Don't Forget Me

by Victoria Stevens

  Red didn’t say anything about it, but he didn’t have to. He said hello casually enough as they passed each other in the hallway after dinner, but then he grabbed hold of Luca and pulled him in for a tight hug. Red might not have been as well built as him, but he was a good few centimeters taller, and when his arms wrapped around him Luca couldn’t help but feel that Red was trying to hold him together too, in his own way.

  There was a candle on his desk when he went upstairs. Just one single cream candle in a glass jar. Luca took it to the track, because that was where he felt closest to Ryan, where he felt Ryan was looking down—if he was looking down at all. Luca walked to the very middle of the grass, illuminated by the floodlights. He lit the candle, watching as the flame flickered slightly in the evening breeze, and took a deep, shuddering breath.

  He had a thousand things he wanted to say. There were so many ways he wanted to remember Ryan, to memorialize him, but for some reason he couldn’t. He couldn’t find the right words, couldn’t figure out how to do him justice.

  “I miss you, buddy,” he whispered instead, and somehow that was enough.

  He sat down cross-legged on the grass and placed the candle in front of him. He watched the flame, and he pictured Ryan’s face in his mind during his last seconds, those green eyes and those curls and those dimples. Then Luca pictured his laugh, wild and reckless and untamable—so inherently alive even in the face of death—and he replayed it over and over and over again in his mind until the wax melted down into a hot puddle and the flame dwindled into darkness.

  Dear Mum,

  I remember the Christmas you took me ice skating at Somerset House. Neither of us was very good, I thought, and so we clung to each other as we made our way slowly around the rink. We spent almost the entire hour teaching ourselves how to move our feet properly on the ice, but we still had a great time.

  When the hour was up, you led me off the ice and then told me to hang on while you did one more lap. I was confused, but I did as you asked.

  Without me, you skated around the rink like a professional. You glided across the ice like you’d been there all your life.

  You could’ve let me learn on my own, but you didn’t. You took it slow for me, and I never told you just how much I appreciated that.

  I miss you, Mum, but I remember.

  Love,

  Hazel

  30

  Luca turned up on Hazel’s doorstep without warning on Saturday evening. “Are you busy?” he blurted out before she even had a chance to say hello.

  “Just clearing away dinner, what’s up?”

  “I just … I’d really like to talk. If that’s okay. I need someone to talk to.”

  “Of course,” Hazel said, pulling the door shut behind her. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  She took him to the stretch of beach behind Graham’s house, and they sat down on the sand, facing out to sea.

  “I was supposed to have a scholarship,” Luca began. “For the University of Sydney. I was only sixteen, so it wasn’t an outright offer, but the scouts said it was as good as.”

  “A scholarship for what?”

  “For running.” He was silent for a moment, gathering his thoughts. “The scholarship was a big deal, even if it was unofficial, because they’re so difficult to get over here. But I screwed up. When Ryan died, I stopped racing, and when the university found out, they cut me off. I wanted to run, at first. I tried, I just … It felt wrong. I didn’t—I couldn’t do it, not without him. We’d always done it together, and knowing that we never would again just … It made me miss him too much. So I gave up, in the end. Not just on the running. On everything.”

  Hazel said nothing, waiting for him to continue, but he didn’t. Just looked out to sea.

  “Us training,” she said finally. “You being so focused on getting back your time. Was that a way to come to terms with it?”

  “Partly—because it was something we always did together, even when we weren’t training, and it makes me feel close to him somehow. But also partly because running has always been the only thing that clears my head, even before that, and I thought that maybe if I could just get back up to the standard that I was at when … when he…”

  Hazel reached out to touch his arm, and Luca shuddered, hard, before raising his eyes to hers. “I thought it would fix things, you know? That it would make me feel better. That it would make it not hurt.”

  “And it hasn’t?”

  He smiled ever so slightly. “No, it has. Somewhat.”

  The thought of being a part of the reason why Luca felt better—however marginally—made Hazel feel good. He deserved that. He needed that. They all needed that. She thought back to that night when she’d first found him at the track, sitting with his head in his hands, and how he’d been such a mystery; she remembered trying to piece together the few things she knew about him and failing to turn those fragments into a person. People didn’t work like that—they weren’t the sum of a handful of unconnected facts, they were the sum of everything, and now that Hazel knew so much more about him and what he’d gone through he wasn’t a mystery anymore. He wasn’t an enigma or a riddle to be solved; he was just human.

  “It was a year ago yesterday,” Luca said then. “A year ago that Ryan died. One whole year.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said automatically. “If I’d have known, I would’ve—”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “I just wanted to be alone, you know? To think things through.”

  “Did it help?”

  He nodded. “I think so. If nothing else, it made me realize how afraid I am that if I let myself move on I’ll start to forget about him. That’s what terrifies me the most.”

  Hazel thought back to her own mum, about all the times she’d told herself the exact same thing. I remember, I remember, I remember. “Then you just … you have to keep remembering. Every day.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “Is that how you survived losing your mum?”

