The Words We Keep

Micah rides his bike toward the ocean with me perched on the handlebars.

He pedals fast, the night air rushing past me eagerly, whipping my hair. It hits Micah in the face and he laughs. I laugh. Aren’t we normal? A boy and a girl on a ride down the coast. Look at us! Happy and laughing and moonlight in our faces.

Micah pulls off above our cove, the sand that held—briefly—our art. He leads me by the light of his cell phone down the steep stairs to the beach and across the sand to a rocky point, jutting out into the water. The waves crash onto the rocks, rough and hard, spraying plumes of frothy white into the air as we make our way over slick stones.

Ahead of us, the ocean sprawls out to the edge of nowhere. To the right, Deadman’s Cliff looms, large and immovable. At the base of it, Micah sits on the edge of a big, black rock, half-submerged in the water, misting us with each wave. All around us, sharp, angular rocks poke up from the water—a lethal landing pad.

I sit next to him, the rumors about Micah bouncing around in my head. The picture of him on the Underground, teetering on top of the cliff. He was going to jump. Isn’t that what people say? That he almost let the ocean suck him away?

Is that why he brought me here? To lay all his secrets bare? How do I react? Shocked? Sad? What’s the right response to something like this?

He turns his hand over, his semicolon tattoo barely visible in the dark. My stomach tightens.

“Do you know what this means?”

I nod. “It means—it means you tried to—” I can’t find the words.

Micah runs his fingers over the ink. “Last year—”

“Micah, you don’t have to—”

“I want to.” He looks out at the cliff again. “The first time, it was pills. Mom sent me to Fairview. For a while, I was better. Until I wasn’t. I was going to do it again.”

“But you didn’t.”

He shakes his head. “Because of art.”

“Art?”

“I had this art teacher at Fairview, and he told me to stay. Stay and take all the hurt and the sad and the numb and put it into my drawings. So I did. And the more I poured into my art, the easier it was to stay. ‘One more day,’ he’d say. Then one more. Until I didn’t have to remind myself to live. And the art saved me. One day at a time.”

“Is that why you’re always sketching?”

He nods.

“I’m glad you stayed.” The words sound stupid leaving my lips, but they’re all I have. He looks to the north, and I follow his gaze to where the cliff stands silhouetted against the milky moonlight. The picture of Micah flashes into my mind again. So close to the edge. “Do you still—are you still—” The panic takes hold in my gut, quick and sharp. I stand up on the rocks. “Is that your biggest fear? That one day you’ll go through with it?”

Micah pulls me back down to sit. “No, no, wait. I didn’t finish. I don’t go up there to jump. I mean, if I’m being honest, yeah, I think about it. I’m not sure I will ever not think about it. My biggest fear is that no matter what I do, all people will ever see is the boy who almost jumped. The boy from rehab. And maybe that’s all I’ll see, too.

“So I come here to remember that I’m alive. That I’m more than Manic Micah. That I have a choice.” He turns his hand palm up, and without thinking, I reach out and outline the semicolon tattoo on his wrist with the tip of my finger. “This doesn’t mean I almost died. It means I chose to stay.”

His heartbeat pulses up and down, his blood blue and full of life through his skin.

“That my story isn’t over,” he says, offering me his hand. “Come see.”

I let him pull me to my feet and guide me across the rocks. The tide is coming in, soaking my shoes as we make our way toward Deadman’s Cliff.

“But they closed the path,” I say, my mind already creating headlines for tomorrow’s news. Two teens found at base of cliff.

“Don’t need a path,” Micah says. The wind almost carries away his voice, but I can see the determination in his eyes. We are going to the top of that cliff. At the base, he stops and takes off his shoes. “You’ll have a better grip barefoot.”

I neatly stack my tennis shoes under the earthy overhang. He has me go first, telling me where to step and where to grip as I scale upward, step by step, only seeing a foot ahead of me in the dark, the rocks sharp and uneven beneath my feet. When I get almost to the top, Micah pushes my butt from below. He heaves himself up behind.

We walk until we run out of earth. From the edge, darkness and ocean and nothing reach to infinity, the moonlight spilling onto the water. On the horizon, the sky’s so black, I can’t tell where the ocean stops and the night begins. Looking down, I get the same feeling I did when Dad took us to the Grand Canyon. What if I jumped? Would I fall? Or would gravity release me? Let me fly?

“I want to show you something,” Micah says, standing behind me. He puts both his hands on my waist, just above my hips. His fingers graze under my shirt, near my scabs. I freeze and instinctively pull away before he can feel them.

“Sorry. I—” he starts.

“No, it’s just…” I tuck my shirt into my jeans. “Your fingers were cold.”

I grab his hands and put them back on my waist. Micah pulls back on me, slightly.

“Lean forward.”

I shoot him my best not on your life, buddy look.

“You still don’t trust me, do you?” He’s staring at me earnestly, and even though I’m standing on a cliff where a man died, with a boy who just told me he almost did, too, the funny thing is, I do. I trust him. Slowly I lean forward. Micah’s hands hold me by the waist like a tether, anchoring me to the earth.

“This is all very Titanic,” I yell back at him over the roar of the waves crashing below.

“Right? And we haven’t even reached the nude drawing portion of our evening.”

“Don’t make me laugh!”

I let my weight fall forward, Micah’s hands holding me steady. Below, jagged rocks splinter waves into a million pieces. The darkness swallows me.

“Don’t look down.” His voice cuts through the night. “Keep your eyes on the horizon.”

When I do, the world disappears: Micah and the cliff and the waves—vanished. Just me and the sky and the water, and the feeling that I’m soaring, weightless through the air. The wind rushes by my ears. My fingers tingle. Every nerve of my body is alive, going berserk. Every inch of my skin is connected. Awake.

“This is wild!” I scream.

Micah’s hands pull me back from the edge, and I turn to face him, our noses almost touching, only an inch of night between us.

“And what is wrong with me that being centimeters from certain death is the most alive I’ve felt in a long time?” I whisper.

“Nothing,” he says, brushing my hair out of my face. “Absolutely nothing.”

With those gold-speckled eyes piercing mine, I almost let myself believe him.