Free Verse

by Sarah Dooley

  “Where did it come from?” he asks.

  There are so many complicated ways to answer that question. I think about how, for so long, I’ve tried to figure out a way to balance the inside of my head and the out. Inside my head, there is poetry, and there are memories of Michael and Ben and Judy all the time. There are plans for escape and fears of what will happen if I don’t, and a bigger fear that by the time I figure out how to escape, I won’t want to anymore.

  And outside my head, there are people trying to get to know me. Anthony writing in my notebook and never asking me to speak. Miss Jacks encouraging me to write. All the poetry club kids sharing their words. And at home, Hubert taking me into his family. Mikey doing things the way he thinks I would do them. Phyllis, always meeting me halfway.

  “I’m not sure,” I say, because there’s no way to explain all the thoughts in my head.

  29

  “I didn’t know you entered any contest,” Hubert says. A little more than a month has passed since I turned in my poem for the contest. It’s January, and we’re on the porch, putting down salt because they’re calling for snow. Phyllis and Phoebe are sitting on our steps, playing with Stella, who has followed them over.

  “I might not win,” I remind them. “I have to perform at the conference in February. Then they’ll announce the winners.”

  “You’ll win,” Phyllis says, with complete confidence. “You have earned this, sweet Sasha.”

  I kiss her cheek, then scoop Stella up and look her in the eye. “You’re not eating all Miss Phoebe’s food now, are you?”

  Phoebe giggles. “She begs for everything. She’s like a dog.”

  “More like one than Chip,” I agree. “He’s like a . . . like a bearskin rug. Unless you’ve got a stick.”

  “So where is this conference?” Hubert asks.

  “Charleston.”

  “And when do we go?”

  “It’s the second week in February.” I like how he used the word do, like we’re definitely going to do it.

  “And you get to read your poem to everybody?”

  I nod. Hubert nods, too, and tugs at his scrub-brush beard. “Well, little lady, I can’t wait to hear it,” he says.

  30

  We drive up the road, up the mountain, up the state. Trailers grow into houses and houses thicken into businesses and people grow into cleaner and gentler and more polite people.

  Being free of Caboose, watching places change outside the windows, makes me feel like I’ll put a foot wrong, put a word wrong, trip and fall in front of everybody, and I won’t even know how to land properly. I’ll skin my elbows when a normal girl would have skinned her knees.

  The weather is that perfect mix of sun and snow, with frost still sketched on the windshields of parked cars. We’re only going for a day, but I feel giddy with travel and achy with homesick, and there is a pain I can’t find the word for, which has something to do with how badly I want to win this contest, with its built-in gift of eventual escape, just the way Michael wanted. And, also, how badly I don’t want to win, because if I win a scholarship, I don’t have a good excuse for not leaving Caboose someday—and Caboose is where my people are.

  • • •

  I can barely remember the hustle and bustle of Beckley. I can barely remember wanting to be a part of it. Charleston is something else again. In Charleston there are tall buildings like you’d expect to find in a city, but the mountains are taller, too. The whole place is tucked into the crook of the mountains. I think of how every state in the nation has a nickname. How ours is the “Mountain State.” I’ve always hated that name. Our mountains, down Caboose way, make me carsick. They’re not majestic with their strip-mining bald spots. They look injured.

  These mountains are different. They complete the city. They’re something special.

  The buildings, too. There is nothing like them down our way. Some are golden. Some shine like mirrors.

  This day is something special. Maybe I’ll shine, too.

  • • •

  I almost chicken out, but then Hubert finds me backstage. The director of the poetry conference looks so relieved to see Hubert that I almost laugh.

  “What’s going on, little lady?” he asks.

  “What if I don’t win?”

  He shakes his head. “Who says you got to win? You won already. You, standing up in front of people, talking.” He rests a heavy hand on my shoulder. “I am so happy I get to hear your voice every day. Including today, reading this poem.”

  “But what—but, Hubert, what if I win?”

  He laughs. “Well, that’s a good thing, right?”

  “I get a scholarship and in a few years I have to go to college and . . . and Mikey will still be a kid. And there’s Phyllis . . . and you . . .”

  “Sasha. Who says you have to go away?”

  I swallow hard on the name, tears welling up. “Michael.”

  Hubert nods slowly. “Your brother wanted what was best for you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, your brother didn’t know you was gonna meet all us family, did he? So what’s best for you maybe changed since you saw him.”

  “But I don’t want to have to decide without him!” Now the tears spill, but Hubert laughs.

  “I get it,” he says. “I do. Michael had a plan for you, and it took away the pressure of deciding. But in the end, kid, we all got to make the call by ourselves. You have to do what’s right for you.”

  I remember writing that same thing to Mikey in my poetry notebook, back when he was missing. But it’s harder when we’re talking about me. “I don’t know what’s right for me!”

  “Which is lucky,” Hubert says, “because you’re fourteen years old. You’ve got time, Sasha.”

  “Not much time,” the conference director interjects, catching the end of our conversation. “I need you on the stage in five minutes, Miss Harless.”

