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  ****

  But life wasn’t fair, even in Heaven.

  The next day, Ancel was gone. He’d left Heaven like a thief in the night, and had stolen my heart away with him.

  During

  The guy in the red shirt was gorgeous. He was all blond hair, green eyes, and way too much testosterone. His muscles stretched under his tight T-shirt as he threw the football across the patch of grass to his friend. My eyes barely left the curve of his strong jaw, or the way his thighs flexed when he stopped from a sprint.

  I sighed heavily and looked back down at my notepad. I’d scribbled some nonsensical words and pictures down on the letter I’d been writing to him. Not that I’d ever give it to him.

  He and his friend threw a football around in the field most weekends, and most weekends I was there, sitting on my tire swing hung up in the tree, watching him. My mom sometimes questioned why someone my age didn’t have anything better to do than to sit around on weekends writing letters to strangers.

  Ripping the letter I’d written for the boy in the red T-shirt out of my notepad, I crumpled it up and placed it in the same hole in the tree where all my letters went to die. I swung my legs out of the center of the tire and slid down onto the ground. Making sure my notepad was neatly tucked away into my bag, I slung it over my shoulder and took one last look at the handsome boy in the red T-shirt.

  It was almost springtime, and I wished I could profess my undying love of spring like everyone else in Heaven, but it just wasn’t true. I loved spring, sure, but I loved the frost of winter, and the leaves of fall, and the unbridled heat of summer. I couldn’t pick a favorite season any more easily than I could pick a favorite song, or a favorite smell. Everything was beautiful in its own way— you just had to look close enough.

  Everything in Heaven was beginning to turn green. Front lawns, the leaves in the trees, the color of the skirts the girls wore. Something about this spring though felt particularly new and fresh. There must’ve been something in the air.

  I walked down the main street in Heaven as I made my way to my dad’s butcher shop. The light posts had white LED lights twirled around them from base to tip, and potted plants hanging from them from Mrs. Langley’s shop, Buds. She’d glued business cards to each of the pots so that everyone knew she was the best flower shop in town. Everyone agreed, of course, and not just because she owned the only flower shop in town.

  There were a few cars parked along the wide road, but almost everyone in Heaven just walked where they needed to go. Heaven was so small that it felt like a waste of gas to drive anywhere. Still, a few of the popular kids in my high school had their licenses, and even one or two of the seniors had their own cars.

  Mrs. Allen waved to me as I walked past her accounting shop. I just smiled and looked back down at the sidewalk. Usually no one noticed me, and I preferred it that way. Those who did notice me were usually just the other kids at my high school. They whispered about me.

  When I arrived outside my dad’s butcher shop, I stopped and looked up at the sign, thinking of the first time I’d ever laid eyes on it. Paige Butcher Shop— the simple navy sign strung up above the door, painted on a plank of wood. Most people who weren’t from Heaven thought my dad had named the shop after my mom, but in truth Paige was my family’s surname, and the Paige butcher shop had been passed down through the generations.

  The front of the shop was one giant glass window, along with the glass door off to the right side of the shop front. Signs were taped to the inside of the glass so passersby would look and see the prices without having to go in, or what kind of specials they were having that week.

  I pushed the front door open and listened to the familiar sound of the bell chiming above my head.

  “Be out in just a minute,” my dad hollered from the back.

  “It’s just me, Dad,” I yelled back. “I just stopped by before work to say hi.”

  A few moments later, my dad came out from the back of the shop wearing his typical black apron and a smile on his face.

  “Hey, Rust,” he said happily. “How’s your day going, Son?”

  I shrugged but smiled at him.

  “You know,” he went on, “Sheriff Johnston was driving down the highway the other day and came across a dead fox. He said it looked like the poor thing was run over by one of those big semitrucks.”

  I frowned. “Poor thing.”

  “But I convinced the sheriff to let me keep the fur and a few of the teeth. I know how you feel about stuff like that. I figured you’d want it for an art project or something.”

  Unable to stop myself, I grinned from ear to ear.

  I’d once told my friend Beth that I made art out of roadkill. She dry heaved into the garbage can in the school parking lot. At first I thought she was joking, but as it turned out, she just has a sensitive stomach.

  “Why the hell do you do that?” she had asked me with her eyebrows low over her eyes.

