Write a story that ends in the past.

Rules are to keep me hooked till the end!

Example :-

It’s like I said, I didn’t know him very well. He’d already graduated by the time I came along, and I only heard about him from his mother and ex-girlfriend and the chemistry teacher who thought he was spoiled. 

I’d seen him once, when he came in to ask his mother about something. He came barging in through the dull fake-wood door and held a muttered conversation with his mother, who bore ink stains up to her elbow. She lit up when she saw him. 

Both of them were so tall. Tall and strong. She was tall and bony and white-haired and had swum competitively for years, just like me. She wore glasses and gaudy shirts and found a loophole in every math problem that could be applied to every day life. 

He was tall and black-haired and his cheeks were ruddy and bronzed, like he’d been outside for the morning in the fresh air. Piercing black eyes like a falcon. I suppose he was handsome, but I am prejudiced against good-looking males, and disliked him instantly. She told me later he was training to me an engineer. 

She talked about him from time to time. She had a daughter who was a chemist in Florida, and two other girls who’d left home. William was her youngest, her only son, the one she must have doted on as many youngest children are. I knew Melanie, his ex-girlfriend. She was a black girl who dyed her hair white and wore it in huge long braids and had been the cheer captain. I liked her and feared her—she reminded me of myself. Not as popular, but with a clear inner strength and resolve. 

I came to the school after they’d broken up but sometimes she still talked of him always dispassionately. There her strength was apparent. She’d moved on. I admired her. She was a senior the year I came.

It was interesting, the type of girls he attracted. It made me think, with circumstantial evidence, that he was strong and radiant as well.

The semester moved on like a great lumbering elephant, unsympathetic to the skittering students at its feet. Parabolas and matrices and probability and averages and keys on calculators that get stuck right when you need them. Spring break hit while I was beginning to get back into the rhythm of school. And then we were stuck at home and the rhythm fell away. She posted videos online of the lessons and talked over the phone. Sometimes she spoke of him. 

Her name was Ann and I adored her. 

She is probably fifty years older than I, fifty years and four children and many a math class taught in between, more than I’d ever sit through during my life. She showed me the easiest shortcuts and laughed with me about silly mathematicians and bonded over common logarithms. Through horrible mathematics and confusing formulas, we became friends. 

With her at the helm, dispersing formulas and allowing use of calculators during tests and dismissing the ugly useless formulas the book would have had us learn, I became excellent. 

I hate math. Hate it. It’s beautiful, I can understand that. Everything fits into place like a fractalling puzzle, a masterpiece. But it’s easily misunderstood, and when I can’t figure something out I become so frustrated I sometimes cry. It’s my character flaw. 

But with Miss Ann teaching me, I grew to love it. She could explain away the tears and dispensed mercy when I forgot the negative sign. 

The year was almost over, the elephant growing tired, readying itself for a summer-long nap. Math books put away, English research papers handed in with a prayer, teachers thanked and given cheap gifts. No finals, no grades, and the half-yard to the finish line was free and easy. 

And then. And then the half-yard was marked with grief. Staggered the school, already burdened with disease and death stats.

The words just became symbols, I couldn’t understand it but this time frustration stayed away and shock took its place. I have no idea the belly-aching earthquake, lightning strike of pain, disembowelment of total horror which must have happened when Miss Ann saw those words. 

It said something. I don’t care anymore, the words are meaningless. 

I just knew that I didn’t care for the boy but I wept for her. The sun set slowly, I was freshly excited from a full day of birthday celebration—another year! How mature I am becoming!—but then my father showed the words to me. Senseless scribbles on a screen. 

I never knew him, as I keep saying. I didn’t like him. But through her influence, her presence in my life, her friendship that held me steady through many a confusing math test, I couldn’t have felt the hurt more than if he were my best friend. 

I wrote to her the next afternoon, sun high, robins singing innocently in the gumball trees. I said, Miss Ann, I heard about what happened to William. Please know I am so sorry and that you are in our prayers. 

She must have felt so old, reading those words. So old and so tired and shaken to the bone by hurt she didn’t think could ever have been experienced. 

I don’t know what she did. I don’t know how long she cried or sat on her knees by her bed that night and wondered Why with an empty mind and wet cheeks and dried ink stains on her elbows. I don’t know if she sat limp in a chair by the dusty window and watched the wind through the leaves with uninterested, preoccupied eyes, wanting to think of anything else. To forget. To know Why.

I wept for her.

I hate it when I cry. My cheeks grow hot and tight and my face goes all red for hours afterward. My face crumples and aches and my whole body shakes. Sitting on the hard wood stairs with my phone useless in my lap I leaned my head against the wall, looked at the expanding light downstairs, and wondered what Miss Ann must be thinking. 

How do you move on from such tragedy? My mother told me a few days later it is the worst thing anyone can experience, the loss of a child. How do you move on? In your eighties you must stare at the wall, look at the pictures of your healthy grandchildren, and wonder what he might have looked like as he grew older. 

I wonder. She must wonder, too. Though we’re still apart, forced away from each other by years in age and CDC regulations, I can still tell her, Miss Ann, I love you. I’m here for you. You’ve always got me.

I wish I could have gone to her. Hugged her tight and long. I can just imagine it, though. And wish things were better. And hope for greater days. And ask for peace. 

Just nineteen, so full of ruddy life, bursting with color, handsome in an aggravating way, life ahead of him with a good strong degree and a way with girls. So young, so full of ideals, cut. Life cut from him in a streak of unbending steel and screaming lights.

I can tell it in the tone of her writing. I can hear it in her voice when we talked on the phone. I feel timid speaking to her as an equal, but she reaches out. Across the years, across the time and space and wanting Heaven and aching loneliness. She grabs hold with both hands and asks me to tell her it’s going to be alright. That he’ll pick himself up from the asphalt and come bounding through the door full of light like he used to. That he’ll open his cold still eyes and smile up at her through thick black hair and laugh the way she remembers. 

That he’ll leap up and hug her and say it was all a joke, he never meant to make her so afraid. Afraid? Of death. Afraid of loneliness. Of never having the answers.

I know she’s got better friends, the girls who graduated college with her and laughed with her at William’s first birthday nineteen years ago, teacher friends she made through coffee and stories of awful students. I know she’s got her husband and her three daughters all living in different countries. I know she’s got the faded words on her marked-up Bible and the folding of hands in the dark with tears down her face. She has the words of Jeremiah reaching up out of his pit of despair, singing through Jerusalem’s destruction lying about his knees, weeping that God is faithful and merciful, singing that he knows through the despair that God never turns away forever, words so familiar in that longing tone, the aching ringing voice begging for answers. 

She has that. She wants more. 

Answers.

And I don’t have them. I want to have them. I want to tell her everything, say it was all a pitiful joke, he’s not gone. He’ll be back. 

I can’t. I can just say that I love you, I’m here for you, I understand you. I don’t know if it helps. I hope it does. I just offer words and more words, an essay less than two thousand words attempting to tell my grief the best I can. I can only stand here, a lone figure reaching in the darkness with open palms just like her, a student who is also a friend, trying to bring understanding to a grieving mother, and hope I am enough.