  Hubert straightens his button-up. He looks as uncomfortable as Mikey, but Phyllis made them both dress up a bit. He hooks a finger under my chin and lifts it so we’re looking at each other.

  “You look pretty as a very pretty picture,” he says. “And I can’t wait to hear what you’ve written.” He kisses me on the forehead and makes his way back down the stage stairs and out of sight. But I don’t feel alone. I feel like he’s still standing there next to me.

  • • •

  I take my seat in the white plastic chair and study the shiny wooden stage floor under my feat. I shift and then shift again to make sure my dress is covering all the right parts of me. I try to hold my paper still, but it shakes in my nervous hands, too flimsy for the weight of all the words.

  The kids on the stage with me are clutching flimsy sheets of printer paper, too. All around me, 8½˝ x 11˝ rectangles of white, nervous words tremble under the stage lights. There are so many kids about to step up and read their innermost thoughts. At least one other rectangle of truth must be something like mine.

  Until now, I’ve been focused on my own flimsy white paper. On my own shaky words. Now I realize that I’m glad I came. I can’t wait to hear what is in these other heads.

  • • •

  We sit behind the guest speaker, who is not really speaking to us. Down in the crowd, out of sight in the dark, our parents and guardians murmur and rustle. I can’t see Hubert in the crowd. I can’t see Phyllis or Phoebe. I can’t see Mikey, but I know he’s next to Phoebe and I know he’s giggling with excitement from the road trip. I can’t see Anthony.

  I hope there’s an empty chair somewhere in the crowd, holding a spot for my big brother, Michael, or my father, Ben. If there had been no fire at the Cupcake Emporium, maybe that chair would be filled. If the Hardwater mine had never fallen in, maybe that chair would be filled. But too many things have happened for maybe.

  • • •

&n
bsp; The speaker talks about how we have our futures in front of us, and our stories are only beginning. We can write them any way we want. We can develop a solid plot. We can choose our supporting characters with care. We can every one of us arrive at the final chapter with a happy ending.

  But this contest was for poetry, not prose. I think his metaphor isn’t quite right.

  The dean of the college steps up and clears her throat. She explains about the prize money and the scholarships. I think about college. I think about how, if I win, or even if I don’t, maybe I will choose this college. I look at my blurred reflection, a haze of color on the freshly waxed floor. I look different. Older. For the first time in a long time, I don’t feel like I’m from someplace bad. If I can write poetry back home that gets me the chance to step under these stage lights, then maybe I’ll be okay. Maybe I can hang on long enough to grow into the girl Michael wanted me to be. Or even the girl I want to be.

  • • •

  There are so many people on the stage and in the audience. They expect me to stand at the microphone. They expect me to open my mouth, which has been quiet too often in the year since Michael died, and let a poem come out.

  “My name is Sasha Harless.” I can barely pronounce it. I’m nervous. My voice is shaky like moth wings. “I’m in the eighth grade. I’m fourteen.” This is the information everyone volunteered. Their name. Their age. Now is where it gets different. I’ve heard so many beautiful poems tonight, all about kids doing things they want to do. So many of the poetry forms Anthony and the club taught me have been read tonight. I’ve heard haiku, short and sweet. I’ve heard epistles pleading with family members. I’ve heard tanka all about the beauty of snow.

  I try three times to say the word we.

  The first time, I’m too close to the microphone. I startle back, and there’s a low rumble of laughter down in the invisible audience.

  The second time, my voice just plain doesn’t work. I open my mouth and nothing comes out, and the sensation is so familiar it’s almost comforting. Then I think of Mikey’s mother by the road, green smudge at her throat, talking and talking but not saying anything. I close my mouth, get one more run at it. Open it. Begin.

  We—

  all of us folks from there—

  will meet again someday,

  driving down and down

  on winding roads

  we aren’t used to anymore,

  when we’re grown.

  Our wives, husbands, children

  will gasp with fear.

  They have never seen roads like this.

  They will stare

  at the crumbles of buildings,

  at the crumbles of roads,

  at the crumbles of generations

  gone before,

  and they will be amazed

  that we ever made it out

  with our sanity and our humor

  and our lives and our words.

  But I have a confession.

  When I think of leaving

  the place where I was born,

  the place where I have passed

  each miserable, no-good day—

  each hopeful, got-to-get-better day—

  each rare, peaceful, lying-in-the-sunshine day—

  I lose all my words,

  just for a minute,

  and pictures fill me and fill me up.

  Me and my cousin

  on the front porch on our backs

  with the sun pouring down in buckets.

  And

  a kind neighbor in a kitchen

  teaching us to preheat, to grease the pan,

  to step lightly so the cake won’t fall.

  Common sense, she says.

  She doesn’t know how

  uncommon she is.

  And fog

  heavy on

  morning mountains

  that don’t know any better

  than to be beautiful

  even above the coal slurry

  and the fast cars crashing

  and the coal mines caving

  and the bedsheets waving,

  God bless these lost miners,

  God keep these lost miners,

  in bloodred, hopeless spray paint

  from a now-empty can.

