The Candle Labeled “To Brandon’s Girl”

I asked her once why, and she said, with the flat logic of an eight-year-old, that if you burn a candle it gets used up and then it’s gone, and she wanted to keep this one.

I have decided not to read too much into it, and also I know exactly what it means.

The candle was meant to be the mark of her not-belonging, the cheap proof that she was less.

And she took it home and put it where she could see it every day, and made it hers, and by making it hers she turned it inside out — turned the thing that was supposed to say you don’t count into a small daily monument to the morning she found out she did.

That is Holly.