**

The Sun tells a tale

The Moon harkens in the dark

An eclipse of hearts 

**

By the time Seth had finished, I was doing my damnedest to hold back tears. He had a haunted look in his eyes, as if he was watching the tragedy unfold in front of him as he talked about it. He finally looked up, dragging his eyes out of the past. 

“Well, come on. I told you about my shit, now you have to tell me about yours.” 

“I already told you about my dad.” I stalled, knowing exactly what he was really asking about. 

“Not him, there’s something else. Those.” Seth gestured toward my legs. I looked down to find blood tracing a path down my calf. Fuck, I’d torn them open when I grabbed the bracelet from the pool.

“I don’t claim to be a mind reader or something, but I think that is a pretty good indication of something bothering you.” Seth twisted the bracelet against his wrist as he spoke. I sighed. Better now than never.   

“My ex-girlfriend, Zoey, she leaked my nudes a while back.” I watched to see Seth’s expression, but it didn’t change. Just stony indifference. 

“I was too wasted to really stop them and they, they um...”

“They raped you.” I’d never heard it put that way, that bluntly. My chest tightened, like someone had grabbed my trachea. 

“Yeah, I guess.” I felt my breath hitch in my throat. Seth said nothing. For a split second, I don’t know why, but I thought he was going to laugh.  Please, you got raped? You’re a grown ass man. You could’ve stopped it if you wanted to. This is your fault. I felt my pulse quicken, growing louder in my ears. The threat of panic pooled in my throat. But before it had the chance to spill over, Seth grabbed the front of my shirt. 

He’s crying. The idea was foreign to me. Seth Radley, someone I’d met only days ago, was standing there crying for me. Why?

“It’s not your fault.” 

“What?”

“It was never your fault. You’re a kid, you deserve to go to a party without your world falling apart. Without walking away feeling like shit, and like it will never get better. Like the galaxy is on your shoulders and YOU fucked it up, and now you get to live with the consequences. You’re a damn kid, and the universe decided to fuck you over. It’s not fucking fair. None of it is, none of it.” 

I pulled him against my chest, my arms locking him in place. I wasn’t sure which one of us he was talking about, but it didn’t matter. The story was the same. We were kids, and we deserved better. But what happened happened, and here we were. The two of us standing in the hallway of the high school we’d broken into. Crying in the way we should have lifetimes ago. Crying in the way we deserved. 

It took us way too long to pull ourselves together, but god dammit if I didn’t feel better than I had in years after. It felt like I’d been going through life with a thousand-pound weight on each ankle, and now I felt so light I could reach up and grab a star.

“Come on,” Seth said, smiling even though his eyes were still tinted red. “The library should be open. The janitor is too lazy to lock any of the doors inside the building.”

“Concerning,” I admitted, thinking about all of the apparently up-for-grabs chemistry equipment. Seth was right though, the library door wasn’t just unlocked, but slightly ajar, as if someone had left it open. 

“Alright, what year did he say? 1999?” I asked, scanning the shelves of yearbooks.

“1998 I think,” Seth reminded, scanning a book on emperor penguins he’d picked up on the way in. 

“Alright, ‘93, ‘95, ok here it is.” I pulled it from the shelf and leafed through the pages to find the freshman class. 

“Hey look,” I called Seth over. “Here he is.” 

Shane had glasses reminiscent of Harry Potter and a near afro of auburn curls. Oddly enough, even then he looked exhausted. 

“And there she is,” Seth whispered, pointing towards a picture on the other side of the page. “Daphne Halloway.” 

I knew it was her. I knew it. But I still ran over to the nearest table and turned on the lamp to get a better look. Her hair was shorter and laced with streaks of color, but she was without a doubt, our Daphne. 

“What?” I whispered. “She’d be almost forty by now. How does she look almost exactly the same? Some sort of miracle moisturizer?” 

Seth had run back over to the shelves of yearbooks and returned to the table holding three more. 1999. There she was, her sophomore year, her eyes slathered in dark eyeliner. 2000. She was smiling in that one, far more so than in the other two. 2001.