  “Well,” I had replied, “it would feel like a waste not to, you know? These animals were so beautiful in life, and because of a tragedy, their lives are lost. It almost feels like a way to honor them— to keep them beautiful a little while longer.”

  “Holy shit, you’re weird,” she had replied with a straight face.

  I looked up at the clock on the wall, remembering that my visit to my dad’s shop had to come to an end.

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said as I began walking toward the door. “I’ll see you at home tonight around dinner time.”

  My dad waved and went into the back of the shop. I made my way down the street about two blocks to the ice cream shop. When I pushed the door open and it chimed, I was instantly greeted with, “Hello, and welcome to— oh, it’s just you.”

  I smiled and pulled my bag off my shoulders. Beth immediately slumped back down onto the stool she’d been sitting on behind the counter, and went back to eating chocolate cherry ice cream out of a disposable cup.

  “You’re early,” she said.

  “By four minutes.”

  “Still early.”

  Beth was always late. At least at work I could cover for her. She was late to all her classes, late to work, late for dinner at home, late whenever she and I went to the movies. It wasn’t a feature of hers I disliked— quite the opposite, in fact. For some reason, I saw it as one of her notable character traits— one that, while it might’ve been inconvenient, was just another piece to the puzzle that was Beth.

  “What are you planning on doing this summer?” Beth asked me as she scooped frozen cherries into her mouth.

  “I’m running away and joining the circus,” I replied as I tied my white apron around my waist.

  “You’re hilarious. What are you actually going to do, though? Just work here at the ice cream shop?”

  “And work on some art projects. Make jewelry. Bus down to the beach one day, walk along the shoreline, and see if I can find some sea glass.”

  “Most other boys your age are doing other stuff, you know. Parties, sports, girls.” I slid her a sardonic look. She laughed. “Okay, maybe not girls. But really, Rust, who wants to spend their summer looking for pretty feathers, or painting animal teeth, or hunting for shiny pieces of sea glass?”

  “Me.”

  Beth ignored me and went back to her ice cream. I wasn’t offended by her pestering. She liked poking at me whenever she was bored and couldn’t find something else to entertain her. And she meant it in the nicest way— I think.

  Besides, my mom and dad were already asking me questions about things that I had no answers to. What I wanted to do after high school, if I was going to take over Paige Butcher Shop, if I wanted to go to college. I didn’t have an answer for any of it. I didn’t want to think about any of it. All I wanted to do was make art.

  The first time I told my dad I didn’t want to be a butcher, he frowned at me. It was because the shop had been in our family for so long, and I knew he didn’t want to have to sell it when he got older and wanted to retire. Still,
I couldn’t do what my dad did. I knew his work was humane, and he’d never been unkind a day in his life, but it wasn’t what I pictured for myself. When I pictured my future, I imaged sculptures made from fur and bones and smooth pieces of glass. I pictured gold rings and yellow paints in every shade. I pictured lying on my back in the field in the middle of the fall, looking up at the dark blues of the sky, feeling the crisp wind beat against my skin and listening to the breeze flowing through the grass.

  “Customers,” Beth said as she stood up and put on a phony smile.

  The rest of the evening passed by in a blur. There was a woman who came in with twelve kids, and each of them ordered numerous flavors of ice cream. She apologized and said it was for her son’s birthday. Beth grumbled the entire time, but I smiled at each of the children and tried to make their ice cream cones to their perfect specifications.

  By the time I left work that evening, I was exhausted. I walked through the field behind my house slowly, holding onto the straps of my bag, trying to convince myself not to curl up in the tall grass and sleep under the stars.

  Just as I was almost at the gate to my back yard, something caught my eye. I turned and looked behind me. The back porch light was on at Ancel’s house. Although, it wasn’t Ancel’s house any longer and hadn’t been for many years. People had come and gone throughout the years, no one staying longer than a few months to a year in that house.

  The first time after he’d left, I hadn’t believed my mom when she told me they had picked up and moved away. I ran over to his house, stared into his backyard through the wood fence boards, and looked for Daisy. But Daisy wasn’t there. And neither was Ancel.

  Sighing, I closed my eyes, blocking out the sight of the porch light, the field, Heaven itself.

  I had to let go of his ghost.