He opens the door wider. “Come in. You’re freezing.”
Nope. Just terrified.
I haven’t been inside his house since that day I drove him home, when he taught me how to play guitar and I learned all about Devon. I step inside and drop my car keys on the entry table where I left them last time.
And that’s when it hits me. I jumped out of the car without checking the odometer. For a split second, I consider going back outside, but AJ is already walking toward his room. He looks over his shoulder, sees me hesitating, and gestures for me to follow him.
I force myself to walk down the hallway, trying to think about him and nothing else, ignoring the intense urge I’m feeling to sprint back to the car and park correctly.
Last time, when he closed the door behind us, I didn’t know where to go or what to do, but this time, I walk straight to his bed and sit on the edge. I’m relieved when he sits next to me. He leans back on his hands, looking serious. Or maybe he’s still freaked out, I can’t really tell.
“What do you want to know?” he asks.
I take a deep breath and blow it out slowly. “Everything,” I say.
The small smile that forms on his lips makes me relax a bit.
“Mr. B told me the whole story when he gave me the key at the end of last year. He met Caroline when she was a sophomore. One day during lunch, he opened the door to the storage room next to the cafeteria, and found her hiding in there, all alone. It took some doing, but eventually she admitted it wasn’t the first time; she had been eating there every day since the middle of her freshman year.”
I picture her in one of her funny T-shirts, eating a sandwich while nestled among mop buckets and dustpans, and I want to cry. Or punch something. Possibly both at the same time.
“I guess people were mean to her. She told him she didn’t have any friends, and she was too embarrassed to eat alone in the quad, so she ate alone in the storage closet because she couldn’t think of anyplace else to go.”
My heart sinks deep in my chest. I remember saying almost the same thing to Shrink-Sue at the beginning of the school year. She asked why I wouldn’t leave the Crazy Eights. I said I didn’t have anywhere else to go.
“Caroline and Mr. B became friends. He started bringing his lunch and joining her. At some point, she told him about her poems, and eventually she let him read some of them. She told him about this crazy idea she’d had to start a secret poetry club.
“Mr. B didn’t think it was so crazy. He showed her a room underneath the theater that the drama department hadn’t used in years. He installed the lock, hid the seams with paint, and moved some furniture inside. Caroline started filling one corner with her poetry. Over time, she met a few people she felt she could trust. She told them about the room, and by the end of the year, the other walls were filling up, too. I guess she wasn’t the only one who needed a place to go.”
I came over to AJ’s house today because I needed to know what brought him to Poet’s Corner, and when he says that last part, things begin to fall into place. My eyes well up.
“You needed a place to go,” I say, and he nods.
“Emily and I had freshman English together. It was still really hard for me to talk in class, and she caught me doing my strumming-on-my-jeans thing. She asked me about it. Eventually, she brought me downstairs.”
“AJ,” I whisper. I wipe my eyes, but all I really want to do right now is throw my arms around his neck and kiss him like I’ve done so many times over the last few weeks. But I’m so afraid of what will happen if I do. Will he push me away? Will he tell me it’s over? I don’t want to lose him, and I can’t tell if I already have. I wish he’d touch me. My heart starts racing, my hands feel clammy, the thoughts are gathering and swirling, and I start panicking.
Why won’t he touch me?
And then, as quickly as they began, the thoughts stop. Completely. Inside my head it’s eerily quiet. And I know what I need to do.
Caroline’s been giving me words, and they’ve worked. But they were never her words. They were always mine. My words got AJ to let me into Poet’s Corner, both times. When I told him how I name my playlists, he paid attention and wanted to know more. When we were at the pool that night, he begged me to talk to him. When I finally told him what I was thinking, he kissed me. Every time I talk to him, he comes closer.
He wants me to talk to him.
And suddenly, I hear Caroline’s voice, calm and clear, as if she were sitting right next to me.
Don’t think. Go.
I look over my left shoulder, expecting to see her there, but the space is empty. I follow her instructions anyway.
“My mind messes with me,” I say, talking in that unfiltered way he likes, not measuring my words and not quite certain about what’s coming out until I hear myself say it. I scratch the back of my neck hard three times, no longer caring if he notices. “It’s been happening as long as I can remember. I can’t turn off my thoughts. I can’t sleep without being drugged into it. My mind just…never stops working.
“I was diagnosed with OCD when I was eleven. I’ve been on antianxiety medication ever since. I have this amazing psychiatrist named Sue who is, like, my lifeline, and I see her every Wednesday afternoon.”
This is harder than I expected. I take a moment to gather my thoughts, looking around at his posters and his messy desk. I see his clipboard on the floor next to his guitar, and together, they seem to calm me. I shake out my hands.
“For a long time, my friendship with the Eights has been…challenging for me. So when school started, Sue and I decided to channel my energy into positive things, like my swimming,” I say. “That’s been good. Then I met Caroline, and that was really good. And then I found Poet’s Corner, and started writing poetry, and met a bunch of amazing people, and then there was you. And I felt healthy for the first time in years. I thought I was getting better. But as it turns out, I was getting worse.”
