I was driving one night in a really foul mood and speeding. Anyway this car gets behind me and for some reason I can just tell it wasn’t a cop. Something just didn’t sit right with me.
As I’m getting out of my car, the truck rolls its windows down. And what I saw still haunts me to this day. It was a man with a face like it had been through fire and back—scarred, uneven, eyes like burnt-out coals.
But that wasn’t what froze me. It was that he said my full name—first, middle, and last—like he was reading it off my soul. “Liyah Samara Belen.
You finally stopped.”
My heart dropped. I didn’t recognize him. Not even a little.
“Do I… do I know you?” I asked, trying to steady my voice. The man tilted his head, then gave a strange, almost pitiful smile. “You knew my brother.”
I swallowed hard.
“Who’s your brother?”
He said, “Mateo.”
Now that name, I did recognize. Mateo Farid was this quiet, lanky kid I knew back in high school. Always sitting alone.
Always getting picked on. But never really fighting back. I’d barely talked to him, if ever.
He dropped out in sophomore year and never came back. But why would his brother be tracking me down like this, ten years later, on a random highway in the middle of nowhere? “I haven’t seen Mateo in forever,” I said slowly.
“Did something happen to him?”
The man’s face hardened. “He died.”
Now I was really confused. I blinked at him.
“I’m sorry… I didn’t know. I had nothing to do with that, though.”
He let out a dry chuckle, like I’d just told the world’s saddest joke. “You don’t remember, do you?” he said.
“But he never forgot you.”
I stood there stunned, my keys still dangling from my fingers, the engine ticking behind me. “Mateo wrote letters,” the man said. “Whole notebooks full of them.
He wrote about people who made fun of him. Ignored him. Laughed when others threw his backpack in the toilet.
But you… he wrote about you differently.”
That made my stomach twist. I wasn’t a bully. I wasn’t one of those kids who went out of their way to be cruel.
“I never did anything to him,” I said again, more firmly now. “No,” the man said. “But that was the problem.
You saw it. You knew. And you did nothing.”
The silence between us was thick.
He reached down and picked up a small, leather-bound notebook from the passenger seat and tossed it to me. I caught it instinctively. “Page 42,” he said.
“That’s the one that made me find you.”
I opened it with shaking hands. The handwriting was tight, slightly slanted. I flipped to the page, eyes scanning it.
It was dated the same week Mateo left school. “Liyah saw it happen. She was by her locker.
Our eyes met for a second while they poured soda in my bag and called me a ‘refugee freak.’ She looked away. She knew it was wrong. She knew.
But she walked away.”
I swear something cracked inside my chest. I remembered that day now. The smell of Sprite.
The snickers. The way I told myself, It’s not your fight. And walked away.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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