Chapter 1

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Marcus Thompson sat in the second row of folding chairs in the meeting room at the community center, and he was listening.

That was the thing people got wrong about Marcus. They thought, because he didn't say much, that he wasn't there. That he was somewhere else, thinking about basketball or video games or whatever it was they thought thirteen-year-old boys thought about. But Marcus was always there. Marcus was listening so hard sometimes that his ears ached with it.

He was listening now.

Aaliyah Farrell was standing at the front of the room with a sheet of paper in her hand, and the light from the window behind her made the edges of her curly hair glow like the rim of a planet. Aaliyah was twenty-six years old, and she was an animator, and she was the animator of the junior youth group, which meant she wasn't a teacher exactly but she wasn't a friend exactly either. She was something in between. She was the one who showed up every Saturday morning and sat in a circle with them and asked them questions like, "What do you think it means to be a person who keeps their word?" and then waited, actually waited, while they thought about it.

Marcus liked that about her. Most adults didn't wait.

"So this is the letter," Aaliyah was saying, holding up the sheet of paper. "The Ridgewood Community Foundation is putting together something called Youth Voices Festival. It's going to be at the library in April. A whole day. Music, art, spoken word, poetry, speeches. Anything where young people have something to say."

Marcus felt his stomach do a small, uncomfortable thing.

He wrote it down. Not what his stomach did; he wrote down the words Youth Voices Festival in the margin of the page of his composition notebook, which was open on his lap. His composition notebook had a red cover, mostly, although one corner of the cover was bent and getting white and fibrous where he had chewed on it one time when he was trying to think of a word. His pen was clipped to the spiral spine, because it was a composition notebook that was also spiral, which was the best kind, and he always had the pen clipped there so he could find it.

He wrote Youth Voices Festival in small, neat letters.

"They've asked if our group would like to contribute," Aaliyah said. "They want junior youth. They want kids your age. They want to hear from you."

Across the circle, Diya Patel put up her hand. Diya always put up her hand. Diya was twelve years old and had long black hair that she wore in a braid that hung down her back like a rope of shiny silk, and she had a lot of opinions, all of which she was happy to share.

"Can it be a group thing?" Diya asked. "Like, could we all do something together?"

"It could be," Aaliyah said. "Or it could be individuals. Or both."

"What about a skit?" Eden Reyes said. Eden was twelve also and had a round face and a laugh that started in his belly and came out his nose in a snort, and he was always thinking of ideas for skits. "We could do a skit. About, like, something."

"About what, Eden?" Jin-woo Park said. Jin-woo was thirteen and he was a thinker. He had a serious face and dark eyebrows that went down in a small V when he was concentrating.

"I don't know yet," Eden said. "That's why I said 'like, something.' We'd figure it out."

"I could bring my violin," Aliyah Teklemariam said quietly. Aliyah was twelve and she had been playing violin since she was six and she was almost good enough for the all-district orchestra. Her voice was quiet the way Marcus's voice was quiet, but her violin wasn't quiet. Her violin, when she played it, was bright and fierce, like a bird flying out of a window.

"That would be wonderful," Aaliyah said. "Aliyah, would you like to play something?"

"Maybe," Aliyah said. She looked down at her hands. "I would have to think about it."

"Of course."

Aaliyah let her eyes move around the circle. Marcus could feel her eyes coming. He could feel them like the shadow of a cloud moving across a field. He did not look up. He looked down at his notebook.

"How about you, Samira?" Aaliyah said.

Samira Javidi was sitting across from Marcus, and Marcus was both disappointed and relieved that Aaliyah's eyes had gone to her instead of to him. Samira was thirteen, Persian-American, with a dark braid down her back and eyes that noticed things. Samira had been the one, last year, who had figured out a lot of the things the group had had to figure out. Samira had been the center of the storm in a way, and she had come through it, and now she was quieter than she had been before, but in a way that was more solid, like a pond after rain stops.

"I've been thinking about it," Samira said. "Maybe I could write something. Not a whole speech. Just, a short thing."

"That sounds good."

"Felix said he would help me," Samira said, and she glanced over at Felix Delgado-Brown, who was thirteen, and who, last year, had lived in a homeless shelter with his mom, and who, this year, was living in transitional housing which was an apartment with a kitchen and a door that locked, and Felix's face when he sat in the circle these days was different than it had been last year. It was less tight around the eyes. Marcus had noticed.

"Felix?" Aaliyah said.

"I'm not writing anything," Felix said quickly. "I'm just helping Samira."

"That's okay too."

Aaliyah kept going around the circle. She did not push anyone. That was another thing Marcus liked about her. She did not say, Come on, Felix, you must have something. She did not say, What about a poem, Marcus? She just let the question be in the air, and the people who wanted to catch it caught it, and the people who didn't let it go by.

When she got to Marcus she only said, "Marcus?"

And Marcus, who had thought about this the whole time the others were talking, and who had written three different things in his notebook and crossed them out, said, "I don't know yet."

"Okay," Aaliyah said.

And that was all.

*I don't know yet.* *I don't know yet.* *I don't know yet.*

Three times. In smaller and smaller letters.

When the meeting ended, the other kids went out into the parking lot, where some parents were waiting in cars with the engines running. Marcus walked home. He always walked home from junior youth, because the community center was only six blocks from his house, and because walking was when he did some of his best thinking.

It was February. The air was cold in the way that made his breath come out in small puffs like a train engine. The sidewalks had been shoveled but there were patches of ice that looked like silver scars, and he stepped around them. He was wearing his gray hooded sweatshirt under his jacket, and the hood was up. He liked the hood. The hood made a little tunnel around his face that blocked out the side of the world and made everything just straight ahead.

Mrs. Okafor was out sweeping the front step of her house on Linden Street. Mrs. Okafor was old, and she was from Nigeria originally, and she always spoke to Marcus.

"Hello, young man," she said.

"Hello, Mrs. Okafor."

"How is your grandmother?"

"She's okay," Marcus said.

"You tell her Mrs. Okafor says hello."

"I will."

He walked on. He would not, actually, tell his grandmother that Mrs. Okafor said hello, because his grandmother sometimes had trouble with new information these days, and he didn't want to make her sad by telling her something and then finding out an hour later she had forgotten. That was what he told himself. But it was also that telling her made his chest ache, and he didn't like that feeling.

*Old women's voices calling over fences,* *hello young man, hello* *my grandmother does not forget the names* *of her old friends.* *She forgets the names of* *days.*

He did not write this down. He only composed it, in his head, and when he got home he might or might not write it in his notebook. Sometimes he wrote down the things he composed while walking. Sometimes he let them float away like leaves on a river, and he could not call them back, and this was all right because new ones came.

His house was a small brown house on Cedar Street, with a porch that had a wooden railing and two plastic chairs on it. The porch light was on even though it was daytime, because his grandmother liked the porch light on.

He let himself in with his key.

"Grandma, I'm home," he said.

"Is that you, Marcus?"

"It's me, Grandma."

She was in the kitchen. She was sitting in the wooden chair by the window, where the afternoon light came in, and she had a cup of tea on the table in front of her but she wasn't drinking it, she was only looking out the window at the blue jay that was on the bird feeder.

"You see this one?" she said. "This one been coming every day for a week."

"I see him."

"He's telling me something."

"What's he telling you?"

She turned and smiled at Marcus. Her face was soft and brown and wrinkled like a paper bag that had been folded and unfolded a thousand times, and when she smiled the wrinkles moved like rivers.

"I don't know," she said. "I forgot."

She laughed, a small dry laugh, and Marcus laughed a little too because she was laughing, and he hung up his jacket on the hook by the door.

"You want some tea, baby?"

"Yes, please."

"Sit down. I'll make it."

*Grandma's hands know everything her memory forgets.*

He took his notebook out of his backpack and he wrote it down.

Later, after tea, after he had done his homework at the kitchen table with his grandmother dozing in the chair across from him, after his mother Denise came home from work with her tired eyes and her heavy bag of textbooks for the social work class she was taking at the community college, after dinner which was pork chops and rice and collard greens, after the dishes, after the news on the television, after his grandmother had been tucked into bed in the room that used to be Marcus's room but which now was his grandmother's because the stairs to the second floor had gotten too hard for her, after all of this, Denise came and sat on the arm of the couch where Marcus was reading.

"Aaliyah called me," she said.

"Oh."

"She said the group is doing something for that Youth Voices thing."

"Yeah."

"She said she thinks you should do a poem."

Marcus did not look up from his book.

"You got all those notebooks," Denise said. "You got, I don't know how many notebooks up there in your room. Poems you never show nobody."

"They're just for me."

"Some of them could be for other folks too."

"I don't want to."

Denise was quiet for a minute. She reached down and put her hand on his head, lightly, like she was checking to see if he was hot, which she used to do when he was little and sick. Her hand smelled like the lemon lotion she used. Her hand was warm.

"Baby," she said, "you don't have to. You really don't. But I'm gonna tell you what your grandma told me one time when I didn't want to do something I was scared of. She said, Denise, the thing you scared of is usually the thing you supposed to do."

"That's not always true," Marcus said.

"It's not always true. That's right. It's not always true. But it's true sometimes. And you're a smart boy. You'll know the difference."

She patted his head once more and got up.

"Think about it," she said.

Marcus did not say he would think about it, because he was already thinking about it, he had been thinking about it since the minute Aaliyah had held up that piece of paper, and Denise didn't need him to say he would think about something he couldn't help thinking about.

*Aaliyah asked the group* *if anyone had something to say.* *I had a thousand things to say.* *I said* *nothing.*

*I said I don't know yet.* *Which was the only true thing.*

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Saturdays were for his grandmother.

This had been true for as long as Marcus could remember. When he was five and six and seven, Saturdays had been for his grandmother because his mother had been working two jobs then, one at the hospital as a ward clerk on weekdays and one at a dry cleaner on weekends, and his grandmother had been the one who took Marcus to the park and to the library and who made him grilled cheese sandwiches cut into triangles. Now his mother only worked one job, at the city housing office, but she worked it hard, and she was also taking night classes, and so Saturdays, still, were for his grandmother. For being with her. For helping her.

For watching her hands.

This Saturday morning Marcus had his notebook on the kitchen counter and his grandmother had a bowl of flour in front of her and a cup of buttermilk beside the bowl, and she was making biscuits.

His grandmother's name was Geneva Thompson. She was seventy-four years old. She had grown up in Alabama in a little town called Uniontown where the creek ran red from iron in the ground, and she had come north to Ridgewood when she was twenty-two to marry Marcus's grandfather, Otis Thompson, who had been a carpenter and a deacon in the church and who had died before Marcus was born. Marcus had only ever seen his grandfather in photographs. In the photographs his grandfather was a tall thin man with a mustache and wire-rimmed glasses, and he was always, in every photograph, standing very straight, as if someone had just told him to stand up, and he was always looking directly at the camera with an expression that was half serious and half ready to laugh.

"Hand me the lard, baby," his grandmother said.

Marcus got the little blue can of lard from the refrigerator and set it next to her. She opened it and scooped out a spoonful with her fingers.

"You know what's the secret to biscuits?" she said.

"Cold lard," Marcus said. He had heard this a thousand times.

"Cold lard and a light hand."

"A light hand."

"Don't be mashing at it. You just tickle it together."

Her hands went into the flour. They were brown hands with dark knuckles and pale palms and her fingernails were cut short and neat, and there was a gold ring on her left hand that she had worn for over fifty years and that she said could not come off and would not come off until she died because it had grown into her. Her hands worked the lard into the flour the way she said, with a light touch, her fingers moving quick and soft, turning the flour and the lard together until the mixture looked like small grains of rice.

"You see that?" she said.

"I see."

"You put the buttermilk now. A little at a time. You tell me when."

He started pouring the buttermilk, slow, into the well she had made in the flour.

"When?" he said.

"Not yet."

He poured more.

"When?" he said.

"Now."

He stopped pouring, and she put her hands in and started pulling the dry flour in from the edges, making a dough. She wasn't looking at her hands. She was looking out the window at the bird feeder, where the blue jay was back again.

"He's back," she said.

"Yeah."

"Marcus, you know what?"

"What, Grandma."

"I can't remember what I did with my glasses."

"They're on your head."

She reached up and felt her glasses on top of her head, and she laughed.

"Well now."

She took them off the top of her head and put them on her nose, and she looked down at the dough, and she said, "All right. All right. We're gonna roll this out now."

She put flour on the counter and turned the dough out onto it, and she patted it flat with her hands, not with a rolling pin, because she had never used a rolling pin in her life, and then she took the top of a jar that she kept just for this, a small round tin that had once held peppermint candies, and she started cutting circles out of the dough. Her hands pressed the tin down and twisted it and lifted it up, and a circle of dough came up with it, and she put the circle on the baking sheet, and she pressed the tin down again, and again, until the baking sheet was full of circles like small pale moons.

Marcus watched her.

Her hands were perfect. They did not hesitate. They did not fumble. They did not have to think about what they were doing. Her hands had made ten thousand biscuits, maybe more, and they knew every step, and Marcus thought about how strange it was that a person's hands could know something that the person did not know anymore.

She slid the baking sheet into the oven.

"Twelve minutes," she said.

"Twelve minutes."

"Sit down. Sit down with me."

They sat at the kitchen table. The kitchen was small and old. The floor was linoleum, yellow with a pattern of little white squares, and it was worn through to the wood in the spot in front of the sink where his grandmother had stood, over the years, a million times. The curtains over the window were white with red cherries on them, and the afternoon light came through them and made red splotches on the wall.

"How's school?" his grandmother said.

"It's all right."

"Any girls?"

"Grandma."

"Well, what. You're thirteen years old. There's got to be somebody."

"There's nobody."

"Nobody."

"Nobody."

"That's not a word I believe. There's always somebody. They just haven't showed themselves yet."

Marcus smiled a little. He didn't tell her that he had heard this exact conversation from her maybe twenty times over the last year. Every few weeks she would ask him the same thing, and she would tell him there was always somebody, and he would tell her there was nobody, and she would tell him they just hadn't shown themselves, and this was a kind of loop they were in together, and he did not mind the loop. There were worse loops to be in.

"What you writing in that book?" she said.

She was pointing at his notebook, which was open on the counter.

"Just stuff."

"Poems?"

"Sometimes."

"Read me one."

"Grandma."

"Go on. Read me one."

Marcus felt himself get shy. It was a thing that happened to him, a kind of inside-curling, a kind of wanting to be small. But his grandmother was looking at him with her glasses crooked on her nose and her hands folded on the table, and the oven was beginning to smell like biscuits, and he thought, I can read her one.

He got up and brought his notebook over and sat back down.

He flipped to a page from the previous week. He did not want to read her the Grandma's Hands poem. He was not ready. He found a short one he had written about the way the streetlight outside his window made a shape on his ceiling.

*The streetlight makes a square of yellow* *on the wall above my bed.* *A small window into nothing.* *I lie awake and look into it* *and try to see what's on the other side.*

He stopped. He didn't look up.

His grandmother was quiet for a moment.

"Lord," she said. "Baby."

"It's not very good."

"It's good."

"It's just short."

"Short is fine. Short is better sometimes. Your grandfather, he used to say the best preachers preach short. The long ones, he said, they're just trying to hear themselves."

Marcus smiled.

"You got more of those?" she said.

"Yeah."

"Read me one more."

He flipped the pages. He hesitated. He stopped at the page where he had written Grandma's Hands. He looked at it. He closed the notebook.

"Later," he said. "I'll read you more later."

"All right, baby."

The oven timer went off. His grandmother started to stand up, and Marcus said, "I'll get them," and he got them. He pulled the baking sheet out with a dish towel wrapped around his hand. The biscuits were golden on top, tall and round, and the kitchen smelled the way it smelled twelve times a year when his grandmother made biscuits, which was the best smell in the world.

They ate two each, hot, with butter and a little of the strawberry preserves his grandmother had made last summer from the strawberries at the farmers' market. Denise came downstairs in her sweatpants with her hair tied up in a blue scarf, and she ate one too, and she said, "Mama, you still got it," and his grandmother said, "I never lost it," and Denise said, "No, Mama. You never did."

When his grandmother was napping in her chair later, and Denise was at the kitchen table studying, Marcus went up to his room and he opened the notebook and he added to the Grandma's Hands poem. He had written only one line the other night. Now he wrote more.

*Grandma's hands know everything* *her memory forgets.* *They roll the biscuits* *the way they always rolled* *without being told.* *They reach for the tea tin* *on the shelf above the sink* *without her eyes* *to tell them where.*

*Her hands are older than her mind.* *Her hands remember her husband* *who has been gone for twenty years.* *Her hands remember* *my father* *who she raised until he was a man* *and who does not call* *and who is not here.*

*Her hands remember me* *when she forgets.* *They reach up to touch my face* *like they know who I am* *even when her mouth* *calls me by the wrong name.*

He stopped. He read it over. He made two small changes. He crossed out the line about his father, because he did not want to write about his father, not today. His father was a man named Reggie who lived in Atlanta and who sent a card at Christmas sometimes and sometimes did not, and Marcus had met him only three times in his life, and the last time had been four years ago.

