“He remembers,” I say under my breath as I walk away.
Caroline’s at her locker after last bell, and I stall, waiting for everyone to clear out. When the coast is finally clear, I race over to her.
“I know what I did to AJ.” My stomach turns over as I say it. “No wonder he doesn’t want me downstairs. Caroline, what do I do?”
“You can start by apologizing,” she says.
He’ll never forgive me. How could he?
“He must think I’m a horrible person.”
Maybe he’s right. Maybe I am.
“Do you want my help?”
I nod. Caroline turns on her heel and gestures for me to follow her. “Come on,” she says. “I know what to do.”
She leads me to the first row of the theater and we spend the next three hours working on a single poem. I write. Caroline listens. When I get stuck, she feeds me word after word until we find the perfect one that sums up what I want him to know. When I’m done, we have a poem that doesn’t say “I’m sorry” in so many words, but it talks about regret and second chances, a fear of not belonging that runs so deep it changes you into someone you don’t want to be. It’s about seeing what you’ve become and wanting—craving—to be someone different. Someone better.
It’s me, asking him to let me in. Asking all of them to give me a chance to show them that, deep down, I’m not who they think I am. Or, maybe I’m exactly who they think I am, but I no longer want to be.
Fifteen minutes into lunch, I start stuffing empty wrappers back into my lunch bag, collecting my trash, and brushing the grass off my pants. “I have to go to the library and get this book for English,” I announce. “Anyone want to come?” I already know they’ll pass.
“I’m not allowed in there,” Olivia says proudly.
Kaitlyn laughs. “How the hell do you get banned from the school library?”
Olivia rolls her eyes. “Mrs. Rasmussen caught Travis and me making out in the biography section. It’s around that corner, you know?” she says, drawing an imaginary curve in the air with her hand. “It’s completely out of view. What else are you supposed to do over there?” She giggles.
“Look for biographies,” Hailey suggests.
“Nah. Boring.” Olivia sits up a little straighter, eyes darting around the circle, enjoying the attention. “Trust me, it was worth getting kicked out. Travis may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but that boy can kiss.”
We all laugh.
“I wonder what he’s doing this weekend?” Olivia adds as she reaches for her phone.
“I thought you broke up because you two didn’t have anything to talk about,” Alexis says.
“We don’t.” She crinkles her nose. “I’m not planning to talk to him,” she says, cocking her head to the side and continuing to search for his number.
Kaitlyn pulls a piece of bread from her sandwich and chucks it at Olivia’s head.
I mutter a quick “See ya,” and head off for the path that leads to the theater. I know exactly where to go—I’ve pictured those stairs and that narrow hallway in my mind a hundred times now—and soon I’m inside the janitor’s closet, pulling the mops and brooms to the side to reveal the concealed seam and the black bolt. Their voices are muffled, like they’re far away, and I knock lightly, three times. The sound stops immediately.
I hear the key slip into the lock and the dead bolt click. AJ cracks the door open, just wide enough to see me. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
Ignoring his comment, I come up on my tiptoes, looking over his shoulder, searching for Caroline. She’s part of today’s plan. I come downstairs and she tries to convince him to let me in so I can read the poem we wrote.
“I’m looking for—” I start to say her name, but AJ opens the door and steps forward, and I have no choice but to step back inside the janitor’s closet. That stupid Chia Pet jingle pops into my head.
What the hell’s wrong with me?
He closes the door and uses that key around his neck to lock it behind him. “What, are you on some kind of twisted quest or something? Did your friends put you up to this?” He walks over to the door that connects the janitor’s closet to the hallway and peers out, looking for my accomplices.
I was expecting him to be surprised, but not quite so pissed. My hands start shaking and my legs feel like they’re going to give out, but I force myself to stand tall and look right into his eyes like Caroline told me to.
“I have something I’d really like to read to you. To all of you.” I pull the poem from the pocket of my jeans and open it wide so he can see the proof.
