What's in a Name?

We bumped into each other riding the dodgems at our town's annual fair—my economic reply when later asked how we'd met by an intrusive reporter. In my place, you'd have recounted a more detailed scenario. A tale of being pursued by a hunter pack of hormonal teenagers, and the collisions your skilful manoeuvring avoided before, being outnumbered, you were finally cornered and rammed. We'd only recently become classmates, but a heated interchange post-crash was the first time we'd spoken, although I mostly listened. Your New Yawk drawl and earthy vocabulary sounded brash and colourful to my small-town ears.

Hope was your name, and hope is something I held on to when you entered the classroom on that midterm morning where our teacher introduced you as a new pupil. I hoped you'd notice me, and eventually, because of a forcible introduction, you did. But you then dished out as good as you got, and what soon became a firm friendship, blossomed.

Three years later, on the eve of my leaving for university, I'd called at your house, invited by your parents, for a farewell meal. Entering the kitchen through the patio's folding doors, I met an acrid smell and noticed a pot of your mother's Sunday sauce on the hob burning dry. Extinguishing the flame, I headed next door, to the TV room, and saw your brother lying face up on the carpeted floor; blood-soaked brains oozed from what remained of his brow. Panicking, I cried out your name, and two goons appeared from your father's den. One wore a knuckle duster; the other pulled a gun. Shouting at me to stop, he let off several shots as I turned and sped back through the kitchen. Exiting onto the patio, showered in splinters as the doorframe took a hit from a bullet that whizzed by my ear, I made for the garden, before escaping through a field of maize bordering your property.

The police found you and your mother upstairs in her bedroom, bound, and shot. I'd arrived as the last vestiges of life were being beaten from your father, later reported by the press as a protracted and vengeful death. The perpetrators escaped by hijacking a near neighbour as he reversed out of his property. He'd later be located across the state line in his car's burnt-out shell.

I dodged a bullet that day and over the following months learnt more about the secret you concealed than you could ever reveal—your father's role in organised crime, his taking the stand, and your real name.

The fairytale you'd so expertly spun is what I long for, not the nightmarish realism of witness protection that brought your family to the Midwest and failed you all. A fantasy, I know, but one where Hope is not only your name but also a guiding light. But above all, I yearn for a fantastical reality where your presence is fact and not a dream.