The Words We Keep

I wake to Alice’s phone in my face.

“Say ‘Good morning,’ Lily!”

“Too early,” I say, rolling over and covering my face with the comforter.

I don’t know how Alice is this bright-eyed at seven a.m. after last night, talking about a new idea that is apparently going to “change everything.”

“It’s because of you, Lil!”

I force my body out of bed and head to the bathroom. Alice follows me, still talking while I brush my teeth.

“I just keep thinking about the guerilla poetry. How you put it all out there. And how that’s so brave, and I have all these thoughts and feelings that I never share, and like, how sad is that? And so I was thinking about your poems and what’s going on in your brain, and how I never talk about what happened to me, and the point is—” She takes a big breath. “I don’t want to hide anymore.”

I spit into the sink.

“And the videoing comes in where?”

“I’m starting a YouTube channel! Gonna talk about Fairview. About being bipolar. All of it.”

“You know people watch YouTube, right? Like, real, live people.”

“Yeah. That part is slightly, all-consumingly terrifying, but like Micah says, it’s not brave if you’re not scared.”

I point to the paint samples scattered across her desk. “Maybe you should finish the redecorating before your YouTube career?”

Alice laughs like I’m hilarious. “I can do both! I’m an excellent multitasker.” She’s gone back into the room now, and I can hear her plucking posters and décor from the walls. “Maybe the redecoration will be my first video! I mean, home decor isn’t really about mental health, but people always love a good before-and-after montage, right?”

Alice pops her head into the bathroom, scaring the snot out of me.

“Oh!” she half shouts. “And text me. I want to know how everyone responds to the guerrilla takeover! Man! What a rush. Are we going again tonight? I can bring my video camera!”

“No cameras,” I say. “Anonymous, remember?”

“Right. Right. You’re the boss. But I want in!”

She’s off again, humming from the bedroom as she continues prepping the walls for the seafoam green. In the medicine cabinet, her nearly full bottle of pills stares back at me. Maybe she’s right: she’s better off without them.

And I’m better, too.

Aren’t I?

My skin is starting to heal, and I’m not up Googling all night, and I haven’t even posted on my Word of the Day in forever because I’m writing poetry instead.

At night, when the thoughts are circling, I pull out my pen.

I get the words out.

And the monsters get a little quieter.

And the random acts of poetry are a hit, which means I’m that much closer to UC Berkeley and the win my family needs. And Alice is becoming more Alice every day. We’re almost normal again.

Things are definitely getting better.

—

Ridgeline High is awash in words. Ours, plus more, so many more. The white paper in the lobby slowly fills throughout the day:

I wish my parents were still together. I’m in therapy. Nobody sits with me at lunch. I love Meredith Iorg. I hate the way I look. Someday I’ll travel the world. John Dougherty is a manwhore. I cry at chick flicks. Does God even exist?

Gifford is beside herself.

“It’s wonderful,” she says, and I swear she gets a little misty-eyed. “To be surrounded by words. Just wonderful! But, guerrilla poets, whoever you are, one word of warning. Principal Porter is concerned that these random acts of poetry are bordering close to vandalism. I pointed out that no actual school property was harmed besides a poster, and I’ve offered to buy a new one. Push the boundaries, my dear poets, but don’t overstep.”

She looks in my direction so briefly that I’m sure no one else catches it, but I do.

She knows.

I wonder if Principal Porter personally reviewed the security footage tape with her. Did she convince him to look the other way in the name of art? I make sure to give her an extra-big smile on my way out of class.

“Just wonderful,” she whispers so that only I can hear.

Even Sam is caught up in it.

“Let’s go add something,” she says, pulling me by my sleeve toward the lobby before track practice. She plucks two pens from her backpack and hands me one, then starts writing in an open space under Micah’s SAY SOMETHING.

“Such a cool idea,” she says as she draws a small violin. Next to it, she writes: sometimes I want to smash my violin to pieces.

“You do not,” I say, not sure if I should laugh or take her to the counselor’s office. Sam has played violin since we were in elementary school. I can’t even picture her without her black case in tow.

She shrugs. “It’s a love-hate relationship. I love playing it, or at least I used to, but I hate that it’s taken over my life. Between practicing for my solo and track and homework, I have zero social life. Not like you’re ever free lately anyway.” She nods toward her violin case. “But yeah, sometimes I fantasize about just going all rock star and smashing this puppy into a million little pieces. Except my parents would just buy me a new one and ground me for life, so it’s not a totally solid plan.”

She nods to the blank space in front of me. “You didn’t write anything.”

“Oh, I—”

She lifts up my hand with the pen and laughs. “You can do it, Anxiety Girl. It’s not actual graffiti. You won’t get in trouble.”

Micah walks past just then, giving me his signature we’ve got a secret grin, and I guess now we do. I know some of his. He knows some of mine. And we share the guerrilla poets.

