Sweet Romance15 min read
The Pink Diary and the Boy Who Chased a Bus
ButterPicks12 views
I found out the truth about my family by accident.
It was the night my "father" collapsed. "Dad!" I shouted, but no one heard me in time. The ambulance came and left and later everyone said the right words, but the house went quiet the way a room does when a lamp is switched off.
"Your sister will be here," my grandmother said, voice flat as paper. "She left years ago. She will handle the funeral."
When the black-clad funeral parade passed our small house, a new figure slipped behind it — a woman with hair curled into careless waves and heels that clicked on the pavement. She did not cry. She walked like a guest at a show, not like someone who had lost a child.
"Who is she?" I whispered from the doorway.
"That's Jiao," my grandmother answered. "She went away a long time ago."
She looked right through me. "She didn't come for him," I thought. "She came so people could see her in a mourning dress."
That night my mother — the woman who raised me — closed the front door and locked me out while she argued with her inside. Voices came through the wood, masked and rough.
"You're trying to kill me," a woman's voice snapped.
"You could take her, yes?" another voice said. "You could take her away. We promised."
But then the words became clear.
"No. I can't raise her. I can't have that life again."
The door opened. The woman who had stood behind the funeral walked past and froze when she saw me. I watched her eyes shrink — not with pity, but with fear. She slid past like a shadow and disappeared into the night.
I found her things in the old storage, all the boxes a person leaves when they plan never to return. I wanted to burn them. I wanted to burn the idea of her from the house.
Then I found the diary. Pink stickers of rabbits clung to the edges. The pages were thin and yellow. I sat on the cold floor and read.
"March 17," one entry said. "I'm five months pregnant. He will study his exams; his family says I will ruin his future. They say I should have an abortion. The doctor says no. I can't. I am scared."
"March 19," another line. "I had to stop university early. My belly shows. I am too tired. I go home while everyone else studies."
"April 3. I can't find him. His house is empty. His family moved. He promised me a future and left instead. My father says to keep the child. My mother says she will call her our daughter, so people will not shame me."
The entries stopped on August 9.
That was my birthday.
For years I had faced whispers from classmates. "Old parents," they said, and laughed like it was salt to throw at me. I thought it was because my parents were old. I did not know the truth. My whole life was a sitting lie: my "parents" were actually my grandparents, and the woman I had been told to call sister was my real mother.
I remember the way my chest went hollow when the diary told me she had left me with them on the day I was born. The way her handwriting trembled when she wrote that she couldn't bear to look at me because I reminded her of him.
I understood why she had been afraid of me that night. I understood why she had never come home.
After the funeral, my grandmother fell ill and died a year later. The house dropped its last ribbon of warmth. The woman with the curled hair came back again, more distant than before, as if she feared something she had started.
She sold the house in a day. She gave me a train ticket, a fat stack of cash, and a brisk list of instructions. "Go to Chengdu," she said without meeting my eyes. "Your uncle is waiting. It's all arranged."
She lied. Her breath shook when she spoke. The uncle she named was dead.
I stormed out of the station, ticket in hand, and threw it at her back as she walked away. "I don't need you," I hissed. But the city swallowed her heels whole and left me with nothing but rage and the folded diary in my pocket.
A woman with a baby tried to drag me into a factory job. "Eight thousand a month, room and board," she whispered. I said no. I didn't want a job; I wanted a family.
Then she put me in a corner where two men loomed like threats. I tried to scream but a small hand gripped my sleeve and pulled me away. The woman who had left stood in front of the men as if she were a different person — smaller, but suddenly fierce.
"Didn't I tell you not to wander off?" she said. Her voice was not the same as the one who had left me for dead.
"Why did you go?" I demanded, then the words were a sob. "Why did you leave?"
She looked at me, surprised by the tremor in her own face. "Come home," she said.
The train ride to the town where she lived felt endless. She slept with her head against the window and sometimes reached out to tuck my hair behind my ear when I nodded off. In the dim light I noticed the little black mole under her right eye — the same mark I had. I remembered the rabbit stickers.
