I made sure to be out in the hall early that night to meet Jillian before other boys got there. As we locked eyes and smiled at each other, it felt so casual – normal – that I forgot it was twelve o'clock at night.

"I'm glad you decided to come," I told her.

"Yeah," she said. "Me too."

That's when the other boys got there so we didn't have time to continue our conversation, though I doubted we would have had much to say.

"Jillian," Charlie said, surprised. I wanted to kick him.

"Charlie," she replied.

"What are you doing here?"

"Umm, Neil invited me," she said.

"Cool," he said. "Shall we go?"

I gave him a grateful smile and we continued to the cave.

My limbs felt so numb from Jillian being there that I didn't register the cold, just the darkness. The fog. The beams of light from our flashlights, cutting through the blackness like a knife. The smell of Jillian next to me. The tenseness in between my shoulder blades, not wanting to trip and embarrass myself. Her body heat. Her light step on the crunchy leaves, as if anyone could actually hear us. Memories flashed in between the blackness and what I guess you could call visions but I guess you could also call hypothetical situations flashed in between them. Memories of her, and me, and me pressed against her and her hands and my hands and I wasn't even sure who was who anymore. And then the visions. Oh God. I almost regretted inviting her to the cave. What if she laughed? At our club, at what I had written, at the things we talked about. What if she rolled her eyes and sighed and called us immature or stupid what asked us why we were just sitting there and talking when back at school I was still at the mercy of my father.

As we reached the cave and went inside and sat down and as I read the opening passage and probably did a lot more little things that I never think twice about, I couldn't stop thinking about her. Jillian. The name came to my head every time I had nothing else in it. It was like a chalkboard and whenever it was wiped clean my hand just instinctively reached up and wrote her name. Sometimes I doodled on the side of the chalkboard as well, writing down major important information but always in the margins, the sides, the empty blackness I would scrawl her name with hearts and stars. I wanted to say it out loud. I wanted to taste her name on my lips.

Perhaps this is why I did what I did next. One second I was closing the book and Knox was stepping forward and reciting another poem about Chris and the next second I was reaching over and grabbing her hand and trying to intertwine my fingers with hers.

Except for one small problem: her hands were clenched into tiny balled up fists and her legs were shaking. She didn't need my hand, she needed my entire arm. I didn't know why she got so worked up with Knox around, or whenever he mentioned Chris and Chet. I didn't know anything about her and yet I lay my arm over her shoulder and she put her head on my shoulder and Charlie looked at me and made some obscene gesture but I didn't even care.

Then all of a sudden I was standing up and pulling a worn down sheet of paper out of my back pocket that had words written on it and I was taking a deep breath and reading them and staring at Jillian as I did so, and hoping that she knew it was for her, it was all for her:

"I don't know where or when I first saw her. In my head she was rain, she was wind, she was that deep shade of purple that I couldn't create with a thousand different paint colors. It could have been in the pastoral farms of Germany or a hot air balloon ride over Switzerland or a carnival ride in a small town in the middle of nowhere. She could have been a circus freak, beautiful and lightning, or a small pale frail human baby who transformed overnight to something larger than life itself. We could have met in the middle of dance if that's possible or flying which seems even more unlikely. It could have been a forbidden romance or an arranged marriage or just two random strangers meeting. I don't quite know. All I know is that with one look my heart jumped straight out of my chest and I spent the next month trying to keep in under control, wrestling with it behind closed doors with a picture of a tidal wave pinned up on my wall because she was everything."

That's when I breathed and saw her smiling.

Note: Yeah. It's kind of weird. I'm not quite sure how Neil writes because we've never really heard a poem from him, have we? That was kind of weird to write. But I hope you like it.