Sam elbows me, bringing me back to the crowded hallway.

“People are talking about you two, you know.”

“About who two?”

“You and Micah.” She click-clicks her pen and sticks it behind her ear. “I told people there’s nothing going on, because if there were, I’d definitely know about it.”

“Who are these people?” Probably Damon. Probably started spreading rumors the second he saw me jump away from Micah in the hallway weeks ago.

“Just people. Dumb gossip.” She picks up her violin case, and we walk to practice. “You know, if there were something between you two, you could tell me, right? I’m Sam, best friend extraordinaire, remember? 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.”

“I hear those Russians can be wild in bed,” I say, because I’m nothing if not a master of deflection, and what I’d really love right now is to take all the attention off me, especially when I’m standing in a hallway surrounded by my words while simultaneously being totally unable to tell my best friend that they’re mine, or even something as simple as how I feel about Micah, how I feel when I’m with him.

When I look back, Micah’s standing with his art posse across the lobby, writing on the paper like he wasn’t the one who hung it there. It’s better this way. Him in his world. Me in mine. And us? We’re in a good place. We’re over the awkwardness of the hallway jump-away. We’re killing this project. Why mess with it?

—

Micah and I add more words and art all week.

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. Index cards with poems slipped into locker slats. I even pen a short and admittedly terrible haiku in Spanish and tack it to the noticios bulletin board.

Micah brings more magnetic poetry and slaps it onto the lockers casually as he walks down the hall. We do it quietly, slowly, so no one knows it’s us, but over one week, we’ve scattered random acts of art and poetry through the school.

And we’re not the only ones. 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, along with the occasional blow me imbecility, the letters constantly rearranging into something new.

In the girls’ bathroom, someone has written messages on the mirrors:

you are beautiful

you are unique

you are loved

During one of our last in-class artist-poet collaborations, the other partnerships are buzzing with rumors of the identity of the guerrilla poets. Micah and I are sitting on the floor of the art room because Friedman has decided we all need to give his junk-to-masterpiece theory a whirl.

“Just thrown out. Can you believe it?” Friedman says after showing us a Frankenstein-level atrocity he’s made out of a broken guitar and a busted lamp.

I’m creating some sort of microwave-utensil mash-up, while Micah’s scrolling something on his phone. 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. Sidewalk chalk drawings. A row of books in the library, their spines lined up to create a short and sweet poem:

THE HATE U GIVE

EVERY LAST WORD

I’LL GIVE YOU THE SUN

ALL THE BRIGHT PLACES

EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING

Each picture is tagged with #mywords #mystory.

“You’re a hit,” Micah whispers.

“We’re a hit,” I correct him. “And we’re hardly viral.”

“Maybe not, but look at these comments.”

He holds up the latest Ridgeline Underground, where someone has posted a picture of my blackout poem in the lobby.

13 comments

THIS. So much this.

Wow. Get out of my head, guerrilla poet!

Love this. Give me more!

“Are those all from secret accounts you have or something?” I ask.

“Nope. These are bona fide people, reading your words.” He puts down his phone and picks up a couple of cheap forks from the pile of junk. “So. Would you say the method was a success?”

“Definitely. I’ll be posting my Yelp review tonight.”

“Excellent. So then this is the part where I get to say I told you so, right?”

“Only if you’re sure you want to play the jackass card this early.”

Micah taps a fork to his chin. “Nah. I’ll save it.”

“For what?”

“For when we win.”

“We?” I say. “I thought you weren’t making too many plans for the future.”

“And that is still my official party line,” he says. “But I may or may not have looked into some art programs.”

“And what, may I ask, caused this change of heart?”

He leans in close, pretending to reach for something in the junk pile, his breath tickling my skin just like it did in the motion-sensor room at the art exhibit. And just like then, all my own plans become a blur because all I can see are his lips.

“Word on the street is that Lily Larkin, perfect student extraordinaire, broke into the school, plastered her deepest fears on the walls. I can’t just let her be the only brave one, now, can I?”

“No, you definitely cannot.”

The same electric energy pulses between us as on the beach, drawing in chalk at night, standing on the cliff.

“Am I interrupting something?” Kali’s voice drives us apart.

“Just some project planning,” Micah says, bending one of his forks against the edge of a desk.

Kali looks from him to me and back again, trying to figure us out. She’s probably heard the same rumors Sam has.

“Well, we’re all just going for second place at this point anyway, right? Like anyone could beat these freaking guerrilla poets. ‘Ooh, look at me, I wrote on the walls.’ It’s all so juvenile, and honestly, I’ll tell them right to their faces when they turn in their project.”

Micah scoffs. “I’m sure your disapproval will break their hearts.”

