The Words We Keep

Alice claps excitedly as we climb the metal ladder on the side of the school. She’s standing on the edge of the flat roof, holding open a huge service hatch.

“And you knew about this how?” I say as we scale down the rabbit hole on an even tinier ladder.

“It’s how all the seniors get in for their pranks,” Alice says. “The janitor leaves it unlocked for his secret smoke breaks.”

We come out in the boiler room. The massive equipment heaves and belches and hisses.

“The underbelly of Ridgeline High,” Micah says like we’re on a horror show. “What torrid tales this room could tell. Naughty children being tortured. Librarians making out with janitors. Terrified freshmen hiding from wedgies.”

Alice laughs. The sound of it calms me. Stops me from turning around. From slipping out of my body.

We exit into a dark and deserted senior hallway. Our footsteps echo against the walls.

“Creepy,” I whisper.

“It doesn’t even feel like the same place,” Micah says.

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. Alice’s fingers beat out a dum-dum-dum rhythm as she drags them against the lockers, rattling the locks.

“Everything seems so small,” she says.

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

“A year and a lifetime,” she says. “And it’s definitely not nostalgia. I hated this place.”

“I think you’re supposed to hate high school. It’s like a rule,” Micah chimes in. “The only ones who like it are the kids who are peaking at seventeen, and that’s just interminably sad.”

“Besides,” I add, turning to Alice, “in case you forgot, everybody loved you in high school. Girls, guys—especially the guys, as I recall. Trust me, I know. I was the little sister to wild, popular, funny Alice Larkin with the best smile in the senior class. She’s a hard act to follow.”

She stops for a second, looking back at the empty hallway. “Smiles can hide a lot.”

Micah finds a switch, and light floods the hallways, filling all the dark spaces. My stomach tightens when I notice the security camera in the corner.

Micah follows my eyes. “You want to turn back?”

I shake my head. “We’re already in. Might as well do what we came to do.”

“Who are you tonight?” Micah asks.

I shrug, trying not to smile.

We get to work covering the school with words. On each classroom window, I write a poem in dry-erase marker. Alice writes prompts on bathroom mirrors:

I wish…

I won’t…

I want…

Micah draws sketches on whiteboards.

We make our way around the building, leaving a stream of words and art in our wake. When we get to the main lobby, I pause, the muse whispering in my ear. Every student passes through this lobby at least once a day. Walks past the enormous eagle-mascot painting on the wall and the oversized poster spelling out the school rules with a cheesy acronym: SOAR—Safety, Optimism, Accountability, Respect. Keep your hands to yourself. Use your words. Speak in inside voices.

“Micah,” I say. “You don’t happen to have access to some black paint, do you?”

He looks at the poster, and without a word, he takes off down the hall toward the art room. He comes back with brushes, jars of paint, and a huge roll of paper and tape.

“Alice, help me.” I toss her a paintbrush and show her which words on the poster I want to keep. Then we black out everything else. Micah tapes up the paper next to us on the wall and gets to work on his own idea, which turns out to be two massive eagle wings rising out to the left and right, with just enough space between them for a person.

When I’m done blacking out words, Micah reads what’s left.

Micah adds one more touch to his painting, writing, SAY SOMETHING between the wings and #mywords #mystory below them.

“What?” he says with a Valley girl accent and a flip of his hair. “You have to have a tagline. Everyone who’s anyone on the interwebz has one.”

“But we are not on the interwebz,” I remind him.

“Not yet.”

He tapes more paper all around the lobby, plenty of space for everyone in the school to say something. When he goes to return the supplies, Alice flips through my notebook.

“You really wrote these?”

“Yep.”

“I had no idea.”

“Yeah, well, that’s kind of the Larkin family way.”

“Well, they’re…” She pauses.

Ridiculous?

Frightening?

Insane?

“Brave.”

I exhale.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she says. “They’re also super dark and twisty, but I wish I could put myself out there like that.”

The far-off hallway light haloes her hair, which has grown out a little since she first came home. It’s not traditional-Alice wild yet, but it’s getting there.

“Hello? You’ve always been the brave one.”

She scoffs. “Right. What is it I’m supposedly doing right now? A work-study project? I’m hiding in my own life.”

