It’s an indescribably beautiful day. They had said it was going to snow, but the clouds all passed. Children stumble with ice skates on the frozen pond, trying to find balance on the slippery ice. Sarah watches them as they fall and wants to help them up, but she decides it isn’t her business. There are some things people just have to learn on their own.
The movement of a waving hand catches her eye and she sees Sebastian approaching her. His hair is windswept and his eyes are the color of red clay. He’s wearing a gray parka, a gray plaid scarf, and black jeans. He looks so bundled up that Sarah wants nothing more than to hug him, to feel the soft layers of his clothes, his rib cage beneath, feel him breathe, smell the uniquely Sebastian blend of shampoo, deodorant, and laundry detergent. But she can’t bring herself to; she feels tears welling up just thinking about it.
Instead, she smiles and waves back. Elementary forms of communication she can handle; when things get too serious, she loses her words. She’s been losing her words a lot lately.
“Sorry,” he says, playing guilty. “I hope you weren’t waiting long?”
“Not at all, only a minute,” she answers, though she’d been there for at least twenty. She would’ve waited all day for him, if she had to.
He smiles, relieved, and she admires his smile, memorizes it, bathes in the warmth of it. Still, she feels a piece of her heart break, a tiny splinter she hadn’t realized was still there.
“Did you want a cider? Have you eaten? I brought some cash.” He has a mole under his right eye, a gap between his incisor and his canine tooth, and a dimple on his left cheek when he smiles.
“I love cider,” she says, looking at him.
He places a hand on her back as they walk toward the chalet. She nearly flinches, then leans into it.
They’d been friends since the seventh grade, when they were the only two who registered for a bird watching elective. Now juniors in high school, they were as comfortable with each other as siblings. Today, though, it was as if she was seeing him for the first time. She wondered, when had he gotten taller than her? Maybe only this past summer.
She has something she wants to say to him, something she needs to say to him, but the timing isn’t right yet.
They sip their apple cider, sweet and cinnamony, and walk around the pond together. Sebastian is explaining something about a new song he wrote on his busted, third-hand guitar. She doesn’t understand what he’s saying, knowing nothing about songwriting herself, but she hangs on to his every word, watches his exhalations condense in the air, notices the timbre of his voice has gotten deeper.
“Once I get it all ready, you have to come over and listen,” he says.
She tries her best to mirror his excitement. “I’d really like that.” She means it.
They finish their loop of the pond and find themselves by the chalet again, watching the kids on the ice. Sarah suggests they go to “the top of the world,” their childish name for the hill with the city’s radio tower on it. Ever since they found the way up to it in freshman year, they’d spent as much time up there as possible, particularly in the fall and winter, when the bugs weren’t so bad. Two kids hiding in the clouds, whispering secrets to each other, pretending. Pretending that the world is far below them, pretending the sky is only inches away from the tip of the tower, pretending they can stay up there forever and never have to come down.
“Let’s do it,” he says, and hooks his arm to hers nonchalantly. He’d done it a thousand times, but this time she truly cherishes it.
On the walk, for a while, they just discuss small things— his little sister’s birthday party, the upcoming semester, plans for the New Year. As they speak, Sarah notices Sebastian has no gloves on. She points this out to him and he only laughs and shrugs. It is hard, sometimes, for his family to afford things. She laughs, too, but for some reason wants to help with something small like that. Small things like that are easier to handle.
She pulls off one of her mittens, a big and colorful one from Kmart, and shows him how you can fit both hands inside.
“That way, neither of us are cold,” she says. He puts both his hands into the mitten and it looks as if he is praying. Feeling self-conscious, he pulls a hand back out. “I’ll just switch it when one hand gets too cold,” he says.
She notices his cheeks have flushed pink and wonders if it’s from the cold. While he chose to keep one hand free, she did the majority of the climb with both hands in one mitten, looking like a prisoner with her hands bound.
The top of the world is a view not many get to see, because not many are inclined to jump fences. The path cuts through some backyards, a graveyard, up the hill through frozen weeds, and over a poorly maintained chain link fence. They come out of the brush and arrive at the concrete bottom of the radio tower, the world spread out below them.
They sit on the base, their feet dangling above the snow. They say nothing as they look out over their hometown, catching their breath.
