The Words We Keep: Chapters 28–40

“What torrid tales this room could tell. Naughty children being tortured. Librarians making out with janitors. Terrified freshmen hiding from wedgies.”

Without all the people, it seems less, somehow. Less daunting, less chaotic, less final without the teachers and the tests and the shoulds and should-bes taking up all the oxygen.

“You’ve only been gone a year,” I say. “It’s a little soon for a nostalgic montage of your youth.”

We are matching Hello Kitty lunch boxes and snuggles before bed and frolicking in frothy waves.

I don’t care what people say about him, only what you say about him, but if you do have some secret love affair and don’t let me live vicariously by sharing every juicy detail, then I will be pissed. ’Cause if my parents have their way, the only relationship I’ll ever have is with Tchaikovsky.

We do it in broad daylight this time, leaving small random acts of poetry throughout the school when no one’s looking. Post-it notes with small sketches surreptitiously stuck around the school.

People write words and poetry on the windows. Leave small sketches on the whiteboards. In the halls, rhyming couplets and long strands of magnetic poetry materialize...

He turns his screen so I can see: in little digital squares, pictures of all the poetry people are making or finding. Snippets of random acts written under a desk.

“Are those all from secret accounts you have or something?” I ask.
“Nope. These are bona fide people, reading your words.”

Before Micah can answer, Damon walks behind him, discreetly dropping a putty knife from the supply closet into Micah's lap.

I’m glad she’s returning to the land of the living and all, but with her videos and shuffling the furniture around for her redecoration extravaganza, she’s been nonstop since she joined us as an honorary guerrilla poet.

The Ridgeline Underground is full of speculation about the true identity of the guerrilla poets, and it's not pretty.

Staci has turned the corner of the room into her own mini yoga studio, with an essential oil diffuser on the dresser and a mat in front of a mirror.

He’s going to kiss me. I know this as surely as I’ve known anything in my life, and all my misgivings about him—about us—give way to the feel of his breath on my skin and the roller-coaster-drop feeling lurching inside me as he leans in.

Of course none of that happens because (a) this is high school and no one applauds hypothetical epiphanies, and (b) I’ve screwed everything up.

I was going to start painting, or at least do the primer, but then I saw how nasty these baseboards were.

She launches into a description of her latest video for her YouTube channel—interviews and retrospectives and maybe even a tour of Fairview.

She carries a box over to me and flips open the lid, revealing all the razors and pencil sharpeners and various don’t-let-Alice-hurt-herself paraphernalia I hid away.

She scuttles out of the room, leaving a whirlwind of energy and disinfectant in her wake.

Four days of me watching Alice, trying to decide if she’s careening toward disaster or just being Alice.

At track practice, she’s stretching before our scrimmage against the high school from Riverside.

On the open page, a wispy, black demon squats on top of a man, a natural extension of his shoulders.

And then he’s yelling at the sea.
Not words, just sound. Raw and guttural. Feral.

And then he’s yelling at the sea.
Not words, just sound. Raw and guttural. Feral.

“Those teachers really push you, don’t they?”
“Understatement of the century.”

“Raise you girls. All alone. No one really tells you how, you know?” The quaver in his voice scares me. He’s Dad—always trying to make things better, trying to make me happy.

The Post-it notes have taken over.
Dozens of them adorn Alice’s side of the room.

Micah's curls are in total disarray in the morning outside the school.

My courage wavers slightly as we walk the halls.

Micah and I convene the final meeting of the guerrilla poets of Ridgeline High to put together all our poems and artwork and pictures of the random acts of poetry and all the words that followed.