  “Luca, my mum isn’t—” she started, and he looked at her, his eyes wide with the hope that there was a way out, that she was living proof that there was light at the end of the tunnel.

  “She isn’t what?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, that’s how I survived.”

  He let the words sink in. “How long has it been since you lost her?” he asked eventually.

  “A long time,” she said, and that wasn’t even a lie, not really. “Years.”

  “And it gets better?”

  “It gets numb,” she said softly.

  You learned how to get up every day and survive, and you kept on moving forward even when you didn’t want to, and eventually, finally, the pain started to fade to something bearable.

  * * *

  It was almost one o’clock in the morning by the time they decided to turn in, which was incredible considering a few months ago she and Luca couldn’t even sustain a conversation for a couple of minutes.

  Instead of disappearing back through the hole in the undergrowth, Hazel let Luca walk her around to the front of Graham’s house the way he did when they trained together.

  “Well,” she said, stopping at the gate.

  He shifted on the pavement to look at her. “Thank you for tonight. It means a lot.”

  Neither of them spoke for a moment. Hazel studied his face—thinking once again how different it was from Red’s, despite all the DNA they shared, how his eyes seemed to burn, even in the near darkness—and Luca watched her back.

  “I’ll walk you to the door?” he offered, and Hazel nodded. The air between them seemed suddenly thick, perhaps with all the things they were both thinking but not saying.

  “So,” he said when they reached the porch. “Here you are.”

  She rocked up on her tiptoes to pull him into a hug, wrapping her arms around his neck like she would Red or Hunter or Maddie. At first, he seemed to freeze like he had in the hallway at school, but then after a moment he hugged her back.


  He smelled good, warm and musky. He started pulling away, but not completely. He stopped when they were face-to-face, his hands still at the bottom of her back, holding her. He swallowed hard, looking right into her eyes.

  Hazel remembered how he’d looked in the moonlight on the beach earlier, and suddenly she had the strangest urge to lean forward, to close the space between them and put her lips on his. Just quickly. Just to know what it would feel like. But then the moment passed, and she had stood for too long just looking at him and not saying anything. She dropped her arms and took a definite step backward, putting distance between them.

  He rubbed his neck. “I should probably go.”

  “You probably should.”

  She met his eyes, and he looked away first. Did he know what she’d been thinking?

  “See you,” he said then, and before she could answer, he ducked his head and walked down the path without looking back.

  part three

  31

  The beginning of December brought a shift in the heat. The weather in Port Sheridan had gotten steadily warmer as Australia headed toward its summer, but now that it was here, it had changed from a dry heat to a more humid one, which everyone kept telling Hazel was because of the “wet season.”

  When Hazel had arrived in the country back in August, she’d hoped that she would be home by Christmas, but with each day that passed that was seeming less and less likely. She still hadn’t heard anything from England, but instead of letting herself dwell on it the way she would have a few months ago, she focused on other things instead—like the fact that there were three weeks left in the school year and everyone at Finchwood was gearing up for the final push before the six-week-long summer vacation.

  * * *

  Hunter was taking Coach up on his offer to join a fencing practice at lunchtime today—something that Maddie was apprehensive about.

  “Are you sure about this?” she asked him. “You do realize that fencing is just a bunch of people sticking each other with swords, right? It’s dangerous.”

  Hunter waved a hand dismissively. “I’ll be fine. I’m a natural-born warrior.”

  Maddie patted his arm. “If you hurt yourself, don’t come to me expecting Band-Aids and sympathy.”

  “You know you won’t be able to resist kissing me better, Mads.” He grinned back at her.

  She rolled her eyes. “You are delusional.”

  * * *

  When Hazel, Luca, and Maddie caught sight of Hunter emerging from the gym as they were on their way to class at the end of lunch, he just shook his head.

  “Fencing,” he said as he approached them. “Is definitely—”

  “Not your thing!” Maddie and Hazel chorused back at him, and fell into a fit of laughter.

  Hunter sighed, nursing his elbow. “You know, this isn’t even funny anymore. I’m a failure.”

  “Hey.” Luca put an arm around his shoulder. “Sports aren’t for everyone. It just means you have another calling.”

  “You think?”

  “Oh, definitely. Knitting, maybe?”

  “Oh, screw you,” he said. “I sincerely hope you burn in hell. All of you.”

  “Love you too,” Luca said with a smirk.

  “You know, I liked you more when you didn’t talk.”

  “He’s joking,” Maddie said quickly. “Hey, Hunter, does this mean you don’t want kisses and Band-Aids and sympathy ice cream after school?”

  Hunter beamed at her. “You know I love you, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said, smile slipping slightly. “I know.”

  * * *

  In the end, they all wound up going around to Maddie’s house to comfort Hunter—not that he needed it, since he was over the whole fencing debacle before the end of the school day. Instead, he was focused on the fact that he hadn’t yet tried any track-based sports.

  “There’s loads of them!” he said excitedly. “Sprints, relays, hurdles, and that’s just the ones that involve running. There’s gotta be something there that I’m not terrible at, right?”

