Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz (books to read for teens txt) 📕

Has every reason to be in the park any time he returns to the rocks, no different from any other man on the West Side. This is his backyard, after all. A place he knows.

I’d say I come here almost every day, is how he’d answer, if anybody ever asked.

The truth is, I wasn’t just keeping Ruby from him. When he comes here, when he stands and looks out over the water, I can feel his pleasure, the swell of it in his chest, the fizzing in his fingertips. He bites into the pain he caused, feasts on it as if stripping meat from a bone, tasting those last terrifying moments of my life over and over. It used to overwhelm me.

But I can see him better now, this man. I no longer back away from the world he has created. I’m staying close, as I wait for another chance to bear down, push through. My anger burned bright and fast, that night my name was spoken out loud. It was a brief, beautiful flame. But I’ll get that second chance, I know it.

To make him feel the weight of my remains.

Something Josh left out of the story, when he told Ruby about returning to the scene of his accident. Looking for the tree root that upended his bike, searching for some memory of his pain, and finding nothing was as he remembered it. It wasn’t until he had given up his search, accepted the impartiality of sticks and stones and dirt, that he saw it, gleaming beneath a nest of rotting leaves. The face of his watch, cracked in a hundred places, hands bent and stopped, one on top of the other. As his body hit the ground, the impact must have dislodged it from his wrist, sent the small disc flying. Picking up this remnant, examining the damage, Josh felt a strange kind of relief. He had been looking for proof. Something to validate how totally his world had been rearranged—and there it was. Cupped, now, in the palm of his hand. Passed over in the weeks after his accident, missed by anyone who wouldn’t grasp its significance.

The truth doesn’t always announce itself loudly, see. Sometimes it is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.

If you know what you are looking for.

Sometimes, when Ruby is down at the river, I come sit with Lennie at the mortuary, watching as she tends to her dead. Most of her charges have long since left their bodies behind, but occasionally I can see someone hovering, carefully patting Lennie’s arm, or touching their lips to her forehead as she works. I see the fine hairs on her arm stand up, feel the prickling of her scalp when this happens, and then the person is gone. Her dead girls briefly show up other places, too, following her to restaurants, or standing close by as she scans the racks at her favourite vintage clothing store. I only ever catch glimpses, flickers, but now I know that what Lennie thinks of as her terminal clumsiness, the trips and knocking of glasses, is really just the women who love her accidentally coming too close.

Back at the mortuary, I’ve also been there in the private viewing rooms, watching family and friends sit with their loved one’s body. I’ve looked on as each grieving person brings their love and memory and pain into the room, seen the way it all mixes together, before flowing out in a stream of colours. To see this grief up close is to look at light passing through a prism, like a rainbow, but so much brighter. It is the most glorious thing, this arc of remembrance, as if the beginning and end of a person was only ever light.

The living cannot see this, of course. They get busy with whatever it is that picks them up off the floor. Soon enough, grief is replaced by other emotions. Anger, despair, disbelief, resignation; all the tools it takes to survive. But that first mix of colours, that fusion of grief, lights up the room. It illuminates the dead, and it reminds us we will not be forgotten; we get to leave our light behind.

Watching these private, poignant moments unfold, I understand something else, too. It matters who remembers you. The people who knew me remain distant from one another, they each carry around their own, unshared memories of Alice Lee, as if I was many things, or nothing, depending on who you asked. Ruby has tried to bring all of these pieces together, bring me into focus, but she can only get so far with their resistance, and a dead girl as her guide.

Maybe this is why I’m still in that tug of war between the living and the dead. Because I am no less broken into pieces than when Ruby found me, down there on the rocks.

They are learning some things. Piecing together the story of a girl called Alice Lee as best they can. But there are still so many gaps. What would they say about me, if I filled in some of those gaps for them?

She once posed for pornographic pictures.

She had an affair with her high school teacher.

She let the old man she lived with buy her things.

Or this. She couldn’t sleep after calling Mr Jackson one last time, got up at 5 a.m. and stumbled out into the heaviest, most beautiful rain she had ever seen. Zipped up her purple parka, her camera tucked under the jacket, pressed up against her chest. Thinking about portfolios and school submissions, and how life was a lot like this storm, washing away the bad things, and some of the good things, too, but that was okay, because there were so many good things to come. And then some man, some man with his series of bad days and disappointing mornings approached her as she tried to take pictures of the storm, and he