“Yes.” I wanted to say more. But to explain Reforging would require revealing too much. At least, that was my instinct. It’s always my instinct to default to secrets and handle everything on my own. Yet with her on the phone, gushing about grandmother’s cooking, asking about a pencil, about grandmother, I was overcome by a thought, that if I could not share with her, who could I share with? Only this journal, and that’s starting to not feel like enough.

“I have something to tell you,” I blurted out before I could change my mind. “Do you have time now?”

“Of course! Is everything alright?”

“It’s about the pencils that grandmother and Meng used to make.”

“What about them?”

Now that I reflect on our conversation, I am struck by the careful evenness of her tone right then. That despite her openness, she was a master of giving little away when it counted.

“This is going to sound off-the-wall, but don’t hang up on me, okay?” I said.

“I would never.” The assured validations.

I closed my bedroom door, the downstairs television fading.

Then I told her about Reforging. How grandmother stabbed a pencil into her wrist, how the lead melted into her skin. Louise kept trying to interrupt me. But I kept going. I needed to finish, no matter how unlikely the story. Needed to tell her how the ink filled grandmother’s scars, to describe how grandmother cut her wrist and then—

“And then the words the pencil once wrote came out with her blood,” Louise finished.

I sank to the ground, the room blurring around me. I calculated and recalculated, nothing was adding up. It did not make sense that she would know this. Or rather, that she would know this and not tell me. Like I should have gotten an alert that we both knew this strange secret. It should not have been possible for us to talk every day and miss this commonality.

“How did you know that?” I asked weakly.

I could hear her moving past a crowd.

“Meng told me. I didn’t—I didn’t really believe her though.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I never saw her do it. It’s hard to believe, you said so yourself. I didn’t fully believe her, and when I gave you Meng’s pencil, you seemed so disappointed, even asked if there wasn’t a note that came with it. So yes, I knew, but I didn’t believe, and I wasn’t going to ask and make you doubt your grandmother.”

I bit my lip. It made too much sense, like it was well practiced.

“Do you believe me?” I asked.

“Of course I believe you. Even if Meng hadn’t told me the same thing, I’d still believe you. There’s something about you.”

“What about me?”

She gave a light laugh.

“Like you can’t lie.”

“I can lie!”