All Chapters of SIR: Chapter 211 - Chapter 220

Aunt Sel pulls me into another quick hug before she turns toward my mother who has stepped back into the room. “Nora, I have missed you so much.” She wraps her arms around her next and holds on for a moment. “Life has made us all way too serious lately. I saw Tyler and Lucas downstairs in the sitting room and they told me Lucia was up here so I thought I would check on her first. Luckily I found both of you together having some mother daughter bonding time.” I look down at my hands and fidget with the edge of my sleeve. Selene notices immediately, because of course she does, and looks between the two of us. “Did I interrupt something important?” My mother glances at me before answering. “Oh it is nothing serious. We were just having a little mother and daughter chat.” Selene’s eyes move to me and then she gasps, bringing both hands to her face in the theatrical way she has always had. “Oh my God. Was it a boy? Lucia, is there a man? Tell me everything immediately.” I let out a g

#74"I look like a literal child," Garvin says, holding the uniform blazer at arm's length with the expression of a man being asked to wear a hazmat suit to a dinner party. "Who designed this? Who sat down and thought, yes, this is what a human being should put on their body voluntarily?"Elias takes a sip of water and watches his friend examine the thing like it might be contagious. They are in the back of the gym between sessions, the afternoon light coming through the high windows in long strips, and Garvin has been having variations of this same conversation for the better part of thirty minutes."You've been complaining about that blazer since you bought it," Elias says."Because the complaining is justified," Garvin says. "It has a crest on the pocket. A crest. Like I'm going to a medieval tournament.""A lot of schools have crests.""A lot of schools are also wrong," Garvin says, throwing the blazer into his open locker and closing it like the uniform might escape if given the

The art teacher is saying something about emotional truth and I have been staring at the monitor for forty minutes and I could not tell you a single thing he has said in the last twenty of them.This is my final term of high school. My final term, which I was supposed to spend doing the things final terms are for, the mild senioritis, the lunch table politics, the general coasting on the knowledge that the end is close and the beginning of something else is closer. Instead I am sitting in my childhood bedroom in front of a laptop while a man I have never met in person tells me that art is about pouring your feelings into the work, which is rich, because my feelings right now would produce something nobody wants to look at.I turn to Zeke, who is sitting in the chair by the window doing the thing where he appears to be engaged with whatever is on the screen while actually just existing very professionally in the room.“You’re not listening,” I tell him.He doesn’t look away from the mo

A/N: Double update today cause I love you guys and you asked nicely :) ~ I am sitting at the edge of the pool with my legs in the water and my sketchbook open on my lap and my headphones in and for about forty minutes I have successfully avoided thinking about anything that requires my actual attention. Then a shadow falls across the page. I pull one headphone out and look up. Zeke is standing behind me with his hands in his pockets. “You’re not at your desk.” “Extremely observant,” I say. “Have you considered a career in security?” “Your class started twenty minutes ago.” “My class,” I say, closing the sketchbook, “can start without me. It is a screen with a teacher on it. The teacher does not know whether I am there or not. The screen is the same regardless.” Zeke looks at me for a moment with the particular patience of someone who has decided not to have an argument about this right now. Then he takes off his shoes and sits down beside me at the pool edge, rolling his trouse

Breakfast is the best it has been in weeks.I know this because Tyler is arguing with Lucas about something that happened in a video game and my mother is laughing at both of them and my father is reading the paper with the fake seriousness of a man pretending not to find the argument funny. The kitchen smells like the good coffee and the eggs that the cook does with the herbs from the garden, and for the first time in twenty-two days the morning feels like a morning rather than a holding pattern.I watch Tyler steal the last piece of toast from Lucas’s plate and Lucas’s subsequent outrage and I feel something warm and entirely uncomplicated settle in my chest.Selene is at the end of the table with her coffee, looking at everyone and interacting whenever she can. After the laughter dies down, she clears her throat.“We’ve decided to stay,” she says, looking at my father. “We’ll cancel the trip, or at least postpone it. Nora and the kids need people around right now. Marcus and I talk