Chapter Text
Evan is superstitious.
This is an undisputed fact, half influenced by his upbringing and half by his desperate need to control the world around him. So if centuries of old wives tales tell Evan to throw salt over his shoulder when he spills it and wear blue for good luck, he’ll do it, no matter how weird it seems.
There is a difference, however, between knocking on wood to counter a jinx and having a small boy appear in your house unexpectedly.
The boy sits in Evan’s desk chair, his legs dangling above the ground as he twists the chair back and forth.
“Please stop,” Evan says. “You’re going to give me a headache.”
The boy doesn’t stop, though. Just swings his feet in the air and sucks on his red-and-white striped candy cane.
“What-what’s your name?” Evan asks. He doesn’t know if the boy has a name, after all, he was just... there when he woke up. Maybe he’s an orphan. Maybe he’s a ghost.
“Connor O-gwen Murphy,” the boy says proudly.
Evan’s heart stops. Connor Murphy. It’s got to be a different Connor Murphy, right? Not the Connor Murphy from school, the scary one who everyone says does hard drugs whenever he skips class.
He never believed the rumors, but they were hardly outside of the realm of imagination.
“Con-Connor Murphy? Do-do you have a, um, a sister?”
“Yep!” The boy, Connor, says. “She’s four an’ her name’s Zoe.”
So if Zoe’s four, that means that, if this is truly Connor, Evan’s Connor, the kid is six. “Do you, um, do you know how you got here?”
“Nope!” Connor responds, sucking happily on his candy cane. “I jus’ got here.”
“Are- are you real?”
“I think so,” he says. “I feel real. Hey, what if you hit me? Then if I feel it I’ll know if I’m real.”
“I-I’m not punching a kid.” Evan feels like he’s hallucinating. He did take his meds last night, he’s positive of that.
“Do you like Spiderman?” Connor asks, halting any thoughts Evan might be having.
“Uh… no? I’ve, uh, never watched any of the movies.”
“What ‘bout the comics?” Connor is leaning forward in his seat, and his feet are swinging madly. “Can you read? How old are you?”
“I’ve- I’ve never read any of the comics, either.” A sharp pain has started in Evan’s temples. “I’m seventeen. I’m a senior in high school.”
“Seventeen is old. I’m only six.” Connor has that all-knowing voice that little kids get when they talk about things like how old they are, their siblings, or their favorite movies (or comics, in this case).
“I know,” Evan says, pressing his palm against the side of his face.
“How do you know? Are you a-a staker?”
Evan gets the impression that Connor’s parents aren’t the type to correct the way he says things because they think the mistake is adorable. And he has to agree, little Connor is pretty cute. His brown hair is curly and short, and his face is heart-shaped and elvish with a smattering of freckles across his nose. He smiles conspiratorially, a thin mischievous grin, lopsided and awkward.
“No. I-I just, um, assumed.” Evan forces a smile.
“Oh.” Connor looks a little disappointed to have not caught a real life ‘staker’ in the flesh.
“Hey. Do you, um, want to come downstairs and-and I could make you some, uh, hot chocolate. Would you like that?” Evan asks.
“Yeah!” Connor says, nodding quickly.
Evan stands up and stretches. He beckons for Connor to follow him downstairs into the kitchen, where he sits him down at the table and goes about making the hot chocolate.
“So,” he says as he pours the mix into the mug, “do you, uh, maybe have parents I could call, or-“
But when he turns around Connor is gone, leaving Evan with a mug of hot chocolate, a throbbing headache, and more questions than answers.
-
When Evan’s mom comes home, she doesn’t seem to know about the kid who was just in her house.
She does, however, ask about the smell. When Evan looked up how to keep away ghosts, it said to hang hazelnuts and garlic around the house and to place your shoes at the foot of your bed, one facing towards the bed and one facing away. They didn’t have hazelnuts, so Evan had to do with old garlic cloves from the spice cabinet and hope that it would work.
“What’s that smell?” She says as soon as she walks in the door. “Evan, did you cook something?”
Evan sits at the kitchen table with a now-cold cup of hot chocolate the same way he had for what seemed like hours. “No. It’s just garlic.”
“What were you doing, keeping away vampires?” Heidi teases.
Evan frowns. “Ghosts.”
She laughs softly, and the noise sounds like the ringing of a bell. “Okay.”
Evan wonders if hallucinations are a side effect of his new medication. Sleep aids usually don’t do things like that, but you never really know what such a cocktail of drugs will do to your body. “Do you, um… I’m going to go. Check something out.”
“But I just got home!” She protests. And Evan feels guilty.
“It’ll be quick.” Evan runs upstairs and desperately checks the label of the bright orange pill bottle on his bedside. Burning or tingling in arms, feet or legs. Changes in appetite, constipation, diarrhea. Dizziness. Daytime drowsiness. Nothing. A wave of helplessness washes over him. Evan is going crazy and there is no way to explain it. Unless the kid actually was in the house and had left somehow when he wasn’t looking…
“Evan?” Heidi calls from downstairs.
Right.
Evan nearly trips over his moved-around shoes leaving. And even though ghosts are pretty bad, Evan doesn’t think he can handle having his shoes all mixed up forever.
But tripping over shoes seems to be a pretty mediocre price to pay to not have little ghost boys drive you insane.
On the way downstairs, Evan inspects the wall for sticky fingerprints. The kid’s hands were covered in candy cane residue, and Evan remembers dragging his fingers against the wall as a kid.
But there’s nothing. No fingerprints, no traces anyone in the house except Evan. The same faint traces of humanity that had been filling the house the whole summer. The only clues to any life in the house are barely there: chinese takeout containers in the trash, a halfway-drunk glass of water on the counter, the musty smell of an old shower. Evan can’t wait for school to start, even if only to escape the void of his house.
