The Margins

Lexile: 1300 | Grade: 12

Passage

The first time Celia wrote in the margins of a book, it felt like trespassing. Her literature teacher had loaned her a worn copy of *Invisible Cities*, the pages feathered and faded from years of handling. In the white space beside a particularly cryptic paragraph, Celia penciled a single word: *Why?*

It wasn’t for a grade. No one would see it. But the question stayed with her longer than the sentence that caused it. It echoed. And with each new chapter, she added more—sometimes questions, sometimes fragments of memory, sometimes connections that surprised even her. The margins became maps: not of the author’s cities, but of her own thoughts, winding and unfinished.

Celia began to carry a pen wherever she went. She underlined phrases on menus. Wrote similes in the backs of receipts. She even annotated advertisements, amused at how easily language made promises it couldn’t keep. It wasn’t about rebellion or critique. It was about paying attention—about reading the world as if it were a text with hidden themes waiting to be decoded.

Her classmates wrote essays the night before they were due, compiling opinions from sources they hadn’t read. Celia wasn’t faster. She was slower. She lingered. She reread. She let sentences interrupt her thoughts. Sometimes she didn’t finish the assigned book, but she could talk for hours about a single paragraph.

Her teacher once told the class, 'Literacy isn’t about finishing chapters. It’s about what happens between the lines.' Celia had written that in the margin too, then added: *And between the reader and the lines.*

Years later, long after she stopped needing permission to underline library books, Celia looked back through her old journals and essays. They weren’t linear. They wandered. But in the tangents, in the half-sentences and scratched-out metaphors, she recognized the shape of someone learning how to think—not for tests or approval, but for the sheer act of becoming.

She never became an author, not in the traditional sense. But she became something quieter: a reader who didn’t just consume meaning, but made it. One annotation at a time.