I want to tell you about the art teacher, Em.

Her name is Peggy Donaghue. She's tall and skinny and has the biggest nose I've ever seen on a person. Her eyes are like small oceans, all blue and green and stormy. She didn't know about you. She asked me why I wasn't doing the assignment and everybody turned to look at me. Someone even started to say something but she stopped them. She walked up to me and leaned down, looking into my face with this pinched, focused expression.

"Something's wrong with you, what is it?"

Again, someone tried to pipe up with something. She shook her head and leaned closer.

"You look sick. And you're not sleeping. You've got circles the size of melons beneath your eyes. What is it?"

I don't know what I said. I don't know what happened next really, except when she pulled back, her eyes had turned to liquid, and she no longer looked so pinched. Everybody was quiet and if a pin had dropped, I think you would've heard it. She pushed a piece of paper into my hand and gave me a charcoal pencil.

"Draw it," she told me. "Draw all of it."

So I drew you lying on the street, all torn up and twisted, the way they told me you'd looked. I drew the bike, that stupid, damned bike, mangled and broken and in pieces at your side. And your useless helmet, the one you were always so careful to wear. I drew the sky above you, black and stormy and full of clouds, and the truck that hit you with its stupid, untouched bumper and the man sitting inside with his cloudy eyes and the cigarette dangling from his lips. I drew it all. And when I was done, I put my pencil down, got my bag, stood up and walked out.

Nobody stopped me.

When I got outside the sun was shining. I stood there a minute and I didn't know where to go or what to do. The bus was pulling up so I started to walk towards it. And as I did, I started thinking about that thing you said, about the sky. And I thought about your gnome and that Walter kid (he really isn't that much of a clown, after all) and that thing I wrote down earlier, about how we're always looking. Looking for the people we lost and the pieces they leave behind. I don't know what I'd thought I'd find today, but Em, in a way, I think I did find a piece of you.

You were in the sky and in the clouds. 

You were in that gnome in Walter's locker and in the way he said your name. 

You were the look in that Peggy Donahue's eyes, when they turned to liquid and you were in that picture I drew when it all bled out.

Maybe you really were on to something, Em, about the sky mirroring the color of our souls... maybe you really were.

The End