The Words We Keep

I spend my suspension waiting. For Micah to message. For Gifford to tell me she can save my future.

I wait

and wait

and wait.

Across the room, Alice sticks ideas onto the wall for her YouTube channel until she crashes at one a.m. still in her clothes. I Google Deadman’s Cliff and read anything I can find about Micah’s dad. I force myself to look at the pictures, read the words, the descriptions of the wife and little boy left behind. As I read, I pick at my scabs. In fact, I purposefully dig until I bleed. I like the sting—I want it—as if pain can pay my penance.

I skip the pre-state track scrimmage on Saturday. I’m sick.

At least that’s what I tell Dad. My stomach does hurt, but technically, it hasn’t stopped hurting since the loudspeaker summoned me to the office and my life started unraveling thread by thread. It hurts in waves—big crashing peaks that overtake my whole body when they hit. I curl into a fetal ball in my bed and wait for the tide to wash back out.

I watch the minutes tick by on my clock during the track meet. They’re doing their stretches now. They’re on the starting blocks. Crossing the finish line.

They probably don’t even notice you’re gone.

Dad checks on me, but he stands at my door instead of sitting on my bed. He’s barely spoken to me since the principal’s office. He doesn’t tell me what a massive disappointment I am. I haven’t told him that I lost the scholarship.

I don’t say other things, too.

I’m sorry.

I’m still your good girl.

Aren’t I?

We dance around each other, a silent and deliberate duet of moves and bends and twists.

Alice, on the other hand, won’t shut up. She’s standing by my bed, wearing a bright pink short-sleeve T-shirt, the brightest color she’s worn since Fairview. Her scars are easily visible on her arms—light pink and fading, but still there.

“I’m actually getting kind of pumped about this therapy group next week. I have all these questions I’m gonna ask for my video. Oh! I’m going to do an interview with Micah, too. Have you heard from him, by the way? He’s not returning my calls. Should we go see him? I think we should go see him. What do you think?”

My head pounds. “I think that’s a lot of questions.”

Something dings on her computer, and she’s off again, zipping back and forth between helping Margot with her math flash cards and editing her videos.

Margot smiles at me and leans in close. “It’s working.”

“What is?”

She rolls her eyes. “The Patronus.” She eyebrow-gestures to Alice. “Those Dementors are all but gone.”

I retreat to the 100-acre-wood. It’s empty. All Micah’s drawings, deleted.

You did this.

I carve new tracks in my stomach.

My barely healed spots gape open.

—

Everyone at school knows.

They stare at me in the halls when I come back after my two-day suspension. Whisper as I walk by.

A few people tell me how amazing our poetry was. How sorry they are about Micah. They want to know how he is. I lie and tell them he’s fine. The Artists are wearing bright socks with fruit and palm trees and jungle animals on them, in solidarity with what they’re calling a total miscarriage of justice—a violation of First Amendment rights.

In the lobby, the paper has been torn down, along with Micah’s eagle wings. A shiny new poster full of Ridgeline’s code of conduct has replaced the blackout poem. A smattering of Post-it notes and magnetic poetry show up randomly, but for the most part, the words are gone.

I eat my lunch in the bathroom stall where I found my first words. My poem has been taken down. The wall scrubbed clean like it never happened.

In English, all the other partnerships are still buzzing about the projects they turned in during my suspension. Gifford says they’ll pick a winner soon, and Kali doesn’t even bother to flaunt her certain victory in front of me. I’m no longer a threat. I sit on the floor in the art room, Micah’s hoodie pulled up tight around my ears, as I fumble to make something out of the junk pile. Damon leers at me the entire time.

“I tried to warn you,” he says. “Once a psycho, always a psycho.”

Sam yells from across the room, “Hey, douche-canoe, why don’t you mind your own business for once in your sad little life?”

She smiles faintly at me before turning back to her partner.

She just feels sorry for you.

She’s blocked you.

Cut

you

out

from her phone and her life.

Smart girl.

What did you ever do for her?

I pick up a fork and try to make something beautiful, like Micah did, but I just end up with barely bent junk. I want to say something back to Damon, hurt him the way he hurt Micah. Accuse him of doing the spray-paint, but my words fail me. I see now what Micah meant about staying quiet. Everyone would love to see me lose it. Validate all the rumors.

As I walk through the parking lot in the afternoon, it’s raining, and Damon and his friends make cuckoo calls after me from where they gather around his car. My hand’s on my door handle when Damon yells out one last time, and I turn to see him waggling a can of spray paint in my direction, a vicious smirk on his face. Before I can stop myself, I’m running toward him, dropping my backpack on the wet cement, lifting my knee at just the right angle to rack him straight in the nuts. He bends in half, moaning.

“Crazy bitch.” He spits the words after me.

I pretend not to hear.

—

Instead of track practice, I go to Micah’s house. The rain and sun have destroyed his chalk creations.

Did any of it really happen?

His mother answers the door, in scrubs like before, except the house is dark and doesn’t smell like tamales.

“Lily,” she says, mustering a weak smile. She steps out onto the porch and closes the door behind her. Her eyes are circled with pink.

She hates you.

“Micah’s not feeling so good today. But I’ll tell him you stopped by?”

I jam the toe of my shoe into the hard cement and resist the urge to shove the door open and force Micah into the light.

“It’s all my fault.”

She shakes her head slowly, putting her hand on my shoulder. “Things like this are nobody’s fault, mija.” The term of endearment guts me.

I walk, defeated, back to my car and convince myself that I see a flicker of the curtain in his room. Maybe he knows I’m here, that he’s not alone in the Hundred Acre Wood.

I stop by the track after the team has left. Alone, I stand on the starting line. Click my stopwatch. Force my legs to move.

I sprint around the track

over and over

until the finish line is a blur

and my lungs are gasping for air.

And then, I run it again.

LogoLily’s Word of the Day

anginog (n) The sinking realization that you’re floating out to sea, and the waves keep knocking you farther out, until the shore disappears and all you can see is the water, relentless and steady and impossibly strong.

From the prefix an (not) + Old Saxon ginog (enough)