I study his body language like I do with Sue each week, watching the way he moves in direct correlation to the words I say. It’s slight, almost imperceptible, but I notice when he props his hand on his bed and leans in a tiny bit closer to me.
Let your guard down.
“Caroline was my friend,” I say as the tears slide down my cheeks. “And now she’s gone and I can’t quite decide how I’m supposed to feel about that. I’m embarrassed that I made her up in the first place, but I’m also so sad that she’s not part of my life anymore.”
Keep talking.
“But when I was downstairs this afternoon, I realized something: I don’t regret bringing her to life. Not even for a second. Because she’s this better part of me, you know? She speaks her mind and she doesn’t care what people think about her. I’ve always been too scared to be that person, but that’s who I want to be, all the time, not only when I’m alone with you, and not just on Monday and Thursday afternoons during lunch.”
I can tell I’m rambling, but I can’t stop now. I’m letting the words tumble out of my mouth, still wishing he’d touch me, hug me, kiss me, do something—anything—to make me stop talking. But he doesn’t speak and he doesn’t move. He just listens.
“It was as if she knew it was time for me to tap into this better person. So she showed me where to find you. All of you. These seven amazing people who seem to know how to pull her out of me.”
“Sam,” he says, and before I can interpret the tone in his voice, he closes the distance, and finally, I feel his thumbs on my cheeks. He rests his forehead against mine, just like he did that night in the pool, and I wait for him to kiss me, but he doesn’t.
Keep going.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about me. I should have, but all my life, I’ve just wanted to be normal. You made me feel like I was. I was afraid that if I told you, I wouldn’t feel normal anymore.”
He laughs. “I made you feel normal? You do realize I’m pretty far from normal, right?”
“I don’t care,” I say, brushing
my lips against his. “I like you too much. Remember?”
I kiss his dimple first, and then I cover his mouth with mine, kissing him, thinking about how perfect he is, maybe not in every way, but in every way I need him to be. And I’m so relieved when he kisses me back. I feel the thoughts that have haunted me for the last four days pop like bubbles, disappearing into the air, one by one.
“I like you too much, too,” he says.
“Still?” I ask.
“Still,” he says with a huge smile on his face. “Way, way too much.”
After that, we stop talking.
Emily pats the spot next to her and I sit down. I steal a quick glimpse over my shoulder at the couch Caroline and I sat on during the P.M. last Thursday night, but I don’t expect her to be there. Cameron’s got the whole thing to himself today.
“We missed you on Monday,” she says. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” I see AJ taking his usual seat on the orange couch. He catches me looking at him. “It wasn’t, but it is now.” I reach down for my yellow notebook and set it on the cushion next to me. Emily’s holding a napkin in her hand, presumably for today’s reading.
“How’s your mom?” I ask.
She doesn’t look at me. “She came home last weekend.”
“That’s great,” I say enthusiastically. But Emily shakes her head as she twists the napkin around one finger.
“Hospice,” she says, and I feel a pit form deep in my stomach.
“Oh, Emily. I’m so sorry.”
“My dad made it sound like a big event, as if her coming home was a good thing, but, come on…Like I don’t know what fucking hospice is?” She tucks one leg under the other and turns toward me. “The entire living room has been transformed and now it looks nothing like the one she decorated, and there are machines everywhere, and that horrible bed is smack in the middle of the window, like she’s on display for the whole neighborhood or something. But ‘it’s a good thing,’ right?” she says sarcastically. “Because now she can see our front yard during the day.”
Emily rests her elbow on the back of the couch, props her head in her hand, and keeps talking. “I pretended to be happy because I knew it meant a lot to my dad, but now coming home from school every day is absolute torture.” As soon as she says it, her eyes grow wide and her whole face turns bright red. She covers her mouth. “That sounded so horrible. I shouldn’t have said that.”
I picture that cute house she lives in with the cheery paint and the rope swing, knowing that’s what her mom is staring at all day, and I can’t imagine how excruciating it must be for Emily to walk through that blue door and see her mom lying there, slowly dying.
Emily turns away from me, shaking her head in disgust. “Jesus. What kind of person says that about her own mother?”
I’ve said those same what-kind-of-person words myself. They’re especially damaging, the kind of thing that can make a thought-spiral tornado unexpectedly change course, shifting into an entirely new and even more destructive direction. My mom and Sue always have words that help, so I say them to Emily.
“A good person,” I tell her. She catches my eye and gives me a trace of a smile. “Someone who loves her mom and doesn’t want to see her in so much pain.”
She blows out a big breath like she’s air-drying her face. “Thank you,” she whispers toward the ceiling.
The idea comes out of nowhere, and before I give it a second thought, I start blurting. “Come over to my house after school today. We can talk. Or write. Or listen to music, and not talk, and not write, and not think about anything bad at all.”
“I don’t know,” she says, looking down at the floor, picking at her fingernails. “My dad likes me to come straight home after school.”
I point at the phone next to her hip, screen facing up like it always is. “He’ll call if he needs you. I can have you there in ten minutes.” Emily looks like she’s considering it. “You can even stay for dinner if you want to. My mom’s a horrible cook, so you’ll have to pretend to like the food, but my dad is, like, the king of small talk, and my little sister can be kind of funny.”
