It was a normal day. About as normal and average as you can get, really. I walked to school. I flunked a chem test. I ate popcorn chicken in the school cafeteria while I worked on my research paper for English. I even scored a touchdown in flag football, despite having little interest in sports. Sure, it looked kind of grey and the slightest bit ominous outside, but it didn't rain, and the distant rumble of thunder was so faint it was like an afterthought, or a glimpse of what was to come.

It was a normal day until one Jacob Havisham showed up at my door at approximately 3:36 P.M.

          It wouldn't usually be that weird. We used to do this all the time. We were best friends. We practically lived at one another's houses. So no, normally, it wouldn't be weird. Except that Jake was drenched from head to toe and it still hadn't rained. Except his shoes were covered in mud and he wore his winter jacket even though it was April. Except he wasn't holding anything but his empty schoolbag and a battered, barely-recognizable copy of To Kill A Mockingbird.

          Except that three months ago, in the comfort of his own home, fifteen yards away from mine, Jacob Havisham shot himself in the head.

I didn't know what to do. So I did what any not-entirely-sane person would do: I shut the door and asked myself, did I take one pill or two this morning?

          I thought it was two. I hadn't heard or seen anything other than the boy at the other side of the door. But then again, maybe I had. Sometimes I didn't know.

          My knees buckled suddenly, and I pressed my back against the door. When had I started breathing this hard? I ran my hands through my hair and tried not to think about the dead boy on my doorstep.

          A dull boom boom boom reverberated through my spine. Someone was knocking.

          I got to my feet, steadying myself with a hand on the wall. I sucked in air, but it seemed to be going right through me. And when I swung open the door again, Jacob Havisham was still there.

          He wasn't wet or muddy anymore, and he'd ditched To Kill A Mockingbird, but other than that, he was exactly as I'd left him. He looked at me with intensity, his dark eyes lacking the softness they usually—used to—have. My breath caught in my throat.

          "Hi, Akirah."

          I tried to ignore the knot in my chest. "You're not real, Jake. Go away." I went to shut the door again, but it wouldn't close—he was holding it open, his hand pressing against the wood with a strength and urgency that I couldn't associate with who he'd been before. I blinked. I couldn't remember him moving towards me, but he had.

          "I need to come in," he said, forcing it open. "Please, Akirah."

          Please, Akirah. I scowled, but I stepped aside. He pushed past me silently, leaving me to lock the door behind him. Whatever the reason, he was on a mission. He was definitely ready to leave me in the dust, in my very own house. "Jake," I called after him, feeling like I was sleepwalking. He turned around, his eyebrow raised, the silent "yes?" that he always used. My chest ached. "How long are you staying?"

          He shrugged. "Forever? Until I need to go?"

          What a dumbass. I rubbed my temples, trying to unscrew the vise that I could swear was squeezing my hippocampus to death. "Right. Well, remind me to get my antipsychotics adjusted. I don't really want you to be around forever."

          He didn't seem to hear me. Instead, he turned around and headed up the carpeted stairs, whispering to himself.

          I rolled my eyes. He always listened to me. At least, he did. "Wait, Jake! Where are you going?"

          Again, he didn't answer me. He'd disappeared. He hadn't even made it to the top, but I kept going. I had a sneaking suspicion of where he went. I rounded the corner and came face-to-face with my bedroom door. Closed. I let myself in, and sure enough, there he was, sitting on my bed.

"My room's a mess," I said out of habit. I blinked, realizing my mistake. As a product of my imagination, he didn't care one bit. I shook my head, trying not to think too much about it. "Jake. . .what's this about?" I found a path to my bed, stepping over discarded clothing and school supplies, and sat down next to him.

          He—or rather, his image—flickered, and for a second I could've sword I was looking at the Jacob I met in second grade, his brown eyes boring into me like I was his only friend in the world. He'd been so nice to me. Neither of us knew anyone on the first day of school, and he'd come up to me, introduced himself, and stuck out his hand. "Hi, I'm Jacob Trevor Havisham, want to be friends?"

          Maybe it was the friendliness that drew me to him, or the fact that he was wearing an Iron Man T-shirt, I don't really remember. But what I do know is that I looked into his eyes, specifically the left one, unique in its own right, housing a single, large freckle of green that took up a quarter of the pupil. I looked into his eyes and I knew that whether I said yes or no, we'd end up being friends anyways. Of course, I didn't know that our time together was limited to nine years, six months, and fifteen days.

          I blinked, and seventeen-year-old Jake was back, as though he'd never left in the first place. He'd always been full of positivity, love. But I looked at him now and I couldn't say what he was feeling. Every muscle in his face was slack, like a person who'd suffered a stroke. Devoid of emotion. It was like my mind was trying to compensate for the fact that Jake was dead, and dead people didn't have feelings.

          He didn't answer me. Of course not. I didn't know the answer, so why would he? Instead, he got up and threw my book bag across the room.

