The Words We Keep

“Time to spill the tea.”

Sam’s tuning her violin on my bed, both of us still in our track uniforms from an after-school meet. I won my heat, but my time was up. Definitely not good enough for state.

“What is the dealie with your English partner?”

“Micah?” I write down an equation for my math homework.

“Oh, don’t even try to play dumb with me.” She points her bow at me before pulling it across the strings, as her fingers dance impossibly fast on the strings. The music is low and haunting and incredible.

“You’re going to kill your solo.”

“I better.” She sighs as she lays her violin in the velvet case and snaps it shut. “Or my parents will literally kill me.” She rests her chin in her hands like she’s waiting for juicy gossip. “Nice try on changing the subject, by the way, but back to the boy. I saw you two deep in conversation the other day.”

I shake my head, pretending like I’m focused super hard on this quadratic equation.

“It’s not like that. Like, at all.”

“Then what is it like? What’s he like?”

I search for the words to describe Micah. His weird mix of know-it-all bravado and indifference, plus the flash of passion when he talked about coloring books, and another flash of humanity when he offered to help me. We haven’t had another collaboration, so he hasn’t elaborated on how exactly he’s going to help me find my muse, and I haven’t had time to go searching for the enigmatic 100-acre-wood to ask. I see him in the halls, though, mostly alone, a new pair of whimsical socks every day, and a smile on his face.

“I haven’t given it much thought,” I say, still piecing it all together. “But it’s like I can’t quite figure him out. The rumors about him don’t seem to jibe with the guy who draws cartoons on people’s hands, and he offered to help me on this project, which he doesn’t have to do, and I can’t tell if he’s, like, a total a-hole, or just completely different from—”

Sam’s grinning wildly at me.

“What?” I ask.

“That’s a lot of thinking about someone you’re not thinking about.” Sam shuts my math book. “And, a-hole or not, you have to admit the boy is adorbs. Those weird socks? That black hair? The little scar in his eyebrow? Come to momma.”

I shrug. “If you say so.”

“Don’t tell me you’re not into his whole vibe. It’s so…unique.”

“Not my type.” Not that I have a type. Between track and my honors classes and taking care of things around here, there is zero room in my life for breathless romances. “Besides, I barely know him.”

Sam pulls out her laptop matter-of-factly and lies on her belly next to me, her legs kicking up behind her. “Shall we do some recon, then?”

First she scrolls through the Ridgeline Underground. Micah Mendez comes up with two hits: one post about Micah being a violent psycho, and the second, a photo of him standing on a cliff over the ocean, his arms wide, the wind blowing his black curls. The post simply reads: A Boy on the Verge?

“Is that Deadman’s Cliff?” I ask.

That’s been the nickname for the steep jut-out by Crater’s Cove since I was about seven and the local news station kept playing the footage of a local man’s dead body. Mom had died the year before, so I was a little death-obsessed, and I kept watching the body covered in a white sheet like a bloated whale on the sand, washed ashore like so much seaweed. The news anchor kept saying apparent suicide.

“So, Damon’s right,” Sam says. “Boy’s got a death wish. Ooh, do you think it’s true about the fight at his old school, too? Maybe that’s where he got that scar. I bet it is. Should’ve known by the socks: boy’s wild.” Sam’s eyes are blazing as she rattles off her theories. “Let’s keep looking, shall we?”

Nothing shows up when she types his name into her social media. I open my notebook to the page where he’s written @100-acre-wood.

“He gave me this.”

Sam smiles wide.

“Of course he did.” She taps it into her screen. “Got him!”

She pulls up a wall of photos. Little squares of charcoal drawings, interspersed with quotes and vibrantly colored sketches of the Winnie-the-Pooh gang.

“That’s…unexpected,” Sam says.

I point to the first drawing on the page. “Is that Damon?”

Sam makes the image bigger, and it’s definitely Damon, except Micah has drawn him as a caveman, knuckles dragging on one side, and the other hand holding an energy drink.

“Well, the kid’s got balls,” Sam says. “Or he’s looking for a beatdown.”

