This Is What I Want to Tell You Read Online Free Page A

for Model U.N. Do you wanna come?
    Okay. Keeley finally looked at me. She smiled. God, she was beautiful. How had I never noticed that? Everything about her looked like she just shot out this glow, like without even trying she lit up.
    I saw a flash of Keeley, years of Keeley, little kid Keeley. Taking off on her bike, leaning into my sister’s ear whispering, leaning over a pile of construction paper, scissors, torn magazine pages—she was always making something. A collage, a poster; on her knees over a pile of paper and glue in our kitchen and then her eyes welling up when her parents would come to get her. I don’t wanna go, she never wanted to go. And then she’d gone with them this summer. I hadn’t thought about it. She’d gone this time. And now she was here, glowing.
    The library was packed with tables hawking crap—school T-shirts and pens and last year’s newspapers and promises of popularity if you signed up. Matthew Levitt was manning the M.U.N. table as usual. Damn poor Matthew Levitt. Matthew Levitt was a senior who had a ponytail and drove a vintage Chevy Nova and knew the guidance counselors by their first names and spoke quiet and fierce. I couldn’t help but think that there was a place and time where the intensity and intellect of Matthew Levitt would be really exciting. But it wasn’t here. And sometimes I couldn’t help but be afraid that my slipping under the social radar actually put me closer to Matthew Levitt than I wanted to admit.
    What’s M.U.N.? Keeley whispered. She was right next to me, whispering against my neck. You’re always going to M.U.N. meetings but I have no idea what that means.
    It’s, you know, like the United Nations but it’s—like we all get assigned a country and debate the issues and …
    I couldn’t believe what an asshole I sounded like. It’s lame, I said. Hey, I said to Matthew.
    Hey man, said Matthew, looking at Keeley.
    It’s not lame. Keeley watched me sign my name. Matthew watched Keeley standing next to me. When I put the pen down Keeley picked it up.
    I wanna try it, it sounds cool.
    Matthew Levitt and I both stared at Keeley bent over signing her name, her blonde hair falling on the table.

    Keeley left for Oxford on the first day of summer vacation. The last night of school, we stayed up all night packing her suitcase. Her bedroom is round; it’s in the turret of the house and has windows all the way around. It feels like you’re sitting in the sky. She has long silver curtains that blow out from the window like clouds and brush along the floor, which is carpeted in Turkish rugs, one piled on top of the other. Her parents used to live in Turkey and the whole house is filled with rainbow-colored rugs, each one with its own story, and each one, they always tell us, made only of all-natural vegetable dyes.
    Her paintings and collages paper the walls—photographs of us and swirling watercolors and magazine pages and pieced-together quotes. Whether it’s the handmade rugs or the handmade wallpaper, it’s like everything there was done by hand.
    Keeley had one giant suitcase; it was bright green and deep enough to sit inside. We filled it with carefully chosen jeans (only the faded ones), and skirts of clingy fabrics and thin T-shirts and scarves, because overseas no one wore zip-up hoodies, they only wore scarves. She was going to spend the summer with her parents while they taught a special course about the guy who wrote The Lord of the Rings and spent all of his time writing and drinking with other famous people at a bar called the Eagle and Child. Keeley said her mom actually wanted to have the class at this bar. Meet there every day and read his stuff out loud. I didn’t tell Keeley, because she seemed so mad about it all, but I kind of wanted to take that class. More and more when she talked about the stuff she was going to do, I realized that it was stuff I just couldn’t do—I wouldn’t get to do. Like go to England on vacation or look