“What the hell…” we whispered in unison as we turned to the pictures of the class of 2001. There, awkwardly bisecting the other portraits, was an entire page dedicated to Daphne and some guy named Jackson. The Daphne we knew, messy bun and paint-stained blouse. 

“In loving memory of Daphne Halloway and Jackson Davis. May they fly high together.” 

**

The Moon and the Sun

Together form the cycle

 Earth’s beginning and end 

 **

I grabbed the four yearbooks and stood. Emil’s expression was a battleground of shock and confusion. 

“Come on,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. “We’re gonna go figure this out. Right now.” 

As soon as I was sure he was following, I ran as fast as I could, carrying the four yearbooks to the stairwell. 

“Daphne!” I shouted, knowing I sounded like a lunatic. I got no reply. I ran faster. By the time I got to the top of the staircase I was panting like a dog, my heart pounding in my chest like it wanted out. The door was open, just a crack. The door was never open, I always had to jimmy the lock to get up there. I wonder why they always lock this door?

And there she was, her back to us, leaning with her arms crossed over the railing. The moonlight drained the color from the world around her, turning her blonde hair into mercury, her paint-splattered clothes into ink on paper. The wind blew by across the roof, causing the trees around the school to shudder. Her hair didn’t move, her clothing didn’t ripple. 

“Daphne? What the hell is going on?” My voice shook. 

“Who, no, what the hell are you?” Emil asked, his tone far stronger than mine, almost threatening. 

She turned around slowly to face us. For a moment, I expected to see some sort of Lovecraftian monster, with fangs and tentacles and countless eyes. But it was just her, Daphne Halloway. Her two iridescent eyes rich with emotion. 

“Isn’t that obvious?” she whispered, a forlorn smile on her lips. “I’m dead.”

“That’s not possible,” Emil stated, taking a step forward. “Daphne, you’re right in front of us.” 

“You want me to prove it?” Her voice grew unsteady as she held out her arm to us. Emil hesitated, I crept forwards, reaching out my hand. It fell right through hers as I tried to grab it. 

“See?” she asked, sounding exhausted. “Neither of you ever noticed. I didn’t want you to find out. Not yet.” 

“What are you then?” Emil interjected. “Some kind of ghost?”

“An angel?” I added.

“I think Emil is closer, but your guess is as good as mine.” 

“Then, Daphne, what happened to you?” I asked, though deep down I already knew the answer. 

“I jumped.” Her statement made me shiver. Emil looked as if he’d been hit. 

“But why?” he asked, betrayal replaced by genuine sympathy. 

“That, well, that’s a long story.”

“Daphne, we’ve got all night.” 

“Alright,” she said, her knees buckling as she bent to sit down. We sat too, our eyes locked with hers, twin gazes of confusion and morbid curiosity.

“Well, let's start with freshman year,” she began, gesturing for me to put the 1998 yearbook on the roof between us. I flipped through to the pictures of the freshman class. 

“My dad left before I was born, but my mom hated being alone so she always had one guy or another at the house. Occasionally, she’d say stuff like, ‘this is your new stepdad, Daph. He’s gonna help me take care of you,’ and admittedly, half the time that was true. But the nice ones never stuck around. They always moved on to better things. The dicks stayed though, because my mom never had the strength to tell them to go.

 She married the worst of them my freshman year. A guy named Michael, but he made me call him Mike. He was nice at first, but after they got married he turned off the charm and became this alcoholic asshole. He’d even hit her, every now and then. I hated him. Then came sophomore year.” 

I opened the 1999 yearbook. 

“Michael just kept getting worse. I did everything I could to stay out of the house, hung out with a bad crowd because I thought we were the same. We all hated the world. It had hurt us, we wanted to hurt it back. But eventually I realized all that meant was hurting ourselves.” 

She rolled up her sleeves to reveal pale, white scars lining her biceps.