I force myself to shut up because I can’t tell if all this family talk is making Emily feel better or worse. But then she looks over at me and says, “That sounds nice and…” She pauses for a moment, as if she’s searching for the right word. “Normal.”
Normal.
She’s right. It does sound normal. My life might not be perfect and my brain might play tricks on me and I might be overwhelmed by my own thoughts, but now that I think about it, I’m lucky to have as much normal as I do.
I look at Emily, wondering if I could do for her what Caroline did for me. Wondering if I could pay it forward.
I’ll gauge it, but if she comes over today and it seems like she wants to talk, I’ll ask her questions and listen—really listen, like Caroline listened to me—and keep her talking until she has nothing left to say. If she wants to, I’ll help her write a happy poem about her mom. Something positive. Something she can read to her. And if the moment feels right and she wants a change of subject, I’ll tell her my secrets. I’ll let her in on my OCD and Shrink-Sue and Caroline and the number three, and I’ll talk until she knows everything.
Does she see it in my eyes right now, how much I want to be her friend? Because something shifts in her expression and her whole face lights up, more than I’ve ever seen it do before. “Actually, I’d love that,” she says.
“Okay, who’s up first?” AJ asks from his spot in the front of the room.
I look around. Sydney’s got a wrapper in her hands, but aside from doing a little dance in her seat, she doesn’t move. Emily is still holding her napkin, but she doesn’t look ready to go yet. Jessica and Cameron are holding papers in their hands too, but they don’t stand up and head for the stage either.
“I’ll go,” I say, and before I can think too much about it, I’m standing up, walking to the stage, sitting on the stool. I open my notebook to the right page. “I wrote this on Tuesday in—”
As soon as I speak, my mouth goes dry. I take a deep breath, close my notebook on my lap, and look out into the group, letting my gaze settle on each one of them. I remember the first time I sat up here, staring at these total strangers, feeling terrified about how much of myself I was about to expose.
Things are different now.
“I went through something last weekend,” I say. “And it made me realize it was no mistake that I wandered down here one day and found all of you. So before I read this poem, I just want to say thank you for letting me stay, even though I probably didn’t deserve it and some of you didn’t think I belonged.”
My notebook is still closed on my lap. I don’t open it. I don’t need to. I know these words by heart.
“I wrote this in Poet’s Corner.”
I bring my left hand to my shoulder, exactly where Caroline’s was the first time I sat on this stool and read aloud. My eyes fall shut.
You’re still here
stitched into me, like threads in a sweater.
Feeding me words
that break me down and piece me back together, all at once.
Tightening your grip,
reminding me that I’m not alone.
I never was.
None of us ever are.
You are still here
stitched into the words on these walls.
Every last one.
The room is completely silent. Then everyone starts clapping and whistling, and I open my eyes to find AJ standing up, glue stick ready to launch. I give him one of his trademark chin tilts and he sends it flying. I catch it in midair.
It feels good to rip this poem out of the notebook, and even better to cover the paper with glue. I march to the back of the room, and I find a sliver of empty space on the wall near the hidden door. “Thank you, Caroline,” I whisper as I bring the page to my lips. Then I press it against the wall, running my hand over the words, securing them in place.
Back on stage, Sydney clears her throat dramatically. “Most of you have already heard this tasty treat, but since some of you missed it because you were dealing with ‘car trouble,’” she says with air quotes, locking eyes with AJ, then with me. “I thought I’d read it again.”
I sit next to AJ this time, and he wraps his arms around my waist. I recline against his chest and he rests his chin on my shoulder.
Sydney unfolds a paper In-N-Out hat and positions it on her head. Then she launches into a dramatic reading about the secret menu. She praises the Flying Dutchman and the 2x4, makes us hungry with her descriptions of special sauces and spices and grilled onions, and leaves us mystified about the people who order “cold cheese.” When she finishes her poem, she passes out paper In-N-Out hats to all of us.
We’re all still wearing them as we file out the door. Everyone heads into the hallway, but AJ hangs back.
“What’s the matter?” I ask him.
“Your call, but I’m wondering if that poem of yours is in the right home.” He hands me a glue stick.
He has a point.
I step back inside, remove the page from the wall, and apply a fresh coat of glue to the back. Then I walk over to Caroline’s Corner and find a new spot, right next to her collection.
“Much better,” he says as he anchors my hat on my head.
AJ grabs my hand and leads me up the stairs, back into the real world.
My legs feel wobbly and I’m sure everyone is staring at me as I cross the cafeteria. Alexis and Kaitlyn are on one side of the table; Hailey and Olivia are on the other.
Alexis sees me first. She elbows Kaitlyn and whispers something in her ear. I keep taking brave steps across the room, Sue’s voice in my head, reminding me to hold on to the people who make me stronger and better, and let go of the ones who don’t. Holding on to the Poets was easy. Letting go of the Eights is already proving to be harder than I expected.
“Can I talk to you guys?” I’m asking all of them, but for some reason, I direct the question to Alexis.
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