Puck Around And Fall のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 31 - チャプター 40

Ms. Okafor asked me to stay after elective on a Thursday evening when the snow outside had turned to the kind of freezing rain that hit the windows sideways and made the repurposed storage room feel warmer and more necessary than usual.I had read all four new chapters to the group that afternoon. The room had gone through its range — Marcus calling the third chapter structurally fearless, which from Marcus was the highest possible compliment. Priya saying the fourth chapter's last line was the kind of sentence she would underline twice and come back to. Darius doing the thing he did when something moved him, which was going very still for a moment before he said anything at all.Ms. Okafor had said nothing during the reading. She had listened with her hands folded in her lap and her red pen untouched on the desk beside her, which I was learning meant she was in receiving mode — taking something in fully before she decided what to do with it.After the group filed out, scarves and bac

I mailed the letter on a Friday morning before I could talk myself out of it.Not emailed. Actually mailed, with a stamp I found in the junk drawer under three dead pens and a takeout menu from a restaurant that no longer existed. I wrote the address in the careful handwriting I used for important things, walked to the blue mailbox two blocks from school, and stood in front of it for a moment with the envelope in my hand.Then I let it go.The walk back felt lighter and heavier at once, which was the specific physics of doing something you'd been putting off — the relief of the action and the weight of what came next arriving simultaneously.What came next was the phone call.I made it that evening, sitting in my car in the school parking lot after the late library session I'd invented as an excuse to be somewhere alone. The photograph was in my jacket pocket. I had been carrying it since Thursday, taking it out and looking at it in quiet moments the way you returned to something you

I drove to the lake alone on a Wednesday night and told nobody.Not a secret exactly. Dad knew I took drives sometimes when I needed to think, had stopped asking where I was going about two weeks in when it became clear I was always going somewhere reasonable and always coming back. Knox knew I liked the lake. Finn knew I processed things by moving. None of them needed to be in the loop on every instance of those facts.Tonight was mine. Just mine. I had been understanding, slowly and with some resistance, that there were things you could only do when there was nobody beside you to do them with — not because the people beside you made things worse, but because some versions of yourself only showed up in solitude, in the quiet that came from being accountable to no one for an hour or two.I parked at the gravel track between the two pines, cut the engine, and sat for a moment in the cooling silence.Then I got out, pulled my jacket tighter, and walked down to the bank.The lake was wha

Knox was waiting outside AP Lit on Monday morning.Not casual-waiting, not the leaning-against-the-locker version with the easy grin. Actually waiting — standing in the middle of the hallway traffic with his hands in his jacket pockets and his eyes on the corridor entrance, watching for me specifically, which I knew because the second I came through the door he moved. Directly. No detour.I stopped walking.He stopped in front of me.The hallway moved around us — lockers, backpacks, someone's skateboard getting confiscated by a teacher who had clearly confiscated this particular skateboard before and had feelings about it. All of it proceeding as normal while Knox Callahan stood in front of me with an expression I hadn't seen from him before — open in a way that cost something, the captain version entirely absent."I was a jerk," he said.Not preamble. Not I've been thinking or I wanted to say. Just the fact, placed in front of me immediately like he'd been holding it since Saturday a

Mom talked on Saturday morning.Not the way she'd talked on the phone — that had been a call, contained, the distance of a thousand miles giving both of us somewhere to retreat to when the weight of it got large. This was the bed and breakfast dining room at eight in the morning with coffee that the Ostranders made strong and good and a plate of toast between us that neither of us was eating, and my mother on the other side of the small table looking like someone who had decided last night, writing in her notebook in the small desk chair, that today was the day she was going to stop managing the pieces and just hand them over.She started with the easy part.She grew up forty minutes outside of Evergreen, which I already knew from the phone call. One-stoplight town, grain elevator, parents who were teachers, summers that she had loved with the specific totality that children loved things before they understood that loving something meant you could also lose it. She'd spent every summe