Kali huffs as she walks away, and Micah chuckles again to himself, but stops midlaugh when he sees my face. “Whoa. What’s up? You look like you’re about to have one of those panic attacks you don’t have.”

“I guess—I guess I just never really thought about what happens when we have to turn the project in.” I lean in close to Micah to whisper. “Everyone will know it’s us. They’ll know the poetry is mine. They’ll know.”

“And this is just occurring to you now?”

In the back of my head, I knew there was a deadline, a moment when all this anonymity would end, but I was so eager to get my muse back, to win, that I didn’t think it through.

“Maybe Gifford will let us turn it in but not share it. We could convince her the anonymity is part of the whole idea?”

Micah raises his hand, and I tug at his sleeve, whispering for him to “Stop. Never mind. It’s a bad idea.” But Friedman nods at him, and Micah asks—in front of everybody—if anonymous submissions are allowed.

Friedman and Gifford exchange a glance across the classroom, and then shake their heads.

“As Matisse says, ‘Creativity takes courage,’ ” Friedman says. “So I’m afraid not, Mr. Mendez. Once created, art belongs to no one—and everyone.”

Micah shrugs at me. “Well, there you go.”

“What the hell was that?” I whisper to him, scanning the room to see if anyone is looking. “Are you trying to out us?”

Before Micah can answer, Damon walks behind him, discreetly dropping a putty knife from the supply closet into Micah’s lap. As he walks back to his seat, Damon makes wrist-slashing motions to Micah. I fight the urge to huck my microwave at Damon’s head.

“When did he start pulling this crap again?” I ask.

“Never stopped.” Micah tosses the putty knife into the junk pile. “In fact, there’s been an uptick in his efforts ever since he saw you and me in the hall that day.”

“Micah, I had no—”

“It’s fine,” he says, waving off my concern.

“It’s not fine, Micah. You need to tell someone.”

He ignores me, focusing extra hard on whatever he’s doing with the tines of his bent forks. “Trust me. Better to lay low.” He holds up his creation, the forks wrapped around each other, tines overlapped so that they look like two hands clasped together, the handles curving into a heart above them.

“How do you do that?” I ask.

“What?”

“See things like that.”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I just see what something could be instead of what it’s been.” He puts his pointer fingers to his temples and closes his eyes. “Like right now, I’m seeing you and me, standing in front of everyone, telling them we are the guerrilla poets. They applaud. They carry you on their shoulders! They worship you as the poet queen!”

“Micah!” I almost yell. “You seriously want me to spew my most personal secrets to strangers, and you won’t even tell anyone that Damon is straight-up harassing you?”

“Touché.” He hands me the fork heart. “But where’s all your bravery from the night we broke in?”

I toss the microwave back into the pile of junk. I can’t see the potential in used-up appliances like Micah can. Across the room, Damon’s banging together two pieces of junk from the pile, looking particularly apelike. Part of me wants to strangle him for tormenting Micah. The other part wants to make sure he never knows that I’m the girl with the monsters in her head. The thought of everyone knowing makes me want to rip into the still-healing scabs on my stomach.

“But that was at night, with no one around. I’m a different Lily there. I’m—I’m guerrilla poet Lily—and in the daytime, in front of everyone, I lose her.”

Micah grabs my phone from next to me, flips open the calendar, and taps a few times. He turns the screen to me. POETRY PROJECT DUE is in big, bold letters.

“Well, then, according to the almighty planner here, you’ve got about two and a half weeks left to find her.”

Unspoken Haiku

Just behind my ribs

deep by my heart, lies a trove

of words unspoken.

I hide my scars, too,

because no one wants to see

the truth that is me.

Will they want to stay

if they see the wounds and hear

all the words I keep?

The Ridgeline Underground

220 likes

These random acts of poetry are amazing! It’s about time we had some positive messages in this school and on this hell site.

85 comments

I wrote, like, four magnet poems today!

Seriously. So awesome.

Yeah, but also kind of sad that everyone has all these secrets!

Right? Someone wrote in the lobby that they have an eating disorder no one knows about.

So sad 🙁 I wish people felt safe sharing that kind of stuff.

I know! And also, has anyone thought about how whoever is writing the poems is kind of messed up?

That shit is dark

I just want to hug them! When they turn in their project, I will!

Hug them? I want to get them some help.

Definitely mental.

And you wonder why no one shares, assholes.

1:30 am

LogoLily: Have you seen the Underground?

100-acre-wood: Imbeciles.

LogoLily: This is why no one can know.

100-acre-wood: As someone who is no stranger to the public lashings on the Underground, I assure you, it’s not so bad.

LogoLily: They’ll crucify me.

100-acre-wood: Lily. Those words are yours. Be proud of them. Be proud of what we’ve done.

LogoLily: I am.

100-acre-wood: Then stop hiding.