 “Whenever I came home after curfew he’d hit me, call me a criminal. He’d threaten to call the cops, even if he didn’t know what for. He just knew I smelled like pot and that was enough for him. But then, when it was worse than ever, something amazing happened. I met someone who pulled me out.” 

She pointed to someone's picture in the yearbook. A boy with rich, dark skin, bountiful dreadlocks, and one of the most infectious smiles I’d ever seen. The same one Daphne usually wore. 

“His name was Jackson, but everyone called him Jack. He was popular, but not in the douchey way. He broke up fights, never started them. We were in art class together. He’d always compliment my work, even if it was dark and mopey and full of hate. He didn’t care. He thought it was cool. 

We started hanging out after school, and then on weekends, until eventually I didn’t hang out with my old group anymore. He’d helped me to find new friends, real ones, that wanted to see me get better, not worse. He saved me. By junior year we’d bought an apartment together with some of our friends.” 

I opened the 2000 yearbook, the one she was smiling in.  

“It was awesome. I never went home, and since I was nearly eighteen, no one made me. I think Mike just didn’t want to spend the money to take me to court. I felt bad about leaving my mom behind, I still do, but she brought him into our lives and I refused to be hurt anymore because of her mistake. Anyway, Jack and I, we eventually realized we were in love. Soulmates. I didn’t even believe in that concept until I met him. It was paradise, but it didn’t last.

He got sick, cancer. It was in his blood, he said. By the start of senior year, we thought he could beat it. He even promised me we’d graduate together, start our lives together.” 

I didn’t want to open that yearbook, but I had to, for her sake. 

“But you guys know how this story goes. He didn’t make it. He fought hard, real hard, but he lost. The first and last time he’d ever broken a promise. I tried to stick it out for him, to live my life without him. But without him, I was only half a person. Half a heart, one lung, bisected. It sucked.

As graduation grew closer, I knew I just, I couldn’t. Not without him. If he wasn’t going to make it to graduation, neither was I.”

“Oh, Daphne,” Emil breathed, utterly crushed. I stared at the ledge, the ledge I’d stood at only a few days before. I looked over at him, his terrified expression. I placed my hand on his arm, the other tugged at Rachel’s bracelet. Daphne smiled. 

“I died, but I was happy. I got to see him, for a moment. Jackson, his stupid smile, but then, I was here. He told me, he told me he missed me, but that I couldn’t stay, not yet. He said what I’d done to myself, it hurt a lot of people, people who didn’t deserve it. He said I had to make it up to them. He said I had to save someone, the way I’d been saved. So, I stayed, and I waited, until someone needed me. Then I saw you two, and I just knew.”

I tried to process what she was saying, but something inside me already knew she was telling the truth. If I hadn’t met her that day, if she hadn’t caused Emil to apologize, if she hadn’t started this whole domino effect that led to us meeting, talking, I honestly think I would’ve done something I couldn’t take back. Emil, well I couldn’t speak for him, but his expression told me he felt the same. Without her, we never would’ve met each other. She helped us remember we weren’t alone.

“Daphne, I don’t know what to say.”

“Thank you. Daph, really. Thank you.” Emil spoke for us both, his voice gentle and calm, but still sticky with emotion. “Does that mean you get to, like move on or whatever? That you get to see him again?” 

“I don’t know,” Daphne admitted. “I guess we’ll find out when the sun rises.” 

She smiled, her expression mirroring the one in the photograph with Jackson. 

“Hey, will you guys stay with me until then?” she asked, though she really didn’t have to. 

“Of course, Daph,” Emil answered. “It’s like, impromptu camping. It’ll be fun. Anyone got any marshmallows?” 

Daphne laughed her weird, snorting laugh. 

We stayed there with her, talking about the lives we’d lived, and the futures we’d have, some parts more certain than others. The sky turned purple, then red, then orange, all the colors reflected in Daphne’s kaleidoscope eyes.

The sun's rays finally flickered over the mountains. The whole world inhaled with the first breath of a new day. And Daphne Halloway was gone.