He put the line back in. He did not know why. But he put it back in.

He closed the notebook.

Downstairs his grandmother was snoring softly in her chair.

Outside the window a blue jay was on the bird feeder, and the afternoon was going slow, and the February sun was tilting down through the bare trees of Cedar Street, and Marcus sat on his bed with the notebook closed in his lap and he thought about what it would be like to read this poem out loud to a room full of people who were not his grandmother, who were not his mother, who were not even Aaliyah, who were strangers, a whole room of strangers, and he felt his heart begin to beat faster and he closed his eyes and he pushed the thought away.

Not yet, he told himself. I don't know yet.

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The next Saturday, Aaliyah brought a guest to junior youth.

Marcus did not know about this ahead of time. He walked into the meeting room at the community center and there, sitting in the circle next to Aaliyah, was a woman he had never seen before. She was maybe sixty years old, and she had short silver hair that was cut close to her head, and she wore big gold hoop earrings, and she had on a long orange scarf wrapped twice around her neck. She had her hands folded in her lap and she was watching the kids come in with an expression that was not smiling and not frowning, just an expression of watching, of taking them in.

When everyone was seated Aaliyah said, "Everyone, this is Ms. Verna Wright. Ms. Wright is a poet. She has published three books of poetry, and she has taught at the library and at the high school, and she is a friend of mine, and she has agreed to come and do a workshop with us today. Is that all right?"

"Yes," said the circle.

"Good morning," said Ms. Wright. "Thank you for letting me come."

Her voice was low and even. It was not the voice of somebody putting on a voice for kids. Marcus noticed that immediately. It was the voice of a person talking.

"I'm not going to give a lecture," Ms. Wright said. "I am only going to ask you to do a few things, and then I am going to ask you to write something. And then, if anybody wants to, they can share. But nobody has to share. Is that a deal?"

"Deal," said Eden, who was always the first to agree to anything.

"All right. The first thing I want you to do is close your eyes."

The circle closed their eyes. Marcus closed his.

"Now I want you to think of a place. A specific place. It doesn't have to be a big place. It can be a small one. It can be a corner of a room. It can be a bench. It can be a porch. Somewhere you go. Somewhere your body knows."

Marcus thought of the kitchen. He thought of his grandmother's chair by the window.

"Got it?"

The circle nodded.

"Now I want you to notice the things in that place. Three things. Not the big things. The small things. What is the light like? What is on the floor? What is the smell? Pick three small things."

"Open your eyes."

Marcus opened his eyes.

"Now I want you to write for ten minutes," Ms. Wright said. "I want you to write about that place. You can write a story, you can write a list, you can write a poem, I don't care what you write. I only want you to write about that place, and I want you to put those three small things into your writing. Not explained. Just there. The light will be there. The floor will be there. The smell will be there. You understand?"

"Yes."

Ms. Wright set a small timer on the floor in front of her chair.

"Ten minutes. Go."

*My grandmother's kitchen*

*My grandmother's kitchen has a yellow floor.* *Not the yellow of the sun.* *The yellow of old things.* *The yellow of butter left out on a plate* *since Sunday morning.*

*The curtains have cherries on them* *and when the afternoon light comes through* *the cherries make red shadows on the wall* *so it looks like someone is bleeding* *a little* *but happily.*

*It smells of vinegar.* *It smells of cinnamon.* *It smells of my grandmother* *which is a smell* *no one else in the world has.*

*At the table my grandmother sits* *in a chair by the window* *watching a blue jay she cannot name* *and she is a queen* *in a country* *that is getting smaller every day.*

The timer went off.

"Pens down," Ms. Wright said.

Marcus lifted his pen and looked at what he had written. He felt strange. He felt as if he had been running and had just stopped, his chest moving but his body still.

"Who wants to share?"

Diya's hand went up. Diya read a poem about the bathroom of her grandparents' house in Mumbai, where she had visited when she was little, and where the floor was cold stone and the light came through a small high window and the smell was of sandalwood soap. It was a good poem. Ms. Wright listened with her head tilted slightly, and when Diya was done, Ms. Wright said, "The light. The floor. The smell. Yes. Good. Thank you."

Eden read something about his friend's basement, which had a ping-pong table and smelled like old laundry and had a couch that was the color of an avocado. He got everyone laughing. Ms. Wright smiled.

Samira read something about the kitchen of her mother's house, about the smell of saffron rice, about her grandmother in Tehran whom she had only met through a video screen. Ms. Wright nodded slowly when Samira was done, and she said, "Thank you, dear."

Jin-woo read something about his grandfather's garage, which had tools hanging on pegboards and a floor of gray concrete and smelled of oil and sawdust. Ms. Wright said, "I can see that garage."

Aliyah read, in a small voice, something about the practice room at her music school, where the floor was linoleum that squeaked when she moved her chair and where the light came through a window high in the wall and where it smelled, she said, of rosin and nervous sweat, which made everybody laugh.

Felix did not share. Ms. Wright did not push him.

When it came around to Marcus, Aaliyah looked at him, and Ms. Wright did not. Ms. Wright was looking at her hands. Marcus appreciated that.

"I don't have to share," Marcus said.

"You don't have to," Ms. Wright said.

"I could," he said.

He had not meant to say this. It surprised him.

"If you want to," Ms. Wright said.

Marcus opened his notebook. He looked at what he had written. He cleared his throat. His voice, when it came out, was not loud, and it was not steady, but it was there. He read the poem about his grandmother's kitchen. He read all of it, all the way through to the line about the queen in the country that was getting smaller. When he got to that last line his voice got quieter, not on purpose, but because the line was a line that wanted to be said quiet, and he said it quiet, and then he stopped.

The room was silent.

Ms. Wright was not looking at her hands anymore. She was looking at him.

"Son," she said. "Come here."

Marcus looked at Aaliyah. Aaliyah gave him a little nod. Marcus got up and walked over to Ms. Wright, and she held out her hand, and he gave her his notebook. She took her glasses out of the pocket of her coat and put them on, and she read the poem over silently, her lips moving a little.

She took her glasses off.

She looked up at Marcus.

"How old are you, baby?"

"Thirteen."

She nodded. She handed the notebook back.

"You have a voice," she said. "The question is whether you're going to let it out."

Marcus did not know what to say. He looked at his feet.

"I'm not pushing you," Ms. Wright said. "You don't have to do anything. But I'm telling you, young man, what is in you is real, and it wants to come out, and if you don't let it out it's going to make you sick inside. That's just how it is. I have lived sixty-three years. I know."

Marcus nodded.

"Go sit down," she said, not unkindly.

He went and sat down.

Ms. Wright looked at the rest of the circle.

"You all have voices," she said. "Every one of you. Some of you know it already. Some of you are still figuring it out. That is all right. Writing is a practice, like anything else. You practice at it. You keep a notebook. You carry it with you. You put down what you see. One day you look at what you put down and you say, My God, did I write that? And you did. You wrote it. You. Nobody else. That is the gift of this."

She paused.

"I want to say one more thing. And this is for all of you, and I mean all of you. Writing is not about being special. It is not about being a poet with a capital P. It is about paying attention. Anybody who pays attention can write. Anybody. What the poet does is pay attention out loud. That's all. You understand?"

"Yes, ma'am," Eden said.

"Yes, ma'am," said the others.

"Yes, ma'am," said Marcus, although he said it quiet, and maybe no one but Ms. Wright heard him.

The workshop ended. Ms. Wright stood up slowly, leaning on the arm of her chair. She gathered her bag. She shook Aaliyah's hand and thanked her, and she walked around the circle and said a word to each kid, and when she got to Marcus she only put her hand on his shoulder and said, "Remember what I said."

"I will."

"Good boy."

And she was gone.

Marcus walked home with her words in his head, rolling around like marbles. You have a voice. The question is whether you're going to let it out.

Whether. Not when. Whether.

He did not know, yet, which one it was.

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On Wednesday night Marcus could not sleep.

He could not sleep for no reason he could name. He was not thinking about anything in particular. He was not worried about anything in particular. He was just lying in his bed with the blankets up to his chin, looking at the square of yellow the streetlight made on the wall above his bed, the same square he had written a poem about, and he was awake.

When he could not sleep he sometimes got up and went downstairs for a glass of water.

The house was dark. He walked on the sides of his feet, which he had learned made less noise, because the floor in the upstairs hallway creaked in a certain spot if you put your weight on the heel of your foot. He went down the stairs slow, holding the railing.

The kitchen light was on.

His mother was at the kitchen table.

She had her back to him. She had her face in her hands. Her shoulders were shaking.

Marcus stopped on the bottom step of the stairs. He could not see her face. He could only see her shoulders, and the way they were moving, and he heard a small sound, a small thin sound that he had not heard from his mother before, or that he had not heard in a long time.

She was crying.

She was crying at the kitchen table, trying to be quiet about it.

There was a pile of papers next to her. A medical bill with the header of the Ridgewood Community Hospital. A letter from some other place. A checkbook open with a pen next to it. The bank statement. A notebook with her social work notes in it.

Marcus stood on the bottom step and he did not move.

He did not know what to do.

He did not know if he should go to her or if he should go back upstairs. He did not know if going to her would make her feel better or worse. He did not know if seeing her cry was something she wanted him to see or something she had tried hard not to let him see. He did not know what he would say if he went to her. Mom, are you okay. Mom, what's wrong. Those questions seemed stupid. She was obviously not okay. It was obviously wrong.

He stood on the step.

He was thirteen years old and he was on a step in the dark and his mother was crying and he did not know what to do.

After a long time — maybe two minutes, maybe five, he could not tell — his mother took a breath and wiped her face with the heels of her hands and picked up the pen and started writing something. She did not see him. She was facing the other way.

He went back upstairs.

*My mother is at the kitchen table* *counting papers.* *She has forty years in her face.* *She is thirty-five.*

*I am on the stairs.* *I am standing on the bottom step.* *I do not know the prayer* *for a mother crying.* *I do not know the prayer* *for a son who cannot go to her.*

*I go back up.* *The stairs are quiet* *because I know which board creaks* *and I step around it.* *I have been a sneaking son for years.* *I have sneaked past her in so many moments* *she should have seen me.*

He stopped writing. He closed the notebook. He put it back on the nightstand.

He did not sleep for a long time.

*

In the morning his mother was up when he came down for breakfast. She was making oatmeal. She had her blue work sweater on and her hair was pulled back, and her face was tired the way her face was always tired but she was smiling, and she said, "You sleep all right, baby?"

"Yeah," he said.

But he was not sure he was all right with the agreement.

He ate his oatmeal. His grandmother came in from the bedroom, shuffling in her slippers and her blue robe, and she said, "Good morning, good morning," to both of them, and Denise got her a cup of coffee, and they sat at the table together in the early light, and for a moment, a small moment, the kitchen was warm and the three of them were there together and the world was all right.

Then Denise looked at the clock and said, "I got to run."

She kissed Marcus on the top of the head. She kissed her mother on the cheek. She grabbed her bag and her travel mug and her coat, and she went out the door. The door closed behind her.

Marcus watched the door.

His grandmother said, "That girl works too hard."

"She does."

"She always worked too hard."

"She does, Grandma."

His grandmother reached across the table and patted his hand. Her hand was cool and light like paper.

"You a good boy," she said.

"Thanks, Grandma."

"You been a good boy since you were born. I held you, did you know that? In the hospital. I held you first after your mama. They put you in my arms and you looked up at me. You had eyes like two big dark stones. You looked at me like you already knew me."

"You told me."

"I'm telling you again."

She laughed a little, the dry small laugh. She got up from the table slowly and she went over to the sink and she stood there looking out the window for a minute, and then she said, "Where's my tea?"

"Grandma, you want me to make you tea? You were drinking coffee."

"Coffee?"

"Yeah. Mom made you coffee."

She looked at the cup on the table. She looked at it like she had never seen it before.

"Well, all right," she said.

She came back and sat down.

"I'll drink my coffee," she said.

Marcus watched her. He watched her pick up the cup with her two hands, the way she always picked up a cup, with two hands, because her wrists were not strong anymore, and he watched her take a sip.

She looked at him over the rim of the cup.

"I love you, baby," she said.

"I love you too, Grandma."

She drank her coffee.

Outside the window the blue jay was on the bird feeder. The sun was coming up behind the neighbor's fence, and the sky was pale and streaked with pink.

He did not know, yet, what the poem was.

He would wait. He would let it come.

*

*I did not go to her.* *I did not say her name.* *I did not put my hand on her shoulder.* *I did not tell her it would be all right.*

*I went back up the stairs.* *I stepped around the board that creaks.* *I got into bed.* *I wrote down what I saw.*

*Writing is not the same as doing.* *Writing is not the same as going to her.* *But it is something.* *It is something I have.*

Ms. Corbett, his math teacher, did not see him writing, because she was at the board explaining a problem that Marcus already knew how to do, and so he had the time.

He closed the notebook.

He felt, for a moment, a little lighter.

He did not know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

============================================================

English class met fourth period, right before lunch, and Marcus had it with Ms. Beaumont in Room 214.

Ms. Beaumont was his favorite teacher, even though he did not say this to anyone, and even though he would have died, actually died, if anyone had known it, which she did not. Ms. Beaumont was in her late fifties and she wore skirts that came down to her ankles and she had a gray streak in the front of her hair that went straight back from her forehead like a racing stripe. She loved books. You could tell she loved books because when she read aloud from a book, which she did almost every day for the first ten minutes of class, her voice changed. It got slower. It got kinder. She read to them as if every word was a small gift and she was unwrapping it for them one by one.

On Monday she announced the Recitation Project.

"You are going to memorize something," she said. "Poem, speech, monologue from a play, monologue from a movie, your choice. Minimum ninety seconds. Maximum three minutes. You are going to recite it in front of the class. A week from Friday."

A groan went up from the class. Ms. Beaumont smiled.

"Yes, I know. Yes, it is horrible. Yes, you will survive. Ninety seconds of your time, and you will learn something about what it feels like to put words that matter in your own mouth."

"What if we hate it?" Eden Reyes said. Eden was in this class too.

"Then choose something you love, Mr. Reyes, and you won't hate it."

"What if we don't love anything?"

"Then this is your chance, Mr. Reyes, to find something you love."

Marcus read the sheet walking to his next class. Or propose your own.

He folded the sheet and put it in his backpack.

*

At home that night, after dinner, after he had done his homework, after his grandmother had gone to bed, he took out the sheet and spread it on his desk in his bedroom. He read the list of suggestions.

Frederick Douglass. What to the slave is the Fourth of July. He had read that one before, last year, for a history project. It was a good speech. Long, though. And hard to make sound like you meant it, because the language was not the language of now.

Langston Hughes. Mother to Son. That was a good poem. That was one his grandmother had recited to him when he was seven, and he remembered some of it.

Maya Angelou. Still I Rise. Everybody did Still I Rise.

Shakespeare. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. No.

He read down the list. He put the sheet down.

He opened his notebook. He flipped to the page where he had written Grandma's Hands. He had added to it, over the last few weeks. The poem was longer now. Maybe thirty lines. It was about his grandmother and her kitchen and her hands and what her hands knew and what her mind was forgetting.

He read it silently.

His throat got tight in the middle of it and he had to stop.

He read it again.

He closed the notebook.

He sat on his bed with his hands in his lap.

Or propose your own.

*

He did not decide on Monday. He did not decide on Tuesday. On Wednesday morning, in the hallway before first period, he saw Sasha Moore at her locker. He noticed her not because he was noticing her but because she was talking with her friends, all girls, in that loud laughing way girls talked in the morning, and she was the center of the laugh, and her laugh was the loud part. Sasha was a tall girl with her hair in twists that fell past her shoulders and she was on the volleyball team and she was, Marcus thought, a kind of person Marcus had been looking at from a distance for almost all of middle school. She did not know his name. He knew hers. That was the asymmetry of the thing.

She was in his English class. That was why he noticed her. She was going to give her Recitation Project in the same room as him, in front of the same people, and she would be good at it, and he would be terrible, and they would all see.

He opened his own locker. He got his books. He went to class.

On Wednesday night he still hadn't decided.

On Thursday morning, before school, his grandmother was in the kitchen when he came down, and she looked up at him and she said, "Robert, is that you?"

Marcus stopped in the doorway.

Robert was his father's name. His father, who lived in Atlanta. Who was a grown man.

"Grandma, it's Marcus."

"Marcus?"

"Your grandson."

She blinked. Her eyes refocused.

"Oh. Oh, baby. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, baby, I don't know why I said that."

"It's okay, Grandma."

"Robert. Lord. Robert, where'd that come from."

"It's okay."

