Free Every You, Every Me by David Levithan

taking a look, Jack. I guess I’ll be going. I mean, I was already going, so it’s not you that’s making me go, Miranda. I don’t want you to think that.”
    “Oh, good,” Miranda said. She didn’t sound sarcastic. If I’d said something like that to you, you would have been merciless. You had no use for sputtering.
    I spent the next fifteen minutes before school walking the halls, looking for the photographer. I saw girls with similar hair or similar clothes or similar features, but never at the same time. Either she wasn’t here, or she was hiding, or I wasn’t looking right.
    I had no way to know.

12A
    When I walked through the halls, I thought of you. I wondered what you thought of this school now. This building. Was it a shelter against everything else? Could you be happy here? Or was it just another form of prison, just another place where you felt the weight of all the stones, all the people, all the thoughts?
    I wish I’d known what was wrong with you.
    I still wish I knew what was wrong with you.

12B
    I felt weird asking my friends at lunch about another photo, when I’d just cross-examined them about Sparrow the day before. So I decided to wait.
    Fiona, though, brought the whole thing up.
    “Did you find Mr. Mohawk?” she asked.
    “I think he’s in California,” I mumbled.
    “You sent the detectives all the way to California?” Charlie joked.
    “No, I found him online.”
    That should have been the end of the conversation. And it was—for everyone except Fiona.
    “Who is he?” she asked.
    “It doesn’t matter,” I said. Then I stood up from the table. “I have to run to the library. I almost forgot.”
    Fiona looked at my tray. “You haven’t eaten anything.”
    I shrugged. “I’m not really hungry.”

12C
    Really: I was hungry. And I was remembering one of the things you had said. Not the last day in the woods, but maybe three days before. Everyone was supposed to hang out together, but you didn’t want to go.
    “Why?” I’d asked.
    “I don’t trust any of them,” you’d said. “I don’t trust Fiona. I don’t want to see them. They think they know the truth, but they don’t. I know the truth. They don’t.”
    The truth. Really the Truth.
    I should have been concerned. But then you’d said, “You’re the one I trust. You.” And that’s what I felt. That’s what I remembered.

12D
    The day it happened, the week after it happened—those were not times I wanted to go back to. How I felt like I was trapped in a chamber of my own noise. Sitting in class and not being there at all. Sitting in a chair and fragmenting at the same time. Clutching to the random facts. Thinking the concept of a fact was itself a fiction. Because we live in a blur. All of us live in a blur.
    I was starting to feel it again. Only this time no one was really watching.

12E
    “What is the answer, Evan?” Ms. Granger asked.
    Giraffe, I wanted to answer. It was on the tip of my tongue. Giraffe.
    This was in math class.

12F
    “Where is your homework?” Mr. McNulty asked.
    It’s with Ariel.
    “There is no such thing as homework,” I said.
    “What?”
    “I mean, I left it at home.”

12G
    If the photographer existed, I had to be able to find her.
    But I couldn’t find you, could I?

12H
    You existed. You existed now as a fractal.
    Definition:
    A fractal is generally a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be broken into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole.
    Maybe I was a fractal. Maybe the photographer was a fractal.
    Maybe we were all fractals.

12I
    Matt was talking to me. For a moment I didn’t recognize him.
    “Are you okay?” he asked.
    “I don’t know what okay is,” I said.
    “What?”
    “I mean … I don’t know what okay means. No, not what it means. Where it comes from. Where does okay come from?”
    We looked it up.
    The answer: Nobody knows. They think it is a misspelled variation of all correct —either oll