“Your room is probably way cooler,” Jess says, picking at the carpet and eyeing me nervously.
“Are you crazy? My room is four blank walls and a bunch of unpacked boxes. I just never know what to do with my room, you know? I don’t know how to make it mine, like you have.”
I wander over to the far wall, where Jess has posted a collection of quotes.
“Let me guess which is your favorite,” I say, running my fingers over the papers before stopping on one that makes me smile. “This one?”
It’s “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
Jessie laughs and shakes her head. “That’s a good one, but I love this one more.” She points to a quote from a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip: “Reality continues to ruin my life.”
I stop in front of a page marked Alice in Wonderland and feel the air rush out of my lungs. It reads, “I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.”
“That’s a good one too.” She pulls the page off the wall and hands it to me. “For your room. It’s time you started decorating it.”
I could kiss her.
Instead, I grab my sketchbook out of my bag and head for her bookshelf. “Let’s find some new ones to add to the wall.”
We sprawl on the carpet, flipping through books and sharing the quotes we find. Jess scribbles her favorites into a journal she pulled off the bookshelf, and I copy mine into my sketchbook before adding drawings and embellishments.
I’m finishing my fifth or sixth sketch when I look up and realize that more than an hour has passed in silence. I sneak a look at Jess. She’s sitting cross-legged with a book in her lap, chewing on a piece of hair that’s come loose from her ponytail. I stop sketching quotes and start drawing her instead. There’s something so intense about watching someone when they don’t know anyone’s looking. All the stuff they carry around with them falls away, and you can catch the quickest glimpse of who they really are, underneath everything.
I’m drawing Jessie’s eyes and marveling at how the little line that’s usually between them smooths out when she reads, and at that moment she looks up and catches me watching her.
“What?” she asks, swiping at her cheeks. “Do I have something on my face?”
I shake my head and stop sketching. The little line is back on her forehead. “I was drawing you,” I tell her, holding up the page so she can see.
“Oh my gosh,” Jessie breathes. “That’s amazing.” She comes over and sits beside me. “I didn’t know you could draw like that.”
I shrug. “Drawing is easy. It just takes practice.”
“Clearly you’ve never seen my impressive collection of stick figures.”
I look down at the drawing in my lap. I’ve messed up the eyes, I realize. And the shape of the face isn’t quite right. I flip back to a book-quote page. I don’t usually show my sketches to anyone, and I’m not sure what possessed me to share a half-finished one.
“Any new quotes?” I ask, gesturing at her notebook.
She picks it up and reads a few to me. She’s come up with: “I am haunted by humans”(Markus Zusak), “Sometimes people just want to be happy, even if it’s not real” (Veronica Roth), and “Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them” (Lemony Snicket).
She looks over at my sketchbook, open to “It does not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live,” and groans. “No Harry Potter.”
I blink at her in surprise and then remember the locker room. “Don’t be stupid. You can’t let a bunch of idiots turn you off of Harry Potter. You’re a reader!” She looks like she’s about to cry. “Besides,” I add, “you are so Hermione Granger.”
She laughs through her tears. “It’s the hair, isn’t it?”
“Kinda,” I admit. “But mostly ’cause you’re bookish and smart.”
She points at my sketchbook. “What else have you got in there?”
I flip through the pages, stopping at a quote I memorized from The Bell Jar. “This one’s my favorite: ‘I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence.’”
“I’ve felt like that,” she whispers.
I nod, and flip through the other quotes I’ve sketched out. She stops me at “There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning.”
“I love that,” she says, surprised. “I’ve never seen it before. Where’d you find it?”
“I actually don’t know where it’s from. My dad says it all the time, and it just popped into my head.” I pull the page out of my sketchbook and hand it to her. “From me. This’ll be my contribution to your wall.”
“Our wall,” she corrects, taping the page to the empty space where the Alice in Wonderland quote used to be.
“Yes,” I agree, feeling at home for the first time since we moved out here.
Our wall.
Jessie
Annie is the geekiest cool girl ever. She’s like a rebellious supermodel who’s secretly a complete nerd underneath.
I mean, really, how many girls with true popularity potential would opt to join the Avery Family Games Night willingly? I thought I was going to die on Monday when my mom told Annie all about our Friday night ritual of tacos and board games, but Annie practically begged for an invitation.
She’s been over at my house nearly every day since school started, but never for one of our goofy family dinners. I was a complete basket case before she came over tonight, and my mother’s antics certainly didn’t help.
“Look what I found,” Mom singsonged about half an hour before Annie was due to arrive. She held up the most enormous sombrero I’d ever seen. It was
