Chapter 13 — Lia

I want to write this part, because it’s mine and because there’s already a version of it out there that somebody else wrote.

I was twelve when I found the post.

A girl in my year called Simone sent it to me on a Tuesday in October — not to be cruel, she genuinely didn’t know, she just said is this you??? with three question marks, which is how a twelve-year-old asks about something enormous.

It was on the neighborhood page. It’s still there. It has four hundred and eleven comments.

My mother wrote it the morning after, in a hotel room, while I was asleep in the next bed.

It’s about two thousand words. It has the note in it — the actual text, in capitals, the way it was on my door. It has the empty corner and the water dishes.