At her house there was a child with two braids who ran into her arms shouting "Mama!" The child launched herself at her mother, and the woman, my "sister," became someone else entirely: soft, laughing, careful.
"Kaia," she said once, in a voice that had my name for me, "this is Nono. She's your niece. She will call you aunt."
My chest felt two sizes too small. I had to be "aunt" to a child who stole all the easy love my mother had left. The house smelled of soap and children's bread and a kind of patience I had never been taught to expect.
Her husband — Vernon Murphy — was not cruel on first glance. He brought home gifts, fixed the broken bed, bought sweets for Little Nono. But his glances at me were thin as ice. "This house might not be for you," he said once, blunt and rough. "My home doesn't keep strays."
I slept on the couch. The woman — my mother — tucked a thicker blanket around me at night. "You'll be safer here," she whispered, and I bought the lie. Every small kindness felt like a stone she could drop at any time.
Her son from a previous marriage — Preston Lopez — was a boy who said almost nothing. He watched me like someone cataloging a new book on a dusty shelf.
"You're staying?" he asked the first day at school, his voice bored, like a door creak.
"Probably until they put me on a train again," I said.
He stared and then muttered, "We'll see how long you last."
At home he was a habit I had to adjust to. In class, he left an empty desk beside his and I took it. He called me ghost words like "shadow" and "stowaway." He tossed a pencil at me. He was grumpy, clever, and he made me feel small in ways I didn't know how to resist.
Weeks passed. I tried to earn my place by working like an extra limb. I cooked meals, washed dishes, helped Nono with homework, bought vegetables, even faked being patient with Vernon when he criticized my tongue at the table.
"You're too much like him," he told my mother when he was drunk. "You bring trouble."
I kept doing dishes. I wanted, with every clumsy breath, to belong.
Then one afternoon the town seemed to fold into a pocket of violence. I was carrying heavy bags when a crowd pushed by, and Preston was dragged into the center by ten boys who hated him for reasons I couldn't parse. When they beat him, the blood on his face looked like a map of wrong turns.
I threw my bags and the vegetables at them and called the police with shaking hands. "Get away!" I screamed. "Get off him!"
Preston's first instinct was an annoyed shove. "Get back, Kaia!" he snapped, the way someone shoves a small rock back into place.
They grabbed my phone, hit me with a stick. I remember a sharp pain, and then light again. I woke up in the hospital. Preston sat on the edge of the bed, quieter than an empty page.
"You saved me," he said, and for the first time there wasn't scorn in his words.
"It wasn't a choice," I answered. "I couldn't stand watching."
The house grew warmer after that. Even Vernon couldn't keep his face hard for long. For a time, we stopped being strangers.
Rumors floated from school like leaves. They said I was his girlfriend, that I was pregnant, that we were keeping secrets. The truth was none of those. I was "aunt." The truth stuck because people liked to fill the blanks.
One hot summer day, Nono's birthday came, and I wanted to do something kind. I bought a pretty biscuit box I thought she would like. After work, when I returned, I found our home smashed.
"Who did this?" I whispered.
"It's your fault," Vernon slurred, glass in hand. "You bring bad luck."
I found the diary in the middle of the mess, pink rabbit stickers shining like accusations. I had hidden it years ago — never burned it, never shown it to anyone. I had kept it like a small, private pulse. Little Nono had found it and mistook it for a toy. She had brought it out and left it on the bed. Vernon had seen the cover and started to read.
Outside the room someone shouted and the household collided. There were screams, a bottle thrown, and then Vernon collapsed moaning on the floor. Nono wept with a small animal's sound. My mother clutched the child and looked at me the way someone looks at the sky during a storm: frightened but also filled with pity.
"She left," Vernon hiccupped from the floor. "She left a child with us. You lied."
"Stop," my mother said, voice breaking. "Nono didn't do anything."
He slurred louder. "Divorce. I'm done."
