Once again: Just be careful.

Upstairs, I brave Decca’s chamber of horrors to make sure she’s okay. Her room is enormous, and covered with her clothes and books and all the strange things she collects—lizards and beetles and flowers and bottle caps and stacks and stacks of candy wrappers and American Girl dolls, left over from when she was six and went through a phase. All the dolls have stitches on their chins, like the ones Decca got at the hospital after a playground accident. Her artwork covers every inch of wall space, along with a single poster of Boy Parade.

I find her on her floor, cutting words out of books she’s collected from around the house, including some of Mom’s romance novels. I ask if she has another pair of scissors, and without looking up, she points at her desk. There are about eighteen pairs of scissors there, ones that have gone missing over the years from the drawer in the kitchen. I choose a pair with purple handles and sit down opposite her, our knees bumping.

“Tell me the rules.”

She hands me a book—His Dark, Forbidden Love—and says, “Take out the mean parts and the bad words.”

We do this for half an hour or so, not talking, just cutting, and then I start giving her a big-brother pep talk about how life will get better, and it isn’t only hard times and hard people, that there are bright spots too.

“Less talking,” she says.

We work away silently, until I ask, “What about things that aren’t categorically mean but just unpleasant?”

She stops cutting long enough to deliberate. She sucks in a stray chunk of hair and then blows it out. “Unpleasant works too.”

I focus on the words. Here’s one, and another. Here’s a sentence. Here’s a paragraph. Here’s an entire page. Soon I have a pile of mean words and unpleasantness beside my shoe. Dec grabs them and adds them to her own pile. When she’s finished with a book, she tosses it aside, and it’s then I get it: it’s the mean parts she wants. She is collecting all the unhappy, mad, bad, unpleasant words and keeping them for herself.

“Why are we doing this, Dec?”

“Because they shouldn’t be in there mixed with the good. They like to trick you.”

And somehow I know what she means. I think of the Bartlett Dirt and all its mean words, not just about me but about every student who’s strange or different. Better to keep the unhappy, mad, bad, unpleasant words separate, where you can watch them and make sure they don’t surprise you when you’re not expecting them.

When we’re done, and she goes off in search of other books, I pick up the discarded ones and hunt through the pages until I find the words I’m looking for. I leave them on her pillow: MAKE IT LOVELY. Then I take the unwanted, cut-up books with me down the hall.

Where something is different about my room.

I stand in the doorway trying to figure out exactly what it is. The red walls are there. The black bedspread, dresser, desk, and chair are in place. The bookshelf may be too full. I study the room from where I stand because I don’t want to go inside until I know what’s wrong. My guitars are where I left them. The windows are bare because I don’t like curtains.

The room looks like it did earlier today. But it feels different, as if someone has been in here and moved things around. I cross the floor slowly, as if that same someone might jump out, and open the door to my closet, half expecting it to lead into the real version of my room, the right one.

Everything is fine.

You are fine.

I walk into the bathroom and strip off my clothes and step under the hot-hot water, standing there until my skin turns red and the water heater gives out. I wrap myself in a towel and write Just be careful across the fogged-up mirror. I walk back into the room to give it another look from another angle. The room is just as I left it, and I think maybe it isn’t the room that’s different. Maybe it’s me.

In the bathroom again, I hang up my towel, throw on a T-shirt and boxers, and catch sight of myself in the mirror over the sink as the steam starts to clear and the writing fades away, leaving an oval just large enough for two blue eyes, wet black hair, white skin. I lean in and look at myself, and it’s not my face but someone else’s.

On my bed, I sit down and flip through the cut-up books one by one, reading all the cut-up passages. They are happy and sweet, funny and warm. I want to be surrounded by them, and so I clip out some of the best lines and the very best words—like “symphony,” “limitless,” “gold,” “morning”—and stick them on the wall, where they overlap with others, a combination of colors and shapes and moods.

I pull the comforter up around me, as tight as I can—so that I can’t even see the room anymore—and lie back on my bed like a mummy. It’s a way to keep in the warmth and the light so that it can’t get out again. I reach one hand through the opening and pick up another book and then another. What if life could be this way? Only the happy parts, none of the terrible, not even the mildly unpleasant. What if we could just cut out the bad and keep the good? This is what I want to do with Violet—give her only the good, keep away the bad, so that good is all we ever have around us.

VIOLET

138 days to go

Sunday night. My bedroom. I flip through our notebook, Finch’s and mine. I pick up the pen he gave me and find a blank page. Bookmarks and the Purina Tower aren’t official wanderings, but this doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be remembered too.

Stars in the sky, stars on the ground. It’s hard to tell where the sky ends and the earth begins. I feel the need to say something grand and poetic, but the only thing I come up with is “It’s lovely.”

He says, “ ‘Lovely’ is a lovely word that should be used more often.”

Then I get an idea. Over my desk, I’ve got this enormous bulletin board, and on it I’ve tacked black-and-white photographs of writers at work. I take these down and dig through my desk until I come up with a stack of brightly colored Post-its. On one of them, I write: lovely.

Half an hour later, I stand back and look at the board. It is covered in fragments—some are words or sentences that may or may not become story ideas. Others are lines I like from books. In the last column, I have a section for New Nameless Web Magazine. On three separate Post-its I’ve tacked beneath it: Lit. Love. Life. I’m not sure what these are supposed to be—categories or articles or just nice-sounding words.