Free Places No One Knows by Brenna Yovanoff Page A

Five
sign, write myself a hall pass, and go for a walk.
    I want to talk to someone and really mean what I’m saying. I want to put into words any of the frantic, tumbling things in my head and know that someone else in the world understands.
    Instead, I wander in ever-shrinking circles until I wind up in the west hall bathroom, standing in front of the spill wall, looking at the secrets. There are so many of them—so much realer than any of the things people say to each other’s faces. A thousand truths about drugs and sex and friendship. Beauty, envy, bodies. Love. Even if I managed to read every single one, in an hour, they’ll have already proliferated.

    Down in the corner, next to the heating register, someone has written:

    I study the handwriting, trying to figure out if it’s someone I know—someone from cross-country, maybe?
    But maybe it doesn’t matter.
    Maybe all that matters is that it’s something true.
    With a tight feeling in my chest, I unzip my bag. This is so stupid. It’s absolutely not my business. My pencil case is stocked, though, filled with weapons of frank communication.
    I take out a green felt pen I never use and uncap it like I’m watching from outside myself. Underneath the secret, I write, in neat block letters:

    I leave the bathroom wondering if giving unqualified medical advice constitutes some kind of malpractice.
    But the sentiment is right.
    I decide that at most, it must amount to practicing common decency without a license.

.
    Home—where the spring that’s coiled inside me unwinds a little, where the gears stop grinding. Where no one is waiting or watching, or expecting me to be anything but bright and sharp and self-contained.
    In the kitchen, there’s a stack of takeout menus on the counter and everything smells warm, like ginger and lemongrass. My parents are standing in perfect symmetry with the island between them. They’re eating Thai food out of paper containers and talking about determinist psychology.
    No one else’s parents like each other as much as mine do. They are charged like nucleons, paired like magnets. They communicate using a cool, coded language of theories and statistics, but their eyes are always locked in flirtatious combat.
    “So tell me,” she says, “about that Cambridge study on automatic eating.” Her hair is shot with gray, and under the kitchen light, it looks silver. “I can’t remember if it suggested industry-manufactured addiction, or just offered conclusive proof that people can be manipulated into consuming whatever you tell them to.”
    He smiles, gesturing with his chopsticks. “Does this mean you’re going to try and convince me that volition is a flawed concept because of
peer
pressure?”
    She takes another bite of pad see ew before launching into a mini seminar on social conditioning.
    I climb onto one of the tall stools at the counter, watching as my parents conduct their courtship rituals. I eat green curry out of the plastic tub, thinking that I have never seen two people so in love, and so completely untouchable.
    It’s not that they fake the fake parts better than I do, because they don’t. My mother is easily the strangest person I know. It’s more like they know a language I’ve never encountered. A dialect you can only speak with someone who actually understands you.
    Suddenly, I want to know what they’d think about the spill wall. Maybe one of them would understand the psychosocial appeal of confession. Maybe they could make the wall make sense. As soon as I imagine the conversation, though, it’s an unmitigated disaster. Me, trying to explain that I wrote something there today—their hyper-rational, law-abiding daughter has defaced school property. Them, just as baffled by the entire concept as Maribeth is.
    Answering someone’s cry for attention is not in my character. I’ve never been one to involve myself in someone else’s problems. But what I wrote today seems more like fulfilling a moral