"I didn't say a word." She throws her hands up like she’s surrendering.
"Your eyebrow said it."
"My eyebrow has opinions." She sips her latte. "Which one?"
"I'm not answering that."
"It's Zero. It's always Zero with the biting."
"I hate you."
"You love me."
I do.
The university accepted me in the spring. Full admission. Creative writing program. I sit in workshops and I can't believe I'm here. Every week. A room full of people who care about sentences the way I care about sentences—arguing about structure and voice and whether the second act earns the ending.
I stay after class to talk to my professor about point of view. I read my classmates' stories and mark them up with notes in the margins because I can't help it, because this is the thing I've wanted since I was fifteen and writing in notebooks I hid under mattresses. I'm doing it. I'm actually doing it. And the stuff I write—about locked rooms, about the feeling of counting meals, about a boy who learned to disappear—it's finding its way onto the page in shapes I didn't know I had in me.
My professor pulled me aside after the third workshop. Said my writing had a quality she couldn't put her finger on—an urgency, she called it. Like the narrator was always on the verge of something. Running toward or running from, she couldn't tell which.
Both, I told her.Sometimes at the same time.
Wren and I started a group. Not a therapy group—we don't have the credentials for that, though Wren is working on hers. A support group. For foster kids, former and current. Omega or not. Designation has nothing to do with it.
We meet Tuesday nights at a community center that smells like floor wax and donated coffee. Eight regulars. Sometimes ten. Kids who aged out of the system and don't know how to fill out a lease application. Kids who flinch when someone raises their voice. Kids who sit in the circle and say nothing for three weeks straight and then one night say everything.
I know those kids. Iwasthose kids.
Wren runs the meetings. I bring the coffee and sit in the circle and listen and sometimes, when someone can't find thewords, I sayI knowand I mean it in a way that doesn't require explanation.
She texts me after every meeting.
You good?
I'm good.
Liar.
I'm working on it.
Same. See you Thursday.
∞∞∞
Margot calls every day.
Not at a set time—she's not that organized, never has been. She calls when she thinks of me, which means I get calls at seven in the morning and eleven at night and once, memorably, during a lecture on Flannery O'Connor while I fumbled to silence my phone and mouthedsorryto my professor.
She went to Wisconsin. Georgia's guest room, the cedar sachets, the soup. She stayed six months. Dodged Richard's calls for the first three. I don't know what changed—maybe Georgia talked her into listening, maybe she just ran out of reasons not to—but eventually she picked up.
Eventually she heard what he had to say.
She's back with him now. Slowly. Carefully. The way you walk back into a house after a fire—checking every room before you sit down.
I told her I don't want her to not live her truth if he's who she wants. She got quiet on the phone when I said that. Quiet in the Margot way—the silence that means she's trying not to cry.
"He's been going to therapy," she said. "Anger management. He's not the same man, Max."