“Hey, Evan?” Heidi calls from downstairs. “We don’t have any food in the house and my stomach is about to eat itself. I’m going to the store, do you want to come?”
Evan pauses and stares at the wall, at the fingerprint smudges along the paint, shoulder-height and not at all six-year-old hands. Evan places his own hand against them. “I, uh, I have stuff to do.”
“If you come, I’ll let you pick what flavor ice cream to buy!” Heidi barters. And Evan troops downstairs, not motivated by his mother’s bribe but by the pleading in her voice. The desperate attempts to connect with her son.
“Great,” she says when Evan appears in the doorway. “Just for coming, I won’t buy those Trader Joe’s dumplings you hate so much.”
“I don’t-“
Heidi grazes her hand agains Evan’s shoulder, as if confirming his reality. “I know you hate them, honey. Come on, I want to go before everything closes.”
Evan walks mutely with his mother to the car, where the radio starts to play some sort of country song, upbeat and full of fiddle, to which Heidi wrinkles her nose. However, she neglects to change the station.
It’s a comforting song that feels vaguely like summer camp. Rock me mama, or something.
Evan can feel himself slipping out of the world, collapsing in on himself as the fiddles play tonelessly in his ears. But it isn’t an altogether unpleasant experience. This time, the chasm in his chest he retreated to was warm and cozy. Not like the cave it usually was.
The radio switches songs, and Evan doesn’t even realize he had closed his eyes until he opens them to see the grocery store in all its fluorescent glory. Evan wants to sleep in the heat of the car until the afternoon fades into dusk and his face sticks to the sweaty leather of the car seat.
But instead, he follows Heidi inside like an obedient dog. “Can you get, uh…” Heidi scans the list. “Can you get some pasta? Whatever kind you want. I want to do some actual cooking tonight.” She looks too happy about this.
Evan nods and wanders the aisles until he finds the shelves of pasta. He chooses a box of spaghetti and walks back, trying to find his mother again. There’s someone seated by the dairy, scribbling furiously in a composition notebook. When Evan walks by, the person lifts their head and brushes their long hair from their face. They grin, and the smile is eerily familiar.
“Evan?”
Heidi emerges from the aisles to find Evan standing there. When he looks back, the person is gone. A piece of paper rests on the butter, and without thinking, Evan crams it in his pocket.
“I’ve got the pasta.”
Heidi takes the spaghetti from Evan’s hands and places it neatly in the cart. “What was that paper?”
“Oh. It was. Um.” Evan’s hand finds its way to the paper, where he touches the ripped edges as if to make sure the paper hadn’t disappeared like its author had. “Something from school, uh, fell out of my pocket.”
An obvious lie, as school wasn’t starting for another three days. But Heidi buys it.
On the drive home, the radio plays pop music and the pint of strawberry ice cream freezes Evan’s hands, even inside its bag. The paper in his pocket is aggressively There and Evan wants to take it out and read it but he can’t, not just yet. Not while his mom is sitting next to him, mumbling along to some sugary soprano whose notes Heidi can’t quite hit.
His mom makes spaghetti and some boxed meatballs and uses the entire can of tomato sauce, something Evan would’ve prefered she hadn’t done. Even though he knows it’s stupid and childish, Evan had always preferred his pasta with just plain butter instead. As they eat and engage in mediocre conversation, Evan can only think of the piece of paper in his pocket and whoever had dropped it.
“I bet senior year is going to be great for you,” Heidi says. “I’m sure you’ll make lots of friends.”
“What do you know about ghosts?” Evan asks, except he doesn’t. Instead, he says, “yeah.”
“Promise me you’ll reach out to people.” Heidi takes a bite of pasta. “I know it’s hard, but you need to make connections.” She points her fork at her son. “I don’t want another year of you sitting at home on your computer saying you don’t have any friends.”
“I found a weird note at the store,” Evan says. “Want to see it?” But he doesn’t. He just frowns and says, “me neither.”
There is nothing good that can come out of a mysterious paper left by a mysterious stranger in the grocery store, Evan thinks. The paper is in his hand and his bedroom door is locked. Heidi is downstairs, watching TV.
Unaware.
Evan unfolds the paper. It’s folded neatly in quarters, one edge jagged and ripped like it was torn from a notebook. The first line almost makes his heart stop.
There across the top of the page, in handwriting that is not his own, are the words, “Dear Evan Hansen.”
It was for him. The note, the person in the dairy aisle. It was all meant for his eyes to see.
There’s a small paragraph in the middle, and in the margin the same hand has scrawled, “DON’T CHEAT. DON’T LIE.” over and over again like in those horror video games Jared makes Evan watch him play.
Evan stands up and checks outside, half expecting the shadowy form of a man waiting on the lawn with an axe or something.
The paragraph in the middle seemed to be some sort of poem, one that Evan couldn’t really comprehend.
“I would leave fond farewells to friends
If that’s what they happened to be
And all the harm that e’er I’ve done,
Alas, it was to none but me
I leave behind this broken life
And give to you my lone goodbye
Don’t be a liar, know your desire,
Thus with a kiss I die.”
Evan doesn’t want to believe this.
He doesn’t want to think of the possibility that someone he had never met in the grocery store A) knows who he is, and B) had chosen to write him what looks vividly like a suicide note.
Isn’t it?
Evan’s stomach lurches and he’s tasting old, acidic pasta and for a second, Evan is positive that he’s going to puke all over his bed and the paper.
But the nausea goes away, and Evan is left with a sick feeling and a sinking hunch that somebody just died. A stranger in the dairy aisle has died and Evan is the only one who has the suicide note.
Tomorrow, Evan is going to look through the obituaries.