Walking with ghosts

"Here's my hand."
"And mine, with my heart in't."
*****
There's nothing more beautiful or more deadly than lovesick teens.  Before the first heartbreak, with all the longing in the world-love has the possibility to be everything and there is no reason to hold back, remain circumspect.  Meredith remembered that feeling as her heels clicked off the empty walls of her old school.  Ten years, had it really been ten years?  The ghosts of her youth were walking beside her down the tiled hallway.  The lockers were new, but that's not surprising.  They had just changed them when she arrived in this school, and by her senior year they were already well used.  Pausing by the library she looked through the window and remembered scenes of terror, crawling into the ceiling with her best friends and waiting for hours for help to come.  It was all still here-Ken, Ash, Erik.  Belle and all the others, still living their lives in the most dramatic way possible. 
Upstairs, a she could hear a light rain beginning to fall on the roof.  Deliberately starting near the math classrooms she wandered from one to another, remembering hours of tortuously struggling with numbers that would never make sense to her, hearing the echos of "you won't have a calculator in your pocket for the rest of your life."  She smiled and touched her cellphone, wondering at how far we've come from playing snake and paying 25 cents a text. 
She had saved the science wing for last, wondering if she would feel anything- remember any more when standing there.  The theater had always been her home, her safe space, but somehow so many of her memories began here.  A refrain of an old song came drifting back to her, she wondered if students still went caroling around school twice a year celebrating an obscure holiday based around a really really big number.  She couldn't remember what her chem teacher looked like, or his name even.  It was all lost in the fog of time.  She could remember the notebook though, an old fivestar one with pockets.  They had passed it up and down the row whenever the ghost teacher wasn't looking.  In it were her dreams of romance, the names of boys that she was too afraid to actually talk to but could giggle about with her closest friends.  Back when her biggest dreams had been about her first kiss.  Back when she still thought that Grey's Anatomy and Gone With the Wind were proper guides to relationships.  She had always imagined being swept off her feet by the first man she ever fell for and then living happily ever after-if not that a bittersweet ending with a man staring wistfully after her plane as it departed; "here's looking at you kid."  Her world was Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Here, in this room it was almost like being back there again. 
And it all started with the notebook. Her life in the book was so dramatic, shared with her closest friends.  Teenage pregnancies, car crashes, boyfriends cruelly murdered.  Back when real life needed spicing up. 
Would she change any of it?  If she had known what was to come?  If she knew she would cease to be the perfect student, would fall into the darkest moments of her life when no one was around to turn on the light.  That she would find herself in a place where the people who claimed love were grinding her beneath their shoes and laughing at her screams.  Would she go back and tell herself to live in the moment, to be happily tortured by the fact that she was too shy to tell a boy that she liked him? That getting cast in the chorus again wasn't the end of the world.
No.  If she could, she would keep quiet.  She would let the notebook lie, full of adventures that the authors dreamt up out of a need for adrenaline in this sleepy island community.  The song faded and with it so did Meredith.  Confined now to the few pages in a notebook that is probably lost to time.  Clicking out of the classroom, I hurry downstairs and down the corridor to reality. 
I love this world that I live in, but some days I miss her- and the moments when I didn't know anything beyond pinning for a kind of romance that I did not understand.