He walks toward me, laughing. “It doesn’t work that way, Samantha.”
“How does it work?”
He brings his hands to his hips. “It works like this: Members read. Members listen. Non-members do not read or listen, because they aren’t allowed inside. Look, I made an exception, but I told you, one time.”
“Can’t I just—”
He cuts me off. “You need to go.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he says, “you don’t belong here.”
My heart sinks. I fold my poem along the creases and stuff it back into my pocket. “Why not?”
His gaze travels around the room, like he’s searching for words, but he won’t find any on these walls. There’s nothing but cleaning supplies in here.
Finally he locks his eyes on mine, and he doesn’t say a thing, but I understand completely. He told me the first time I was down here. We’re not friends.
I reach into my pocket, removing the folded piece of paper again. I press it into his palm and close his fingers around it. “I didn’t remember at first. It was years ago.…I don’t know, maybe I blocked it out or something. But anyway, I know what I did now, and I am so sorry. I’ll never be able to tell you how much I regret it. But I’m truly, genuinely sorry. And mortified.” Some weird sound escapes, and I cover my mouth. “But I deserve to be, right?”
I turn to leave, hoping he’ll stop me. He doesn’t.
As I’m about to step into the hallway, I glance over my shoulder. AJ is already back inside Poet’s Corner. When I hear the bolt click into place, I return to the door and rest my ear against it.
I can hear their voices on the other side. I feel tears pricking my eyes when I think about Sydney standing on stage, making everyone laugh, and AJ singing, giving everyone chills. I’m curious about Caroline. She said it would be easy to get me inside, as long as we found the right words. She was wrong. Maybe she’s up there right now, pleading my case since I can’t do it myself. I picture that room. Its tactile walls. All those colorful slips of paper and incredible words I’ll never see again.
I climb the stairs, cross the stage, and step out into the sunshine, taking deep deliberate breaths like Shrink-Sue taught me to. By the time I arrive at our tree, I’m under control again.
“Where’s your library book?” Hailey asks as I sit down, rejoining the circle.
“It was already checked out,” I tell her.
I pluck at the blades of grass—one, two, three—and look around at Alexis, Kaitlyn, Olivia, and Hailey, thinking about Sue’s advice to make new friends, and realizing that after all those years of saying I couldn’t do it, I just tried to. And failed.
“Fill me in,” Sue says. “How are things with your friends this week?”
I stretch the putty between my fingers, testing to see how far I can pull it before it snaps. “Better in some ways. But different.”
“Do you mean they’re treating you differently?”
I kind of wish they were. That would be easier. “No. It’s more…the other way around.”
It’s been a month since I tried to give AJ my poem. Ever since that day, something’s shifted in me. I’m quieter during lunch. Last Saturday night, I skipped a party and went to the movies with my family instead. I’ve been hanging out with Paige after school, taking her to gymnastics practice, helping her with her homework. I’m having a hard tim
e being around the Eights. I can’t even look at Kaitlyn. Every time I do, I think of that smug look on her face when she said we “cured” AJ, and I feel sick.
I kick off my shoes and pull my feet onto the chair, curling myself into a ball. “I don’t feel like talking about them today. Can we change the subject?” I ask, resting my chin on my knees.
“Of course. What do you want to talk about?”
I glance over at the clock. I’ve spent the week obsessing about sitting in this chair, talking to Sue, hearing her advice, playing with my putty. Now I’m here and I have no idea what I want to say.
“I’ve been swimming every day. I’m feeling good about that. I can tell I’m getting stronger, and it’s taking my mind off, well, everything. And I’ve been writing a lot. It’s cathartic, you know? It makes me feel…” I search for the right word, something Sue will like, and settle on, “Healthy.”
“Hmm. I like that word. Healthy.” She says it slowly, letting it linger in the air for a while. I feel a pang of guilt when I picture myself huddled under the covers with a flashlight, writing until late night becomes early morning. This probably isn’t the best time to tell her I haven’t been taking my sleep meds.
