The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows

Evie cried and cried and cried. It would be impossible to count how many tissues she went through and how many times she had to fetch another fresh box of perfect white Kleenex.

Shamelessly Evie sat on her bed, the only companion being the insolently brightly printed tissue box that sat beside her wearily, as the tears carried on following down her cheeks that had turned pink with the effort of crying.

She couldn't understand how Andrew could have done something like that. The boy whom she was in love with wrote another girl a song. It was in this moment that Evie realized she had confessed something to herself that she had been avoiding for many weeks now. She was in love.

This enlightenment only made Evie cry harder, it seemed that heartache went directly with love. However this was not heartache, this was heart break.

There were no words written in Evie's heavy notebooks that could convey the distress and hurt she was under. Even her parents were at a loss. They could only watch their daughter break down and attempt to help her. However she was incapable of speech and when asked what happened the only word she could utter was 'Andrew'. It was enough to make a white hot anger rise inside Mr. Philips and he was halfway out the door with his shotgun when Mrs. Philips, almost as hysterical as her daughter, called him back. A murder was the last thing that the family needed.

And so it came that Evie spent the night with her tissue box and a deluxe sized box of Belgian chocolates, which her dad had gone to fetch especially for her. He had never seen his daughter in such an emotional state. Evie never showed such feelings, she only wrote about them, convinced that real people never felt like this.

Tears carried on streaming down Evie's face as she threw another praline into her mouth with a vengeance and chomped angrily on it. She sent her gaze across her room, so many things reminding her of the person whom she wanted to think of least. The piles of notebooks that Evie had filled only served as a cold reminder that Andrew had been allowed to read them, because the words were written for him and only him. The notebooks were her pride and his joy.

Evie suddenly stood up, causing the blood to rush to her head and for a second cause the whole room to shift to the side violently.

Once the room was vertical again Evie scooped the notebooks into a black bin liner, which her mother had originally presented to her with the request to tidy up her room. However Evie had another purpose.

It was already dark now, misery making the time pass quicker. Her parents had long given up on comforting her and had retreated to their beds. Evie pattered down the stairs quietly in her long pajamas, pulling on a hoodie and slipping into a pair of short brown UGGs before opening the door to the back yard where at the end of the garden, her father had set up a bonfire to burn the last of the autumn leaves before the winter came.

Evie walked towards this determinedly, dragging the full black plastic bag behind her, it being too heavy to carry properly. She heaved the sack into her arms with some problems and then tipped it upside down onto the frail and fallen leaves, which crunched under the sudden weight of the notebooks.

This having been accomplished Evie went back into the house and moments later came back with a box of matches. She pushed the box open and extracted a single match, with intent to start a fire.

However she was prevented from striking the match by the sound of footsteps behind her. She wheeled around ready to strike whoever it was down, with one kick of the leg.

When she saw who the person was, the impulse to strike them down grew alarmingly when her angry gaze fall upon no one other than Andrew McMahon, who approached Evie like a kicked puppy.

"Hey…" he said softly, taking the state of Evie in with a shock. Even in the dim orange glow of the streetlights he could see just how much she had been crying. Her puffy red eyes served as a reminder to him of the amount of pain she had been through.

"Go away," Evie hissed, not even feeling the need to ask what he was doing in her back yard in the middle of the night. She turned away from him and struck the match.

The minute she had done this, Andrew knew exactly what she was going to do. He had already taken in the notebooks that were thrown onto the bonfire and the match in Evie's shaking hand only served to mock him insolently.

"Evie don't do that!" Andrew shouted but it was too late.

She dropped the match onto the bonfire.

The dry leaves were instantly devoured by the flames, which then eagerly started on the books that held all of Evie's work, all of her words, passages, songs and stories were being eaten by the flames. It was as sight that caused Andrew's heart to crumble even more and he acted on a crazy and inexplicable impulse.

He jumped forward to the bonfire and attempted to pull some of the books out of the fire. However the dryness of the leaves had caused the fire to spread quicker than Andrew had anticipated and so there was no book that was spared from the flames, despite this some steely determinism in Andrew prevented him from giving up and he managed to extract one book that had not been completely attacked by the orange fire tongues.

He dropped the book on the grassy ground almost immediately, having slightly burned his hands in the process. His action however was not interpreted as one of goodwill.

"Just who do you think you are?" Evie shrieked and was about to reach for the notebook so she could toss it on the fire, where in her eyes she felt it belonged.

However Andrew was quicker than Evie and he held the singed book in his burnt house, as it were a life ring and he were a drowning man.

"You can't do this Evie, you worked so hard on all those," Andrew shouted, still clutching the only surviving notepad, whilst the rest of them slowly turned to ashes.

"What just as hard as you worked on that song?" Evie shouted back at Andrew, regardless of the fact that her parents were asleep in the house.

"I can explain that goddamnit Evie, if you'd only just listen!"

"I've had enough of listening to you Andrew. I've had enough," Evie said in a soft whisper, which was still audible over the crackling of the burning leaves.

She turned away and slowly walked back into the house, a part of her hoping that Andrew might call out to her, or run after her, but this was no Hollywood film. This was real life and this was what real heartbreak was all about.

The porch door snapped shut softly and Andrew was left standing alone by the slowly decreasing bonfire, the notebook still clutched closely to his chest, as the flames from the fire threw shadows on his face that were marked by sleepless nights and a complete loss.