I wanted to rip the diary to pieces. I did tear it — and then felt like I had ripped out a piece of the only person who had ever left something of hers for me. "I didn't mean to hurt her," I told my mother. "I only wanted to keep that thing that connects us."
That night she spoke. She told me how Ace Price had broken promises. How she had almost killed herself. How carrying me had been a kind of sentence. How she had kept away because every time she looked at me she saw the man who had gone and left her.
"I never stopped loving you," she said, and the words were the most dangerous thing she had ever said. "I just couldn't look at you."
"You left me," I said. "You turned your back."
She looked at me with a cruelty that came from truth. "I wasn't brave enough. I was afraid you would be like him. I couldn't stand to see his face every day."
I wanted to throw up. I wanted to kill the man whose name came like a rusted key in the lock of every bad memory: Ace Price.
The house went still. Someone called an ambulance for Vernon. I went outside, and in the street my legs gave. I couldn't stop shaking. I had to do something — anything — to fix this.
I ran to find Vernon, to beg him to stay. I found him downstairs, sitting on the curb, and told him the things I couldn't say to my mother because saying them made me small and foolish.
"Please," I begged. "Don't go. Nono needs you."
He looked at me like a man trying to read a map he wasn't given. "I will think," he said.
Days passed. Vernon left for work and came home kinder at times. He apologized. He promised not to leave. He went to the civil office and tried to undo what had been broken among them.
In the middle of all of this, Nono and I became closer. We made silly faces, cooked pancakes, bought small stickers. Preston and I found a strange new rhythm. He began to show up when I worked late, carrying a pair of soda bottles like a small satellite, sitting with me on the roof while we shared cold bread.
He changed in a way I could not predict. He started to study, reading a battered English book at night. He sketched things on napkins. He gave me the small things he collected because he thought I liked them.
"You're trying to out-study me?" I joked once.
"Maybe," he said, cheeks red. "I want to study like you do."
He was clumsy at emotion. He was brash and then gentle. Once he stuck a tired hand out and rubbed my hair to get a knot out, and I felt something like a warm current run through me.
When rumors at school about the biscuit box and the diary fanned the flames, the house became a tinderbox again. Vernon accused my mother of lying about me. My mother said she would accept whatever punishment came. The worst part for me was that what I wanted — to stay — felt like the selfish thing that broke them apart.
In desperation I tried to fix things with an apology I wrote myself and signed with a clumsy thumbprint. I wanted to kneel in front of Vernon and ask him to forgive my mother so that Nono would keep both parents.
"Don't!" Preston said, alarm in his voice. "I'm your family. Let me talk to him."
He took the paper and went to the hospital where Vernon lay. He returned with tired eyes but a small smile that broke my heart in a kind, hopeful way.
"My father will think," he said. "He'll set things right."
He did set a thing right by telling his father how much Nono meant to him. Vernon and my mother talked. Vernon finally agreed to consider staying, to live with the mess and to make room for me.
But then the secret from the diary — that my mother had loved Ace Price — spread. The small town loves a scandal. Someone found Ace Price's contact, someone else found a number of places he had lived. The past can't stay hidden forever.
I wanted him nowhere near us. I wanted the man who abandoned her to disappear like a bad smell.
I tracked Ace Price down with a group of people who had known my mother at the time — neighbors, a woman who once taught her at university, and a man who had the habit of keeping old letters. We found him in a nearby city, living small and neat in a rented room, as if his life were still half packed.
I did not plan to bring him to the house. I wanted only to force him to see what he had done.
But the town needed a reckoning. People wanted him to be seen.
"You're the one who left her pregnant," I said when he opened the door. "Do you know what that did?"
He smiled like a man with nothing to lose. "I did what I had to do."
"Do you understand that your choice has names? That there are faces?"
He shrugged. "I moved on. So did she."
"Move on?" I repeated, and my voice shook. "Do you know what you did to a child?"
He looked at me like I was a stray animal making noise.
