I have never felt so much pain in my life.

The blade wrenched from my gut barely scraps the surface of the broken heart tearing its way from my chest.

"Maria. . ." Magnolia stares at me. Her face is smeared with bright red blood, and her eyes hold no light. The thing that scares me most is the lack of regret, the lack of guilt. Her spear drips my blood from the tip of the silver blade.

"Magnolia." My voice is raspy and wet, like someone poured wet gravel in my throat. "Why. . ?"

\Two years prior/

"We'll get out of here," I say, staring into the sky. "I'll make sure of it."

Magnolia nods.

I cross my pinky finger over hers.

"Promise."

"Okay, then we need to get going. We need to find a way together," Magnolia says.

I grab her hand and lace our fingers.

"Let's go."

"Yeah, we need to be home on time,"

I look over at her. That kinda tense face relaxes as we walk down the streets.

"Maria, I love you, I mean like that," Magnolia says. "And like. . .I really want to know if you'll like start dating me?"

I blush kinda hard. "I mean we can try. But my parents will probably find out, sooooooo."

She smiles. "'Kay."

A day later/

I wake up and get out of bed. I get dressed and go to the kitchen and feel a tension in my chest.

a voice says in my head. "You can leave, but you can't take anyone with you, not, Magnolia, not, Elon, not, Marissa, not, Elliot, not, Emo, not, Ember, not, Alexis, not, Alex, not, Amber, not, Elf."

I nod.

I find some paper, and a pen, then walk out of the house.

I write down notes to each and every one of them and leave it at their doorsteps.

Then I run down the street as the tension in my chest relaxes.

I feel like I'm free and then poof, I'm gone.

I spend weeks weaving from small town to small town. I push away thoughts of the hurt I've caused. Leaving everything behind wasn't my first choice, but when push came to shove, I ran, because I'm a coward.

And even as faces haunt my dreams, the one that never surfaces is Magnolia's. I don't dwell on the reasons for that as I exist in the moment, surviving on whatever I can get my hands on. I head south as fast and as far as I can, pushing every day until I'm exhausted and then falling into sleep as if surrendering to the void. My days blend into each other as I seek solace in motion. I pick up odd jobs, so I don't starve and as the weather grows increasingly warmer, I shed my old clothes like I've shed my old life.

Three months after I left, I find the warm shores of what used to be Jamaica. Thankfully I didn't have to try and swim here, I'm sure I would have died trying. Instead, I scraped together enough in Miami to hop aboard a fishing vessel that was headed south.

My dreams are more like nightmares, reminding me that I am utterly alone in this world that is like my own personal hell. Whatever future I'd hoped to have even six months ago is no longer a possibility. So, I curl up into a ball at the base of a Blue Mahoe tree and slip into sleep.

...

Two weeks later I've found steady work at a cafe that serves the best coffee I've ever tasted. It's so good in fact, that I can't even complain about its diminutive size. It's the only thing I look forward to in my minimalist life.

I take the tray of coffee to a table; two girls sit there and a boy.

"Here you go!" I say, setting the three cups of coffee on the table. "Enjoy!"

The boy nods and takes a sip of his coffee. "Thank you, I will enjoy. And so will they."

One of the girls looks way too familiar. "Well, I had planned on it. Mr. Stupid Pants." That voice - Magnolia?

The other girl looks up at me with most beautiful ocean blue eyes I've ever seen. "How much would that cost, ma'am?"

I snap back into reality. "Uh, $12, please."

She smiles and hands me a 20-dollar bill. "Sorry, um could you have this broke up for me?"

I nod. "Yeah, give me a minute."

I go to the cash-register and hand the dollar bill to Stephania Cornelia, the owner of the cafe. "I need this broke up."

He nods his chicken-like neck/head and breaks it up. "There you go."

I take the rest of it and give it to the girls and boy.

"Thank you."

It has to be Magnolia.

I don't sleep that night.

I lie on the thin mattress in the room above the cafe, staring at the ceiling fan that never quite spins straight, and I replay her voice over and over. Well, I had planned on it. Mr. Stupid Pants. Nobody says that. Nobody but Magnolia says that, that stupid nickname she gave some boy back in eighth grade that somehow became a thing she called everyone she liked.

By morning I've convinced myself. It's her. It has to be her.

I ask Stephania where the trio usually stays: turns out they've been coming in every morning for a week, always around nine. Tourists, she says. Poking around the old town, asking about the reef. So the next morning, I follow them out the door instead, three cups of coffee forgotten and going cold on the counter behind me, Stephania yelling something about my shift that I don't hear because my ears are full of my own pulse. I trail them down to the water. The girl breaks off from the other two to sit on a half-collapsed sea wall, looking out at where the old buildings sink into blue.

"Magnolia." My voice breaks the silence before I've even opened my mouth.

She turns. Up close, in real light, it falls apart immediately. Her eyes are brown, not the near-black Magnolia's were. There's a gap in her front teeth Magnolia never had. I'm sorry -- what?"

"Nothing. Sorry. I thought--" My voice cracks somewhere in my throat and I hate it. "You sound like someone I used to know."

She tilts her head, and says, not unkindly, "That's a big reaction for a coincidence."

"Yeah." I laugh, and it comes out wet. "Yeah, it is."

"You okay?"

I'm not. I haven't been okay in three months, maybe longer, maybe since I stood over Magnolia with her blood on my hands and asked why like I was the one who deserved an answer. I don't say any of that. I just shake my head and sit down on the sea wall, an arm's length away from her because my legs have stopped being willing to hold me up.

"Sorry," I say again. "You just... you have her laugh. Had. She had."

"Had?"

I don't answer that either.

The girl doesn't push. She just sits with me and looks out at the drowned rooftops with me, like that's a completely normal thing to do with someone who just accosted her on a sea wall, and something about her patience makes it worse, because Magnolia used to do exactly this. Sit with me in silence until I was ready to talk.

I ran three thousand miles and I still found a ghost wearing someone else's face.

"I did something," I hear myself say, to the water, to nobody. "I don't think it can be undone."

"Most things can't," she says, like it's obvious. "Doesn't mean you stop existing after."

I want to tell her everything. The blade, the blood, the two years of a promise I apparently didn't keep the way I thought I had. I want to ask a total stranger to forgive me for a thing she has no context for, just so someone will say the words out loud.

I don't.

I just watch the tide come in over the sunken town and think about how running doesn't shrink the distance between who you are and who you were. It just gives you more time alone with the gap.

"Thanks for sitting with me," I finally say, standing, brushing salt dust off my knees.

"You don't even know my name," she says, half a laugh in it.

"No," I agree. "I guess I don't."

I walk back toward the cafe with my hands shaking, I finally let myself think her name without flinching away from it, for the first time since Jamaica swallowed me up in its heat. Magnolia, maybe still bleeding from a wound I gave her, maybe healed, maybe hating me with every breath she has left to hate with.

Either way, I can't keep running from a ghost that was never a ghost at all.