  I am shocked to realize that

  today I am homesick

  for a place I never even knew I loved.

  The paper stops trembling halfway through, and when I finish, there is silence—half a second of quiet so deep it might as well be written in my poetry notebook. Then there is clapping and, under the clapping, murmuring, and I hear one lady—it might be Phyllis—say, “Oh!”

  Then the stage lights dim in between readers, and my eyes single out a familiar, coal-miner-shaped shadow in the crowd, and love pours into me like water into a glass, and my tears spill over, and I know, without being able to see, that Hubert has tears on his cheeks, too, because we’re family, and family knows.

  31

  Hours later, while Hubert shakes off the cold and walks toward his daughters’ bedroom out of habit, then steers toward his own instead, Mikey and me sit on the couch, which has not yet warmed. Even the crocheted blanket off the back of the couch is cold. The baseboard heaters tick and stutter and push out a skinny beam of lukewarm air. Mikey drapes sideways so he can press his bare feet against the heater. There is a messy pile of shoes by the door: dirty gray sneakers and one yellow sandal, left-behind high heels and coal-black work boots. I haven’t yet kicked off the simple gray dress and shoes Phyllis picked out for me at the pawnshop. Once I take them off, the trip is over. I reach into my pocket to touch the check, my prize money for second place. It will be enough to replace a GUI-tar so Phyllis can sing to Phoebe. It will be enough to make one thing right.

  “Sasha?” Mikey asks, his voice heavy with sleep, although he insisted all the way home that he would rather be on a road trip than in bed any day. Today he wants to be a truck driver. He wants to haul something fun, like chickens or carnival rides, but if he drives a truck around here, I know what he’ll haul. The roads and our families have chipped away under the weight of it. I’ve told him he won’t be choosing that career. That he’ll go to college and learn to do something safe. He laughed me off. I’m his cousin. I’m not a parent, not a guardian. I cannot tell him what to do.

  I look at him slowly because I feel like something is different in his voice, and I’m tired, too, and I’m sunk in a fog of half happy from the travel and the winning, and half ready to cry, with relief and dismay, that we’ve come home.

  “Where you think you’ll go with that scholarship?” he asks. There is a hitch of sad. But college is a hundred years in the future. He knows I won’t be leaving yet.

  I look around the living room. Even in the dark I can see the red of the kitchen. There aren’t so many apples now. As I clean, I put more and more of them away. The house is hunkered down for sleep, a different place entirely at night than during the day. Something is missing to make it completely home. I think of how something was missing up Charleston way, too, something I looked for as we walked around town celebrating my victory. Something familiar and comfortable. Something I didn’t find. I think of how maybe every place has something missing. Maybe what fills it up and makes it whole is the people there.

  I listen to the ticking of the baseboard heater and the groan of frost seizing the window glass and the settling sounds of the house.

  “Somewhere,” I tell Mikey before I shove him off the couch and aim him toward his bedroom. He’s asleep on his feet. He’s dreaming of the open road. He doesn’t hear the rest of my answer. “I’m going somewhere. You and me both.” The darkness swallows up my words, but that’s all right. I’ve got more.

  Acknowledgments

  I’m grateful to so many
people who have helped Free Verse become a reality!

  Without my agent, Laura Langlie, I would be lost in the tall grass most of the time.

  If I told you how patient Stacey Barney and Kate Meltzer at Putnam have been with me, you wouldn’t even believe it. It sounds made up, and, after all, I do write fiction. But this time I’m telling the truth.

  I’m extraordinarily grateful to Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, Daniel Handler, Lyn Miller-Lachmann, Neal Shusterman, Susanna Reich, and the PEN American Center for their faith in me and in Free Verse in awarding me the PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship in 2012. With their help, I was able to devote the time and energy to the novel to bring it into the light.

  While I was working on this novel, I was also leading a weekly youth writing group at Cabell County Public Library. My library writers—talented, devoted kids who showed up faithfully to the library each week to dazzle me with their characters, stories, and energy—gave Sasha her poetry club and gave me the inspiration to complete Free Verse. I am grateful to, and remain in awe of, Beth Anne, Elaine, Matthew, Abby, Darius, Chloe, Lauren, Jasmine, Alice, Aaron, and so many other writers who shared their work with us over the years. I can’t wait to hold your books in my hands.

  I’m so grateful to early readers Sheila and Cassie for taking time away from their own full plates to offer advice on early drafts. I must also thank Janell Reynolds and her son Jamie for the time they spent squinting into the sun to capture an author photo. And I’m forever indebted to Curtis and his momma, Melissa, for making me put down the book and get some fresh air once in a while!

  I don’t know where I would be without the support and encouragement of my Bright Futures work family. When I traveled to NYC to accept the award from PEN, I was wearing an outfit from Jill’s own closet, which Teri helped me choose. Bev, who can materialize anything from nothing, supplied matching handbags. Alexis created an amazing city skyline banner, which hangs in my writing space to this day, and the lot of them saw me off with a reminder not to be so nervous, that it was enough to be myself—something I do better in their company than almost any other time.