She shakes her head like she’s shaking off the thought, and holds up my notebook. “So, these monsters?” She points to the poem I wrote about the voices in my head. “Did they get worse after—I mean, when you”—she pauses, swallowing hard—“found me that night?”

“Yes.” My voice is small, the images leaping to my mind, fresh and raw. Alice’s blood. Help me. I don’t know how.

She starts to say something, but stops, tugging the sleeves of her shirt down farther over her wrists. She picks up a pen and writes on the paper next to the eagle.

I’m sorry

Then she whispers, “I wasn’t trying to kill myself, you know.”

Her voice falters a little, but then her words come out in a rush, like they’ve broken a barrier. “I just wanted to feel something. Something real. I saw the razor and I was so numb, and when I cut into myself, it felt—better.”

She laughs, but it sounds forced—fake—as it echoes in the empty hall.

“That probably sounds crazy, huh?”

I touch my scarred stomach. All the times I’ve dug into my body, made myself bleed. For what? A distraction? A release? A momentary fix. Something, anything, to quiet the voices in my head.

“Not crazy at all.”

She sighs heavily. “It’s just, sometimes I feel so big. Like my body can’t contain me. Other times, so small I could disappear. Too big, too small, and sometimes, too nothing at all. It’s exhausting, you know, never fitting in your own skin.”

She groans. “There I go again, making it all about me. What I’d really love is to not have it be about me for one freaking second. And I know I haven’t been much of a big sister lately, but I’m feeling more like my own self every day.”

“Just like that?” I ask.

“Not exactly.” We start walking down the dark hallway to meet Micah. “Can you keep a secret?”

I nod.

“I stopped taking my medicine.”

I pause midstep. “Alice—”

“Don’t do that. Don’t do the voice.”

“What voice?”

“The Alice-you’re-being-an-idiot voice.” She turns to me, her eyes boring into mine. “The meds were killing me, Lily. Maybe not all at once, but pill by pill, I was disappearing.”

“What do your doctors say?”

“Those doctors don’t know what I need. I know what I need. I know my own body, and it wasn’t working.”

“I have to admit, you do seem more you lately.”

“I am. I really am. I’m getting better.”

“Well, that makes two of us,” I say, and it sounds exactly like the truth. No recent panic attacks. I haven’t woken up with blood on my fingers since our first night of guerrilla poetry.

“Promise me you won’t tell Dad about the meds?”

“Alice, I—”

“Promise me,” she says sternly. “He just wants me to be better, and this is better for me. I know it is. So promise me.”

She looks at me like she did when we were young, swapping secrets beneath the covers.

“Fine,” I say, even though in my gut I know I’m being stupid. “But same with my poems.”

Alice crosses her heart, buttons up her lips, and kisses her fingers like when we were little. She loops her arm through mine and we walk down the dark hallway together. For an instant, we’re two fearless explorers again making our way in the world with nothing but each other. And even though that world may be crumbling around us, for a moment, we are not bloodstained floors and scars peppering my stomach. We are matching Hello Kitty lunch boxes and snuggles before bed and frolicking in frothy waves. We are limitless possibilities and invisible worlds unfolding before us.

We are whole.

When we’ve sufficiently guerrilla-poetried the crap out of Ridgeline High, we head back to the boiler room. We crawl up the small ladder, and barely make it out onto the roof before a loud, male voice barks at us from the sidewalk below.

“Hey! You! You can’t be up there.”

Micah mutters obscenities as he ushers us to the ladder on the side of the building. We fly down, stepping on each other’s fingers as we go, and hit the ground as the security guard turns the corner of the building. We barely make it to Micah’s bike, with the guard yelling at us to stop, but Micah hops on and Alice sits on the handlebars while I run alongside, and we zoom out of the parking lot, leaving the poor guy doubled over in the dark.

Alice laughs, and I’m laughing, too, and Micah is whooping into the night.

And my brain is firing a million little zaps through my body. Aren’t we happy? Aren’t we normal?

Micah winks at me as I run, and even though my heart is in my throat and my lungs are gasping for air, I’m here and Alice is here and our laughter fills the dark spaces.