Every Last Word by Tamara Ireland Stone Read Free Book Online Page B

the silence.
    I kick hard underwater and try to lock in my song, but nothing comes. As I pop up and start the fly, my strokes feel sloppy, uneven, and by the time I turn and kick off the wall, I’m at
least four strokes behind everyone else. I climb out of the pool and get in the back of the line.
    Jackson Roth looks over his shoulder at me. “Coach is in a mood today, isn’t he?”
    “I guess.”
    We’re down to a small group of swimmers now that school’s started. The numbers will keep dwindling as fall’s extracurricular activities begin, homework picks up, and it becomes
harder to squeeze in team workouts at the club. I’m looking forward to that. I prefer to come here at night, swimming under the stars with the adults. They keep to themselves.
    I press my fingertips hard into my temples, ignoring everyone around me, while I breathe and try to focus my energy. When it’s my turn, I step onto the blocks again, slide my thumb along
the surface three times, and dive in, waiting for a song—any song—to come.
    And one finally does, but it’s not one I expect. Those notes AJ played the other day start running through my head, and as soon as I surface, I know what song will be taking me back and
forth across the pool. I speed up the tempo, and my body follows suit until I’m flying through the lane, pushing hard off the wall, throwing my arms over my head, feeling that adrenaline
surge every time I lift my chest out of the water.
    The tune is clear in my head, but now I want to remember the lyrics and I can’t.
Lazy ray
…I think he was singing about the sun going down. There was a line about sunlight
dancing on your skin and another about a crack in a fence or something.
    What was that line?
    I’m still trying to piece it together as I step into the shower to rinse off the chlorine. I’m alone in the locker room, so I start humming as I pull on my sweats and pile my hair
into a messy bun. On the drive home, I leave the stereo off because I prefer his song over anything I have on a playlist. And I have to remember all the lyrics. It’s driving me nuts.
    It’s easy to stay lost in my thoughts during dinner. Paige got sent to the principal’s office today for talking back to a teacher, so she has my parents’ undivided attention.
My family is arguing over the distinction between “clarifying questions” and “back talk,” while I drift off to a better place.
    I’m picturing that room and its walls, covered in torn notebook pages and ripped-up napkins, pieces of brown paper lunch sacks and fast-food wrappers, and how all that chaos and disorder
gave me such a strange sort of peace. I can visualize the exact spot AJ slapped up those words. But that’s all I have. I can’t download the song and listen to it on repeat, looking up
the lyrics online and deciphering them like I typically would.
    I have to get back down to that room.
    I’m starting to recognize this for the obsession that it is, but it doesn’t bother me. It’s innocent, like solving a puzzle. My mind has certainly come up with more dangerous
fixations.
    “Are you okay, Sam?” Mom asks.
    Her voice snaps me back to reality, and when I look up from my plate, Mom, Dad, and Paige are all staring at me. Dad has a huge grin on his face.
    “What?”
    “You were singing,” he says.
    “And humming,” Mom adds.
    I was?
    “Earworm,” I say. “This song has been stuck in my head all day.”
    “It was really pretty,” Paige says.
    Under the table where no one can see me, I scratch my jeans three times. “Yes, it was.”
    I’m about to pop a sleeping pill when completely different words start forming in my mind. I feel an overwhelming urge to write them down.
    I haven’t thought about the notebooks in years, but they’re still on the top shelf of my bookcase, and I remember exactly what Shrink-Sue said when she gave them to me. I was to
write every day, in the notebook that best matched how I was feeling: the yellow notebook