Page 36 of Good Graces

She gives a quiet laugh. “You’re so annoying.”

“I know.”

She shakes her head and settles deeper into the couch, her focus shifting back to her phone. It’s not her fault I can’t open up like a normal girl. And if I don’t give her anything to work with, she won’t try again.

I drain the rest of my tea and push to my feet. It’s not that late, but I’m done pretending to be calm.

“Night.”

Jordan lifts a hand in a lazy wave as I disappear down the hall, back to my room. Back to silence. The phone still sits on my bed, face down, Warren’s text unanswered.

School starts in just over two weeks. Maybe I can pull it together. Regroup. Try to be productive and convince myself I’m still on track.

I pull my summer reading off the pile.Wuthering Heights. I flip it open, skim the first page. The second. The words blur, my mind slipping between the lines without catching on anything.

I close the book with a sigh and shove it aside.

Instead, I reach for the one I always come back to. I do love classic literature, but poetry has always been mine. Small. Sharp. Honest in a way nothing else is.

Emily Dickinson: Collected Poems.

The spine is cracked, the pages worn soft from years of being turned over in my hands. The edges curl where I’ve dog-eared my favorites. The margins are lined with faint pencil marks, thoughts I never quite committed to ink but needed to leave behind.

I thumb through the pages, my fingers skimming over worn paper.

“I like a look of Agony,

Because I know it’s true—”

There are some things you can’t fake. Some things you can’t lie about.

“Water, is taught by thirst.”

My fingers still.

That one. That was always the one.

I read the rest, the words settling into me like an old ache.

“Land—by the Oceans passed.

Transport—by throe—

Peace—by its battles told—

Love, by Memorial Mold—

Birds, by the Snow.”

My favorite.

Because it makes sense of the hard things. The idea that absence teaches us everything. That knowing comes from missing, from losing, from living without.

And Warren knew that, too.

That first summer, he started memorizing the ones I liked best, even though he didn’t care about poetry. He’d tilt his head at me from across the break room at Sycamore, drop a single mangled line into the conversation just to see me react.

“You make it too easy,” he’d said once, grinning at the way my shoulders tensed.

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