The charcoal drawings on the page are haunting—dark streaks creating even darker images. A girl in a bathtub with long, flowing hair covering her naked body peers out with black eyes. His page is a strange juxtaposition of the brightness of the Winnie cartoons and the darkness of his charcoal—the same perplexing mix as the artist himself.

“Whoa, that’s intense.” She points to a boy drowning in water, one hand reaching up to the sky. “You sure you know what you’re getting into here?”

“I’m not getting into anything. He’s my partner. If my entire future didn’t hinge on this project, and by relation him, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

She winks at me. “Whatever you need to tell yourself, Lil.”

“Besides,” I add. “Even if I was into him, which I am not, boys are not a good idea right now. Between Alice and this poem and needing to shave off that last freaking 1.7 seconds—”

and losing my mind

“—I can’t handle one more thing.”

Sam flips over on the bed.

“What you need is to de-stress.” She raises her eyebrows suggestively. “Some sexy artist action should do the trick.”

“I hate to inform you, but boys are not the answer to everything.”

“Except you totally want him to dip his paintbrush—”

I throw a pillow at her head to stop whatever obscenity was going to end that sentence. She dodges and rolls off the bed, and is aiming the pillow back at me when Alice walks in.

“Hey, Alice. How are you?” Sam’s voice is suddenly tight. She hasn’t seen Alice since Fairview, although I’ve told Sam how Alice is a ghost, moving around us like an echo. As if to prove my point, Alice is wearing a gray sweatshirt and sweatpants, a drab shadow of the bright dresses and vintage finds she used to wear.

Alice says she’s fine and sits on her bed, staring at us until Sam says she’d better get going.

“We’ll finish this later.” She drops the pillow on the way out with a wink.

“No, we will not.”

After Sam’s gone, Alice cocoons into her comforter even though it’s only eight p.m.

“You told Sam about Fairview, didn’t you?” she says, a floating face in a sea of blankets. “About me.”

I swallow the lump in my throat.

“Yeah.” I whisper like it’s the dead of night even though the evening light is still slanting into the room. “But just her, I promise. No one else.”

“I could tell.”

“How?”

She looks at me across the space between us. “I can always tell.” She nods to my computer screen, where Micah’s page is still up. “He’s not your type, by the way.”

I shut the laptop, feeling like she just busted me outside his window with night-vision goggles.

“Oh, I know. We’re just partners on this project.”

“He told me.”

“You guys still talk?”

“Yep.”

I want to ask her more. About him, about Fairview. About why she’s different now from the big sister I grew up with, and if maybe it’s the same thing that’s wrong with me. Maybe we could help each other. But Alice clearly doesn’t want to talk, because before I can get my words out, she flips over, turning her back toward me.

In the silence, my mind hops from worry to what-if and back again for an hour, and eventually lands on the Boy on the Verge. The scar in his eyebrow, the semicolon tattoo on his wrist. He’s unstable, violent, psychotic—I’ve heard all the rumors. Still, I revisit his page, scrolling through the juxtaposition of the bright cartoons and dark drawings. What would it be like to put yourself out there like that? To be, unapologetically, yourself? Here I am, world. Like it or not.

That’s the kind of poem I need for this contest. I may not be able to figure out Micah Mendez, but I do need this win. I type out a message and sit for at least ten minutes, my thumb hovering over the little arrow button.

9:00 PM

LogoLily: So, about my artistic mojo…

I close my eyes and hit send.

100-acre-wood: Ah, you have come to the master, ready to be enlightened?

LogoLily: I’m sorry, I seem to have interrupted you in the middle of an ego trip.

100-acre-wood: No, wait! I’m done. I’m done. Let’s find your muse.

LogoLily: …

100-acre-wood: Saturday? Crater’s Cove. 4 pm

LogoLily: My muse is hiding at the beach?

100-acre-wood: That’s the thing about muses. They’re almost never where you expect them to be.

LogoLily: I’ll be there.

100-acre-wood: Sleep well.

Never do.

The last bit of light from the window has faded, so when I turn off my phone, my eyes adjust to the darkness.

This could easily be the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.