I opened my mouth in surprise, the beginnings of a sentence at the tip of my tongue, but before I could say a word, he kicked over my hamper.

I ducked as he threw part of my work uniform in my general direction. "Jay, what the hell?" He pulled open the drawers of my dresser, rummaging through the insides, and one of them actually fell out. "Jake, stop!" I didn't know what to do. It wasn't like I could go over and grab him, but I was starting to doubt if this was fake at all. His eyes were alight with a kind of crazy I'd never seen in him—maybe in me, but not him. He grew more fervent and frantic, maybe because he couldn't find whatever it was he was looking for. I stood without knowing what I planned on doing afterwards, but as soon as I did, Jake flung open the bottom left drawer of my desk and vanished. And suddenly, everything was back just the way I'd left it that morning.

I drew in a breath and let it out slowly, trying to calm myself down. I knew what was in that drawer. I'd been avoiding it for months. I opened it slowly, and its contents stared back at me.

Jake's journal.

I'd snuck it out of his bedroom, after. His parents hadn't known about it, but I did. I hadn't opened it yet. Even though he was gone, I couldn't bring myself to invade his privacy like that.

It was brown, bound in some sort of faux leather, and relatively new. He'd only had it for a few weeks, and the spine was barely broken. But he'd filled the first twenty-five pages, and judging by pages of other journals he'd shown me when he was alive, they were probably filled with doodles, reminders, short poems, pictures (I'd given him a polaroid camera for Christmas last year), and journal entries. He'd called them diaries for the first few months when he started, but soon decided the term didn't really fit for what he was doing. It felt light, maybe because it wasn't full of ink, or the occasional four-leaf-clover. Or maybe it surprised me because I felt the musings of a dead boy should carry a certain weight.

Opening the notebook felt so intrusive. I knew he would've wanted me to have it, but still, he'd only ever shown me a few pages. The cover page was full of little scribbles of various colors. Testing pens. Jake hated pencils—hated how the graphite inside broke if you dropped them, how the tiny erasers were in no way enough to last you through a whole pencil, how his hand would be covered in shiny gray dust and his papers smeared with it when he wrote anything. Pens were a lefty's best friend. In the top corner, he'd written J.T. Havisham with small, messy letters. He'd gotten the nickname when he was nine, and kids at school adopted it. I was the only one who really called him Jacob.

I turned the page. The first real page in the journal was dated 1/08/18, and its contents were simple. It was a picture of us, bundled up against the cold in a little café near our neighborhood. We weren't going to walk, but we ended up walking anyways. Jake fell on his butt on the way there, and I laughed for, like, five minutes. We were sipping on small peppermint lattes. Jake's ears were still red. A caption was scrawled in red ink near the bottom.

peppermint makes me
think about her and the way
she can make me laugh

A haiku. He'd always liked how they sounded rhythmic without rhyming. A lump formed in my throat, and I tried to swallow it, but it stayed there, waiting. I felt the tears prick my eyes, but I blinked them away. Hand trembling, I turned the page again. It was full of little doodles—a stack of textbooks, a flower, a pair of bicycles, a cloud. The page was covered in them. Small, delicate. My name appeared, written in careful calligraphy. His own was everywhere, in all sorts of different fonts and styles. Mostly black ink, but there was some blue, a little red, even purple.

I kept flipping through, studying each page like it would give me a clue as to what brainchild-Jacob was trying to tell me. So far, it wasn't much. 1/10/18 meeting with Mr. Keiper 1:25 don't be late or else. It seemed like hours of me just sitting there, reading. 1/12/18 Friday, Ms. Conway called Danielle Krupski stupid because she said "meme" wrong. Very funny. Don't forget. I couldn't help but smile at that. I was in his math class, and I'd forgotten about that. Ms. Conway joked with us like that all the time, but we'd been particularly goofy that day. Doodles filled the margins, and there were more cute, meaningless poems scattered in the extra spaces.

1/16/18 sometimes the voices are so loud i can't hear myself think slit your wrists hang yourself dad's gun is in the safe behind his desk 34-22-16 barrel in the mouth google how many painkillers do i swallow to take everything away

I'd known Jacob was depressed. But reading this. . .it hurt. It hurt to breathe. For a moment, I thought Fake Jake was back, and he was tightening a noose around my neck. But he wasn't. My eyes burned. I squeezed my eyes shut. I owed it to him to keep reading this. He was trying to tell me something. I was sure of it. So I wiped my cheeks and turned more pages, a ball of fire nestled in my ribcage. I landed on another picture—the two of us, again. It was from the past summer. He must have lost it, or it would've been in an earlier journal. It was the day we hiked Mount Mansfield. It was cloudy, and there was thunder, and our hair stood on end, and we probably should've headed down sooner than we did, but you can't hike a mountain without getting to the peak. We only took one picture. We both looked sweaty and gross, and my hair, already frizzy and curly as it is, was ginormous, but we were smiling. Laughing. Under the picture he'd written:

1/17/18 found this picture from July
sometimes I want to take a pen and connect all her freckles to see if there's a picture like the constellations or something but it'll probably look like a bunch of scribbles because she has a lot of freckles

I snorted a little. Leave it to him to think of something so random. I didn't realize he noticed my freckles. I could hardly make them out myself—they were barely darker than my skin.

