I look myself up in all the textbooks. On the side they try to tell me what inarticulate means in a blue-black box. I sit on the outside and drool my finger against the gloss, the shine, trying to capture it against my thumb, a personal moon. I sit outside of everyone else until I stand by the setup, biting my lips and holding my face, afraid it will fall apart, feathers and ash colored like white wine in my hands.

She comes over and says, Oh, looks like you're last, haha, and I say Um, I've been reading about Downs syndrome, and she says That book is about anxiety?, and I almost tell her it isn't, snatch her tongue and rip it up like a glass casing of papers on the floor, size zero, stress balls and wet washcloths.

The kid in the corner giggles over restless leg syndrome and one boy—hair like a stunted waterfall, dripping down in the mornings, eyes like blue shanties and green shoes—reads off lists of phobias and pauses at the Latin words, fumbling over his tongue like a phalanx of spiders, falling down in linked chains with their spear-eyes like buckteeth, and finally he says, Forget this, it's fireaphobia, because I said so, and the boy with hair woven from strands of sun says That's pyro, you idiot, and he says, Oh, like those pyromaniacs?

So, she says, her eyes like squashed, eager ants, searching for winter in the grateful tides of spring, are you going to be walking?

I glance at the foursome who giggle and bite fingernails over OCD and the books all set up with covers of girls on their knees, their faces a mosaic meant for churches, the seven thousand books on self-mutilation and the two shivery books on getting better, their fronts like untaken slices and stepped-on moss.

I'm thinking about it, I respond, and she leaves, satisfied.

—

It's my turn, now.

I summoned up every last pound of gut I could've come up with. I agonized over every word, I debated putting in jokes or not, I fretted over getting his email address wrong, I blushed over smiley faces until my face was a motioning bruise; I turned the letter onto its underbelly, arms up and flailing for support, I let gravity take it and I washed it clean, I typed all in lowercase and I made purposeful grammar mistakes and I touched the lovely temples on Casual, avoiding the pointy pinnacle of Earnest; I wrote that goddamn letter with every fiber and nerve in my hands and he did not reply for a month.

It's my turn, now. You'll get your response in May.

—

So, I hesitate, afraid. How do you know when you've crossed a line?, I wonder. How do you know when it's off-limits?

She leans in, shaggy-dog eyes, her blond hair flaying around her, her stomach constricting. She looks at me, curiously, and I look at her over a bridge and river of my fingers, the silver-green of my nail-polish.

Um, I say, do you have, you know, hyperventilation syndrome? They say it's really common with—with—

She smiles and I could kiss the words that fly out of her mouth in interruption. Yes, she says. I hyperventilate in a heartbeat. Breathe shallowly and all.

I touch her eyes with my imaginary arms, lending themselves to the air and the earth, and I let myself gaze at the orange posters about teenage depression on the wall, and I wonder if it has to be romantic to have a soul mate, or if this is what it feels like to come out of your hole.

—

Have a good weekend, he says, softly, softer.

I pause. I want something meaningful. I want to carry weight in simple words, I want to hold the hands of philosophy and beauty, I want to make his lips turn up or his eyes shine with understanding. I want to involve the man next to him, sitting with his ankles crossed like awkward is attempting a rape; I want to stop shaking against the box, bands trickling down my wrist and enveloping my hands in color; I want the most full, bloomed and perfect thank you in the world, one to stop poets in their tracks with their mouths as open as unspun webs, one to keep old dead Greek men entertained and fascinated by the conception, I want angels to stop and smile, frank and just as soft as the way his words turn against my mouth.

I take a breath. Plunge, I think. Quickly, now.

So did you get an email from my parents?, I manage.

His words are shelved, built. Mine die a little on the way out of the tunnel. I hang my head wishfully on the way out.