“What’s all that staff paper there?”
“Ideas for songs. Random notes. Things that’ll become songs. Things I might write about someday, or started once but didn’t finish because there wasn’t enough in them. If a song’s meant to stay around, you carry it with you in your bones.”
He writes I, want, to, have, sex, with, Ultraviolet, Remarkey-able.
I write Maybe, which he immediately rips up.
And then I write Okay.
He rips this up too.
Yes!
He slaps this onto the wall and then kisses me, his arm circling my waist. Before I know it, I’m on my back and he’s looking down at me, and I am pulling off his shirt. Then his skin is on mine, and I’m on top of him, and for a while I forget we’re on the floor of a closet because all I can think of is him, us, him and me, Finch and Violet, Violet and Finch, and everything is okay again.
Afterward, I stare up at the ceiling, and when I look over at him, there is this strange look on his face. “Finch?” His eyes are fixed on something above us. I poke him in the ribs. “Finch!”
Finally his eyes turn to mine and he says, “Hey,” like he just remembered that I’m there. He sits up and rubs his face with his hands, and then he reaches for the Post-its. He writes Relax. Then Breathe deeply. Then Violet is life.
He fixes them to the wall and reaches for the guitar again. I rest my head against his as he plays, changing the chords a little, but I can’t shake this feeling that something happened, like he went away for a minute and only part of him came back.
“Don’t tell anyone about my fort, okay, Ultraviolet?”
“Like not telling your family you got expelled?”
He writes Guilty and holds it up before ripping it into pieces.
“Okay.” Then I write Trust, Promise, Secret, Safe, and place them on the wall.
“Ahhhhh, and now I have to start over.” He closes his eyes, then plays the song again, adding in the words. It sounds sad the second time, as if he shifted to a minor key.
“I like your secret fort, Theodore Finch.” This time I rest my head on his shoulder, looking at the words we’ve written and the song we’ve created, and then at the license plate again. I feel this strange need to move closer to him, as if he might get away from me. I lay one hand on his leg.
In a minute he says, “I get into these moods sometimes, and I can’t shake them.” He’s still strumming the guitar, still smiling, but his voice has gone serious. “Kind of black, sinking moods. I imagine it’s what being in the eye of a tornado would be like, all calm and blinding at the same time. I hate them.”
I lace my fingers through his so that he has to stop playing. “I get moody too. It’s normal. It’s what we’re supposed to do. I mean, we’re teenagers.” Just to prove it, I write Bad mood before tearing it up.
“When I was a kid, younger than Decca, there was this cardinal in our backyard that kept flying into the sliding glass doors of our house, over and over again until he knocked himself out. Each time, I thought he was dead, but then he’d get up again and fly off. This little female cardinal sat and watched him from one of the trees, and I always thought it was his wife. Anyway, I begged my parents to stop him from banging into the glass. I thought he should come inside and live with us. Kate called the Audubon Society, and the man there said if it was his guess, the cardinal was probably just trying to get back to his tree, the one that had been standing there before someone came along and knocked it down and built a house on top of it.”
He tells me about the day the cardinal died, about finding the body on the back deck, about burying him in the mud nest. “There was nothing to make him last a long time,” Finch told his parents afterward. He said he always blamed them because he knew they could have been the thing that made the cardinal last if they’d only let it in like he’d asked them to.
“That was the first black mood. I don’t remember much that happened after that, not for a little while at least.”
The worried feeling is back. “Have you ever talked to anyone? Do your parents or Kate—or maybe one of the counselors …?”
“Parents, no. Kate, not really. I’ve been talking to a counselor at school.”
I look around the closet, at the comforter we’re sitting on, at the pillows, the water jug, the energy bars, and that’s when it hits me. “Finch, are you living in here?”
“I’ve been in here before. Eventually, it works. I’ll wake up one morning and feel like coming out.” He smiles at me, and the smile seems hollow. “I kept your secret; you keep mine.”
When I get home, I open the door to my closet and walk inside. It’s larger than Finch’s but packed full of clothes, shoes, purses, jackets. I try to imagine what it would be like to live in here and feel I couldn’t come out. I lie down flat and stare up at the ceiling. The floor is hard and cold. In my head, I write: There was a boy who lived in a closet.… But that’s as far as I get.
I’m not claustrophobic, but when I open the door and walk back into my room, I feel like I can breathe again.
At dinner, my mom says, “Did you have a fun time with Shelby?” She raises her eyebrows at my dad. “Violet drove to Shelby’s house after school. As in drove.”
My dad clinks his glass against mine. “Proud of you, V. Maybe it’s time we talk about getting you a car of your own.”
They’re so excited over this that I feel even guiltier about lying. I wonder what they’d do if I told them where I really was—having sex with the boy they don’t want me to see in the closet where he’s living.
FINCH
Day 75
“The cadence of suffering has begun.”—Cesare Pavese
I
am
in
pieces.
VIOLET
March 20
After U.S. Geography, Amanda tells Roamer to go on ahead and she’ll catch up. I haven’t spoken a word to him since Finch got expelled. “I need to tell you something,” she says to me.
“What?” I haven’t said much to her either.
“You can’t tell anyone.”
“Amanda, I’m going to be late for class.”
“Promise first.”
“Fine, I promise.”
She’s talking so low I almost can’t hear her. “I saw Finch at this group I go to. I’ve been going a while, even though I don’t really need to, but my mom is, like, making me.” She sighs.