He came over and sat down at the table next to her. She reached up and touched his face. Her fingers were soft and cool.

"You look like your daddy. You look so much like your daddy. When you come in the door like that, in the morning, in the half-light. Just for a second."

"I know, Grandma."

"I'm losing things."

"I know."

"Baby," she said. She dropped her hand.

She did not say anything else. She just sat there, and Marcus sat with her.

He was going to be late for school. He did not care.

After a while she said, "You going to school?"

"Yeah."

"You better go."

"I'm going."

"Marcus."

"Yeah, Grandma."

"You a good boy. I don't forget that. That part I don't forget."

"Thanks, Grandma."

He got up. He got his backpack. He went to the door. He turned in the doorway.

"Grandma."

"Yeah."

"I'm doing something at school on Friday next week. An English project. I have to read a poem."

"What you gonna read?"

"I'm thinking about reading one of mine."

She looked at him. For a moment her eyes were sharp. For a moment she was all the way there.

"One of yours?"

"Yeah."

"You going to read it in front of your class?"

"Yeah."

She nodded slowly. She took off her glasses. She wiped her eyes. She was not crying. She was just wiping her eyes, the way she sometimes did when something tired her a little but did not make her sad.

"Good," she said. "Good for you. You read one of yours. You tell them who you are."

"Okay, Grandma."

"You tell them, Marcus."

"Okay."

He went to school.

But his grandmother had said, You tell them who you are.

He decided that he was going to read Grandma's Hands.

*

He told Ms. Beaumont after class.

He waited until the other kids had gone. He walked up to her desk with the sheet of choices in his hand.

"Ms. Beaumont."

"Yes, Marcus."

"I want to propose my own."

She looked up. She set her pen down.

"What have you got?"

"I want to read one of my own poems."

"You write poems?"

"Yes."

"Really."

"Yes."

She leaned back a little in her chair. She looked at him for a long moment.

"Marcus," she said, "I had no idea."

"It's new. I mean. I've been writing for a while. But. I haven't, you know. Shown anybody."

"You want to show the class."

"Yeah."

"How long is it?"

"Maybe two minutes. I haven't timed it."

"What is it about?"

"My grandmother."

Ms. Beaumont looked at him. He did not know what was going through her head. Her face was still and kind.

"All right," she said. "You have my permission. You have my encouragement. I want to say one thing to you, and I want you to hear me."

"Yes, ma'am."

"If you are going to read something of your own in front of the class, you need to understand that you are giving them a piece of yourself. That is a big thing. It is a good thing, and it is a brave thing, and I am proud of you. But if anyone in this class is cruel to you about it, you come to me. Do you understand? You come to me and I will handle it."

"Yes, ma'am."

"It is not going to happen. I do not think it is going to happen. But I want you to know. You have a teacher. You do not stand alone."

Marcus felt his eyes get wet. He did not let them go further than that.

"Thank you, Ms. Beaumont."

"Go to your next class, Marcus."

He went.

*

That night he practiced the poem in his room. He read it aloud to himself, in a whisper at first, and then louder. He timed himself. He read it in one minute and forty-seven seconds. He read it again, slower, in two minutes and twelve seconds. He thought the second time was better.

He read it standing up.

He read it looking at himself in the mirror on his closet door.

His own face looked strange to him in the mirror, reading the poem. His lips moved. His eyes went up and down the page. His throat got tight at the same places every time.

He practiced and practiced.

When he went to bed he could not sleep, again, for the second time this week. His head was full of the poem, the words of the poem like small stones falling down a hill, over and over, in different orders.

He got up. He went to his grandmother's door. He stood outside it for a minute, listening. He could hear her breathing. Slow, even.

He whispered, "Grandma," through the door.

She did not answer. She was asleep.

"I'm gonna do it," he whispered. "I'm gonna read it."

She did not answer.

He went back to his room and got into bed and at some point, much later, he fell asleep.

============================================================

Friday came.

Marcus ate breakfast in silence. His grandmother was in her chair. His mother was rushing around for work. She kissed his head on her way out and said, "You got your project today?"

"Yeah."

"You gonna do good."

"Thanks, Mom."

"I love you, baby."

"Love you, Mom."

She was out the door.

His grandmother said, "You leaving too?"

"In a minute."

"Come here, baby."

He went over. She reached up and straightened the collar of his shirt. Her hands moved slow. She did not say anything. She just fixed his collar, and then she patted his chest twice, and she nodded, as if she had just completed an important job.

"You go on," she said.

"Okay, Grandma."

"You tell them."

"I will."

*

At school the morning moved toward fourth period like a river moving toward a waterfall.

In first period, history, Mr. Grayson was talking about the Roman Republic and Marcus did not hear a word of it. He had his notebook open on his lap under the desk and he was reading the poem to himself, silently, his eyes going over the lines, his mouth moving just a little.

In second period, science, Ms. Patel was talking about photosynthesis and Marcus did not hear a word of it. He was rehearsing the third stanza, the part about the biscuits, because there was one word there, one word, that he kept stumbling on when he said it out loud. The word was unaware. Grandma's hands worked unaware. It was a word his mouth did not like. He kept saying un-aware. Un, long pause, aware. He practiced saying it smooth.

In third period, which was a study hall, he went to the library and sat at a table in the back and read the poem three more times silently.

Fourth period. English. Room 214.

He walked in. His legs did not feel like his legs.

Ms. Beaumont was standing by the whiteboard with her list of names. Today was the second day of recitations. Five people had gone yesterday. Seven people were going today. Marcus was on the list. He was fourth.

He sat down at his desk. He put his notebook on his desk in front of him. He put his hands on the notebook. He realized his hands were sweating. He wiped them on his pants.

Sasha Moore sat down in the desk two over from him. She was wearing a green shirt. She was talking to her friend Tasha about a math test. She did not look at Marcus.

The bell rang. Ms. Beaumont called the class to order.

"All right. Recitation Day Two. Ginny, you're up first."

Ginny went up. Ginny recited a poem by Maya Angelou. It was a good recitation. Everybody clapped. Ms. Beaumont said, "Thank you, Ginny. Well done."

Darius went. Darius recited the I Have a Dream speech. Well, a part of it. The famous part. He was loud and clear. Everybody clapped. Ms. Beaumont said, "Thank you, Darius. That was powerful."

Tasha went. Tasha recited a poem by Emily Dickinson. Her voice was small but sure. Everybody clapped.

"Marcus."

Marcus stood up.

His knees felt strange. His mouth was dry. He walked to the front of the room. He had not brought his notebook with him. He had memorized the poem. He had decided not to bring the notebook because he thought it would shake in his hands if he brought it, and everyone would see it shaking, and that would be worse than forgetting.

He turned and faced the class.

There were twenty-four kids in English 8, Period 4. Twenty-four sets of eyes. They were looking at him. Some of them were looking at him the way they had looked at Ginny and Darius and Tasha, which was the half-looking of kids waiting their turn and not being mean, just being there. Some of them were looking at him curiously. Some of them were whispering to their neighbor. Ms. Beaumont was at her desk, and she was looking at him with her hands folded and her face calm.

Sasha was looking at him. Directly at him. Her face was neutral.

Marcus opened his mouth.

Nothing came out.

He closed it again. He swallowed.

He felt his face get hot.

"What is it?" Ms. Beaumont said quietly.

"It's a poem," Marcus said. His voice was tiny. "Um. It's one I wrote. About my grandmother."

A murmur went through the class. Not a bad murmur. Just a murmur.

"Called?" Ms. Beaumont said.

"Grandma's Hands."

He took a breath.

"Take your time," Ms. Beaumont said.

He looked down at the floor for a second. He closed his eyes. He found the first line in his head. He opened his eyes.

"Grandma's hands know everything," he said, "her memory forgets."

His voice shook on the word forgets. He kept going.

"They roll the biscuits the way they always rolled, without being told. They reach for the tea tin on the shelf above the sink, without her eyes to tell them where."

His voice was getting stronger. He did not look at anyone's face. He looked at the back wall of the room, at the poster of Shakespeare that Ms. Beaumont had up there. He looked at Shakespeare's forehead.

"Her hands are older than her mind. Her hands remember her husband, who has been gone for twenty years. Her hands remember my father, who she raised until he was a man, and who does not call, and who is not here."

Somebody in the room made a small sound. A breath in. He did not look to see who.

"Her hands remember me, when she forgets. They reach up to touch my face like they know who I am, even when her mouth calls me by the wrong name."

He could hear his voice now. His voice was low and it was even. He was surprised.

"This morning she called me Robert. Robert is my father's name. She has not seen my father in eleven years, but her hand still knew my face. Her hand rose up to me. Her hand touched my cheek. My name was in her hand, when it was not in her mouth. My name was in her hand."

He paused. This was the last stanza. He had added it two nights ago. He had not been sure about it. Now standing in front of the room he was sure.

"Grandma, I know you are leaving. I know it. I know you are leaving in small pieces, like a woman walking down a long road and dropping things as she goes. A glove. A handkerchief. My name. Your name. I pick them up, Grandma. I am behind you, on the road, and I pick them up. I am carrying them. I will carry them until the end. I will carry them after."

He stopped.

The room was silent.

For one long moment, the room was absolutely silent. He did not look at anyone. He was looking at Shakespeare's forehead and he could not seem to look away from it.

Then somebody clapped.

Then somebody else clapped.

Then the whole class clapped. Not a loud clap. A slow, thick clap that built up the way rain builds up. It lasted a long time. Longer than it had lasted for Ginny or Darius or Tasha. Marcus stood there not knowing what to do. He finally walked back to his seat. His legs felt like someone else's legs. He sat down.

Ms. Beaumont stood up at her desk.

"Thank you, Marcus," she said. Her voice was thick. She cleared her throat. She took off her glasses. She wiped her eyes quickly with her thumb. "That was." She stopped. She put her glasses back on. "That was extraordinary. Class, that was a poem written by your classmate. Do you understand what we just heard?"

Nobody said anything. But everybody was looking at Marcus.

"Next recitation," Ms. Beaumont said. "Shayne."

Shayne got up, looking small, and went to the front.

Marcus sat at his desk. His face was hot. His hands were shaking now. They had not shaken while he was reading. They were shaking now. He put them under the desk.

He did not hear Shayne's recitation. He did not hear the next two. He sat with his heart going very fast in his chest and his hands shaking under the desk and he thought, I did it. I did it.

*

When the bell rang for lunch, he stood up to gather his things, and Sasha Moore was standing by his desk.

He had not seen her come over. She was just there, suddenly, with her green shirt and her hair and her hand on the back of the chair of the empty desk between them.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," Marcus said.

"That was beautiful," Sasha said.

"Thanks."

"Is your grandma sick?"

"Yeah. Kind of. It's. It's Alzheimer's, probably. They haven't said for sure. Dementia, either way."

Sasha nodded. Her face got serious.

"My grandpa had Alzheimer's," she said. "On my dad's side. He died last year."

"Oh."

"He didn't know who I was for like the last two years."

"I'm sorry."

"Yeah."

She looked at the floor. She looked back up at him.

"That poem," she said. "I'm going to think about that poem. The hands part. You know? The hands. The way his hands knew me even when his face didn't. He used to hold my hand when I was next to him. Even at the end. Right up until the last week. I never thought about it the way you said it. Like, his hands remembered me."

"Yeah."

"Thank you."

Marcus did not know what to say. He nodded.

"I'm Sasha."

"I know."

She smiled. A little.

"I know you know. I'm just, like, officially saying it."

"Marcus."

"I know."

She smiled more. Then she sort of laughed, and he sort of laughed, and it was not a big deal, but it was a thing, and she said, "See you, Marcus," and she walked off to join her friends at the door.

Marcus stood there for a moment. Eden came up behind him and punched him in the shoulder.

"Dude," Eden said.

"Dude, what."

"Dude, that was, like. Dude."

"Thanks, Eden."

"Come on. Lunch."

*

That night Marcus did not write in his notebook.

He sat on the porch with his grandmother. It had gotten warmer during the day, up into the mid-forties, and the sun had not quite set, and she had wanted to sit out. He had wrapped her in her blanket, the heavy one that was brown and orange, and she was in the plastic chair with her feet on the little stool he had brought out for her, and he was in the other chair beside her.

They did not talk.

A car went by. A bird went somewhere in the maple tree across the street. The neighbor's dog barked, once, and stopped.

His grandmother said, "That was a nice day."

"It was, Grandma."

"What'd you do?"

"I read a poem at school."

"Did you?"

"Yeah."

"What poem?"

"One I wrote. About you."

She was quiet.

"That so," she said.

"Yeah."

"Was it good?"

"I think so."

"Did they like it?"

"Yeah. They did."

She nodded slowly.

"I'm glad," she said.

He did not tell her she had forgotten. He did not tell her he had told her yesterday and this morning. He did not tell her anything.

She reached her hand over and put it on his.

She did not say anything else.

Her hand on his, light and warm, a little papery, was warmer than the air. It was the warmest thing in the world.

============================================================

The next Saturday at junior youth Marcus sat in his chair and waited until the check-in was over and then he raised his hand. He did not usually raise his hand at junior youth. He raised his hand maybe once every three or four meetings. When he raised his hand people looked at him with a small surprise.

Aaliyah saw him. She paused in what she was saying.

"Marcus."

"I want to ask the group something."

"Go ahead."

Marcus looked at his hands. He had been thinking about how to say this for two days. He had rehearsed it. Now the rehearsed words flew out of his head and he just had the thing.

"I read a poem in my English class last week," he said. "One of mine. About my grandmother."

Eden went, "Yo, that's great!"

"Eden," Aaliyah said, softly.

"Sorry. Keep going."

"It went okay. It went, yeah. It was. I'm glad I did it. So now I'm thinking about the Youth Voices thing. The festival. I'm thinking about, I could do that one. The same one. Or maybe a longer version. But I don't know. In English class it was twenty-four people I see every day. At the festival it's. I don't know. A lot of strangers."

He stopped.

He did not know how to ask a question. He did not really have a question.

"That sounds like a big decision," Aaliyah said.

"Yeah."

"What do you want from the group?"

Marcus thought about it.

"I want to hear what you all think."

Aaliyah looked around the circle.

"Any thoughts?"

There was a silence. It was not an awkward silence. It was a thinking silence. Marcus had learned to like this silence. It meant the group was taking him seriously.

Diya spoke first.

"I think you should do it," she said. "I mean, obviously. But also — like — you already did the hard part. Like, the hard part isn't the audience. The hard part is the first time. You already did the first time. Once you did the first time, everybody else is just, like, more people."

"But more people can be harder," Jin-woo said. "Because they don't know you. Your class knows you. Your class has known you for years. So when you read it to them, they kind of knew, like, Marcus is a person, and here is a thing Marcus made. Strangers don't know that. Strangers just see a kid reading something."

"Is that harder, though?" Aliyah said.

"I think it could be."

"I think it could be easier," Aliyah said. "If I'm playing violin and nobody knows me, then if I mess up, nobody knows me, and tomorrow they don't see me and remember I messed up. If I mess up in front of people I know, tomorrow I see them all day long and they remember."

"That's a good point," Jin-woo said.

"I think," Samira said, "it depends on why you want to do it."

Everyone looked at Samira.

"Like," Samira said, "I can say, for me, last year, when I had to stand up about my family and the art and everything — and I did not want to, I really did not, but I had to — the thing that made it doable was that I had a reason. I had a reason that was bigger than my embarrassment. So the question is — Marcus — you said in your poem it's about your grandmother. Is the reading about you? Or about her?"

Marcus thought about this.

"I guess both," he said. "But. More about her. More about. Her being real. Her being. Here."

He stopped. He could not say more without his voice doing something he did not want it to do.

"Then I think you should do it," Samira said quietly. "Because it's about her. And she deserves that."

Marcus nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.

Felix had been quiet. Felix was usually quiet. Felix had grown up in rooms where being quiet was a form of safety. But now he shifted in his chair and leaned forward a little, and he looked at Marcus.

"Can I say something?" Felix said.

"Yeah, Felix."

"When I was in the shelter," Felix said. He paused. He almost never talked about the shelter. "When we were in the shelter I was carrying a lot of stuff. Like, in me. Stuff that was heavy. Worry stuff. Being-embarrassed stuff. Being-scared-at-night stuff. And the only way I got through it was I didn't tell anybody. For a long time. Because I thought if I told anybody it would get bigger. It would get more real, you know? But then when I started to say things — just to my mom, first, and then to some people — I found out it was the opposite. When I said it, it got lighter. Like, saying it let some of the air out of it."

He stopped. He looked at his hands.

"I don't know what your poem is like. I haven't heard it. But if you're carrying something in you, Marcus. If you're carrying a lot. Then sharing it. That might help you. It helped me when I did it."

"But only if you're ready," he added quickly. "Like, only you know when you're ready. I wasn't ready for a long time."

"How did you know when you were ready?" Marcus asked.

