Chapter 14: The Forty Percent

I stood in the doorway of my own room and did not go in.

Zara sat on my bed holding the cream paper carefully with both hands.

"Junie," she said again. "Where did these words come from?"

My pulse was loud in my ears.

I had left Quincy's apartment forty minutes ago, with his shirt folded on his couch and my chest still hurting from five flights of stairs.

I had not slept.

I had not expected a second fight before breakfast.

"Read me the first line," I said.

She blinked. It was not what she had planned for me to say.

"You know what it says."

"Humor me."

She looked down.

"'You make the quiet feel like company,'" she read. "'I never knew a room could do that until you were in it.'"

The floor seemed to tilt a little.

I had typed that on a bus in January, with my forehead against the cold window, to a boy who answered four minutes later with a heart.

I could have recited the next three paragraphs with my eyes shut.

"He gave it to you," I said.

"Friday night. He said he wrote it all week and tore up six drafts."

"Did he say where?"

"At the fraternity house. In the chair by the window." Her voice was careful. "He cried a little when he handed it over."

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