Work Text:
Some of the girls wrote those two names everywhere, on their notebooks and binders. Sometimes in hearts. They called up radio stations and dedicated love songs to them. The quotes under their own yearbook pictures were sad lyrics and lines from moody poems. Only the girls understood who they really meant.
“He loved him, that’s why he saved him,” they’d say, and people would say, bullshit, he did it to fuck the Man.
“He loved him,” the girls would say. “It just took him years to realize it. But he knew it, in the end.” And they’d smile knowingly, annoyingly.
_____
It started on Casey’s birthday, after he’d been gone almost five years. Now, Elise expected it, every May 23rd. Always the same, all day long. A car pulling up. The gate opening. Hurried footsteps on the walk. When they were gone, Elise would open the door to collect whatever the kids had left. Sometimes it was rolls of film, or cigarettes (Why? Casey didn’t smoke.). Conspiracy theory booklets. The girls left flowers, cards.
Elise would put the flowers in water. The other things she kept in a box for when Casey finally came home.
But she always read the booklets.