Felix thought.

"I don't know," he said. "I think. I think I was ready when I stopped feeling like I would die if I said it. When I felt like, I would just feel bad for a minute. Not die. Just feel bad. That's when I was ready."

Marcus nodded slowly.

Eden said, "Felix, that was deep, man."

"Shut up, Eden."

"No, for real. That was deep."

"Shut up."

Everyone laughed a little.

Aaliyah let the laugh die.

"Anybody else?" she said.

Aliyah cleared her throat. Aliyah, with her quiet voice and her violin.

"I want to say something about courage," she said. "I've been thinking about it lately, for me, because I have an audition next week. For the all-district orchestra. And I have been so scared. Like, for weeks. Just so scared. And I talked to my grandmother about it. She said something I've been thinking about. She said that courage is not when you aren't afraid. Courage is when you are afraid and you do it anyway. And I was like, Grandma, everyone says that. And she said, Yes, everybody says it, but not everybody knows it, and there's a difference. Knowing it is something you have to find out."

She paused.

"So. I don't know. I'm not telling you to do it. But if the question is whether you're scared — like, being scared doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. I think."

"Thank you, Aliyah," Marcus said.

She nodded.

Aaliyah let the silence come back in.

After a moment she said, "Marcus, I'm going to say something to you too. As the animator of this group. I'm not going to tell you what to do, because it isn't my decision. It's yours. But I'll say this. I have watched you, Marcus, for a year and a half now. Every Saturday. I have watched you sit in that chair and listen. I have watched you write in your book. I have watched you pay attention to every person in this circle and every word they say. You pay closer attention than almost anyone I know. You carry more inside you than people see. That is a gift. But it is also, sometimes, a weight. If you have a chance to put some of it down, to let it go out into the world where other people can share it with you — to let some of what is heavy become something that is shared — that is a chance worth thinking about. It's not the only chance you'll ever get. But it is a chance."

Marcus nodded.

He looked around the circle. Everyone was looking at him. Not in a mean way. In the way of people who are, for a moment, all together on a small planet that is not the planet of strangers.

"Thank you, everybody," he said. "I'll think about it."

"Take your time," Aaliyah said.

"Yeah. I will."

*

Walking home, Marcus thought about what each of them had said. He made a kind of list in his head.

He walked with his hands in his pockets and his hood up, and the sun was out but low, and the street was quiet, and he thought.

By the time he got to the corner of Cedar Street he knew.

He knew, but he did not say it yet, not even in his head, not all the way in words. He let the knowing sit in him. He let it sit like a stone in a pocket.

He went home.

============================================================

*The group is seven of us.* *We sit in a circle.* *Aaliyah asks questions* *and waits.*

*Today I asked the question.* *I asked whether I should stand up* *in front of strangers* *and read.*

*Diya said yes.* *Jin-woo said maybe no.* *Aliyah said be scared and do it anyway.* *Samira said if it is for Grandma, do it.* *Felix said sharing makes it lighter.* *He knows. He carried heavier things than I have.*

*Aaliyah said I have been listening for a year and a half* *and I carry what I hear.* *She said some of what I carry* *can be put down.*

*I think I will put it down.* *I think I will put it down by picking it up* *and carrying it* *into the room* *and handing it over.* *The putting down is the handing over.* *That is what I think.*

*I think I will read.*

He sat and looked at that line for a long time. His grandmother was in her chair in the living room, watching a program on television that was mostly just sound in the background. His mother was at a class at the community college. The kitchen was warm. The curtains had pulled a little shut and the red cherry shadows were not there tonight but the vinegar-and-cinnamon smell was, and the light above the table was a yellow dim light that made the kitchen look like a painting of a kitchen.

He closed the notebook.

He got up. He went into the living room.

His grandmother was in her chair with the orange-and-brown blanket on her lap. The television was on something about a lady who made her own garden. His grandmother was watching it, but her eyes had the soft look she got in the evenings, the look that was maybe watching and maybe not watching, the look of somewhere between here and there.

"Grandma," he said.

"Hey baby."

"Can I sit with you?"

"Course you can. Come sit."

He sat on the couch, next to her chair. He did not turn toward the television. He turned toward her. He looked at her face in the lamplight. The wrinkles around her eyes and her mouth. The soft droop of her cheeks that was not there ten years ago. The gray hair pulled back into a small bun at the back of her head, and the two small silver hoops in her earlobes, earrings she had worn every day for as long as he could remember.

"Grandma."

"Mmhm."

"I decided."

"Decided what, baby."

"I decided I'm going to read my poem. At the community festival. In April."

She turned her head a little to look at him. Her eyes focused.

"About me?"

"About you."

She nodded.

"All right then."

"I'm scared."

"I know."

"I don't know if I can do it."

"You can do it."

"How do you know?"

She looked at him. Her eyes were very steady. Sometimes in the evenings, he had noticed, her eyes were very steady. The evenings were often her clearest time. The mornings, since last month, had been getting harder. Afternoons were in between. Evenings, for some reason, she was often here with him.

"I know because I raised you," she said. "I know what you got in you. I put some of it in you myself. Your mama put some. Your grandpa, God rest him, put some before you even was born, because he raised the man who went on to be your daddy, whether or not that man ever showed up right, and my husband raised him well even if my husband's son never did show up for you. And your own self, Marcus. Your own self put a whole lot into you, because you pay attention, baby. I watched you pay attention to the world since you were two years old. I watched you stand by the window and watch the birds in the feeder for an hour. You wasn't even three. An hour. Most children can't watch anything for three minutes. You watched an hour. I knew then. I said to your mama, that boy has got a quiet mind."

Marcus smiled a little.

"You said that?"

"I said that."

"I don't remember."

"You was two. Why would you remember."

She reached her hand out. He gave her his. Her hand closed around his. It was warm. It was cool in the fingertips. It was the hand he knew.

They sat like that.

On the television the lady was tying up her tomato plants.

His grandmother said, "I'm gonna come hear you, baby. At that festival. You hear me."

"Grandma, I don't know if you — "

"I'm coming. Me and your mama. We'll be there. You hear?"

"Okay, Grandma."

"You hear?"

"I hear."

She held his hand a while longer. Her eyes were on the television, but her hand was on his.

Then her eyes drifted. Her face changed a little. The soft look came back.

She looked at him.

"Otis," she said.

Marcus felt his chest tighten.

Otis was his grandfather. His grandfather, who had been dead for twenty years.

"Otis, you gonna come set with me."

Marcus did not correct her.

"Yes," he said. "Yes, I'll set with you."

She patted his hand.

"Good," she said. "That's good."

She turned her eyes back to the television.

They sat.

Marcus watched the lady on the television tie the tomato plants, her hands going deftly around the green stems with soft pieces of twine, tying each plant to a tall wooden stake, the same way his grandmother had tied her own tomato plants on the side of the house every summer, until this past summer, when she had not. He watched the lady's hands and he thought of his grandmother's hands, and he thought of his own hand, in his grandmother's hand, now, in this moment.

He did not reach for his notebook. He did not want the notebook. He just sat. He held his grandmother's hand. He let the television be a small bright window on the wall. He let the house do what the house did in the evening, which was settle and tick and creak and hum, and he let the two of them, the old woman and the boy, be there together, on the couch and in the chair, her hand in his hand, her mind somewhere traveling and his own mind here, holding still, holding still so that she could find him when she came back.

She did not call him by any name for a long while.

Then, out of nowhere, softly, she said, "Marcus."

"Yes, Grandma."

"You gonna read that poem, you said."

"I said I would."

"Good, baby."

"Yeah."

She squeezed his hand.

He squeezed back.

Outside the window the streetlights had come on one by one along Cedar Street, and the sky was navy blue, and somewhere up in the navy sky was a star or two if you could see them through the tree branches, and the hour was getting late, and his mother would come home soon from her class, and there would be the three of them again in the kitchen, and tea, and maybe the last biscuit from the tin on the counter, and tomorrow would be another day in which his grandmother's mind would be a little further down the road, and the road would go on in front of her, and he would be behind her, picking up what she dropped, carrying it, as he had written.

But right now she was here.

Right now she was with him.

He held her hand.

He decided, again, in his heart, that he was going to read his poem at the festival. And he decided, too, in his heart, that he was going to tell his mother, tonight, when she came home, what he had decided. And he decided, too, that he was going to say a thing he had not said to his mother in a long time, which was, I love you, Mom. Just like that. Out loud. Before she even had time to take her coat off. He had not said it like that in a long time. She deserved to hear it.

He sat with his grandmother.

The television talked softly to itself.

The clock on the wall ticked.

His grandmother's hand in his was the center of the world, the still point around which everything else turned, and Marcus sat there in the middle of the stillness, and he was not afraid, in this moment, of anything at all.

[END OF PART 1 — TO BE COMBINED WITH PART 2 FOR FULL BOOK]

[CONTINUING FROM PART 1]

The week before the event, Marcus walked to the community center almost every afternoon. He took the long way on purpose. The long way went past the corner store where Mr. Patel waved from behind the counter, and past the old brick library with the cracked steps, and past the vacant lot where someone had planted sunflowers in tires. The sunflowers were only about as tall as his knee, but they were trying. Marcus liked that. He liked things that were trying.

He carried his notebook in his backpack. The notebook had a red cover that was starting to peel at the corner, and inside it, on page forty-seven, was the poem about Grandma's hands. He had written it out clean, the way Ms. Wright said poets do before a reading. He had written it slow. He had written it with a pencil, because pencils felt more honest to him than pens. Pens pretended to be sure of themselves. Pencils knew they might be wrong.

Ms. Wright was waiting for him in the small meeting room at the back of the community center. The room had a round table, six chairs, and a window that looked out at the parking lot. She had put her coat on the back of her chair and set two paper cups of tea on the table. One had honey in it, because Ms. Wright said tea without honey was like a poem without breath.

"Marcus Thompson," she said, when he walked in. She always said his full name. It made him feel like a person worth naming. "Sit down. Show me what you've got."

He sat. He opened the notebook to page forty-seven. He pushed it across the table toward her, and then he pulled it back, and then he pushed it again. His hands did not know what to do with themselves.

Ms. Wright waited. She was good at waiting. Marcus had noticed that about her. Other adults filled the silence, as if silence were a hole you had to fix. Ms. Wright let silence sit. She let it breathe.

"I rewrote it," Marcus said. "Four times."

"Okay."

"I don't know if it's better."

"Okay."

"I keep thinking I should add something. Or take something out. And then I read it again and I think maybe it was fine before, and I messed it up."

Ms. Wright smiled, just a small smile. The kind grown-ups smile when they have seen a thing before and they are patient about seeing it again. "That's the writer's curse," she said. "You start to doubt the thing because you've looked at it too long."

"So how do you know when to stop?"

"You don't, exactly. But sometimes you have to put it down and let someone else read it back to you."

She put on her reading glasses. They were purple and crooked, and she was always pushing them back up her nose with one knuckle. She turned the notebook toward herself.

Then she did something Marcus wasn't expecting.

She read the poem out loud.

Not like a teacher. Not like someone trying to get the words right. She read it the way you would read a letter from someone you loved, slowly, as if the words were a path and she was walking it barefoot. Marcus listened. It was the strangest thing, hearing his own words in someone else's mouth. They sounded older than when he wrote them. They sounded like they had been waiting to be said.

When she got to the last line, she paused. Then she closed the notebook and looked at him.

"What did you hear?" she said.

"What?"

"When I read it. What did you hear?"

Marcus opened his mouth. He closed it. He thought about it. "I heard it slower than I wrote it."

"Good."

"And I heard the part about the soap. I didn't know that part was the important part until you said it."

"Mm-hmm."

"And the part about her ring. You stopped for a second before you said 'her ring.' I didn't write a stop there."

Ms. Wright nodded. "That's because the poem told me to stop there. Poems have their own breath, Marcus. Your job isn't to force them to breathe. Your job is to listen."

She took a sip of her tea. Marcus took a sip of his. His had too much honey. That was okay.

"Read it to me now," she said. "Same way I did."

"Out loud?"

"Out loud."

Marcus swallowed. His throat felt small. He pulled the notebook back toward him and looked down at the words. They were his. He knew every one of them. He had cried while writing some of them. He had eaten cereal over some of them. They were his in a way that very few things in the world were his.

He started reading.

His voice wobbled on the first line, and he stopped. He started over. Ms. Wright did not tell him to hurry up. She waited. The second time, his voice held.

He read the part about Grandma's hands. The way they used to braid his hair on Sunday mornings. The way they smelled like lotion and lemon and something older than lotion. The way one of her knuckles was bigger than the other from when she fell off a bicycle at age nine. The way she sometimes held his face in both hands and said, "Look at me, Marcus," as if his face was a page she was trying to memorize.

He read about the ring. Her wedding ring, thin gold, loose on her finger now. She twisted it sometimes when she was confused, like she was trying to screw it back into herself.

He read about the soap. The soap in the dish by the kitchen sink, cracked into two pieces because she had dropped it, but she had not thrown it away, she had just put the two pieces back in the dish, and every time she washed her hands she used both pieces, one in each hand, as if she couldn't remember which one she had picked up first.

He read the last line.

He stopped.

He looked up.

Ms. Wright was not looking at him. She was looking out the window at the parking lot. For a second Marcus thought she hadn't been listening. Then he saw her throat move when she swallowed, and he understood that she had been listening so hard she had gone somewhere inside herself.

"Thank you, Marcus," she said.

"Was it okay?"

"It was more than okay."

"Should I change anything?"

Ms. Wright turned back to him. Her eyes were the warm brown of good tea. "You could change things. You could always change things. But I don't think you should. I think you should learn it by heart, but bring the notebook anyway, because sometimes we need to see the words on the page to trust them. And when you read it at the event, Marcus, I want you to remember something."

"What?"

"You are not performing grief. You are witnessing love. Those are different things. Grief you perform. Love you witness. Do you understand the difference?"

Marcus thought about it. "I think so."

"When you witness love, you don't rush. You don't apologize for it. You let it be what it is. You let the room sit with it. Don't fill the silence. Let the silence fill."

"Okay."

"And breathe. The breath between lines is part of the poem."

"Okay."

She reached across the table. She put her hand, just for a second, over his. Her hand was thin and cool and had a ring on it too, a silver one with a small green stone. "Marcus. You have a gift. I want you to understand that gifts are not for keeping. They are for giving. What you write is not just yours. It becomes other people's, too, when you share it. That is the sacred thing. Do you hear me?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Good." She sat back. She picked up her tea. She was Ms. Wright again, practical and brisk. "Now. The event is Saturday. I want you to practice every day. Read it to your mother. Read it to the bathroom mirror. Read it to the dog."

"We don't have a dog."

"Then read it to the refrigerator. The point is, get your tongue used to the words. The stage is not the time to meet your own poem for the first time."

Marcus laughed. It surprised him that he could laugh. He had not laughed much that week.

He walked home the long way again. The sunflowers in the tires were still trying. He passed them and he thought about what Ms. Wright had said. Witnessing love. He said the phrase under his breath, turning it over, tasting it. It was a phrase he wanted to keep.

That night, he read the poem to his mother while she was folding laundry. Denise sat on the edge of the couch with a pair of socks in her hand, one sock on and one sock off, and when he finished she did not say anything for a long time. Then she said, "Read it again, baby. Please."

He read it again.

This time she put the socks down. She put her hands over her face. She did not cry, exactly. She breathed in and out very carefully, like she was trying not to break something.

"Your grandma," she said. "She always said you had music in you. Even when you were little. You used to hum in your crib. She said, 'That baby has music in him, Denise. You mark my words.'"

*"Baby who hummed in a crib,* *grew up, learned the names of grief,* *but kept the humming, too."*

He was not sure if it was a poem yet. But it was the start of one.

And he thought, before he fell asleep, that maybe that was enough.

---

The next day after school, Marcus went to the community center again, even though he did not have a scheduled meeting with Ms. Wright. He did not know why he went, exactly. He just knew the community center had become, in the last few weeks, a place his feet carried him without asking permission from the rest of him.

The main room was noisy. A woman was teaching a Zumba class in one corner. Small children were painting in another. Two older men played chess at the back, and one of them kept muttering at his own pieces as if the pieces had personally betrayed him.

Marcus slipped past all of it. He went to the small meeting room at the back. The door was closed. Through the thin window in the door, he could see a man he did not know, sitting at the round table by himself, writing in a long yellow notepad. The man was old, maybe older than Ms. Wright. He had a short gray beard. He was wearing a scarf even though it was warm inside.

Marcus turned to leave, but the man saw him through the window. He waved Marcus in.

"Don't go, son. Come in. I'm just scribbling."

Marcus opened the door. "Sorry. I was looking for Ms. Wright."

"She's not here today. Tuesdays she's at the library. You must be Marcus."

"How did you know?"

"She talks about you." The man smiled. "Verna doesn't talk about many people. When she talks about somebody, you remember them. Sit down, if you want. I don't bite. My name's Harold."

