hey sorry i didnt mean the stuff i said

Unknown number:

sorry for wht happnd to u

And then Nessa:

Hey. Sorry for not getting the mask thing. Or the Brody thing. We ok?

One night and so many sorrys.

Eve wished for snow. Snow would lighten the night sky. Snow would illuminate the concrete. She wanted something beautiful, right then and there.

Abe swerved up to the school a few minutes later.

“Hop in, Dickinson,” he said.

Eve readied herself for bed.

So who was she meant to be, a nobody or a somebody?

Were there only two choices?

Eve’s mother was surely down the hall praying for the sick. For her brother’s safety as he drove. For who knows what else. And then she’d whisper the Sh’ma. A poem itself. Like all prayers were.

The scenes of autumn replayed themselves in Eve’s head. And the words of poets who’d lived hundreds of years ago, with problems much bigger than her own, repeated themselves again and again in her mind like a soundtrack for her life.

How dreary to be somebody. How public, like a frog. To tell one’s name, the livelong June, to an admiring bog …

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

I am large, I contain multitudes …

She still didn’t know what she contained. She just knew the million things that other people assumed she was. Her parents. Brody. Sophie. Winston. Even Nessa. All she knew was that she wasn’t who any of them thought she should be. She was something else entirely. But what?

She contained multitudes. That was it. She contained a poet, the prettiest girl, a plain Jane, a girl who looked for the beauty in little things, who liked her quiet room, who could disappear within herself, maybe for too long sometimes, who wanted some attention, but not too much, a person who loved her one best friend but had started to like having more of them. She wasn’t one thing. None of them were.

They were more than numbers on a list, more than their cafeteria tables, or their hobbies, or their groups.

Within each of them were a million universes.

Multitudes.

And with that thought, Eve dropped her mask into the waste basket. She picked up her phone, ignoring the dozens of notifications from the Shieldmaidens group chat. She wrote, I’m okay. Busy. What an intense night. You were all amazing.

Eve wrote privately to Nessa: Of course we’re ok. There’s a lot I didn’t get, too.

She grabbed last year’s yearbook, sat at her desk, and opened a notebook. She went through every name, endowing each with a sliver of insight, painting a piece of every one with words, able only to merely graze over the tiniest star of the universes within each, but opening the door for more.

Then Eve typed it up, took a screenshot, posted it online, softly recited the Sh’ma, and went to sleep.