She has something she wants to tell him, something she needs to tell him. She’d tried painting her thoughts for him, but all the shapes were awkward and the lines misplaced. She’d tried writing him a letter, putting his name at the top and hers at the bottom, but none of it made any sense so she’d thrown it away. She needs to tell him now, but can’t form the words.
Leaving him with nothing feels cruel.
“Today, my heart is the heaviest it has ever been,” she says. “I’ll never be able to fly with a heart this heavy; if I tried to swim, I’d sink to the bottom and never see the sky again.”
He looks at her in profile as she stares at the city. The sun is beginning to set and the moment, in its totality, is beautiful. “Why?” he asks.
“Why what?” she answers, being willfully obtuse.
“Why is your heart so heavy today?”
She turns to look at him and their eyes lock for precisely two heartbeats before she has to look away. Something about his gaze hurts her.
“Heavy and numb, like ice. Like when we waded into the lake just before it froze, how heavy and numb our legs got. My heart feels heavy like that. My whole body.” She wonders if he’s ever felt numb like that. She doesn’t think so, and hopes he never will. He deserves better, though that never really matters.
He waits for her to explain but she doesn’t.
“Your parents?” he asks finally.
He’s prompting a conversation only suitable for the hill, for total solitude, for the red light blinking above them, for the sunset, for this precise moment. Her time has arrived, she must speak now.
But she can’t. She doesn’t have the strength to give him the words. What would he do, anyway? What could he do?
He hooks an arm around hers again and nudges her gently. She looks at him, smiling bravely, and says, “Yeah.”
He knows her mother is overbearing, to the point Sarah had developed an eating disorder and started cutting herself when she was ten. He knows she was hospitalized for it freshman year.
He doesn’t know that, ever since she turned sixteen, her step-father has been sexually harassing her, abusing her. Sebastian doesn’t know that she’d told her mother, that her mother defended his behavior, blamed Sarah instead. He doesn’t know and she can’t tell him. What if he doesn’t understand? What if he blames her, too? Her shame is so large in her stomach, nearly gagging her, that she can’t bring herself to admit anything.
He pulls her a little closer, holds her mittened hands. “You’ll be out of here soon. We only have a year and a half left and you’ll be free. We’ll get the fuck out of here.”
“Yeah,” she says again, looking at his hand on her mitten. She could pull a hand out and allow it to be held, but his comment proves he wouldn’t have understood. A year and a half? Seventeen months? The eight months she’d already suffered felt like eight years.
She smiles at him. She pushes him playfully with her shoulder. “Yeah, you’re right.” She isn’t lying, either. He is right. She just has to hold on for seventeen months, but she dreads that string of days, each one longer than the last, each violation worse than the last. So she can’t wait. She can’t hold on, not for one more month, or week, or day.
But she loves Sebastian, loves his smile, the dimple on his cheek, the freckles on his nose, his Adam’s apple, his love for music, the golden flecks in his eyes. She loves his soul.
“I love your soul,” she says, just to make him laugh. She loves how he laughs when he’s nervous. His laugh makes her laugh, and her laugh is the first lie she’s ever told him. She isn’t joking. She means it sincerely. She’s never been more serious, but she laughs with him.
“I love your soul, too, Sarah,” he says, a crooked smile betraying his impression that they might only be playing a game.
She turns away and looks at the city, watches the streetlights turn on and paint the scene a sodium-vapor orange, a landscape of flickering lights that smother the stars.
“It’s beautiful,” she says. “From here, from so far away, it’s really beautiful.”
“I wish we never had to go back, just stay up here forever.”
She glances at him. “I wish that, too. With all my heart.”
They sit in silence as the world darkens around them. They are happy to sit in silence beneath the unseen stars.
Sarah walks Sebastian home, insists on it, and gifts him the mittens.
“I should be the one walking you home, and keep your mittens,” he says, but she’s stubborn. She digs in her heels. It seems inordinately important to her that he keep the mittens.
“I’ll see you for New Year’s?” he asks at his door.
“Yes,” she says. It’s the second lie she’s ever told him.
He smiles. She expects a feeling of heartbreak, but feels nothing. She watches him go inside and waits for his bedroom light to turn on.