"Hi, Mr. Harold."

"Just Harold."

Marcus sat down across from him. Harold put down his pen. His hands were big and knotty, with freckles across the backs.

"Are you a poet too?" Marcus said.

"Used to be. Now I'm a retired insurance man who scribbles."

"Ms. Wright says everybody who writes is a poet."

"Ms. Wright is generous. I am not a poet. I am a man who misses his wife, and the scribbling helps."

"Oh." Marcus did not know what to say. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. She's been gone eleven years. You learn to carry it. You don't ever really stop carrying it. But you learn."

Marcus nodded. He thought of his grandmother.

"Verna told me you're reading at the big event Saturday."

"Yes, sir."

"She said it's a good poem."

"I don't know. I think it might be."

"Can I tell you something, Marcus?"

"Okay."

"It is good that you do not know whether the poem is good. The people who know their poems are good usually aren't the ones writing the good poems. The good poems come out of people who are still asking." He tapped his yellow notepad. "I am still asking. Eleven years in, and I am still asking."

Marcus did not quite understand, but he filed it away, the way he was learning to file things away. He could understand them later.

"Mr. Harold?"

"Just Harold."

"Harold. Can I ask you something?"

"Shoot."

"How do you — how do you write about someone who's still here, but who's also — kind of not?"

Harold looked at him for a while. He looked the way Ms. Wright sometimes looked, as if he were deciding whether to say something big or something small.

"Your grandma."

"Yes, sir."

"Verna told me a little. I'm sorry, son. That's a hard one."

"Yeah."

"I'll tell you what I know. Which isn't much. You write about who's there. Not who was there. Not who will be there. Who's there. Right now. That's the only honest thing to do. If she is the woman who forgets your name today, then you write the woman who forgets your name today. You do not write the woman she was five years ago and pretend she is still that woman. You do not grieve her into a ghost while she is still breathing. You love who is there. You write who is there. You let the who-she-was live in the same poem with the who-she-is. Both of them are true."

Marcus stared at him.

"That's — that's what I'm trying to do."

"Good. Keep trying."

Harold picked his pen back up. He tapped it on the notepad twice, as if to call it to order. Marcus took the hint. He stood up.

"Thank you, Harold."

"Go on, now. Go write."

"Yes, sir."

He walked home with Harold's words turning in his head. *You write who is there.* He said it under his breath all the way down Elm Street. It sounded like a small prayer. He liked prayers that were also instructions.

That night, at the kitchen table, while Denise was at her nursing class and Grandma was half-asleep in her chair, Marcus did something he had not done before. He did not write a poem. He wrote a letter. He wrote a letter to his grandmother, a letter she would never read, a letter he did not intend to mail, because his grandmother was in the next room and also because even if she were across the country he was not sure she would have been able to read it.

*Dear Grandma,*

*I don't know if you will ever read this. I don't know if you would understand it if you did. Some days you know me. Some days you don't. Today was a not-knowing day. I came home and you called me sir. You called me sir like I was the mailman. It was okay. I know it is not on purpose. I know you are still in there somewhere.*

*I want you to know some things. In case one day the in-there-somewhere cannot hear me anymore. I want you to have written them down.*

*I remember you taught me how to tie my shoes on the back porch. I remember you let me eat the crust off the pie when you made pie. I remember you called me Marky when I was small, before you stopped because I told you it was a baby name. I wish I had let you keep calling me Marky. I wish I had been a little smaller for a little longer. I wish a lot of things.*

*I am going to read a poem at a big thing on Saturday. A poem about you. It is a poem about your hands. I hope I do it right. I hope the poem is worthy of your hands.*

*I love you. I love you every kind of day. Remembering days and forgetting days. Quiet days and loud days. The days you call me Otis. The days you call me sir. The days you call me honey. All of them. All of them. All of them.*

*Your grandson,* *Marcus*

He read it twice. He folded it. He tucked it into the back of the notebook, behind all the poems, behind all the scribbles and cross-outs and false starts. It was not a poem. It was a letter. But it was something, and he could feel that it was something. He did not know what yet. He left it in the back of the notebook and closed the cover.

Grandma called out from the living room. "Somebody there?"

"It's me, Grandma. It's Marcus."

"Oh. Come sit with me, honey."

He went. He sat with her. They did not talk. The TV was on without the sound. Old people on the TV were doing something involving hats. Grandma watched them. Marcus watched her watching them. Every few minutes she glanced at him, and smiled, and said, "You're a good boy."

*"Tonight I sat with the here of her,* *and I did not ask for more."*

---

It happened on a Wednesday.

Wednesdays were supposed to be the easy days. Denise worked the housing office in the morning, then came home for two hours before her nursing class. Marcus went to school, came home, did his homework at the kitchen table, and Grandma sat in her chair by the window, watching the birds at the feeder. That was the Wednesday pattern. Marcus had come to count on it. He liked patterns. He wrote better when the world was predictable.

But that Wednesday, Marcus came home from school and the door was open.

Not wide open. Just open a crack, the way a door opens when someone has gone out and forgotten to pull it shut. Marcus stopped on the porch. His heart did a small, sharp thing in his chest.

"Grandma?"

No answer.

He pushed the door wider. He stepped into the hallway. The house was quiet. Not the good quiet, not the Grandma-in-her-chair quiet. A different quiet. A wrong quiet.

"Grandma, I'm home."

Still nothing.

He walked into the living room. The chair by the window was empty. The afghan she always kept on her lap was on the floor. The TV was off. Her slippers were gone.

He ran.

He ran to the kitchen. She wasn't there. He ran to her bedroom. She wasn't there. He ran to the bathroom, and that was where he found her.

She was sitting on the bathroom floor between the toilet and the tub, one hand on the edge of the tub, the other hand in her lap. Her nightgown was twisted around her knees. Her slippers had come off. One of them was by the door. The other was somehow in the sink.

"Grandma!"

"Oh," she said. "Hello."

She said it like he had just walked into the kitchen. Like this was a perfectly ordinary Wednesday. Like she was not, in fact, on the bathroom floor.

"Grandma, what happened, are you okay?" He dropped his backpack. He knelt next to her. His hands did not know what to do. They wanted to help her up and they wanted to not touch her in case something was broken.

"I think I sat down," she said.

"You sat down?"

"On the floor."

"Why?"

She looked at him, and for a moment her eyes were clear. "Because my legs wouldn't hold me."

Marcus's throat tightened. "Okay. Okay, Grandma. It's okay. I'm going to call Mom. Don't move. Okay? Don't move."

"I wasn't planning on it, honey."

He ran for the phone. His hands shook so much he had to dial his mother's number twice. When she picked up, her voice was the tired-work-voice, the voice that said, *make it quick, I have fifteen clients waiting.*

"Mom. Grandma fell."

The voice changed. It stopped being the work voice. It became the mom voice, the sharp, awake, terrible voice. "How bad?"

"I don't know. She's sitting on the bathroom floor. She says her legs wouldn't hold her."

"Is she bleeding?"

"I don't — wait." He ran back to the bathroom. He looked at her. He looked at the floor. "No. No, I don't see any blood."

"Can she move her legs?"

"Grandma, can you move your legs?"

Grandma wiggled her toes. She lifted her left foot about an inch. She lifted her right foot a little less. "My hip hurts, baby."

"Her hip hurts, Mom."

"Don't move her, Marcus. Don't try to pick her up. I'm coming home. I'm calling 911. Stay with her. Talk to her. Keep her awake."

"Okay. Mom—"

"What?"

"Is she going to be okay?"

A pause. He hated the pause. He knew what the pause meant. The pause meant his mother was choosing her next words carefully, the way you choose where to step in a dark room.

"I don't know, baby. But I'm coming. I'm coming right now."

The line went dead.

Marcus sat down on the bathroom floor next to Grandma. He took her hand. Her hand was cool. Her wedding ring moved loose around her finger.

"Mom's coming, Grandma. An ambulance is coming."

"Oh, an ambulance," she said. "How fancy."

"Grandma. Don't go to sleep, okay? Mom said not to let you sleep."

"I'm not sleepy."

"Good."

"Am I in trouble?"

"No. No, you're not in trouble."

"I think I did something wrong."

"You didn't do anything wrong."

She turned her head slowly, as if even turning her head was a big decision. "Who are you, honey?"

Marcus's eyes burned. "I'm Marcus, Grandma. I'm your grandson."

"Marcus." She said it like she was tasting the name. "That's a good name."

"Thank you."

"Marcus who?"

"Marcus Thompson. I'm Denise's son."

"Denise." Her face softened. "Denise is my daughter."

"Yes, Grandma. That's right."

"Is Denise coming?"

"Yes. She's coming right now."

"Good." She squeezed his hand. "Good. I don't like to be alone."

"I'm here, Grandma."

"I know, honey."

The ambulance came. Marcus heard the siren from three blocks away, growing louder, and then the red and white lights were outside the window, and there were strangers in the house, two men in dark blue shirts, one woman with a kind round face who bent down next to Grandma and said, "Hello, Mrs. Thompson, my name is Kara, I'm going to help you, okay?"

Grandma said, "Are you here about the bicycle?"

Kara smiled. She didn't flinch. She didn't correct her. She said, "Yes, ma'am, I'm here about everything. Can you tell me where it hurts?"

Marcus backed out of the bathroom so they could work. His mother came through the front door a minute later, still in her work clothes, her keys in her hand, her eyes wide and her face pale.

"Where is she?"

"Bathroom."

Denise went in. There were voices. Gentle voices, but quick. Marcus stood in the hallway. He stood very still. He did not know what else to do. His backpack was still on the bathroom floor where he had dropped it. His notebook was inside the backpack. He could see the corner of it.

He thought he should pick it up. He did not pick it up.

They loaded Grandma onto a stretcher. They wheeled her through the hallway. She seemed smaller on the stretcher than she did in her chair. Her hands were folded over her chest. She blinked at the ceiling.

"I'll ride with her," Denise said. "Marcus, you — "

"I want to come."

"Marcus."

"Mom. Please. I want to come."

Denise looked at him. She looked tired in a way that went past tired, into the country on the far side of tired, the country where people live when they have not had enough sleep in a long time. She nodded once.

"Grab my purse. Grab your jacket. Lock the door."

He did all those things. He did them in a kind of daze. He locked the door behind him. He tried the handle to make sure it was locked. It was locked.

In the ambulance, Kara let him sit up front next to her. The driver drove fast but not with the siren on. Marcus asked why.

"Because she's stable," Kara said. "Sirens are for emergencies. Your grandma's okay for now. We just need to get her seen."

"Okay."

"You did good, kid."

"I didn't do anything."

"You called your mom. You stayed with her. You kept her talking. That's doing something."

Marcus nodded. He looked out the window at the streets of Ridgewood going past. The sunflowers in the tires. The brick library. The corner store with Mr. Patel in it. It all looked strange from the front of an ambulance, like he was watching his own neighborhood on a TV screen.

The ER was bright.

Too bright. Bright in a way that had nothing to do with the sun. The lights hummed. The floor was shiny. A woman behind a glass window asked Denise a thousand questions, and Denise answered them in a voice that was trying to be patient, and Marcus sat on a plastic chair with his backpack in his lap, and he took out his notebook.

He opened to a blank page.

He held his pencil over it.

He waited.

The words did not come.

He waited some more.

His hand shook. Not a lot. A little.

He tried to write *bright.* He tried to write *wheelchair.* He tried to write *my grandma is on the other side of that door.*

Nothing.

He closed the notebook. He put it in his lap. He put his hands over it, as if he could warm it. As if the notebook was cold. As if it was the notebook that needed comforting and not him.

A little girl across the waiting room was coughing. Her mother rubbed her back. An old man with a cane was staring at the TV screen up in the corner, which was playing the weather on mute. A nurse came out of a door and said, "Jefferson family?" and a family of four stood up and went through the door, and the door closed behind them, and it was quiet again.

Marcus did not cry. He did not cry because if he started to cry here, he was not sure he would stop. And he did not want his mother to have to deal with him crying. She had enough to deal with.

Denise came out after a long time. She sat down next to him. She put her hand on his knee.

"They want to keep her overnight."

"Is she okay?"

"She didn't break anything. But she's confused. They want to watch her. Her blood pressure is low. They said it could be dehydration. They said it could be other things."

"What other things?"

Denise did not answer that one. She just squeezed his knee. "We'll talk to the doctor. You can see her soon."

"Mom."

"Yeah?"

"What if — " He stopped. He didn't know how to finish the sentence. What if she didn't come home. What if she did come home but she didn't know them anymore. What if she forgot his name tomorrow. What if.

Denise understood. She always understood the what ifs, even the ones he didn't say.

"One day at a time, baby," she said. "We can't do the what ifs. They'll eat us alive. One day at a time."

"Okay."

"The event is Saturday, isn't it?"

"Yeah."

"Are you still going?"

Marcus looked at his notebook. He looked at his hands. He looked at the fluorescent light above the vending machine, buzzing and humming.

"I don't know," he said.

Denise nodded, slowly. "That's okay. You don't have to decide tonight."

---

They moved Grandma to a room on the third floor around nine o'clock.

The room had two beds. The other bed was empty, the sheets tucked tight the way sheets are tucked when nobody is in them. There was a window, but the curtains were pulled closed. There was a TV bolted to the wall. There was a pink plastic pitcher of water on the table by Grandma's bed, and a matching pink plastic cup with a straw, and a button on a cord that Grandma could press if she needed the nurse.

Grandma was asleep when they wheeled her in. Her eyes fluttered, but she did not wake up.

Denise went to the nurse's station to ask about insurance, and about the night routine, and about a dozen other things. She said, "Marcus, stay with her. If anything happens, press the button. I'll be right back."

Marcus sat in the chair by the bed. The chair was vinyl, the color of tea, with metal arms. He pulled it close to the bed so he could see Grandma's face. Her face looked different in the hospital light. Softer. Older. A little gray.

He took out his notebook.

This time his hand did not shake.

He opened to page forty-seven. The poem about Grandma's hands. He looked at the words. He read them in his head. He read them again. He looked at Grandma.

He glanced at the door. The hallway was quiet. A nurse walked by, but she didn't look in. He cleared his throat. He started.

He read the whole poem, slowly, the way Ms. Wright had read it. He read it softly, because the room was small. He read it with the breath in between the lines.

Grandma did not stir.

He finished. He closed the notebook. He sat with the silence for a moment. He had not expected anything, really. She was asleep. He knew she was asleep. But it had felt important to read it to her anyway. He had wanted her to hear it, even if she never remembered hearing it. He had wanted the air of her room to have the poem in it.

"That's beautiful, baby."

Marcus froze.

"Grandma?"

Her eyes opened. Slowly. They were very dark and very clear. The kind of clear he had not seen in months. The kind of clear that used to be normal, back before the forgetting, back when she was just Grandma, ordinary Grandma, making him peanut butter sandwiches and fussing at him to wipe his feet.

"Come here, baby," she said.

He slid the chair even closer. He put his hand on the blanket. Her hand came out from under the blanket and found his. Her fingers were warm this time. Warmer than before.

"Did you write that?" she said.

"Yes, Grandma."

"For me?"

"For you."

"Marcus." She said his name. His own name. Marcus. Not Otis. Not honey. Not some name that belonged to somebody else. Marcus. "Marcus, that was beautiful."

"Thank you, Grandma."

"Read it to me again."

He opened the notebook. He read it again. His voice wobbled a little this time, but he made it through. She listened with her eyes closed. A tear moved down from the corner of her eye, slow, slipping sideways toward her ear. She did not wipe it.

When he finished, she squeezed his hand.

"You have a gift," she said. "You know that?"

"Ms. Wright said the same thing."

"Ms. Wright is a smart woman. You listen to her."

"I will."

They sat there. He did not want to speak. He did not want to break it. He wanted to climb inside the moment and pull it around him like a blanket.

"Am I dying, baby?"

It was a small question. She asked it plainly, the way she would ask *is it raining* or *did you eat.* No fear in it. No drama. Just the question.

Marcus's chest did a hard, hot thing. He could have lied. That would have been easy. Grown-ups lied about this all the time. Grown-ups said *no, of course not, don't be silly.* Grown-ups said *you'll be fine,* and *don't worry,* and *everything is going to be okay.* Grown-ups filled the silence.

And Grandma was looking at him.

And Grandma deserved the truth.

"I don't know, Grandma," he said.

The words were small. They sat in the room. They were honest.

Grandma nodded. Her eyes stayed on his.

"That's okay," she said. "You don't have to know."

"I wish I knew."

"No, baby. That's not how it works. Some things you don't know. You just sit with them."

"Okay."

"Sit with me."

"I'm sitting, Grandma."

She smiled. A tiny smile. Just a lift at the corners of her mouth. "I know you are. I know you are."

She closed her eyes.

