Chapter 209

The art teacher is saying something about emotional truth and I have been staring at the monitor for forty minutes and I could not tell you a single thing he has said in the last twenty of them.

This is my final term of high school. My final term, which I was supposed to spend doing the things final terms are for, the mild senioritis, the lunch table politics, the general coasting on the knowledge that the end is close and the beginning of something else is closer. Instead I am sitting in my childhood bedroom in front of a laptop while a man I have never met in person tells me that art is about pouring your feelings into the work, which is rich, because my feelings right now would produce something nobody wants to look at.

I turn to Zeke, who is sitting in the chair by the window doing the thing where he appears to be engaged with whatever is on the screen while actually just existing very professionally in the room.

“You’re not listening,” I tell him.

He