1/21/18 skipped church to stay in bed, read Before I Fall. Think that's how I'll end up?

1/24/18 didn't sleep last night, saw a spider on the ceiling and then it was gone and I felt something tickle my leg but it might have been leg hair. I hate spiders because I'm going to flunk my chem quiz

1/26/18 theme for prom this year is "rooftop". that's what everyone voted on. they do realize it's still going to be held in the gym, right? not like they'll be able to Reichenbach off the paper skyscraper decorations, hahaha

1/29/18 suspended for a week. that skinhead Nate Grimke called Akirah a n****r so I socked him in the nose. he bled everywhere, 10/10 would do it again

I didn't know about that. Jake just told me that he was being a dick—which was believable. It was pretty much Nate's whole personality. Still, I found myself wishing he told me the whole story.

2/02/18 still suspended. picked Akirah up from school and we studied for the algebra test at that café. they're not serving peppermint stuff anymore because it's "off season" which is garbage, I'm starting a riot

2/05/18 I don't think I'm going to make it to the end of the school year.

2/10/18 I think I accidentally walked through a drug deal or something? I took a shortcut home and?? It was very sketchy. I don't know what they were talking about but it was freaky man

2/12/18 favorite quote: "In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move." - Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

2/14/18 I ran into one of those guys again? He was wearing the same hat I think. I hate hats I'd literally rather die than wear one but whatever you do you man I hope you didn't smoke all that already that's probably dangerous

2/15/18 I think I want to be alive. I think I want to see the sunset tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the day after that. I love sunsets

He'd doodled suns and clouds and scribbled with multicolored highlighters on the rest of that page. Sunsets made him happy. And he'd never gotten to see the sun set on the sixteenth.

I'd expected his entries to get darker and more desperate the closer they got to his death. I expected a suicide note, even. But when I turned the page, there were no drawings. No doodles or reminders or extra colors. Just one sentence that chilled me to my core.

2/16/18 Someone's following me.

          I remembered walking home from school with him that Friday. How could I not? It was the last time I saw him alive. He'd kept looking over his shoulders. I thought it was his anxiety. It could have been, but would he really have written this if he wasn't certain?

          I looked up from the notebook to find myself looking into a familiar pair of brown-and-green eyes.

          I jumped, giving an embarrassing little squeak that the real Jake would have made fun of me for. "Jesus!" I buried my face in my hands, the journal having fallen, and counted to five. Inhale. Don't freak out. It's not him. "Don't do that," I scolded him anyways. I brushed a curl out of my face and picked the journal up off the floor.

          He didn't apologize or anything. I wasn't expecting him to, but still. It would've been nice of him.

"I read it," I told him. "Is that what you wanted?"

He stared at me.

"Great, thanks. Now I can cross that off my bucket list." I tossed the journal onto my bed. "Why were you—"

"What did I look like?"

          I'm not gonna lie, the question completely caught me off guard. "What?"

          Jacob squinted, and I could've sworn he went in and out of focus, the way cameras always seem to do at the most inopportune moments. "When you found me."

          I let out a breath. Was he really asking me this? Wasn't he. . .me?  "Um. . .I don't know, I kinda. . .you were wearing the blue hoodie you got in—"

          Suddenly he lunged at me, and I thought for a second he was going to smash my head into the wall, but he grabbed my face and held it inches from his own. His eyes bore into me with an ice cold fury that reminded me of my ninth grade girlfriend. I was scared—my heart was definitely having a little bit of a freak-out. He felt so real. "What did I look like?" he shouted, his fingers digging into my cheeks.

          "What the hell do you want me to say, Jay?" I shouted back. "That you were lying facedown on your carpet? That. . .that there was blood everywhere?" I swallowed hard. I couldn't keep my voice from breaking. Not real not real not real not real. "That I found you with a bullet in your temple and a gun in your hand and you didn't even freaking say goodbye to me?"  I was sobbing now. I couldn't help it. I couldn't help how angry I was at him for leaving me the way he did.

          Jacob shook my head in his hands as if he were trying to knock loose an afterthought. There were tears on his cheeks, too. His fingers didn't feel so cruel anymore. "Which one?" he asked, his voice hard with desperation.

          My waterlogged brain had trouble deciphering what he meant by that simple, simple question. "What?"

          He'd taken a step backwards. He didn't look angry anymore. He looked afraid. He looked like a little kid. "Which one?" he asked again, begging at a whisper. And it was only when he reached his ink-stained hand out for me to hold like he'd done countless other times that it finally, finally clicked.

          What had my subconscious been trying to tell me?

          Jacob faded away into dust, and my hand dropped, but I couldn't move.

          Right temple, left hand.

          It was a murder.