Golden Read Free

tragically nerdy boy named Jake, shoves a book back onto the shelf then straightens out the ones around it for the millionth time. None of them look at me, but I’m nervous all of a sudden becauseright now it feels like I’m holding in my hands something I shouldn’t be. Like I’ve just brushed my fingers over a ghost. And by all accounts and definitions, I have.
    Every town has its stories. Stories that have been told so many times by so many different people they’ve worked themselves into the collective consciousness as truth. Julianna Farnetti is one of Summit Lakes’. Shane Cruz is the other. And theirs—it’s a story of perfection lost on an icy road. They were one of those golden couples, the kind everyone adores and envies at the same time. Meant to be together forever. Teenage dream realized.
    And both of them are frozen in time on a billboard at the edge of town for everyone to see. From behind a thick layer of plexiglass that’s replaced every few years, they smile their senior portrait smiles like they don’t know people have stopped looking for them. Somewhere along the line, the words on the billboard changed from MISSING to IN LOVING MEMORY OF, and I can remember thinking how sad that was, but it was bound to happen. Their parents buried empty coffins.
    And still, we have the plaque in the gym, with a picture of Shane and Julianna together, his graduation gown arms wrapped tight around her shoulders and her cap crooked on top of her curly blond hair, both of them laughing like life was about to begin. His family started the scholarship in their name. Hers left town. And still, after ten years, they smile those frozen smiles that never age. Trapped behind the glass and the stories we’ve come up with for what happened to them.
    I glance down again, read the name to be sure. Here inmy hand is Julianna Farnetti’s senior journal. Pages she wrote before all of that, when the world was still at her perfect fingertips. When Mr. Kinney told her to capture herself in words she could read later.
    There’s a post office box on the envelope, but it’s worthless. None of her family lives here anymore, and I don’t blame them. For a long time after, people talked. Speculated. Investigated. Eventually, the case closed and she and Shane became another town story that weaves its way back to the surface on stormy winter nights. And of course, before graduation. That’s when the Summit Times runs a tribute to the two of them in the same edition that features the current graduating class. That’s also when the old-timer search-and-rescue guys remember over coffee the fierceness of the storm the night they disappeared. The ones who found Shane’s mangled Jeep at the bottom of the gorge, half-submerged in the icy river, will talk about how their feet were instantly frostbitten as they plunged in for the two teens who were most surely trapped in the car. At this they shake their heads, maybe mutter “Such a shame,” and go back to their regular business, not wanting to linger in the memory of it too long.
    I breathe slowly, turn the envelope over in my hands, check the flap that’s still sealed up tight. How did nobody think to ask about this? How did Mr. Kinney not open it? Not even out of curiosity about this girl-turned-myth? Maybe he didn’t even realize it was there with the others. Or maybe he did, but left it alone out of respect once the official statement came out that they were swept down the river and into Summit Lake, where the search had to end because ofthe piercing cold and plunging depth of the water. It’d be too sad after that. Like reading Romeo and Juliet and knowing all along how it’s going to end.
    I flip the envelope back over to the side with her name and run my finger over it, teetering on the edge of something. The thing I should do, the most right thing to do, would be to give it to Mr. Kinney and let him decide