Blackthorn Lake
Eli drowned with his eyes open.
That was the part my dreams always remembered.
Not the screaming. Not the cold. Not the way the lake swallowed sound until my own voice felt far away from me, like it belonged to another girl on another shore.
His eyes.
Blue in life, black beneath the water.
They watched me from below, wide and glassy, while his fingers slipped from mine one by one.
In the dream, I was always reaching. My arm plunged elbow-deep into the lake, then shoulder-deep, then deeper than my body should have allowed. The water was not water. It was ink. It was oil. It was something thick and living that curled around my wrist and tugged me toward the place where Eli floated, pale and still, his dark hair drifting around his face like spilled thread.
I screamed his name.
Bubbles rose from his mouth.
Not air.
Words.
They burst against the surface soundlessly, little silver beads of things he never got to say.
I leaned farther over the dock, my ribs grinding against old wood, my fingers stretching until they burned.
Eli’s hand lifted through the dark.
Our fingertips touched.
For one impossible second, I had him.
Then something below him opened its mouth.
His hand was ripped from mine.
I woke up choking on his name.
“Eli.”
The room answered with silence.
I sat up too fast, my blanket sliding into my lap, my lungs working like I had swallowed half the lake myself. My throat hurt. My eyes burned. My skin was damp with sweat, but the air in my bedroom was cold enough to raise bumps along my arms.
For a second, I didn’t know where I was.
Then the moonlight found the familiar wreckage.
My desk beneath the window. My half-dead lavender plant sagging in its ceramic pot. The pile of textbooks I had opened and never read. The string lights Eli hung crookedly above my bed because he said perfect things made rooms look staged.
And his hoodie.
Gray. Faded. Folded over the back of my chair like he had just taken it off and would come back for it any minute.
My heart did the stupid thing it always did.
It reached for him before I could stop it.
I stared at the hoodie until my vision blurred. There was a coffee stain near the sleeve from the morning he spilled my drink in the school parking lot and tried to convince me it was “abstract fashion.” The left cuff was frayed because he chewed on it when he got nervous, even though he swore he didn’t. It still smelled like him if I pressed my face into it hard enough and pretended grief hadn’t invented half of what I thought I remembered.
Cedar soap.
Rain.
Eli.
I didn’t touch it.
That was one of my rules.
Don’t wear the hoodie.
Don’t play the old voice messages after midnight.
Don’t look at the last photo for too long.
Don’t count how many days he had been dead.
My phone sat facedown on my nightstand, charging beside a glass of water I hadn’t drunk. I knew what waited inside it without looking.
Six months.
Today made six months since Eli Hart drowned in Blackthorn Lake.
Six months since the searchlights cut through the trees.
Six months since my mother wrapped me in a thermal blanket while I screamed until nothing came out.
Six months since Eli’s mother collapsed on the shore, clawing at the mud like she could dig him out of the world.
Six months since they found his body just after dawn.
The police called it an accident. The town called it a tragedy. Everyone at school called it by whatever made them sound sad enough to be kind and curious enough to be cruel.
Poor Mara.
Did you hear she was there?
I heard she tried to save him.
I heard she froze.
I heard she doesn’t remember all of it.
That last one was true.
There were pieces missing from that night.
Not big pieces, according to everyone else. Not important enough to matter. Trauma did that, the grief counselor told me. The brain took scissors to unbearable things. It cut holes so you could keep living around them.
But sometimes I wondered what had fallen through those holes.
Sometimes I woke up with lake mud under my fingernails.
Sometimes I heard Eli gasp in rooms with no water.
Sometimes I remembered laughing.
Not because anything was funny.
Because in the dark, memory could wear the wrong face.
I grabbed my phone before I could talk myself out of it.
The screen lit up too bright, stabbing color into the room. 3:17 a.m. glared back at me, along with a row of notifications I didn’t want and one I had been expecting since midnight.
A memorial post.
Then another.
Then another.
People who hadn’t spoken to Eli in two years were suddenly heartbroken over him again. Their grief came with filters and lake pictures and captions about angels. They used the same smiling photo of him from sophomore year, the one where he had one arm thrown around Callum and his grin was crooked because I’d been standing off-camera making faces at him.
I opened none of them.
My thumb drifted, as it always did, to his contact.
Eli Hart.
His name sat there like a dare.
Our last texts were still pinned in place, untouched by time because I refused to delete them and refused to read them more than once a week.
I failed at both things.
Eli: you mad at me?
Me: I’m thinking about it.
Eli: dangerous. you think too hard.
Me: Maybe you should stop giving me reasons.
Eli: meet me by the lake tonight?
Me: Why?
Eli: I need to tell you something.
Me: Is this one of your dramatic boyfriend moments?
Eli: probably.
Me: Fine. But if you’re breaking up with me, I’m pushing you in.
Eli: you’d miss me.
Me: Annoyingly, yes.
Eli: good.
That was it.
No goodbye.
No warning.
No final I love you polished clean enough for tragedy.
Just good.
A word that had rotted in my phone for six months.
I locked the screen and threw it gently onto the bed, because part of me still couldn’t be rough with anything that had held him.
