Found Objects â Story by Maggie Stiefvater
I just remembered that Jim Everest gave me this pen.
When I was fifteen, my mother gave me a sketchbook. With a Sharpie, I wrote PAOLA on the front of it in big, hollow letters, and then I doodled small tunneling animals inside the lines of the them. I left the O empty. I was waiting for inspiration to hit. You have to leave yourself room to maneuver when youâre working with something permanent.
Inside, I mostly worked with pencil. I would have rather used a pen, but the pages were so thin that every pen I tried bled through to the other side. It only took me a few sketches to work that out, so I only have a few pages where I had to make an ink blot into a lionâs eye or the button on a long coat.
One month into the school year, Jim fell into stride beside me as I walked to school and he said, âIâve found you something better.â
It was something better. It was a pen with the sharpest nib Iâd ever seen; when I pressed it to the paper, it left behind a needle thin, deliciously wet thread in its wake. I flipped the page over, scrutinizing the paper below for any ink stains. There was nothing but a slight imprint of the nibâs path. I rubbed my thumb over the dip in the paper.
âWell done, Everest,â I said, but I wasnât surprised. Jim tended to find things. By the time I was fifteen, weâd known each other for awhile, or at least we both walked the same way to school. He was embarrassingly earnest and unflinchingly loyal, and would have probably been the kindest boyfriend at Freeley High, which was probably why he never had a date. The problem was that he was a reliable Ford Taurus and all the girls in school were trying out Ferraris and Aston Martins. They hadnât yet gotten tired of wrapping them around trees or breaking down by the side of the road with something too complicated to repair without a specialist. As for me, I preferred to walk. I just wasnât ready for anything that required seat belts.
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