Things We Know by Heart

Author:Jessi Kirby
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperTeen
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he know that every day is Doomsday.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I DON’T KNOW how to answer Colton’s texts. I pace my room, full of more energy than I’ve had in a long time, then grab my phone again and sit down on my floor and read Colton’s texts again. What do I say? Was it really an invitation to hang out? What time does “later” mean?

I need help with this, so I get back up and cross the hall to Ryan’s room. When I poke my head in, I can hear her shower, so I tiptoe in. Take a look around at what was a neat and orderly room just a few days ago. Now her bags lie in the corner spilling clothes and makeup. Books and magazines litter both sides of the bed, and she’s even pulled out all her old canvases from the closet and leaned them against the wall like a mini gallery, and I know as soon as I see them she really is serious about putting together a portfolio for that art school.

My eyes fall on the dresser, the one neat spot, where Ryan’s completed vision board now sits leaning against the mirror, an artful, color-filled collage of her wants and goals. Of her plans to move forward. She must’ve stayed up into the wee hours of the morning to finish it. Either that, or she never went to bed. She has that kind of manic focus about her, like if she just keeps moving, the things she’s upset about can’t catch her. The opposite of me. It makes me wonder, if she hadn’t been away at school this last year, if it might’ve been different for me. More like today.

In big, bold letters across Ryan’s board are the words New Beginnings, and below those, scattered over various pictures of places she wants to go, Italy included. Over all the images are words that sound like things my sister would say: Get gloriously lost, find yourself, trust, love, hold your breath and take a leap—all the things I think of her doing naturally.

I remember the one picture I found, of the heart in the bottle. I’d stashed the magazine under the bed, hoping she wouldn’t find the picture and cut it out for herself. When I crouch down and look, it’s still there. In her bathroom, the shower shuts off and I flip through fast. Find the dog-eared page opposite the picture of the heart in the bottle and slip out of Ryan’s room with it. Not that she’d care. She’d probably even send me off with the stack of magazines to finish my own board. But something about this particular picture makes me want to keep it to myself.

In my room, I sit down in the bright square of sunshine on the carpet. I open the magazine to the page and carefully cut out the picture, holding it there a moment.

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