I woke up in a closet.

Candace sent a message to Zack that said, “You don’t know what I’m going through.” Candace said this to him because she stared at a wall and felt a loss for words to say to anyone other than “You don’t know what I’m going through.” She needed to send this to him to manifest her existence. If she could speak these words through a text message to him, it would be as if she splashed her face with cold water without turning on a faucet.
Zack replied, “I went through a glass door once,” and Candace laughed partially at the reaction to the declaration of her existence and partially at Zack going through a glass door. She asked him “what happened,” and he told her about the time when he was five years old that he walked into a glass door and broke it, falling through the frame and cutting open his arm so that to this day it appeared that he had a rigid zig-zag along his forearm. Once a kid named Jared asked Zack if he was related to Harry Potter, and Zack punched the kid in the stomach and slammed down the kid’s football helmet on his head so that he bruised his neck. “What are you going through?” asked Zack.
Candace kicked her legs under a desk and scratched her scalp to loosen up the dead skin and oil that dried around her roots and caused unpleasant build up . “I can’t sit still,” she told him.
He replied, “Can you stand still? I miss having food in my stomach.”
Candace had to agree. At this time in the day she missed having food in her stomach as well because she skipped breakfast and drank too much coffee. Candace drank many cups of coffee when she woke up so she could feel like she had energy to do important things even if there were no things to do. “That always felt the best,” she said, “It will be fun when I turn into a bagel and run into the sunset.”
“When you turn into a bagel and run into the sunset will you fall over?” For a couple seconds, Candace wondered why she would fall over.
“No, the sun will fall over and it will be night.”
“Haha. Maybe I will turn into a croissant and run with you.” Candace thought she should tell Zack he’d be better as a doughnut so they would both be round and have holes in the middle, but then she remembered he’d reply that he’d be his favorite kind of doughnut: Boston Crème with a crème-filled middle. She didn’t say anything back to Zack for a couple minutes so he sent her another message.
“I can’t do my work.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Preoccupied.”
“With scrabble?” Candace said this although she had no interest in prying further into why Zack couldn’t finish his work and despite the fact she was uncertain of whether or not she wanted to continue a conversation with Zack about things like work.
“Triple word score! I just used zither. You?”
“Fantum.” Sometimes Candace misspelled words because she thought it was funny. Other people thought it was immature. Most of the time she kept her funny misspellings to herself. “Werds,” she wrote in a notebook, “wut yew yooz two tock two peepul wen yew rite.” Once she wrote down a list of words that were spelled differently but pronounced the same. The list looked like this:

Spelling One Spelling Two
Bear Bare
High Hi
Ant Aunt
See Sea
Mary Merry
Very Vary
But Butt
Know No
Weather Whether
Week Weak
Herd Heard
Stairs Stares
Sow Sew
Meat Meet
Pear Pair
Would Wood
Some Sum

Candace thought there was a name for the words that were spelled differently but sounded the same. She tried to remember for an hour and it felt as if the name was bouncing around in her mouth but her brain forgot how to shape her mouth and flop her tongue to get it out. After thinking for ten minutes, Candace called her mom at work and asked her, “Mom, what do you call the words that are spelled differently but sound the same when you say them?”
“Homophones?”
“Homophobes?” Candace smiled at misspelling something by switching the letter and saying a completely different word with a different meaning. “No mom, you’re right. Thanks.”
“How are things today?” Candace and her mom talked about mundane things like washing the dishes so her father wouldn’t get mad at her when he got home from work later in the day. She remembered why she avoided talking to her mom at most costs, not all costs. There are some things she wouldn’t spend in order to avoid talking to her mother.
“Not bad. I’m doing homework. I hate Columbus day.” Candace’s mom sighed on the other line and she felt annoyed by having air blown into her ear. She remembered when she called Zack once and in the middle of a conversation she screamed as loudly as she could into the phone. Zack was angry for a whole day and didn’t call her back after he hung up, nor did he pick up when she tried to call him again to apologize. She had to wait to tell him, while laughing, how sorry she was that she had screamed so loudly at him. Zack had called her a psycho bitch.
“Have you washed the dishes?” Candace had been in a rocking chair when she was talking to her mom, and at the sound of the word “washed”, Candace rammed her foot against the wall so hard that the chair tipped backwards causing her to crash so hard that the phone cord was ripped out of the wall. Embarrassed at what she had done with her anger, she did not call her mom back.
Candace sent Zack another message that said, “New York is the size of twelve diamonds.” Marveling at the lack of sense in this statement, she sat on the floor and stared at her toes. She wiggled them. She folded the rest of them down so that only the big toe stood. Candace’s phone vibrated and she opened it to see the reply: “One-dimensional diamonds. Goodbye.”