I am the daughter of Earth and Water, And the nursling of the Sky …

I am the daughter of…, she wrote. And all she could think of was her mother’s name. Deb. I am the daughter of Deb. Deb and Joe. What could be less poetic?

So she started two words back. I am … I am … Usually her mind came up with something, even if she later recognized it wasn’t very good. But now … it was like her mind had gone as blank as a snowy field.

All weekend, since the Halloween dance, even with her notebooks and Emily Dickinson surrounding her, she’d had no words.

All she could hear were the voices of what other people said she was. A chorus behind her singing “liar, fake, phony, yuck.”

Even though Eve liked to imagine Emily Dickinson’s life, and how tranquil and full of beauty it must have been in her room of words and solitude, Eve had to admit that sometimes she mentally glossed over a pretty big part of what she’d read in All About Emily Dickinson. Before Emily Dickinson had disappeared into her room forever to write, she’d lived a life out in the world, just like everybody else. A normal life. But then one day, she’d written in a letter to a friend, “I had a terror since September, I could tell to none…” And around that time, Emily stopped going outside.

It wasn’t some magical devotion to poetry that kept her indoors. It was a “terror.” What had that terror been?

As Eve lay in the nurse’s office, she wondered if this list had been the start of her terror. And for her, the terror took her words away instead of allowing her to write them down.

But she had words for Brody. She dreamed of going back in time, saying to Brody, “Sophie isn’t ‘crazy.’ She never was. She is the sanest person I ever know to have turned you down.” And she wanted to say to him, “Nessa has more talent in her finger than you could ever dream of!”

But those moments had passed her by.

Eve got back up and returned to the gym. She didn’t have Emily Dickinson’s life. There was no safe room to hide in.

On her way out of school that day, she spotted Principal Yu coming toward her in the hall. She pretended not to see her and left the building as fast as she could.

On Friday, Eve arrived at her locker to find LIAR scrawled across it in bright orange spray paint. Briefly, Eve rested her forehead against the locker next to hers and took a breath. She could take this. She could. She straightened herself back up and opened the lock.

“This is vandalism!” Sophie pronounced as she appeared by Eve’s side. “I’m getting Principal Yu.”

“Don’t get involved,” Eve said as quietly as possible. “They’ll hate you, too.”

Eve ignored the spray paint and shoved her coat and backpack into her locker. She heard someone say from behind her, “Look, I’ve been telling you, it’s all tissue in there.”