For a minute she just breathed. In. Out. In. Out. The machines beside the bed made their quiet sounds. The clock on the wall ticked. Marcus held her hand. He did not let go.

When she opened her eyes again, she was already someone else. The fog was back. He could see it come across her face like a cloud across a field. Her forehead wrinkled. Her eyes lost their focus. She looked at him and for a second she looked at him with the eyes of a stranger, the polite confused eyes she sometimes used at the dinner table when she could not remember whose house she was in.

"Otis?" she said.

Marcus did not flinch. He had been here before.

"Yes, Grandma. It's me."

"Oh." She smiled a vague sweet smile. "Oh, that's good. Where are the children?"

"The children are okay, Grandma. They're sleeping."

"Good. Good. Tell them I love them."

"I will."

"Otis."

"Yes?"

"Is it going to rain?"

"I don't know, Grandma. Maybe tomorrow."

"I like the rain."

"I know you do."

She closed her eyes again.

Marcus sat there. He sat there a long time. He did not move, because moving felt like it might shake something loose. The lucid moment was already gone. It had come and it had gone. He did not know if it would come again tonight or tomorrow or ever.

Quiet, very quietly, without letting go of her hand, he cried.

He cried the way boys his age cry when they have been trying not to cry all day and finally there is nobody around but a sleeping grandmother. He cried with his mouth closed. His shoulders shook once and then steadied. A few tears fell on the blanket. He wiped his face with the back of his free hand.

He did not cry for very long. He could not afford to. His mother would be back. He did not want her to walk in on him crying. She had enough. He did not want her to carry his crying, too.

He pulled his notebook onto his knees, one-handed. He turned to a fresh page. He wrote, very slowly, one line.

*"That's beautiful, baby."*

*"She called me by my name tonight,* *and then she called me by another man's name.* *Either way, her hand was in mine.* *Either way, she said I love you* *in a language I understood."*

He stopped. He looked at the words. He closed the notebook.

Denise came back in around eleven. She looked at him. She looked at Grandma. She said, "You should go home and sleep. I'll stay."

"I can stay, Mom."

"You have school."

"I don't care about school."

"Marcus."

"Mom."

She sighed. She came and sat on the arm of his chair. She put her arm around his shoulder. It was the first time she had sat down, really sat down, since the ambulance.

"Honey. I know you want to stay. I love you for wanting to stay. But one of us has to be functional tomorrow, and it can't be me. I am going to be a mess tomorrow. I need you to go home. I need you to sleep. I need you to eat breakfast. I need you to get on that stage Saturday and read that poem. That is what I need you to do. Okay?"

"Okay."

"I mean it. That's the job."

"Okay, Mom."

She kissed the top of his head. "I called Ms. Verna. She's picking you up. She'll take you home and stay with you tonight. That's not up for discussion."

"Okay."

"Did you eat?"

"No."

"There are peanut butter crackers in my purse. Eat them on the way down."

"Okay, Mom."

He stood up. He put the notebook in his backpack. He looked at Grandma one more time. She was breathing steady. The machines were quiet.

"I love you, Grandma," he said, very soft.

Grandma didn't answer. But her fingers moved, just a little, against the blanket. He wanted to believe she heard him. He decided to believe she heard him. You got to choose what you believed, sometimes. Ms. Wright had said that once, too.

Ms. Wright was waiting downstairs in the lobby. She was wearing a long brown coat and a knit hat the color of cranberries. She stood up when she saw him. She did not ask questions. She did not say anything at all, in fact. She just put her arm around his shoulders and walked him out to her car.

The car smelled like cinnamon.

He cried a little more on the way home. She let him. She did not turn on the radio. She did not say it was going to be okay. She just drove.

At his house, she walked him up the porch. She took the key from his hand because his hand could not do the key. She opened the door. She turned on the lights. She set her coat on the back of a chair.

"I'll make us some tea," she said. "You go wash your face. You'll feel better."

"Okay."

He went upstairs. He washed his face with cold water. He looked at himself in the mirror. He did not recognize the boy in the mirror. The boy in the mirror had pink eyes and a shiny nose and a very serious mouth. Marcus stared at him. The boy stared back. They were strangers for a minute. Then they were not.

He went back downstairs. Ms. Wright had put the kettle on. She had found the tea in the cupboard — somehow she knew exactly which cupboard — and she had set out two mugs on the counter. Denise's mug was the one with a chipped handle and the words WORLD'S OKAYEST MOM on it, a gift from Marcus two Christmases ago that had become his mother's favorite. Ms. Wright had put it out for herself. Marcus did not mind. His mother would have liked that.

"Sit," Ms. Wright said.

He sat at the kitchen table.

"Have you eaten?"

"I had peanut butter crackers."

"That is not eating. That is not eating, Marcus."

She opened the refrigerator. She pulled out cheese and an apple. She sliced the apple with the small paring knife. She arranged the apple and the cheese on a plate. She set it in front of him.

"Eat."

He ate. He did not think he was hungry, but it turned out his body had a different opinion than his mind. He ate the whole apple. He ate all the cheese. Ms. Wright made the tea. She sat down across from him with her own mug.

They did not talk. They sat for a long time in the quiet.

Finally she said, "Tell me about her."

"Grandma?"

"Yes."

"What do you want to know?"

"What is one thing she did for you, when you were small, that you remember."

Marcus thought. He thought for a long time. There were many things. His memory went through them like a hand going through a box of small treasures. He picked one.

"When I was six, I had a bad dream. I used to have this dream where I was drowning. I don't know why. Nobody had ever drowned in our family. But I had it a lot. And I would wake up crying. And my mom would come in, and she would pat my back, but she had to be at work early, so she could only stay a little while. And after she went back to her room, Grandma would come. She would come in her slippers. And she would sit on my bed, and she would sing this song."

"What song?"

"I don't know. It was an old song. It wasn't a lullaby. It was like a church song, but slower. She would sing it and she would rub my back. And she would say, 'There's no water in this room, Marky. There is only you and me and God. No water.' And I would go back to sleep."

Ms. Wright nodded. She did not say anything.

"That's one thing she did."

"That's a good one, Marcus."

"There are a lot of ones."

"I know."

"I don't know which ones to save. I keep thinking I have to save them all. Like if I don't write every single one down, they'll — she'll — " He stopped.

"They'll disappear with her."

"Yeah."

"Marcus. Listen to me. You are carrying a lot. Some of those stories will stay because you write them down. Some will stay because your mother remembers them. Some will stay because someone else does. And some will fade, and that is not your fault. You are not the only archive. Do you hear me? You are not the only archive of your grandmother. That is too heavy a thing for one boy to carry."

"Okay."

"Save what you can. Let the rest go. That is part of love, too. Letting some things go."

She stayed with him for another hour. She did not say much. She just sat. When Denise called, near midnight, to say Grandma was sleeping and stable, Ms. Wright answered the phone, and she said, in her calm voice, "Denise, honey, he is fine. He ate an apple and some cheese. He will sleep. You stay with your mama."

She made Marcus go to bed at eleven-thirty. She said she would sleep on the couch. She had brought a small bag. She had clearly planned for this.

"Ms. Wright."

"Yes."

"Thank you."

"Hush. Go to sleep."

He went to sleep. He did not dream.

---

Saturday came, the way Saturdays do, whether you are ready or not.

The event was at two o'clock in the afternoon. Marcus woke up at six. He woke up the way people wake up when they have a test, or a dentist appointment, or a thing they cannot avoid. His stomach was tight. His hands felt like they belonged to somebody else.

He lay in bed for a while. The ceiling had a water stain shaped like a rabbit. He had named the rabbit Henry when he was seven. Henry was still there. Henry had been through a lot with him.

"Henry," Marcus said, out loud. "I don't think I can do this."

Henry did not answer, because Henry was a water stain.

But saying it out loud helped a little. Saying something out loud sometimes made it less true.

He got up. He went downstairs.

Grandma was home. They had brought her home yesterday afternoon. The hospital had said she was okay to discharge, that she was hydrated, that her hip was bruised but not broken, that she could move with a walker. They had given Denise a long list of instructions. They had said a lot of things about medications and follow-ups and when to call 911 again.

Grandma was in her chair by the window. She was in her blue house dress. She was looking at the bird feeder, but there were no birds on it, just a single squirrel who was eyeing the seed and pretending to not care.

"Morning, Grandma."

"Morning, honey."

"How are you feeling?"

"My hip hurts."

"I know."

"Who are you?"

"I'm Marcus, Grandma."

"Oh. Okay."

She went back to watching the squirrel. Marcus stood in the doorway for a minute. He watched her watching the squirrel. He wanted to memorize her. He wanted to memorize everything. The light in her hair. The shape of her hands in her lap. The way she tilted her head a little to the left.

Denise came down the stairs. She was already dressed, in the dark green dress she wore to nice things. Her hair was pulled back. She had eyeliner on, which was rare. Denise mostly did not have time for eyeliner.

"You up already?" she said.

"Couldn't sleep."

"Yeah. Me neither."

She put on coffee. She stood at the counter with her hands braced on it and her head down, for just a second, the way she sometimes did when she was gathering herself. Then she stood up straight and opened the cupboard and got the cereal down.

"Eat something," she said.

"I don't think I can."

"Eat something anyway."

She put a bowl in front of him. She poured cereal. She poured milk. She sat down across from him with her own bowl. They ate. They did not talk. Grandma hummed something from her chair, something old, something that was not quite a song.

"Mom."

"Yeah."

"What if I mess it up?"

Denise looked at him. "You mean the poem?"

"Yeah."

"Then you mess it up."

"Mom."

"Baby, listen to me. You've already done the hard part. The hard part is writing it. The hard part is living it. The hard part is loving your grandma and watching her change. You have done all that. Reading it out loud is not the hard part. Reading it out loud is the gift part."

"Ms. Wright said something like that."

"Ms. Wright is correct."

"I might still mess it up."

"Then you'll mess it up, and we'll go get ice cream after, and we'll tell Grandma about it. And next time you'll do it better. That's how it works."

"There's going to be hundreds of people, Mom."

"Mm-hmm."

"I don't know if I can get up there."

Denise put her spoon down. She looked at him. She looked at him in the way she looked at him sometimes, the mom-look, the look that said *I see you, all of you, even the parts you think are hidden.*

"Marcus. You don't have to do this."

"What?"

"I said you don't have to do this. If you wake up this morning and you look in the mirror and you say, *I cannot do this today,* then you don't do it. You don't owe anybody this. Not me. Not Ms. Wright. Not the event people. Not Grandma. Nobody."

"But — "

"I'm not finished. I'm not finished, Marcus. I want you to hear me. You don't *have* to do this. But I want you to ask yourself, when you decide, whether you're not doing it because it's wrong, or because you're scared. Because those are two different things. Not doing something because it's wrong is good. Not doing something because you're scared is a different conversation. That's all I'm saying. Okay?"

Marcus nodded. He could not speak. His throat was too thick.

"Finish your cereal."

He finished his cereal.

He went upstairs. He put on a clean shirt, the white one with the buttons, because he thought poets probably wore clean shirts with buttons. He brushed his teeth. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. He did not say anything to the mirror. He was afraid of what he might say.

His phone buzzed.

It was Samira.

Marcus stared at the phone. He sat down on the edge of the tub. He read the text three times.

Marcus laughed. He laughed out loud, in the bathroom, alone. The laugh surprised him. It was a short laugh, a one-second laugh, but it happened.

The phone rang. Not a text — a call. It was Aaliyah.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey yourself. Samira says you're having a freakout."

"I'm not having a freakout."

"Okay. Having a pre-freakout. Whatever. Listen."

Aaliyah had a way of saying *listen* that made you actually listen.

"I'm listening."

"You know how I'm an animator, right?"

"I know."

"You know what animators do when they're scared?"

"What?"

"They make the thing anyway. They sit at the desk and they draw the first line even when it's ugly. And then they draw the second line. And the second line is usually a little less ugly. And by the hundredth line, you forgot you were scared, because you're just drawing."

"Okay."

"Your poem is the line, Marcus. You just gotta draw the first line. Just get up to the microphone. The microphone is the first line. After that, it's just drawing."

"You're weird."

"I know."

"Thanks, Aaliyah."

"Felix is walking over to get you. We're all meeting at the corner. Get your shoes on."

"What?"

"You heard me. Get your shoes on. We're walking you to the event. Felix's idea. Don't argue."

"I wasn't arguing."

"Good."

She hung up.

Marcus sat on the edge of the tub for another minute. He looked at himself in the mirror. He was a thirteen-year-old boy with a clean white shirt with buttons. He was a poet. He was Denise's son. He was Grandma's grandson. He was scared.

He stood up.

He put his shoes on.

He went downstairs and he kissed Grandma on the forehead. She looked at him and said, "Marcus, you look nice."

It stopped him.

"You know me, Grandma?"

"Of course I know you. You're my Marcus."

He closed his eyes. He did not want to cry before the event. He would cry at the event. He could not cry twice.

"Thank you, Grandma."

"Where are you going all dressed up?"

"I'm going to read a poem."

"A poem you wrote?"

"Yes."

"Is it a good one?"

He smiled. "I hope so."

"Then it'll be good." She patted his hand. "You were always a good boy, Marcus. Even when you stole that candy from the drawer when you were five. I knew you were good."

He laughed. "I thought you didn't see that."

"I saw it, baby. I saw everything."

The doorbell rang.

Felix stood on the porch. Felix had on a tie. Felix almost never wore a tie. It was red. It was slightly crooked. He looked like a kid going to a wedding.

"You're wearing a tie," Marcus said.

"So are you."

"I'm not wearing a tie."

"You're wearing a tie in spirit."

"What does that even mean?"

"Come on. Everybody's at the corner. Aliyah brought snacks. Jin-woo made a playlist. Eden has a sign. It's embarrassing. Come on."

Denise came to the door. She held Marcus's jacket.

"I'll meet you there at one-thirty, okay? I have to sit with Grandma till the neighbor comes over. But I'll be there. Front row. I promise."

"Okay, Mom."

She hugged him. She hugged him harder than usual. She whispered into his hair, "I am so proud of you."

"You don't even know yet what I'm gonna do."

"Yes, I do."

She let him go.

Felix pulled him by the sleeve.

They walked to the corner.

The others were there. All of them. Samira, in her long green coat. Diya, bouncing on her toes the way she always did when she was nervous for somebody else. Eden, with a hand-painted sign that did, in fact, say MARCUS THOMPSON POET LAUREATE OF RIDGEWOOD in rainbow letters. Jin-woo, with earbuds around his neck. Aliyah, with a bag of clementines for everybody. Aaliyah, who had driven over from her apartment and was leaning against her car.

They did not cheer when he walked up. They did not do anything big. Samira just nodded at him. Felix bumped his shoulder. Eden held up the sign and then, seeing his face, lowered it sheepishly.

"We're not gonna take it inside," Aaliyah said. "Promise."

"Thank God."

"Unless you want us to."

"I don't."

"Then we won't."

Aliyah handed him a clementine. He peeled it. He ate it while they walked. It tasted like the best thing he had ever tasted. He did not know you could taste fruit harder because you were scared. He filed that away.

They walked. Seven friends and one animator. They walked past the sunflowers in the tires, which were a little taller now, and past the brick library, and past Mr. Patel's store. Mr. Patel came out to the sidewalk when they passed.

"Where are you going, all dressed up?"

"Marcus is reading a poem," Felix said.

"Marcus!" Mr. Patel said. "My Marcus?"

"Yes, sir."

"A poem you wrote?"

"Yes, sir."

Mr. Patel disappeared back into the store. He came out again thirty seconds later with a pack of mints.

"For your throat. Poets need clear voices."

"Thank you, Mr. Patel."

"Break a leg, young man."

They kept walking.

They walked slower than they needed to. There was time. Nobody said it was because they were trying to make the walk longer, but Marcus thought maybe they all were. He was grateful. Every step was a step closer, and he was not in a hurry to get closer.

Felix fell into stride beside him. Felix did not usually talk a lot. He was a listening kind of friend. But today he was talking more.

"You know what I was thinking about on the way over?"

"What?"

"Remember when we had to do the poetry unit in Ms. Chen's class? Fourth grade?"

"Barely."

"You wrote a poem about a snail."

"I did not."

"You did. I remember. It was about a snail. The snail was going across a sidewalk. The snail was taking a long time. You wrote a poem about how the snail was not afraid of taking a long time."

"Felix. I do not remember writing a poem about a snail."

"Well, you did. And it was really good. Ms. Chen pinned it up on the board. And I remember thinking, Marcus writes about snails and he makes you care about the snail. That is a talent. I was nine. I have been telling people for four years that you are going to be a real poet someday."

Marcus did not know what to say.

"Well, thanks, Felix."

"I am just saying. This is not news, today. To me. You being up there today is not news. This is just the part where the rest of the world finds out."