“How are things with Caroline?” she asks. As soon as I hear her name, I feel my shoulders sink a little lower.
“Good. We’ve been spending a lot of time together. We meet in the theater after school and she helps me with my poetry.” God, if the Eights overheard me say that, I’d never hear the end of it, but Sue clearly isn’t one of them, because she rests her elbows on the armrest and leans forward to keep me talking.
“I like writing with her. When I can’t figure out how to articulate what I want to say, she seems to have the perfect words. And we talk, you know? Really talk about things.” I shift in my chair, squeeze my putty into a tight ball. “The Eights and I used to talk like that, but we haven’t in a long time. It feels kind of…strange to have a friend like that again.”
“But good strange.”
“Yeah. Definitely good strange.”
My fingers work the putty while Sue settles back in her chair and consults her notes, flipping back to earlier pages, previous sessions.
“We haven’t talked about Brandon in a while. Are you still thinking about him?”
Brandon? Wow. Now that I think about it, I haven’t given him much thought in the last month. “No. Not really.”
She writes it down. “How about Kurt?”
“Kurt? Ew. No.” I saw him at lunch today, but that didn’t even prompt me to think about him in the way Sue’s referring to.
“Are you thinking about any other boys?”
“You mean, Am I obsessing about any other boys?”
“Not necessarily. Unless that’s what it feels like to you.”
I grin at her. “Nice spin.”
Sue cocks her head to one side, looking smug.
I haven’t talked to AJ since I gave him my apology poem and he kicked me out of Poet’s Corner, but I think about that day a lot. I think about him a lot. I changed the route I take to third period so I’m more likely to cross paths with him. I write about him almost every night before I fall asleep. I was up late last night making a playlist of acoustic guitar songs I could imagine him playing and titled it Song for You.
I’ve figured out where he lives, but I’ve fought the urge to drive by his house. I know where he eats lunch when he’s not downstairs—I’ve seen him sitting at the round table over by the bathrooms with that other guy and one of the girls from Poet’s Corner—but I don’t stare at him or intentionally drop objects as I walk by or anything.
I picture his dimple and that sexy, fluid way he throws his guitar over his back. But then I think about the look on his face when he told me I didn’t belong in Poet’s Corner, and reality hits. I’m not sure I’m obsessed with him, but I’m definitely obsessed with him forgiving me. And I’m curious about him. Caroline knows. Sue would probably want me to tell her, too.
“No, I’m not obsessed with any boys,” I say.
She raises her eyebrows, looking at me like she knows me far too well to believe it. I’m not offended. I’ve been preoccupied with guys since the day she met me.
“But I can’t stop thinking about AJ. The boy Kaitlyn and I teased when we were kids.” I rest my forehead on my knees, hiding my face.
“You’ve apologized to him, haven’t you?” she asks. I nod without looking at her.
But I can’t undo what I did.
I let out a heavy sigh. “When am I going to stop making mistakes, Sue?”
Her laugh catches me off guard, and I look up at her, wide-eyed and confused. “Why on earth would you want to do that?” she asks.
I stare at her.
“Mistakes. Trial and error. Same thing. Mistakes are how we learned to walk and run and that hot things burn when you touch them. You’ve made mistakes all your life and you’re going to keep making them.”
“Terrific.”
“The trick is to recognize your mistakes, take what you need from them, and move on.”
“I can’t move on.”
“You can’t beat yourself up, either.”
The room is quiet for a long time. Finally she clears her throat to get my attention. “Why are you scratching?” she asks. I hadn’t even realized I was doing it, and when I pull my fingers away, the back of my neck feels sore and raw. I smash my thumb into my putty.
“I need him to forgive me,” I say.
It’s all I think about. It’s making me crazy.
“You can’t need that, Sam,” she says, slowly shaking her head. “That one’s out of your control. You’ve done your part, and now it’s up to him. He’ll either forgive you or he won’t.”