Instead of walking home, she walks back up the hill alone. Why can’t she stay up there forever? It had begun to snow gently and she had a view of the whole world, the world she knew and had decided to reject.
She’s drowsy from 150 milligrams of her mother’s Trazodone. She’s laying down before she realizes it, the cold becoming warm and comfortable. She is calm. She has had the perfect final day, as perfect as possible. She falls asleep. She can’t wake up. She doesn’t.
The falling snow makes a quilt of stars for her to rest beneath.
X
He didn’t read the letter right away when he found it. He was standing in her bedroom the day of her funeral, studying the way she organized her books, flipping gently through her sketchbooks, memorizing everything. He wasn’t alone, people had been going in and out of her room all afternoon, like pilgrims to a holy site, crossing themselves.
Still, he’d never felt so alone. When he glimpsed the crumpled paper in her bin and saw, “Dear Sebastian,” he picked it up and stuffed it into his pocket, without even caring if anyone saw him. Seeing it had very nearly sent him back into uncontrollable, convulsive tears. Since she’d gone, he’d had an overwhelming sense of sorrow and despair and guilt that would hit him in waves, leaving him dysfunctional for hours or days. He’d never felt emotions so large and heavy that they crushed him, body and soul.
He kept his vigil in her room for as long as he was allowed, gently touching the paper in his pocket like a rosary.
At her viewing, he’d been scared by her stillness. She was wearing clothes he didn’t recognize, makeup, and someone had hair sprayed her cowlick into obedience. He could almost believe it wasn’t her at all, just a poor facsimile.
She was there, though, beneath the powders and lipstick, beneath the styled hair and floral dress, the body was Sarah. He could see her in the curve of her jaw, the bow of her lips, the mole on the very top of her ear. She was dead, and he’d been the one to find her.
He could only remember a rotation of intense emotions— the panic when her parents called to say she hadn’t come home, the despair of seeing her body, frosted with fine white snow that clung to her skin and hair, the desperation to wake her, the agony of realization. He’d felt the coldest he ever had in his life, shivering so badly his teeth were chattering the whole time he was trying to figure out what he was supposed to do. He couldn’t leave her to find help, he couldn’t leave her. He couldn’t.
She’d taken off her jacket and he covered her with it, carefully pushed a lock of hair away from her face, squeezed her hand. It could have been half an hour or two hours before he stood, dazed, dizzy, knowing he must find help.
He cut his leg badly jumping over the fence. He stumbled down the hill and through the graveyard, throwing up once along the way, and staggered through people’s yards. He knocked on four front doors before someone finally let him use their phone.
The self-hatred and self-doubt kicked in that night as he lay sleepless in his bed. He should have known. He should have seen it. He should have done something. She was his best friend, he loved her, how could he have missed it?
He’d been worried about her, worried she’d gotten quieter, worried if she was cutting, if she was eating, worried when she said her heart felt so heavy, but he never imagined…
Yet, he should have, he thinks. She’d always been there for him and he’d failed her. In the end, he’d failed her as a friend.
He takes her letter to the top of the world, wearing her mittens, and reads it intermittently by the flashing red light above him. He ripped the stitches in his leg climbing the fence, but he hasn’t noticed. The only thing he can focus on is her letter, undelivered, tossed away. What had she tried to tell him?
Dear Sebastian,
Don’t blame yourself.
I have wanted to tell you everything but I’ve been so afraid. I’ve been so afraid for so long, my whole life has been lived in fear— of my mother, my father, my step-father. Fear of her anger, his indifference, and his attention.
I’m so tired of being afraid, Sebastian, I’m so tired of feeling trapped.
I want you to know you have been the only light in my life and your kindness and friendship are the only things that have gotten me through this far. Please know that, Sebastian, from the bottom of my heart, your love has sustained me. I love you, I love your music, I love your soul, so much. Please don’t let this change you.
We’re only sixteen. This isn’t a world for children. This is bigger than the both of us.
Please remember, just because you can’t see the stars, it doesn’t mean they’re not there.
Sarah
He reads the letter a little bit at a time, catching the words during the few seconds the light above him flashes. He started crying at the first line and now his tears are frozen on his cheeks. Somewhere in the distance is the sound of sirens.
The sky above the city glows orange. Above him, and above the graveyard, the sky is black.
j.k. armstrong 
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