I can't cry anymore. It's worthless, all of those tears. Wasted water: I remember once, after the fire, when I couldn't cry I overheard Mrs. Thomas whisper about that to Sharon. Mary Anne hasn't cried. Why should I: I shed an ocean of tears before that fire, enough to put out the blaze...all of it, wasted.

I'm tired of crying. It does nothing, not a thing. I'm sitting in my room looking just like I did when I was ten...same size, too. Sharon's tried to talk to Dad, but the fight was so disasterous that I ran downstairs and begged her to stop, just stop. I deserved it, I told her. It was okay. So I sit up here since I'm grounded for the rest of the week: no phone. No TV. I had to get my thoughts down, so I asked my therapist if I could use her computer. This is all I'm allowed out of the house for, therapy and my sitting appointments. So, I sit here and knit and quilt and read and take portrait after portrait of my body, of every bone that stick out, looking like it just begs to break. I've been forcing myself to eat, even though it's the last thing I want to do.

I don't know anymore. All I know is I don't want to cry over what my father has done or how much I miss Logan because just like none of the water I cried could put out that fire or bring back everything I lost, none of the tears I cry now would convince my father that I'm not what he thinks I am...or bring back the boy I love. Nothing. It's hopeless, that's all it is. No point. I just stay here, with my braids, in saddle shoes, in this room that never got the makeover that we started. It's been halted, stopped, right in the middle of its change. Just frozen here, like me, my little room.

How do you do this. Who gets a letter, who doesn't. If I write a letter to Stacey, will Claudia feel left out? Will Abby wonder why I didn't leave something for her? Would Bee's parents mail her letter to her in Colorado? Would they all compare length? If Tess's letter is longer than Logan's, will he feel less loved? Maybe I shouldn't write letters at all. Just a note, to explain why.

No. Just a note to say that I'm so sorry.

I'm the only one whose body is made of cinder and smoke, who feels the fire every day. The anniversary of it is Sunday: my bones ache for it, forecasting its coming like as if it were rain. Dr. Reese told me before the fire, when I was just a sad and stressed thirteen year old who needed a therapist to get through the day, that I had to deal with how I felt about my mother's death, the way my father raised me, the discovery of my grandparents...even how it felt to watch my father change into this completely different, happy man at the hands of Sharon, a kind of happiness that I could never give him...that I had to deal with it all before I let it burn me out.

And then...my house burned down. Burn me out, burn me out. No wonder I'm empty.

So I need to say I'm sorry. For being the weak one, for not being good enough...for me. And that will have to be enough. And then I can be done.

I hope, when you die, you get to sleep, that there are no nightmares. That everything you lost is found again.

I hope my mother's waiting for me.

Sunny's gone; she left yesterday. I...wish I knew what to say about it, but all I am is empty. After being so close to Sunny, the selfish hurricane of her, I feel a bit ruined, like the shingles of my roof have been pulled off, windows shattered.

Ever since I yelled at her...I've felt the empty place in me that is shaped like my mother. And it's so large inside of me: it bleeds into the empty place of growing up for over a decade with a man who treated me like a china doll in a glass case and not a girl, the empty place of being denied Grandma and Grandpa, the empty place that makes it so hard to get out of bed some days that I don't even understand. On my birthday last year, Abby and Anna were showing Kristy how to pass your finger through a flame, real quick, touching fire without being burned. I stared at them in fascination for a moment, to be that cavalier about fire, and then I reached out my hand to the birthday candles they had relit and did it too. But I was staring at the fire and...I guess I forgot to move my finger because suddenly, Abby was yanking my hand back and my finger was red and scalded by the fire. And I didn't feel a thing, I just stared at my blistered skin and waited for the hurt. But all there was left was an empty place where the sorrow had been, eroding me down into a hollow canyon.

Sunny's torn it all back up again. I really don't want to talk to Dawn; she was such an apologist for so long, I just...I'm not angry with her, but I need time to try to manuever around the empty places again before I can pretend that I'm all better around her. And the Sunny stuff, the Dawn stuff...I can't eat. I am so disgusting on the inside...I can't. No one's really noticed yet, and I need to work really hard to make sure that they don't. I need to make some order in my life, I have to. I can't take people telling me what's right: they aren't me. This is what I need to get by, and everyone can just jump off a bridge if they don't like it, this is what I need. I just...do.

I'm curled up on my bed with Roo, the most adorable puppy in the world, something that Sunny treated like a broken toy. He hates Dawn's room because that room equals Sunny who equals bad memories, and not that I can blame him. Tigger doesn't like to be inside much: he hasn't, since the fire. I understand that...I don't, either. But it's left me lonely, missing his warm body beside me at night, the way I'm beginning to miss Logan at night, the memory that lingers in the empty space. Like my insides turned out. Having Roo around, it's like a salve. He balls against the concave curve of my stomach, and he doesn't tell me its too thin. He just cuddles there and doesn't move, even in the dark tuck of the night, when smoke curls in my mind and makes me tighten in fright. He stays with me, all night, and when I feel so empty that I wonder if I'm still real, there in the darkness, I can reach out and feel his breathing against my hand...and I know that I can make it to morning, at least.

When I was crying to Logan during lunch the other day...I thought to myself how I couldn't understand how Sunny would run away. No: what I didn't understand was how Sunny would want to run away and not want to come back. How she can live like she does.

But I was wrong. I know how Sunny can want to run away. I wanted to do it, too, once. Not run away, though. I wanted to die. I never got far enough to decide how, if I wanted to swallow pills or sit in the garage with the car running and fall asleep on the concrete of the garage that was mine was I was a little girl. Never wake up. Or maybe I'd slit my wrists because feeling real pain in my body might distract me from how empty I was feeling. How far away and detached, like I was floating three feet above this thing called Mary Anne, this pathetic thing with her pathetic, ashed out life. The fire burned away everything, even my will. I was empty.

Nobody knows. Only Logan. And my doctors, but...I had to. I didn't mean to tell Logan, and it changed every inch of us. It's why he hovered so much...nobody really understood, how the boy who said that I didn't have to talk to him after the fire, but he wanted me to talk to somebody, like Dr. Reese, could suddenly cover me like a blanket, so worried every moment for me. Things didn't get better until I was able to live my life again: until I wanted my life again. And I couldn't want my life with Logan telling me to want it. I had to put my pieces back.

So I understand, where Sunny is coming from. Logan's wrong, she and I are similar...so I have to help her. I don't know how. I don't know what it is that she'd hiding from and what it is that she needs. I'm still learning that about myself...every day. Every minute, every day, I'm trying to understand myself, and what all of the empty parts mean.