  “Not trying to be a killjoy,” Maddie said carefully, digging her spoon into a tub of Ben & Jerry’s. “But when was the last time you ran more than ten meters without getting a stitch or cramp?”

  “Irrelevant.”

  “Relevant,” she argued. “You’re the slowest runner I know.”

  “Then I’ll do long-distance!” he countered. “That’s all about stamina, not speed.”

  “Do you realize how many laps of the running track that is?”

  “I don’t know … like, five?”

  “Ten,” Luca corrected him automatically, and they all turned to look at him. “Well, that’s a 4K race, anyway. Some are longer.”

  “Dude,” Hunter said, horrified. “Ten? I’d die.”

  “Long-distance is anything over 3K, but you could try mid-distance. That’d only be seven and a half laps, or fewer, which would still require some anaerobic training, but considerably less than long-distance.”

  “Interesting.” Hunter helped himself to some more ice cream, sucking on his spoon thoughtfully. “Didn’t know you knew anything about sports.”

  “I don’t, really. About most sports, anyway.” Luca paused. “But I do know a thing or two about running.”

  “Great! So you can take me through some of the basics before I go to a track practice?”

  The expression that crossed Luca’s face was so fleeting Hazel couldn’t quite put a finger on it. Was it pain? Hope? Nerves?

  “Well…,” he started, sounding uncertain.

  “Please? Pretty please? I’ll love you eternally.”

  At this, Luca caved. “Fine,” he mumbled. “I’ll—I’ll try and help you. I’m not promising you anything, but I can try.”

  Hunter let out a huge sigh of relief. “You won’t regret it.”

  Luca smiled at him and went back to eating his ice cream as if nothing had happened, but Hazel was amazed that he was willing to take his running out of the safe, secret bubble they’d created for themselves at the stadium.

  * * *

  Luca was in his room that night finishing up an English assignment on his computer when a loud knock came at his door.

  “Come in,” he called absently. “Hey, Red, what do you think about us all—”

  He broke off. His father was standing in the doorway. In the weeks since he’d moved back, things between Luca and Marc had been civil. Luca knew that his dad was making a concerted effort, always taking the time to ask about school and friends.

  “Luc,” his dad said. “Are you busy?”

  Luca shook his head. “What’s up?”

  Marc stepped inside and took a careful seat at the end of Luca’s bed. He cleared his throat. “So.”

  “So,” Luca said.

  “How are things at school?”

  “They’re okay, thanks. I have an exam this week, but I think I’ll do fine.”

  “Good, good.”

  They fell into silence. Luca wondered how long it would take for conversation between them to feel less forced. Even though they were both trying, it still didn’t feel the same as it used to. He missed that so much. After a minute, his father stood from the bed and brushed down his trousers, heading for the door like that was all he’d come up to say.

  “Well,” he said. “Your mum’s left me in charge of dinner, so…”

  “Sure.”

  Marc was almost out the doorway when Luca said, “Dad?”

  “Yes? What is it?”

  “It’s just … I’ve actually been doing some training.”

  “You have?”

  “Yeah. With Hazel. Not competitively, obviously, but…”

  “But you’re running?”

  “I am,” he said. I’m running, without Ryan, and it’s not the end of the world.

  His dad studied him across the room for a moment and then nodded once. “Well, I’m glad,” he said. “But you know the running isn’t important to me, right?
It’s not what I care about. You’re what I care about.”

  Luca smiled. “I know. But I’m enjoying it.”

  “You are?”

  “I am,” Luca assured him. “Did you … want any help making dinner?”

  Marc’s face lit up. “I’d love some.”

  32

  Hazel had no plans for the weekend—except sleeping and catching up on her homework—so when a buzzing sound from her bedside table woke her from a dreamless sleep far too early on Saturday morning, she groaned loudly before answering it. It was a text, from Luca.

  Get ready, it read. I’ll be outside in half an hour. Bring swimming things. X

  She glanced at the alarm clock: half past nine. What could he have planned that she’d need swimming things for? Surely it was too early to go to the beach? She read the text again. She and Luca never hung out on the weekends unless everyone else was there too, so this was a new development.

  She typed out a reply—See you then x—and pressed Send, smiling up at the ceiling for a moment before climbing out of bed and heading for the bathroom to shower.

  * * *

  Hazel was standing out in the front garden enjoying the morning sun when she caught sight of Luca riding his bike toward her. It took a moment for her to realize he wasn’t on his own—Hunter was riding behind him.

  “Hey,” she said as the two of them approached. “Morning, Hunter. Didn’t expect to see you today!”

  “It’s my fault.” Luca came to a stop at the gate with a grim expression. “He heard what I had planned and decided he was coming too. Phoned in sick to work and everything. Red wanted to come as well, but he said he had to work on some project for school.”

  “Oh,” Hazel said, laughing. “Okay. I feel privileged.”

  She mounted the bike she’d borrowed from Graham and followed the boys down the road. Fifteen minutes of leisurely cycling later, the three of them rode into the parking lot at a small marina. They chained their bikes to the rack, and Luca rearranged his huge rucksack on his shoulder.