked by a folded corner. I left a note in it –

Look in the Prufrock tonight – Rachel.

Lola and I went back out the bathroom window; laughing as we hit the air. It had been a hot day but now rain covered the street. ‘It’s the end,’ I thought, but I wasn’t thinking the end of the world. I was imagining the end of Henry and me, the moment when he read the letter, and everything changed. We’d be a different Rachel and Henry. I saw a couple kissing on the other side of the street, John and Clara from school, and felt rain hiss on my skin.