I look up, and everyone else around me is writing. Fedora is tapping away at a keyboard attached to his iPad. Pride and Prejudice is scribbling in a spiral notebook. Nico, of course, looks perfect hunched over his Moleskine, loose brown curls cascading over his face.
I have to write.
Colette clutches Jasper’s hand against her chest.
I hit delete. That’s not right. Too bow-chicka-wow-wow. They’ve only kissed once. And “clutches” makes it sound like some old-fashioned novel where people have fainting couches or something.
I try again.
Colette holds Jasper’s hand against her cheek.
Okay, maybe, but then says what? What does she decide?
Backspace again. Backspace freaking backspace. Colette says nothing, does nothing. Because my mind is blank. Nothing.
I’m suddenly aware of how loud it sounds when I’m tapping the keys, and now that I’m not typing anything, do the others notice the silence? Can they tell I’m not being productive like them?
And then there’s the fact that I don’t type like I’m supposed to, the way the others use all of their fingers over the QWERTY keyboard. I never learned, and I can hunt and peck pretty quick now—it would only slow me down to change it up at this point. Not that it even matters. Nothing is coming out anyway. Can they tell?
“I think I’m going to try writing in my notebook,” I whisper to no one in particular, and only Ms. McKinney looks up, giving me a small smile, like she’s humoring me or something. She probably knows I don’t belong here. She was probably laughing when she read my pleading emails after reviewing whatever my mom put in my portfolio. She was probably just being nice when she let me into the class, her act of charity for the semester.
I want to shrink myself.
I want to disappear.
With my notebook and my favorite felt-tip pen, still the words don’t come. I look over the loose outline I wrote for the story, and it inspires nothing. Finally, paranoid that everyone, especially Nico, can tell that I’m not writing, I begin to write “I don’t know” in my notebook.
Over and over again.
I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.
I furrow my eyebrows occasionally, tap my chin like I’m thinking, and keep going until however long it takes for the class to end. Hours.
My words are always there. They wake me up, yelling for attention, in the middle of the night. They whisper in my ear during boring classes.
My words are the reason I somehow tricked this school into admitting me.
But now there’s nothing.
My words are gone.
Chapter Nine
I barely speak to Sam the whole drive home, brushing off all his first-day questions with one-word answers. The corners of my eyes burn with tears, but I push them away. I try to keep my mind clear, so it’s open for whatever flicker of an idea comes my way. I try to dream up the next scene in my head, because sometimes the inspiration is stubborn like that, only coming to me when I’m not in front of my computer screen.
But it’s no use.
Nothing.
I throw a “Thank you” to Sam over my shoulder, trying not to feel bad about how puzzled he seems, and then power walk across the street to my house. Chrysalis gets out later in the day, almost five, but still—it’s surprising that everyone is there, gathered in the kitchen, when I walk inside. It smells like pizza, and I don’t ask if it was ordered specifically for this household.
“There’s our writer girl!” Dad calls, a huge smile on his face when he sees me. He was hunched over a slice at the counter, his phone open to work emails next to him, but he comes over to me and pulls me into a tight hug, kissing the top of my head.
I wish he wouldn’t call me that.
“Tessie, there’s pizza!” Miles yells from the table. He sits at the table alone, and Mom is mobile with her meal, taking quick bites while she puts the dishes away.
“I see. Thanks, bud.” I run my hands across his coarse hair as I walk past him to grab a slice. I know I should ask him about his day—how he adjusted to the new routine, if he liked his new one-on-one aide. But my mind is just too full. I keep my backpack on and make my way toward my room.
“Now hold on,” Mom says. “We want to hear about Chrysalis!”
If I were able to have any sort of honest conversation with them, I would tell them how I’m apparently broken. How I wasted all the time I was supposed to use to write today. How I might not even belong there in the first place.
I shrug. “It was good.”
“Good, okay. . . .” She’s wiping her soapy hands on a dish towel, ready to hunker down. “And where did that scarf come from? I don’t think I’ve seen that before.”
I had almost forgotten about the first half of the day, even though it felt like the end of the world at the time. I feel like my life will forever be measured in PLW (Pre Loss of Words) and ALW (After Loss of Words) time.
“I got it from a friend.”
Dad is studying his phone again, and Miles is humming a Dream Zone song to himself. But Mom is zeroed in on me. Of course she is, now, when I don’t want it at all.
“Well, your hair looks really beautiful today,” she says, trying a different tactic. “You know, I was looking at a copy of Essence when we were waiting for Miles’s ENT last week, and there was this really cute style—Bantu ties? No, Bantu knots! We should try it. You would look so cute.”
“Um, thanks, okay.” I need to get to my room before I fall apart. “I’ve got stuff to do. Can I go?”
Her eyebrows furrow. And I know we’re going to have a big discussion now, which is the last thing I want to do.
“Mom, chinga tu madre,” Miles says.
“WHAT?” Mom yelps, eyes bugging out.
“Justin, my new friend in my life skills class, said that. Is it bad?” His laughter is bouncing around the room, and his head starts to roll around. He knows that it’s bad, and he’s ecstatic—he got a reaction.
“Oh my god . . .”
Saved by the brother. I take the opportunity to escape into my room.
After I change my clothes and fall down on my bed, I feel the tears start to come again. I try to take a few bites of the pizza to distract my brain, because crying isn’t going to help anything, but it feels like cardboard in my mouth. I can’t eat. I can’t cry.
I need to write.
I pull my laptop out of my bag and open up Google Docs. Because maybe it was just being in class with everyone around me. My anxiety just got the best of me—it’s happened before. But now that I’m back on my bed, the safe space where I’ve written so many of my stories, the words will come. They have to.
I stare at the blinking, taunting cursor for ten minutes before Caroline calls.
“Hellloooooo!” she chirps, playful and happy. The opposite of how I’m feeling.
“Hi.”
“So how did it go? Did they marvel at your overwhelming genius? Do you have a book deal already? Do you have my next Colette chapter?”
I ignore all of her questions except the last one. “No, sorry. It was more of a warm-up, getting-to-know-you day, you know? The teacher gave us a specific prompt to write about.”
That’s obviously a lie. And I know it sucks to be lying to my best friend, who would probably be nothing but supportive if I told her the truth. But I don’t want to tell her that the one thing I have, the one thing that makes me even a little bit special, may be gone.