If you were here, I know you’d already be done with yours.
I also know it would be beautiful.
I can see your desk from where I’m sitting. I won’t find you there even if I look, but part of me is always afraid that I will.
Sometimes I wonder if that’s what you wanted. For me to be afraid of you. For everyone to be afraid, so no one would try to get close.
They tell me that I died. They say that I was dead, and I want to tell them I still am. At least that’s how I feel. Because I know where you are and what’s become of you. Because I couldn’t stop it and I couldn’t bring you back. Because Reynolds was right when he told me I couldn’t reach you.
Everything’s broken.
And yet here I am, writing you what must be a Valentine.
Because even though I know I shouldn’t still love you, even though I know that is the last thing I should have room to feel for you, more than anything, I want to tell you I do.
* * *
Isobel lifted her shaking pen from the vein-blue lines of her notebook, wondering how the confession had managed to escape her.
She’d never written like that before, where the words just poured out, unstoppable.
The final line burned into her retinas, echoing a truth that she’d hoped to keep hidden away, locked inside with everything else.
She smacked a hand on the paper, crumpling it.
What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she let go?
Why, when he had let her go?
The lunch bell rang, the noise shredding her already frayed nerves.
“Okay, folks,” Mr. Swanson said, standing from behind his desk, his wooden rolling chair sliding back to bump against the chalk tray. “I’d like to go ahead and collect these today, even if you’re not finished. I’ll hand them back tomorrow, so you’ll have the first few minutes of class to do some revising, and then I’ll grade them over the weekend.”
Everyone got up, papers flapping, and the unanimous flutter in the room reminded Isobel of a flock of birds taking wing.
Tekeli-li . . .
Afraid someone might catch sight of Varen’s name, Isobel ripped her own rumpled paper free and stuffed it into the middle of the notebook.
Glancing up, she saw that Mr. Swanson had moved to the door. Like a ticket taker, he collected papers as her classmates filed into the hall.
“Another reason I should gather these now,” he said, “is the simple fact that many a great work of literature has been lost by remaining tucked haphazardly into the pockets and knapsacks of young, carefree scribes such as yourselves. Wanderlust wayfarers, cavalier bards, wistful wordsmiths—”
“And phat rappers,” Bobby Bailey said as he handed Mr. Swanson his sonnet.
“And portly rappers, why not?” Mr. Swanson conceded with a nod, adding Bobby’s paper to the accumulating stack.
Isobel rose. She tore off the top sheet of her notebook and, gathering her things, kept her head down as she approached the door and its guardian. Handing in the blank paper, she ducked past him into the hall.
“Ah, Miss Lanley,” he called after her, his voice carrying over the rising chatter and banging of lockers.
Flinching, Isobel stopped.
“I see thou hast submitted parchment free of words, and thus error. How very avant-garde,” Mr. Swanson said, talking in that way he sometimes did, like a Shakespeare character who had somehow clawed his way out from the press of musty book pages.
The power of words . . .
“Fear not, fair leader of cheers,” he went on, “I both recognize and appreciate the temperament of the artist who feels her work is, as yet, unfit for the scrutiny of another’s eye. So how about I grant thou till the morrow to turn in yon magnum opus I saw thou scribbling on mere moments ago?”