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.
“Bummer. But there’s always tomorrow, right?”
“Right, and get this,” I say, changing the subject. “My mom didn’t take me to school today like she promised . . . of course. She arranged for the boy across the street to take me instead.”
“The Hawaiian shirt guy? With the pizza?”
“Yeah.”
“But you said he was a big ol’ nerd, right?”
“Well, yeah . . . but I guess he’s not that bad, actually. He was very nice.”
“Is he Dungeons and Dragons nerdy? Or, like, those glasses that turn into sunglasses when he goes outside nerdy?”
“Is there, like, a spectrum or something? Have you made charts?”
“Hmmm, no, I guess not. But I can!” She laughs. It’s loud in the background, clanging pans and slammed cabinets. I know it’s Lola making one of her delicious dinners, right outside Caroline’s pantry/bedroom door. I can almost see her floral apron and gray-streaked hair, and it makes me feel a twinge of homesickness, missing dinner with the Tibayan family.
“Okay, now, get this,” Caroline continues. “They put me in AP Lit.”
“What?”
“Right?”
She starts laughing, and I join in because we both know that while Caroline is a prolific reader, her taste skews more toward my stories and the romance novels she sneaks out of Lola’s room, not the works of dead white guys. She barely passed tenth grade English with a C because of her refusal to read anything but the SparkNotes for Brave New World and Animal Farm.
“But that’s awesome! I bet your dad will be happy, and it’s not like you aren’t as smart as any of those AP kids.”
“Yeah, I know! Smarter, probably, because I don’t waste my time reading something ‘important’ when I could be reading something interesting.”
I laugh, even though my chest feels tight thinking about Art of the Novel and knowing what side of that divide my silly stories are on. “Are you going to transfer out?”
“Well . . . I was. But then the counseling office was too busy. So then I went to class and Brandon was there. Brandon Briceño—do you remember him? From Yearbook?”
“Uh-huh, yeah.”
“So he was there, and we got paired together to read this William Blake poem about a chimney sweep, or whatever. And he read the whole thing like Bert from Mary Poppins, which I’m pretty sure is super offensive because of the look the teacher gave us, but I’m not really sure what the poem was about because I was laughing so hard.”
She’s laughing again now, and I try to join in.
“Anyway, yeah, I guess it probably doesn’t make sense now. You had to be there.”
And I wasn’t.
“Who did you sit with at lunch?” I ask.
“Oh, Brandon! And he brought a couple more of his friends, Michael Giles and Olivia Roswell. Did you ever meet them? They’re really nice.”
“Yeah? That’s awesome.”
“I think I’m actually going to meet up with them tomorrow after school. They always go to Denny’s on Tuesdays, and they invited me. Not going to lie, that place is super basic . . . but I don’t know, it might be fun.”
“Yeah, yeah, definitely.”
I know I should be happy that Caroline had a good first day. She’s my best friend, and it’s not like I want her to be lonely or unhappy. But it sort of makes me feel like maybe I’ve been holding her back all these years. Maybe she wasn’t okay with our solo lunches, passing my laptop back and forth. Maybe she was just waiting for me to get out of the way so she could have an exciting social life.
My eyes start to water again, and I let them this time.
There’s a knock in the background, and then the sounds of Caroline and Lola speaking Tagalog to each other.
“Listen, I gotta go now,” she says quickly. “But I still want to hear all about your day! And send me a chapter tonight.”
“Uh-huh.” That’s not going to happen.
When we hang up, I shove my computer under the bed and do my US history homework instead.
When Thomas kissed her, Tallulah felt happy.
Cheery? Delighted?
Beatific. Tallulah needed to throw away her thesaurus.
Tallulah felt like there were fireworks banging in her chest. Banging? Really?
Tallulah felt like a new woman.
Tallulah felt nothing.