"Come with us," the woman who had taught my mother said. "Go to the community center tonight. Sit in the light. Let people tell you what you did."
He laughed, then his face curdled when the crowd showed up, when the faces of my mother's old neighbors filled the hall. He had not expected witnesses. He had expected silence, or at most apologies arranged quietly.
The hall smelled of coffee and old wood. People sat in rows. My mother stayed in the back, hands clenched so tight her knuckles were white. Vernon sat beside her, protective and yet helpless in his own way.
"She left a child that day because you left," one woman said. "She tried to raise a life with your ghost for years and you did not send a note."
His eyes narrowed. He moved like someone pushed by memory. "People move on," he said. "I had to keep my life. I had school. I had plans."
"You had a plan that included a promise," another voice snapped. "You promised to marry her."
He looked smaller then. He tried to speak, then looked away. "I didn't mean—"
"Meaning changes nothing," a teacher said. "You had a duty."
People started to talk. Voices layered up like a river. I stood up then because I couldn't sit through a roomful of speech about other people's pain. I walked to the front and held the pink diary like an accusation.
"This book," I said, "had pages that told of a child and a promise. He tore that promise apart."
Ace's face flushed. "So what? It's past."
"It is not past," I said. "We are here."
He laughed then, but it was thin and hollow. "You're making a scene."
"A scene?" someone in the back said. "You made a life for us a scene, sir."
He stood, trembling with anger that tried to look like calm. "You don't know me," he said. "You don't know what I had to do."
"I know everything," I said, and for the first time I felt something fiercer than embarrassment. "You left a small girl because you were afraid of what you'd lose. You left a woman to raise a child alone. You made her think she deserved nothing."
The room was loud enough to hurt. Phones recorded faces, neighbors whispered and nodded. I saw in Ace Price’s mouth the slow beginning of panic.
"Are you going to apologize?" the teacher asked.
He tried to, then faltered. "I'm sorry...for—"
His words were drowned in the sound of the room. Someone who had once been his friend stood up and read from a letter Ace had written years ago — a love letter turned list of conditions. The letter was clear: he had demanded she quit school. He had asked for a life without risk. He had the audacity to make her choose.
People felt cheated on behalf of my mother. A woman yelled, "You owe her a life," and clapped her hands once. Another person snapped photos. Someone began to chant, not loudly at first, then with a rhythm: "Shame! Shame!"
Ace turned red and then white. He tried to smooth his shirt. He called me names. "You don't know what sacrifice is," he snarled.
"Sa-cri-fice," an old neighbor said, slowly. "You mean cowardice."
He began to shake. "This is not fair!" he cried.
"Nothing about what you did was fair," my mother said from the back, quiet and steady.
His face shifted — from arrogance to confusion, then to the slow crumble of someone who realizes people refuse to let him look away. He tried to deny what he had done. "I had reasons."
"People with reasons go to war," the teacher said. "People who abandon don't."
He sat down abruptly, as if the chair might not hold him. His hands covered his face. "Please," he whispered, "I didn't mean—"
There was an ugly silence. Then someone slammed their palm on the table. "Show your face to the child you left," someone said. "Stand and tell her you failed."
"I can't," he murmured.
"Then you own what you are," a voice said.
He crumpled. A thin, helpless sound escaped him. The room watched him like a creature before a storm. He began to move through the protocol of denial: anger, then bargaining, then a breakdown against a wall of cold witnesses. Cameras recorded everything. People who had been hurt by similar men filed out with their own stories. The public shame was not theatrical; it was a reckoning. He had to face not just me but all the lives he had stepped across.
"Record this," someone said, handing their phone to a neighbor. "Let him see himself in a thousand faces."
He stood suddenly, voice transparent with pleading. "Please. Please—"
The crowd hissed like a tide. Some people applauded. A group of older women stood up and began to list the consequences: he would be known in his town as a man who left. Employers would see the videos. Friends would look away. He would have to live with the echo of the room.
