Ellie and Shannen both went off to the same college as they had initially planned. Last, I heard they still got together every night for dinner along with each of their group of friends coming together. I never found out what happened to Derek, or Lisa “The Buffer” Madsen. Even after searching for Derek online, knowing once he discovered social media, he would be all over it, he was unreachable. No one knows if he made it out, and if he did, what came of him. It was the one loose end from my hometown that always left me unsettled. Lisa was even more of a mystery; she could have stubbornly stayed in her room until the flames swallowed her whole but could have just as easily been lounging on a beach in Hawaii while sipping pink lemonade and eyeing the next object of her affection.
Milo loves college as do I, but it took a while to get adjusted. I was fortunate enough to have a roommate who relished the opportunity to help me catch up on everything that I missed. Milo and I talk on the phone at least once a week. We tried texting, but it felt too impersonal not to hear each other’s voices. When we lived with my aunt, something romantic prodded through our friendship, and we acknowledged it. For the three weeks before going away to college and the week we spent Thanksgiving break together, our relationship was somewhere between friends and significant others. By Christmas, we were both dating other people. It made sense that we would each find someone else we could connect to once we were outside the limited possibilities of Manere. Boyfriend or not, Milo will always be significant to me.
That first Christmas I went to New York City to see Milo. When I got to his dorm room, he handed me earmuffs and a pair of ice skates he borrowed from a girl across the hall. He took me to Rockefeller Center and spent hours trying to keep me from falling. Before the day turned to night, I could skate, not well, but skate nonetheless. I twirled my best twirl as I held my head back to take in the falling snowflakes onto my tongue. “Looks like you aren’t as broken as you thought you were,” Milo said.
As for Manere, those who wanted to get out did. It only took one of the most devastating fires in history to do it. Even though I have yet to return to Manere, I have been told by those who saw the worst of it, and nothing remained. Not a home or business left standing. Swings at Finnegan’s Park somehow managed to survive nearly intact, the creaky decrepit Merry-go-round, which we thought was going to fall apart just by looking at it, somehow persisted long after the rest of the town.
Unfortunately, even with the row of cars, we passed on our way out of town, there were hundreds more who refused to leave their home. In fact, I was only one of the eighty-eight people who made it out. Why so many people chose to stay behind was a question that kept me stirring many nights. For those individuals, it was much easier to deny change and possibility in order to remain in the only home they had ever known. To choose life, for some, held an uncertain and unknowable future. Those were the people who chose Manere and perished along with it. __
All That Remains (Manere Book 1) Page 21