All the Bright Places

Protect the penis
.
Insanity please
.
Fuck all you who may see this
.
This does not feel like a healing place. Back outside, I tramp through leaves
and dirt and snow to find the springs. I’m not sure exactly where they are, and
it takes standing still and listening before I go in the right direction.
I prepare to be disappointed. Instead, I break through the trees to find
myself on the banks of a rushing stream. The water is alive and not frozen
over, the trees here fuller than the others, as if the water is feeding them. I
follow the creek bed until the embankment grows into rock walls, and then I
wade right into the middle, feeling the water push past my ankles. I crouch
down and form a cup with my palms. I drink. It’s cold and fresh and tastes
faintly of mud. When it doesn’t kill me, I drink again. I fill the water bottle I
brought with me and then wedge it into the muddy bottom so it doesn’t float
away. I lie down flat on my back in the middle of the stream and let the water
cover me.
As I walk into the house, Kate is on her way out, already lighting a cigarette.
As direct as Kate is, she doesn’t want either of my parents to know she
smokes. Usually she waits till she’s safely in her car and down the street.
She says, “Were you with that girl of yours?”
“How do you know there’s a girl?”
“I can read the signs. Name?”
“Violet Markey.”
“The sister.”
“Yeah.”
“Do we get to meet her?”
“Probably not.”
“Smart.” She takes a long drag on the cigarette. “Decca’s upset. Sometimes
I think this Josh Raymond situation is hardest on her since they’re practically
the same age.” She blows three perfect smoke rings. “Do you ever wonder?”
“Wonder what?”
“If he’s Dad’s?”
“Yeah, except he’s so small.”
“You were small till ninth grade and look at you now, beanstalk.”
Kate heads down the walk and I head in, and as I’m shutting the door, she
calls, “Hey, Theo?” I turn and she’s standing beside her car, nothing but an
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outline against the night. “Just be careful with that heart of yours.”
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
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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