He said it plainly, the way Felix said things, without any embarrassment. He said it as if it were a fact of the weather. Marcus walked in silence for a minute after that. His chest did the tight hot thing.

"Felix."

"Yeah."

"I love you, man."

"Yeah, I know. I love you too. Now stop being weird, we're almost there."

Samira caught up on his other side. She had been walking with Eden, trying to talk her out of the sign. The sign was folded under Eden's coat now. Eden had promised, on her honor as a junior youth, to keep it folded unless Marcus said otherwise.

"You okay?" Samira said.

"Yeah."

"Really?"

"Mostly."

"That's honest."

"I'm trying."

She put her hand on his shoulder for one second. One second only. Then she took it off. That was Samira. She was an economy of gestures. She did not waste her touches. When she gave one, it meant something.

"We'll be in the fifth row," she said. "I already scoped it. Don't look for us when you're up there, but also — we're there. Okay?"

"Okay."

"You don't have to find us. You don't have to read to us. You just have to read. Ms. Wright's voice. Remember her voice. Not ours."

"Okay."

"Okay. I'm gonna go be annoying to Eden some more."

"Please."

She dropped back. Marcus kept walking. He looked up at the sky. The sky was a bright, high, gray-blue sky. Not a storm sky. An in-between sky. He thought, briefly, about the clouds. He thought about whether clouds ever worry before they rain. He thought maybe they do. He thought maybe worrying is just part of being a cloud that is about to rain.

That would be a poem, probably. Not today. Someday.

He filed it away.

---

The Ridgewood Community Theater was an old building on Elm Street. Brick on the outside. Inside, a red carpet that was wearing thin. Rows of seats that tipped up when you stood. A stage with velvet curtains, red, a little dusty. Lights that shone hot and white.

Marcus had been there before, for a school play when he was in fifth grade. It had seemed enormous then. It seemed smaller now, but only because his fear was bigger.

They checked in at a table in the lobby. A woman with a clipboard asked his name. She found him on the list. She handed him a small blue tag on a lanyard that said PERFORMER in white letters. She said, "You're ninth on the program. Green room is backstage. Follow Devon."

Devon was a tall boy with a headset. He led Marcus behind the curtain and into a room with folding chairs and a snack table and a water cooler. Other kids were there. Two girls with sheet music. A boy with a violin case. A teenager with a hand drum. A dance group in matching blue. They all looked nervous. They all looked like they had dressed carefully. Marcus felt better, somehow, seeing that other people were as nervous as he was.

He sat down. He got a cup of water. He pulled the notebook out of his backpack. He held it on his lap.

The junior youth had gone to find seats. His mother would be there by now. He could hear the audience, muffled, on the other side of the wall — a low ocean sound of voices. The theater was almost full, Devon had told him. Full, meaning hundreds of people, meaning more people than had ever seen Marcus Thompson do any single thing in his whole life.

He breathed.

He counted to ten.

He breathed again.

Sasha came in.

She came in through the backstage door, peeking around it, looking small. She was in a yellow cardigan. Her hair was in a single braid over her shoulder.

"Marcus."

"Sasha?"

"I was looking for you. Someone said you were in here. The lady with the clipboard. She's kind of scary."

"She's scary."

"Yeah."

"How'd you get back here?"

"I told her I was your sister. She didn't check. I don't know her job at all."

Marcus laughed. Sasha sat in the empty folding chair next to him.

"I just wanted to say — I mean — I told you I was coming, but I wanted you to know I came. I'm in row twelve. On the aisle. I'll be the one with the yellow sweater."

"I figured."

"Yeah, I'm wearing it for you. Like, so you can find me."

"Thanks, Sasha."

"I liked your poem at school."

"You said."

"I know. I'm saying again. Because I know you're nervous. And I wanted you to remember that I liked it. In case it helps."

"It helps."

She smiled. A quick, small smile. She stood up. "Okay. I'm going back. You've got this. Don't rush. Ms. Wright told me to tell you don't rush."

"You talked to Ms. Wright?"

"She's out there. She's saving me a seat."

"Ms. Wright is saving you a seat?"

"She said anybody here for you is here for the right reason."

Marcus did not know what to do with that. His throat did the tight thing again.

"Okay. Go sit down."

"Okay."

She left.

He looked at his notebook.

He opened to page forty-seven. He read the poem in his head. He read it again. He moved his lips with the words but did not say them aloud. He breathed where Ms. Wright had told him to breathe.

A woman with a clipboard — a different clipboard woman — came into the green room and said, "Seven is up next. Eight, get ready. Nine, be standing by in five."

Nine was Marcus.

He stood up. His legs were a little bit made of water. He walked to the curtain and stood by it. Through a small gap he could see the stage and a corner of the audience. The seats were full. Every seat. People in coats, people with programs, people squeezed together in the back.

He saw his mother. Fourth row, on the aisle, next to a woman in a headscarf. Denise was sitting very straight. She was holding her purse in her lap. She was looking up at the stage as if she were trying to protect it with her eyes.

He saw Eden. Eden had managed to smuggle the sign in. It was folded small in her lap. A corner of rainbow letters was just visible.

He saw Ms. Wright. Third row, closer to the middle. She had her reading glasses pushed up on her forehead. She was not looking at the stage. She was looking toward the wings. She was looking, Marcus realized, at him. Through the gap in the curtain. She could not possibly see him. But she was looking anyway.

She nodded. A small nod. Just her chin. Half an inch.

Don't rush.

Breathe.

Witness love.

"Eight is up," said the woman with the clipboard. "Nine, get ready."

The boy with the violin case walked past Marcus onto the stage. The audience applauded. The boy played something Marcus did not know. It was beautiful. Marcus was glad the boy went before him. It was good to hear something beautiful before you had to do your own beautiful thing.

The violin ended. Applause. The boy came back past Marcus.

"Good luck, man," the boy whispered.

"Thanks," Marcus whispered back.

"Number nine," said an announcer's voice over the speakers. "From Ridgewood Middle School — please welcome — Marcus Thompson."

Marcus walked onto the stage.

The lights were hot. He could feel the heat on his face. He could feel the beams like the sun at two o'clock in July. For a second he could not see anything. Then his eyes adjusted, and he could see, dim and far, the audience. A sea of faces. A dark forest of people.

The microphone was in front of him. It was a little too high. He reached for it. He missed. He reached again. He got it. He lowered it with a soft squeak that echoed over the whole theater.

Somebody in the back laughed. Not mean. Friendly.

That helped.

He opened his notebook.

He took a breath.

He looked up.

And he did not see hundreds of people. He saw his mother, fourth row, on the aisle. He saw Ms. Wright, third row. He saw Sasha, row twelve, in yellow. He saw Eden and Samira and Felix and Diya and Jin-woo and Aliyah somewhere in the middle, a cluster of friendly faces. He saw Aaliyah at the back, where she had told them she'd stand.

He saw, he thought, a woman in the third row across the aisle. A woman he did not know. She had silver in her hair and she had her hands folded in her lap and she was leaning forward a little, the way some people lean forward when they are listening hard.

He did not know this woman's name.

He did not know yet that her name was Ms. Constance Okoye.

He did not know that she ran a writing program for teens on the west side of the city, every Saturday in the basement of the main library.

He did not know that after this afternoon, she would walk up to him and press a folded flyer into his hand, and tell him she would love to have him in her program, no charge, starting in two weeks.

He did not know that she was going to change the next five years of his life.

He did not know any of that.

He looked down at his notebook.

He read.

He read slowly. He read with breath between the lines. He read the way Ms. Wright had read it back to him, in the small meeting room with the round table and the paper cups of tea. He read as if the words were a path and he was walking it barefoot.

He read about Grandma's hands.

He read about the way they used to braid his hair on Sunday mornings.

He read about the knuckle that was bigger than the other one from the bicycle accident at nine.

He read about the wedding ring that was loose now.

He read about the soap in two pieces in the dish by the kitchen sink.

He read about the way she had held his face and said *look at me, Marcus,* and how he did not know, when she did that, that she was memorizing him.

He read the last line.

He stopped.

He did not close the notebook right away.

He let the silence sit.

Ms. Wright had told him this was the hardest part. You let the silence sit. You do not apologize for it. You do not rush off the stage. The silence is part of the poem.

He lifted his eyes.

He looked at the audience.

The silence held.

It held for maybe two seconds. Maybe three. Long enough that, in another performance, a person might have thought, *oh no, they hated it.* But Marcus knew, somehow, he knew from Ms. Wright's voice in his head, that this silence was the good kind. This silence was people holding the poem in their chests for a minute. This silence was people deciding whether they were going to cry or not.

Then the applause came.

Not polite. Real.

It started in the third row, from Ms. Wright, and it spread outward and outward, and people stood — not everyone, some people stayed sitting, but many stood — and the sound grew and rolled and filled the dusty old theater all the way up to the lights. Marcus blinked into it. He could see better now. The lights did not blind him as much.

He saw Ms. Okoye in the third row across the aisle. She was not applauding. Not yet. She was wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist. Then she started clapping. Then she was clapping harder than anybody.

Marcus bowed. Just a small bow. He did not know if he was supposed to bow. It seemed like the right thing to do.

He walked off the stage.

His knees were water again. The announcer was saying, "That was Marcus Thompson — wow. Wow." Marcus heard him through a fog. The woman with the clipboard said, "Great job, honey, great job," and tried to steer him toward the green room, but he did not go. He went out the side door, into the hallway that led back to the lobby.

He needed air.

He needed air that had not been breathed by hundreds of people.

The lobby was empty. Almost. A single usher stood by the front door, folding programs. He looked up when Marcus came out, and then he saw Marcus's face, and he understood that this was a boy who needed to not be spoken to, and he went back to folding programs.

Marcus walked over to a pillar. He put his back against it. He slid down until he was sitting on the red carpet. He held his notebook against his chest. He closed his eyes.

He could still feel the heat of the lights on his face. He could still feel the microphone in his hand. He could still feel the precise weight of the silence after the last line — the way it had weighed exactly something, the way it had had a shape.

He had done it.

The thought arrived slow. He held it at a distance first, like a plate that was too hot. Then he brought it closer.

He had done it. He had stood up in front of hundreds of people, and he had read his poem, and he had not thrown up, and he had not fainted, and his voice had held, and the silence had been the good silence. He had done it.

He let out a breath he did not know he had been holding for a week.

He opened his eyes. He looked up at the ceiling of the lobby. The ceiling had old tin tiles, painted gold, with little patterns pressed into them. He had never noticed. He wondered how many people had sat in this lobby over the years and not noticed the tin tiles. He wondered if they had other things on their minds too.

He wiped his face with his sleeve.

He stood up.

He went back inside.

---

His mother caught him in the lobby.

She had come running around from the main auditorium. She was already crying. Not a fancy cry, not a movie cry. A real one, with her nose running and her mascara moving.

"Marcus. Marcus. Oh, my God, baby. Come here. Come here."

She hugged him. She hugged him the way she had hugged him in the doorway that morning, only harder. She held his face in her two hands — the way Grandma used to — and she looked at him. She looked at him as if his face was a page.

"I am so proud of you."

"Mom — "

"I am so proud of you. I am so proud of you. Your grandmother would be so proud of you."

"I know, Mom."

"She wasn't able to come."

"I know."

"But she would be. She *is.* She is proud of you, Marcus, even if she can't tell you right now. I know she is. I know her. She is."

"Okay, Mom. Okay. Okay."

Her crying slowed. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand. She laughed once, short. "I'm a mess."

"You look good."

"I look like a raccoon."

"You look good, Mom."

She laughed again. She let him go. She held his hand. They stood there a second, just breathing.

Then the doors to the main hall burst open and the junior youth came out in a pack. They did not say anything for a second. They just swarmed. Samira hugged him first. Diya was practically crying. Aliyah hit his shoulder in the friendly way. Jin-woo held up his phone and said, "I recorded the whole thing. Your mom's gonna want this. I got a good angle." Eden, in a rare attack of shyness, did not make any sign-related jokes, just squeezed his arm and said, "That was so beautiful, Marcus, that was so beautiful."

"You did it. You told the truth."

Marcus closed his eyes. He thought, *I am going to remember that for the rest of my life.*

Aaliyah came up with a paper cup of lemonade from the refreshments table. She handed it to him. "Drink this. Your mouth has to be like a desert. You did good, kid. You did real good."

"Thanks."

"I mean it. That was art. That was *art* art. I'm gonna go home and draw something."

Marcus laughed. He drank the lemonade. His hand shook a little around the cup. The shake was coming down, already, from its peak. It was smaller now. It was the shake of a thing that had already happened.

Then Ms. Wright was there.

She came through the crowd slowly, one hand on her hip, the other one holding her program. She was smiling, but she was not smiling big. Her smile was the small, slow smile she saved for things that were good and also serious.

The junior youth stepped back, somehow understanding they should.

Ms. Wright put both hands on Marcus's shoulders. She was not much taller than him, but right then she felt tall.

"Marcus Thompson."

"Ms. Wright."

"Do you know what you did up there?"

"I read my poem."

"No. Well. Yes. But also no. You listened to your poem. That is a different thing. Most people don't. Most people wrestle their poem. You listened to it. Do you understand what a rare thing that is?"

"I — kind of."

"Just kind of is enough for today."

She patted his shoulder. Her hand was warm. She looked at him a long time. Her eyes did that thing adults do sometimes where they look at a young person and see, all at once, the small child and the adult and the old man you will someday be.

"Don't stop now, Marcus."

"Ma'am?"

"Don't stop now. I've seen a lot of young poets in my time. I have seen them read one good poem and then get scared and stop. I don't want that for you. I don't want you to stop. Write the next one. Write the ugly one after this one. Write the scared one. Write the one that doesn't make sense. Just keep writing. Promise me."

"I promise."

"Good boy."

She patted his shoulder again. She stepped back.

"Now. There is a woman over there who wants to talk to you. I have known her for twenty years. Her name is Constance Okoye. She runs a writing program at the main library. She told me she'd like to meet you. I think you should say yes."

Marcus followed her gaze.

The woman from the third row was standing by the refreshments table. She had her purse over her shoulder. She was looking at a bowl of pretzels, politely, as if she was pretending not to wait for him.

"Go on," Ms. Wright said. "She's been teaching kids like you for longer than you've been alive. You say hello. You listen. You bring your notebook."

Marcus looked at his mother. Denise nodded. "Go, baby."

He walked over.

Ms. Okoye turned when he got close. Her face broke open into a wide, real smile. It was a smile with a lot of teeth and some crinkles at the corners of her eyes.

"Marcus Thompson."

"Yes, ma'am."

"I'm Constance Okoye. I run a program. You made me cry, young man. I don't cry at these things often. I've been to a hundred of them. You made me cry. I wanted to come find you and tell you that."

"Thank you, ma'am."

"Do you know Verna Wright?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Verna taught me how to write when I was your age. Did she tell you that?"

"No, ma'am."

"Of course not. She's a private woman. But she did. I was thirteen. I was sitting in a church basement scribbling angry bad poems in a diary, and Verna Wright walked in one day and told me I was wasting my talent if I didn't keep writing. I have never forgotten that. Never. And now I run a program, and I keep an eye out for young poets, because that's what she did for me. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"I think so."

"I'm saying there is a chain, Marcus. And I would like you to be a link in it. I have a Saturday program. Ten kids. I pay for it out of my own pocket, plus a small grant from the library. There is no charge. I want you to come. I want you to start in two weeks. Can you come?"

Marcus looked at her. He looked at Ms. Wright, who was across the lobby, pretending not to watch, and doing a terrible job of it.

"I — I have to ask my mom."

"Of course. Here." She reached into her purse. She pulled out a folded flyer. She pressed it into his hand. "That's the information. Have your mother call me. Anytime."

"Thank you, ma'am."

"Thank *you,* Marcus. Keep writing."

She smiled again. She squeezed his hand. She walked away.

He stood there with the folded flyer. He felt a little dizzy. He felt as if something had happened that he was going to need time to understand. He folded the flyer once more and put it in his pocket.

He walked back to his mom. He showed her the flyer. She opened it. She read it. She read it again. She looked up at him.

"Marcus. This is — this is real. This woman is — Marcus, I've heard of her. Miss Dottie down at the church goes on about her."

"She wants me in the program."

"She wants you in the program."

"Can I go?"

Denise laughed — a startled, warm laugh. "Can you *go.* Baby, I would *swim* to get you to this program. Yes, you can go."

The junior youth had drifted over by now, trying to look casual about eavesdropping.

"What's happening?" Eden said. "What's the paper?"

"Nothing," Marcus said. "Nothing. I'll tell you later."

"Oh, so we're *mysterious* now," Eden said. "Poet Laureate is *mysterious* now."

"Eden, please."

"I'm just saying."

Samira elbowed Eden. Eden shut up. Samira smiled at Marcus — the small, quiet smile. "You okay?"

"I think so."

"Your hands stopped shaking?"

"Almost."

"Good."

