The Words We Keep

Two nights later, I wake for another guerrilla poets rendezvous, to find Alice teetering on top of her desk in pajamas, pulling the glow-in-the-dark stars off the ceiling.

“What are you doing?” I whisper as I fumble for my socks, trying not to wake Margot next to me.

“Redecorating.” She hops off the desk and stands, hands on hips, surveying our room. “This place is in desperate need of a makeover, and I found this amazing paint color—seafoam green.”

Alice steps into my side of the room for the first time since she got home, pressing a greenish-blue paint sample to the wall.

“It’s going to look incredible.” She eyes the shoes I’m lacing up. “What are you doing? Don’t think I haven’t noticed you sneaking out lately in the dead of night.”

“I learned from the best,” I say, and Alice smiles, and I try not to get my hopes up too high that she’s really back, the old Alice I’ve been searching for. She’s been waking up more and more since her comedy show, but tonight she seems particularly original Alice. “It’s for this art contest.”

“It has to be done at night?”

“Yeah.”

She cocks her head to the side like she’s trying to understand my intentionally vague answers. “Could this have anything to do with Micah?” She smiles the most Alice-like smile she’s given me in a long time as she holds up another paint sample to the wall, and I decide I agree with her: a fresh start is exactly what this room needs.

I finish tying my shoes and hold a hoodie out to her. “Do you want to, maybe, come?”

—

She’s dressed in two minutes flat, like she’s as eager as I am to resurrect the old Alice, the girl who was always up for adventure. We tiptoe down the stairs. Alice recoils when her foot sets off the creaky wood. She covers her mouth, eyes smiling. Suddenly we’re eight and ten again, sneaking down on Christmas morning to shake all the presents before Dad gets up.

We walk the fog-filled streets toward the school, the eeriness of the one a.m. silence surrounding us. We don’t talk, but it feels nice not to walk alone, the heady smell of jasmine in the air. Micah is already at the school, lying on the grass next to his bike, looking at the stars. He hops up when he sees us.

“What’s this? A visitor?”

“Yes, but to what, I’m still not sure,” Alice says, looking from me to him and back again. “What’s this all about?”

Micah opens his arms wide.

“This? Why, this is the nightly meeting of the GPRH!”

“The what now?” Alice says.

“The guerrilla poets of Ridgeline High!”

I lower Micah’s arms. “The name’s a work in progress.”

“I’ve said it before, dear Lily. We are all a work in progress.” He smiles at me, and it sets off a storm of butterflies in my stomach. We haven’t really talked since our date-not-date or addressed the way our bodies swayed together, or how every time I close my eyes, I can still feel him against me.

“Wait,” Alice says, looking at the chalk in Micah’s hand. “You’re the anonymous poets?”

“How do you know about that?” I ask.

“Ridgeline Underground, of course. A girl’s gotta keep up on the local gossip.”

Micah elbows me. “See. We’re famous.”

I shake my head. “Nope. Nope. Nope. Not famous. Anonymous. And that’s how it has to stay. Agreed?” I turn a finger to Micah and then Alice, waiting for each to nod in agreement.

“Well, whatever. I just can’t believe it’s you guys,” Alice says. “Who writes the poems?”

“I do.”

“You do?” She leans back slightly, eyes narrowing like she doesn’t quite believe it. “Huh.”

Micah holds up the bucket of chalk. “Shall we?”

He’s also brought a bunch of magnetic poetry strips to scatter anywhere they’ll stick. Alice goes to scope out magnetic hot spots while Micah and I start on the chalk outside the front doors, since our original art has faded away. I write my latest poem about Alice saving me in the ocean—Through the waves she reaches me—while he draws two hands clasped together.

“So about the other night,” he says, clearing his throat. “I don’t usually make a habit of slow dancing with my project partners.”

I focus intently on the chalk pressing into the pavement as he continues.

“And maybe it was nothing, and I definitely don’t want to misread signals again, but for a second there, it felt like—I don’t know—it felt like something.”

He scans my face.

“Or maybe…” He clears his throat again, looking away from me. “Or maybe we were just high on art and had a moment of artistic indiscretion?”

He says this like a question. One I’m supposed to answer. And the answer is that it was NOT a moment of indiscretion—it was a moment of truth. I know what friendship feels like, and this is not it. You don’t know the outline of your friends’ jawlines, or feel a jolt when you see his name on your messages. You’re not aware of exactly where a friend’s body is in relation to yours, and you definitely don’t lie in bed replaying the hungry way he said your name in the dark, the voracious way he looked at your lips.

But that’s not part of the Plan.

You have to focus

for your family

your future.

So even though I want to tell him I felt a spark in the darkness, too, I don’t. I can’t.

“Totally an art high,” I say. “Bad case of guerrilla poets gone wild.”

“Totally,” Micah says. I know his face too well to believe it.

Alice returns, clearly sensing the awkward tension, but she launches into a full report on bleachers and light poles where the magnetic poetry will stick. She watches as I finish my poem.

and I can breathe again

“It’s about us,” I say. “About that day at the beach? When we swam out too far?”

Alice nods. “And when we made it back to shore, Dad hugged us so hard, we almost broke.”

“He probably wanted to kill us for going out so far. But you were fearless, making up stuff about being explorers.”

She smiles absently, as if she’s caught up in a memory of her own.

“I don’t remember feeling all that fearless.” She surfaces from her memory and looks around the school grounds. “So you only do it outside?”

“Mostly, and usually at night.”

She studies the school building, and for the first time since she got home, she has a true Alice spark in her eyes.

“What if I knew a way in? I mean, wouldn’t it be totally badass to take your guerrilla poetry inside?”

Micah shakes his head. “No way.”

“Hold up, hold up,” I say, my brain zapping with possibility, the same way it did when I first got this whole random-acts-of-poetry idea. “If we go in, we could do something big. Like a guerrilla takeover.”

“Lil—”

But before either of us can say any more, Alice is off, running toward the school. She disappears around the side of the building, and then reappears on top of the roof thirty seconds later.

“It’s open!” Alice’s voice reverberates in the night. She beckons us from the roof, her eyes lit up so bright, I can see them from here.

Micah stares at me. “Your call, Larkin.”

I think out loud, half trying to convince Micah, and half myself.

“Something like this could be just what we need to win.”

Plus, Alice is looking down at me, eyes wide. She looks alive and wild like the Alice from my memories.

“I know it’s crazy,” I say. “But then again, who isn’t a little nuts in the Hundred Acre Wood?”

Micah looks at me again, trying to act stern, but the upturn of his lips gives him away.

Part of me thinks this is the worst idea ever. But another part of me, one that is making my heart race, wants to go on another adventure with my big, brave sister.

I toss the chalk into the bucket.

“Let’s do it.”