Ace's denial broke. Tears leaked, then broke into a storm of words that wanted to be apologies but were too late. He begged, but he had stepped into a public place and the only thing that could happen there was the public collapsing of a false self. The festival of his life was over.
I stayed until the hall emptied and the lights dimmed. I watched him as he was led out into the buzz of judgment. Around us people murmured that the shame would follow him like rain.
It felt like justice. It felt like a kind of mercy, too, because he could no longer walk away from what he was. He had to watch what he had made.
Afterwards, in the street, someone took my hand. It was my mother. "You did the right thing," she said, and her voice was gentle and wild. Vernon held Nono and smiled, small and relieved.
Preston looked at me and his rough face softened. "You were brave," he said. "You made him face it."
I shrugged like I could bear the burden. "I just wanted him to not disappear again."
That public shame did not fix everything. My mother could not forget easily. Old wounds reopened, and our family had scars that would take a long time to heal. But for the first time the town knew that a man could be called to account for leaving a child.
Our days returned to a rhythm. I kept working. I kept going to school. Preston and I sat on roofs and made plans we did not know how to reach. He taught me to kick a ball. I taught him math tricks. We were two awkward pieces being forced to live near one another until slowly the pieces learned to fit.
"Are you afraid?" he asked one night, head on my shoulder in the dark, as if the sky above us could hold our secrets.
"Always," I answered. "But not of you."
He laughed softly. "Good. I don't want to be a thing to be afraid of."
He kissed the top of my head like it was an afterthought, or like it was something careful.
The day I decided to leave, the house felt small and enormous at once. Vernon had insisted the family keep their home for Nono and my mother, and told me to go to a boarding school he had arranged. "You need a chance," he said, awkward and gentle. "You deserve it."
I agreed because the math of staying was cruel. My leaving felt like both escape and betrayal.
On the morning I left, Preston chased the bus.
"You don't have to do this," I said from the window.
"I have to," he said. "You promised you'd come back for the seven-star show."
I smiled despite the weight. "You promised to study."
"I will," he said, breathless. "I will study and study until I'm not the joke anymore."
He pedaled faster, muscles aching. The bus moved like a slow animal around him. For one impossible second he kept up.
"Don't forget us," he screamed above the hum.
"I won't," I screamed back, and as the bus swallowed the gap between us his image blurred and finally dissolved into the glass.
When I left I did not cry. I had already burned and rebuilt myself so many times that my grief had become a hard, sensible thing. But when I pressed my hand against the bus window and felt the cold glass, I thought of the pink rabbit diary, of the biscuit box that broke a house, and of the boy who chased a bus until he could not.
There were letters. He sent postcards with drawings. He sent a crooked math problem he had solved. He sent photographs of him with a book he had finished. He grew in small increments and I watched him in distance and pride.
Years later, at graduation, I went back to the town. Vernon had stayed. My mother smiled with the slow, careful smile of someone who had chosen to live, not survive. Nono was taller and forever bossy. Preston stood there, hair longer and eyes softer, and when he saw me he did something like a small bow and then ran to hug me properly in front of everyone.
"You always run after buses," I teased.
He laughed. "You always walk away."
We were both right. We had both been running toward something. We had both been learning how to stay.
And when he took my hand, it was steady, like a small anchor. I kept a page from the pink diary still, hidden in a book many years later. It was not for me to burn anymore. It was a map of where we came from.
On the night of the seven-star alignment we went back to the abandoned playground where we had slept like thieves. We lay on the grass and watched the sky stitch light.
"Remember when you promised?" he asked.
"I do," I said, and the stars moved over us like a soft promise.
He squeezed my hand. "Let's look for other things we promised — the boring safe promises, like being honest, being brave, being kind."
"I'll make you a promise," I told him. "But it's not about the future. It's about this: if the world ever asks you to run away, you stay."
"You too," he said.
We watched the sky. In the grass under us the ticket I had thrown long ago rustled in my pocket like a small, patient heart.
The End
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