He won’t.
I haven’t let myself cry over what Kaitlyn and I did to AJ—not when I found out, not when I told Sue a month ago—but I can’t hold back the tears anymore, so I let them fall. My chest already feels lighter with the release.
“Hey,” Sue says, resting her elbows on her knees. “Look at me. You’re a good person who made a mistake.” That makes me cry even harder. “Did you learn something?”
I hide my face behind my hand, nodding fast.
“Then this particular mistake has done its job. Forgive yourself and move on, Sam.” When Sue hands me a tissue, my eyes meet hers. “Go for it,” she says quietly.
I’m not sure how long I sit there wiping my eyes and blowing my nose, but I know even if we go overtime on our session today, there’s no way she’ll let me leave this chair until I say it. And mean it.
“I forgive myself,” I finally say, my voice cracking on each word.
As I take my seat in history class, I check the clock on the wall. I still have a few minutes before the bell rings, so I pull out my yellow notebook. I’ve been thinking about mistakes and forgiveness ever since my session with Sue yesterday, and I’m dying to add a few more lines to my poem on the topic.
“Hey, Sam.” I slam my notebook shut and look up. Sydney is hovering over me.
“Hi. Sydney, right?” I ask, as if I don’t know her name. But of course I do. I’ve seen her every day during fourth period for the past month, and each time, I think about her Chicken McNuggets poem and smile to myself.
She rests one hand on my desk and reaches for my silver S pendant with the other. “Ooh, I love this,” she says, lifting it into her fingers. She twists it around a few times, studying it from various angles. She drops it and reaches for her own necklace. “Look. We have excellent taste in letters,” she says, holding up a hot pink letter S.
“That’s really pretty,” I tell her, still trying to figure out why she’s talking to me.
“So,” she whispers, “AJ read your poem to us.”
“What? When?” I gave it to him so long ago. I figured if he’d read it, I would have known by now. It’s been all I can do to stop thinking about it.
“We’ve been talking,” she says. “We want you to come back.” r />
“Really?”
“Really.” She bends down toward my ear. “Some of us wanted you to come back the following week. Some of us took more convincing.”
“AJ?” I ask.
“He wasn’t alone in his opinion. We all know who you are, Samantha. We remember what you did to him,” she says. I hunch my shoulders and tuck my head to my chest, wishing I could disappear. “But I think you meant what you said in that poem. Did you?”
It takes effort, but I sit up straight and look right at her. “Every last word.”
“Good. We’re meeting at lunch today. Come downstairs with me after class.” She taps my yellow notebook. “Bring this with you,” she says. Then she continues down the aisle and takes her seat a few rows behind me.
Holy shit.
My mind is racing and I can’t lock on to one thought. I’m still embarrassed, but now elation is starting to take over. I get to see that room again. But then I think about how Sydney tapped on my notebook, and I start to panic.
I’ll have to read a poem.
Class starts, but I’m not really paying attention. All I can think about are the poems I’ve written so far. I swap out my yellow notebook for the blue one and start thumbing through the pages, looking for worthy candidates as I dig my fingernails into the back of my neck three times, again and again.
Horrible. Lame. Ridiculous. Supposed to be funny but isn’t. Supposed to rhyme but doesn’t. Hmm, this one’s kind of poignant—but…haiku?
Sweat is forming on my brow, and I keep shifting in my chair, and my neck already feels sore from all the scratching. Maybe I’ll have time to ask Caroline for her opinion. She’s heard every one of these poems. She helped me write many of them.
Wait. This one’s worth considering.
I look up at the whiteboard to check the status of the lesson and pretend to take a few notes, but when the coast is clear I read the poem. Then I turn around and look at Sydney. She’s watching me with wide eyes and an encouraging smile, and it reminds me of Caroline’s words that very first day: “I’m going to show you something that will change your whole life.”