Unwritten Lines

Blank Ink

June Harlow had a list for everything: a morning list, a school list, a list for the lists she meant to write but never finished. Lists were a way to keep the world from slipping sideways. They were the margin lines she drew to steady the page when grief felt like a storm. She traced them the way other people traced initials into old tables, and they mostly worked. Mostly.

The first bell sounded like a distant promise. June sat two rows back in English, hands folded on a notebook whose margin had her name in tiny, tidy letters. Mrs. Weller spoke about paradoxes and narrative voice, but June heard only the cadence of the word Evie—three letters that were always there, an ache under the tongue. Evie was a sun that had gone out the year before and left June with a shadowed skyline she had to learn to navigate.

After class, the corridor smelled like old paper and hand sanitizer, lockers slamming like reluctant punctuation. Mara Ellis caught up to her at the vending machine the way she always did—breathless, with a guitar case slung over one shoulder like a stubborn moon. They used to run into each other without thinking; now their meetings were scheduled on June’s weekend list. Mara was laughing about an open mic she’d survived; her voice cut through June’s carefulness and warmed something that had been cold all winter.

“You going to the café later?” Mara asked, scraping the bottom of a chip bag like she did with everything—hungry for the next thing.

June hesitated. Spontaneity had become a threat—an edge she wasn’t sure she could stand. “Maybe,” she said. “I… have a few things to finish.”

Mara tilted her head, the old way that used to mean conspiratorial plans. “You owe me a song critique. Come on, Jun. We’ll sit by the window.”

There was a time when Mara could push June out of her lists and June would go without thinking. There was a time before Evie disappeared into hospital rooms and dates and then nothing. June had built a soft fortress of deadlines and edits. It kept the worst things from finding her.

She left school early, an impulsive decision that felt less like defiance and more like a small, private rebellion. The city had that brittle late-afternoon light that made the brick buildings look like the insides of old book spines. June walked the long way to the café, the route that passed a narrow shop she had never opened before: Adler’s Curiosities. The window was fogged with dust; inside, oddities huddled together—vintage cameras that held other people’s faces in their lenses, a porcelain teacup with a chip that looked like a coastline, a stack of sheet music tied with a ribbon the color of bruises.

Something in the window called to her the way a half-remembered lyric calls to a musician. She pushed the bell on the door and it chimed like a small apology.