Places No One Knows by Brenna Yovanoff

anything else. I’m the one who looks away first.
    Out in the yard, another round of bottle rockets goes off. The shower of sparks is industrial and beautiful, like someone’s welding crossbeams in the sky. I wonder where a person gets bottle rockets, how much they cost. Maybe I’ll invest in some. I like things that increase velocity and then explode.
    “I look at you,” Marshall says, and his voice is very gentle suddenly. “I look at you and I think, why is that girl so sad? Why are you sad?”
    I turn to face him, crossing my arms over my chest. “I’m not sad.”
    Slumped against the washing machine, he looks broken. His face is wistful, half lit by the dull yellow glow of the porch light. And he smiles. “I call bullshit,” he says. “I’m calling bullshit all over that one.”
    I stand with my shoulders back. “Forgive me if I don’t think unbiased evaluation of someone else’s emotional state is really your area of expertise.”
    He shrugs. “Whatever. Not like it matters, but you’re not
fooling
anyone.”
    “I’m fooling everyone,” I say, and know it’s the truth.
    Everyone except him.
    I can feel my blood thinning, becoming air or water. My hands are weak, losing my hold on the world, losing track of Waverly, and I dread the moment when I wake up in my own bed.
    “I’m sorry,” he says abruptly, staring out into the yard.
    “For what?”
    “For this—for not being…” He stops and takes a breath like he’s about to say something else, but in a second, when the words stop eluding him. His mouth is open and I can see the frustration as he struggles for it. I want to jump in, start suggesting conclusions to his sentences, but I wait.
    Instead, he holds out the lighter, offering it to me, but when I reach to take it, my hand is tingling and numb. The way he’s looking at me is so cautious, so impossibly kind. Suddenly, I can’t feel the cracked linoleum or the cold or anything at all.
    “Better,” he whispers as I start to disappear. “For not being better.”
    I wake up breathless, with a squeezing feeling in the center of my chest like my heart hurts.

.
    I’m beginning to suspect that I can only converse meaningfully with strangers. My true, unfiltered personality is unsuitable for everyday use, and the whole morning is just one long object lesson.
    In the commons before AP Lit, I told Maribeth that Kelly green for the balloon arch at the dance was fine, when everyone knows that Kelly green is hideous, and in the last twenty-four hours, I’ve been more honest with Autumn Pickerel than I’ve ever been with any of the people I call my friends. At night, in my dreams, I have the capacity to say and do and be exactly what I want, but never in the daylight. Not in real life. I spend most of second period considering all the ways my ability to communicate is fundamentally broken.
    Anyway, objecting to Kelly green would require me to produce a compelling alternative, and I just don’t care that much.
    When my daily stream of texts from CJ starts rolling in before trig, I take out my phone and set him to
ignore.
His persistence should be flattering, but it makes something sink in my chest.
    Slumped at my desk, I pretend it’s Marshall texting me instead, and smile for the first time all day. His imaginary correspondence would be witty and surprising. He wouldn’t talk about nothing. He would limit himself to one question mark per sentence. I can’t decide if it’s impressive or pathetic that even my wildest fantasies involve appropriate punctuation.
    I tear a sheet of loose-leaf from my binder and compose a note I know I won’t pass to him. It says things that seem largely self-explanatory and leaves out a lot of other things, which are too hard to put into words.
Hi,
    I thought about what you said last night. It’s nice of you to ask, but I don’t think that I am sad. I think I might just be tired. Also, I’m sorry I said your poor decisions were a cornucopia. That was