"Samira."

"Yeah?"

"Thanks. For the text this morning."

"Always."

They stayed at the event for the rest of the program. Marcus sat with his mom and with Ms. Wright and with Sasha, who had pulled up a chair from somewhere. He watched the rest of the performers. He heard a thirteen-year-old girl sing a song in Farsi that made his chest hurt. He watched two brothers do a dance that looked like the kind of dance you do when you're really happy. He watched a poet who was twenty years old and had gone to the same middle school as him, and he thought, *that could be me. That could be me in seven years.*

When it was over, people came up to him. A lot of people. Strangers. They shook his hand. They said *beautiful.* They said *you made me think of my mother.* They said *do you know you have a gift.* He said *thank you, ma'am* and *thank you, sir* over and over until he felt like the word *thank you* had been burnished smooth.

His mom held his jacket for him. Ms. Wright walked out with them. Felix carried Marcus's backpack, for no reason, like a squire. Eden kept the sign folded under her coat. Jin-woo played his phone video back for them at the bus stop, and they all huddled around it, and Marcus saw himself, from a distance and at a weird angle, reading a poem into a microphone. He did not recognize himself.

"You look taller up there," Aliyah said.

"I'm the same height."

"No, I'm telling you. You look taller."

"That's the stage."

"It's not the stage. It's you."

He did not know what to do with that. He put it away. He would look at it later.

On the bus ride home, he sat next to his mother. The others got off at different stops. The bus got quieter and quieter. Eventually it was just the two of them and a sleepy man in the back and the bus driver whistling a song Marcus did not know.

Denise put her head on his shoulder. He did not think she had ever put her head on his shoulder before. It had always been the other way around. His shoulder was not quite big enough yet for a mother to put her head on. But she did, and he sat very still, because he did not want her to move.

"Baby."

"Yeah."

"Your grandma asked me this morning, before I left, what she was having for dinner."

"Yeah?"

"And I told her I'd make her soup. And she said, 'With crackers?' And I said yes, with crackers. And she smiled at me. She smiled like she was six years old. I thought you should know that. I thought that was a nice moment and you should know it happened."

"Yeah. That's a good one."

"I'm going to tell her, tonight, how beautifully you read. Even if she doesn't understand. I'm going to tell her."

"Okay, Mom."

"You'll read it to her too, won't you."

"Yeah."

"Good."

She took her head off his shoulder. She looked at him. Her eye makeup was mostly gone now. Her eyes were tired but they were also bright. He had not seen her eyes look bright in a long time.

"Marcus."

"Yeah."

"I am so tired."

"I know, Mom."

"I am so tired. And I am so proud of you. And tonight after I get your grandma settled, I am going to sit on the couch and eat ice cream out of the carton, and I am going to not feel guilty about it. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, Mom."

"Good."

She smiled. She leaned her head back on his shoulder. The bus rolled through Ridgewood in the slanting afternoon light. Marcus watched the familiar streets go by, but they did not feel familiar today. Today was a different day. Today the streets were the streets of a boy who had read a poem to hundreds of people. Today the streets were the streets of a boy who was going to a library on Saturday. Today the streets were the streets of a boy whose mother had her head on his shoulder, tired and bright, for the first time.

*"My mother put her head on my shoulder* *like I was the grown-up.* *I am not the grown-up.* *But I sat very still, so she could believe it for a while."*

---

The house was quiet when they got back.

The neighbor, Mrs. Patterson, was sitting in the kitchen with a book. She put a finger in her page and stood up when they came in.

"She's been fine. She had soup. She's in her chair. She asked about you a few times."

"Thank you, Eloise. Thank you so much."

"Oh, hush. How was it?"

Denise put her hand on Marcus's shoulder. "He was wonderful."

"Of course he was. I never doubted it. You tell your grandma hello for me, sweetie."

"I will. Thank you, Mrs. Patterson."

She left. The door clicked shut behind her. Denise hung up her coat. She looked exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with muscles. The way a person looks exhausted after a day they will never forget.

"I'm going to run to the drugstore, baby," she said. "I need to pick up her refill. You sit with her. Eat something. Don't wait on me for dinner."

"Okay, Mom."

She kissed the top of his head. "I am so proud of you."

"You said."

"I'm saying again."

"Okay, Mom."

She left.

The kitchen was quiet. The light over the stove was on. There was a plate covered in tinfoil on the counter, from Mrs. Patterson. Marcus peeked under it. Half a sandwich and a handful of grapes. He was not hungry yet.

He went into the living room.

Grandma was in her chair. The afghan was over her knees. The window was showing a gray, lowering afternoon light. She had her eyes half closed, but she was not asleep. She looked up when he came in.

"Hi, baby."

"Hi, Grandma."

"Where did you go all dressed up?"

"I read a poem."

"You read a poem?"

"I read the poem I wrote for you. Do you want to hear it?"

She tilted her head. Her face was open. Her eyes were somewhere between clear and fog, not all the way in either place.

"Yes, honey. I'd like that."

He sat on the ottoman next to her chair. He opened his notebook. He turned to page forty-seven.

This time he did not start immediately. He waited. He looked at her. She was watching him with her patient, half-smiling face. She was not rushing him. She never rushed him. Even in the thick of her forgetting, she was never in a hurry. Maybe the forgetting made her unhurried. Maybe when you cannot count on what the next minute will be, you stop being in a hurry for it.

He read.

He read it exactly the way he had read it on the stage. Slow. With breath. With pauses. He read about her hands. He read about the ring. He read about the soap in two pieces in the dish. He read about her holding his face and saying *look at me, Marcus.*

He read the last line.

He stopped.

Grandma reached out. She touched his face. Her fingers were cool. Her hand trembled a little. She cupped his cheek.

"My sweet boy," she said.

"Grandma."

"My sweet, sweet boy. Marcus."

She said it again. *Marcus.* She knew his name tonight. He did not know if she would know it tomorrow. He did not know how many more times she would. Nobody did. You could not know a thing like that. You just had to sit with it, the way she had told him in the hospital.

"Sit with me, baby."

"I'm sitting, Grandma."

"Good."

She closed her eyes.

He sat with her until she fell asleep. He sat with the ticking of the clock and the hum of the refrigerator and the small slow sound of her breathing. He sat with the gray light of the window going grayer, and then going dark, and then being replaced by the yellow of the lamp when he got up to turn it on.

He covered her better with the afghan. He kissed her forehead. It was cool and soft. She did not wake.

He went upstairs.

He sat at his small desk. The desk was really a TV tray with a cushion on the chair. The cushion had been made by Grandma, once, a long time ago, out of fabric with sunflowers on it. He remembered her making it. He remembered her with a needle in her hand and pins in her mouth, laughing at something his grandpa had said in the other room.

He opened his notebook to a clean page.

*"She forgot me on Monday.* *Remembered me on Thursday.* *Either way, she loved me."*

He looked at the three lines. He read them out loud to himself, very soft.

He thought they might be finished.

He thought they might not.

He left them.

He got up. He went and got his backpack from where Felix had left it by the door. He put his notebook inside. He zipped the backpack closed. He set it by the door for tomorrow.

He did not know what tomorrow would bring. He did not know what Monday would bring. He did not know if Grandma would know his name next Thursday, or the Thursday after that, or ever.

But he had the notebook.

And he had the poem.

And he had the friends who had walked him to the corner. And he had Ms. Wright, who would still be at the community center next week, with her crooked purple glasses and her honey tea. And he had Ms. Okoye, and a folded flyer in his pocket, and a library basement across the city where ten kids were going to sit in a circle in two weeks and read their angry bad poems to each other, and he was going to be one of them.

He had, it turned out, a great deal.

He went to bed.

He did not fall asleep right away. He lay there for a long time with his hands behind his head. He thought about Grandma. He thought about how, when he had been very small, she used to tell him that every night, when you went to bed, you were supposed to think of three things you were thankful for. That was an old rule in her house. Her mother had taught her. Now she had taught him. And so even on nights when he did not want to, even on nights when he was angry, or sad, or just too tired to think, he did it. It was a habit now. He did not always do it well. But he did it.

Three things.

He closed his eyes.

The first one was Grandma's face when she had said *my sweet boy.* Not just her face tonight. The face behind her face. The face he had known for thirteen years. The face that, for a second, had come all the way back through the fog and looked at him, and known him, and loved him. He was thankful for that face.

The second one was his mother, tired and bright, on the bus. He was thankful for her. He was thankful that she had not asked him to be less than scared today. He was thankful that she had not performed pride — she had just felt it, and let him feel it too. He was thankful for the weight of her head on his shoulder.

The third one was harder. He lay there with his eyes closed for a long time trying to pick it. There were so many things. The friends on the corner. The clementine. Felix's tie. Ms. Wright's nod from the third row. The folded flyer in his pocket. The silence after the last line. Eden's ridiculous sign. Sasha in row twelve. The boy with the violin. Mr. Patel and the mints. The sunflowers in the tires.

He picked the sunflowers.

He was thankful for the sunflowers. For whoever had planted them in the tires. For whoever had decided that a vacant lot was not too sad a place for a sunflower to try. He was thankful for things that tried. He was thankful that the world had things that tried in it.

He fell asleep with the sunflowers still in his head. He slept without dreaming. He slept the long, heavy sleep of a boy who has done, that day, the hardest thing he has done so far.

In the morning, he woke up before Denise. The house was quiet. He went downstairs in his socks. Grandma was already awake, in her chair, although he did not think she had slept in her bed. He thought she had probably slept in the chair. She did that sometimes now.

"Morning, Grandma."

"Morning, baby."

"Did you sleep?"

"I don't know. I was here. Is that sleeping?"

"I guess so."

He made her tea. He brought it to her in her favorite mug, the one with the little blue flowers. He sat on the ottoman. He watched her hold the mug with both hands. Her hands had not stopped being the hands from the poem. They would never stop being the hands from the poem. The knuckle that was bigger than the other one. The wedding ring, loose. The skin thin and brown and lined like a map of a river.

"Grandma. I read my poem yesterday. In front of a lot of people."

"You did?"

"Yes."

"A poem you wrote?"

"Yes."

"Did they like it?"

"Yes. They liked it a lot."

"Good, baby." She reached out. She patted his knee. "That's good. You always had music in you."

He smiled. He did not correct the small ways the sentence was not exactly right. *Music* instead of *poetry.* *Had* instead of *have.* It did not matter. She had said the thing. She had reached across the fog and said the thing she had always said, in her own old way, and that was the whole point.

He took her hand. He kissed the back of it. Her skin was cool and thin. He kissed it anyway.

"I love you, Grandma."

"I love you too, honey. Who are you?"

"I'm Marcus, Grandma."

"Oh. That's a good name."

"You picked it."

"Did I?"

"Yes."

"I have good taste, then."

"Yes, Grandma. You have very good taste."

She laughed. It was a small laugh, just a puff of breath. But it was a real laugh. Marcus sat with her until Denise came down the stairs.

---

The next weekend, the junior youth met up at Eden's abuela's panadería on the corner of Seventh and Ash.

Eden's abuela had a shop that was always warm. It smelled like butter and sugar and yeast. The windows were foggy from the oven. There were metal trays of conchas and empanadas and pan dulce lined up in the glass case, and a single small table in the front with four chairs, which was always too few chairs for the junior youth, but Eden's abuela did not care, she brought out extras from the back and set them up in a wobbly circle, and she never charged them for a single concha, no matter how much Denise and the other parents tried to press dollars into her hand.

"Pfft," Eden's abuela said, every time. "These children are feeding me. They come in here. They laugh. They are feeding me."

They sat around the wobbly circle of chairs. Pink boxes were in the middle. Eden was pulling a pink sugary concha apart piece by piece. Samira had coffee with too much milk. Felix had a chocolate something. Diya had ordered a cup of hot chocolate and a pan dulce and was eating them at the same time, alternating bites, which Jin-woo had declared was a monstrous crime against both foods. Aliyah was, as always, bringing one of the trays back to the counter to help Eden's abuela restock.

"Okay," Samira said. She had her serious voice on. "Before we get started, Marcus brought something. Marcus. You said you wanted to read something."

"Did I?"

"You texted me last night. You said bring a poem."

"Oh. Right."

"Don't be weird about it."

"I'm not being weird. I'm being — "

"Marcus. Read the poem."

He pulled out his notebook. He opened it. His hands did not shake anymore. They had stopped shaking on Wednesday, he thought. Maybe Thursday. Somewhere in there. He had kept waiting for the shake to come back. It had not come back.

He cleared his throat.

*"She forgot me on Monday.* *Remembered me on Thursday.* *Either way, she loved me."*

He stopped.

Everyone was quiet. Diya stopped chewing. Felix tilted his head. Samira nodded, slow, the way she nodded when she was thinking.

"That's short," Eden said.

"That's on purpose," Samira said.

"I know. I'm just saying. It's short. I like it."

"I like it, too," Felix said. "It's the kind of short that's long."

"What does that mean?" Eden said.

"I don't know," Felix said. "But it's true."

"It's true," Samira said.

Marcus smiled. He closed his notebook. He reached into the pink box. He took a concha. He broke it in half.

Eden's abuela came over with more napkins. She put them on the table. She looked at Marcus. She said, "I hear you read a poem. Denise told me."

"Yes, ma'am."

"At the big theater."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Was it a good poem?"

"It was okay."

"Pfft. Listen to this boy. 'It was okay.' Your mother said it was beautiful. She cried. She cried telling me about it. *That,* mijo — when your mother cries because you made something — *that* is a good poem. You remember that."

"Yes, ma'am. Thank you."

"You tell me if you write another one."

"I will."

"Good boy."

She went back to the counter.

They stayed at the panadería until the afternoon light got low and orange through the foggy windows. They talked about school, and about Jin-woo's music, and about Samira's cousin who was coming to visit, and about Diya's science fair project, which involved a lot of vinegar and might go wrong in interesting ways. Aaliyah came by for fifteen minutes to say hi, wearing paint on her jeans, smelling like turpentine. She ate a concha standing up and then went back to her studio.

Marcus did not read any more poems that afternoon. One was enough. He was learning, slowly, that one was sometimes enough.

He walked home with Samira. They did not say much. The evening was cool. The sunflowers in the tires were browning at the edges of their petals but still standing tall.

"Marcus."

"Yeah."

"How's your grandma?"

"She's okay. She had a good morning. She called me Marcus twice. She didn't know what day it was. But she called me Marcus."

"That's a good day."

"Yeah."

"You going to the library program on Saturday?"

"Yeah."

"Ms. Okoye's."

"Yeah."

"I'll walk you to the bus."

"Thanks, Samira."

"Always."

They walked without talking for a while. The streetlights were coming on one by one, the way they always did, a little behind schedule, as if each lamp were waking up on its own and not all at once. A man on a bicycle rode past them with a paper bag of groceries balanced on his handlebars. Somewhere down the block, a dog barked twice and then thought better of it. A radio played, softly, through an open window — an old song, a song Marcus's grandmother would have known.

"Samira."

"Yeah."

"Do you ever feel like — like the world is bigger than you thought it was. And it's scary, but also — it's, like, a good scary."

"Yeah. I feel that."

"That's what today feels like."

"Good," she said. "Hold on to that."

They kept walking. The year was not over. The year was a long way from over. There would be hard days in it. There would be days when Grandma did not know him. There would be days when Denise came home at eleven o'clock at night and sat on the couch and ate cold cereal without taking off her coat. There would be days when Marcus sat in his small room and looked at a blank page and could not think of a single word.

But there would also be the panadería on Seventh and Ash. And Ms. Wright and her honey tea. And the library basement on Saturdays. And the sunflowers, trying. And Grandma's hand on his face, sometimes, saying *my sweet boy.* And the notebook, always the notebook, red cover peeling at the corner, with a poem on page forty-seven and a three-line poem on another page and more poems coming, and coming, and coming.

He had, it turned out, a voice.

It was quieter than his writing. But it was there.

And it was going to keep being there.

THE END

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AUTHOR'S NOTE

Marcus's story is about finding a voice that is already yours, and learning, slowly, that it is worth giving to the world.

Many junior youth feel, as Marcus does, that the things they care about most — a grandmother, a quiet afternoon, a poem half-written in a red notebook — are not big enough to be taken seriously. But the heart of courage is not bigness. It is truthfulness. Marcus does not become a different boy on that stage. He becomes a little more of himself, out loud.

Caring for an elder whose mind is fading is one of the hardest gifts a family can be given. There is no trick for it. There is only love, done slowly, done honestly, done even when it is not remembered. Bahá'u'lláh teaches that honoring one's parents and elders is among the highest duties of the heart, and that acts of service are sacred witness to the dignity of every soul. In Marcus's small, steady presence at his grandmother's side, in his mother's exhausted returning-home after double shifts, in Ms. Wright's patient mentoring, we see that witnessing love is itself a form of prayer.

With love, Crimson Ark Publishing