True Letters from a Fictional Life (3 page)

“No!” I protested. “That was Derek!”

They entered the kitchen while we were cracking up and I was gripping Theresa's wrists to prevent her from bopping me on the head.

“Okay,” said Kim, ignoring the fight. “I'm out of here. Thank you again for a wonderful evening.” We each got a peck on the cheek. “C'mon, Derek,” she said, taking him by the hand. “You can wait with me on the porch.”

After they left the kitchen, we stared at each other wide-eyed and grinning. “Stay here tonight,” Theresa whispered.

“We
have
to stay over. Derek's not driving anywhere. He's going to be asleep on the couch in twenty minutes.”

Sure enough, he came back in and stretched out on the couch to chat, but soon he was asleep and smiling. Kim ended up canceling their first date—some family thing—and Derek took it as a flat-out rejection, never called her back. Thinking he'd lost interest, she started going out with a kid at her own school, and Derek pretended not to care. But lying there on the couch, he was goofy with happiness. We covered him with a blanket and went upstairs to curl up in Theresa's bed.

You could see the stars from her window. “Maybe he'll
show her Saturn through his telescope,” I said. “Then she'll be his forever.”

“Oh, yeah? Is that how he made
you
fall in love with him? Astronomy?”

I thought of Hawken's stunned expression when he looked up from the telescope after first seeing Saturn. The way he put his hand on my shoulder in excitement. “Something like that,” I muttered. It was the first time all night I'd let myself slip into thoughts of him.

April 10th

Dear Mom,

Oh, hi. It's your son. James. The middle one. You might remember me as the one who trekked muddy boots across your freshly washed kitchen floor last night. Or as the kid who complained while you dragged me through the mall last weekend after buying me new soccer cleats. Sorry for being a jerk.

At one point during the Shopping Death March, I made fun of some people walking into the bridal shop. That set you babbling about how time flies, and how soon we'll be buying a suit for my own wedding. You might've noticed that I didn't have much to say about any of that. Maybe you're right—I hope you're right—maybe I'll be buying myself a tuxedo ten years from now.

I do like the way people behave toward me and Theresa when we're together—everyone's voice changes to music, and we get all sorts of smiles. And we're not even really dating.

You know, I try hard at everything and, believe me, I'm trying hard here, too. What I wish would happen is that tomorrow morning I'll wake up and everything will be totally effortless. Thanks again for the cleats.

James

Back in freshman year, I fell into the habit of writing letters to people and then stuffing them in my desk drawer. I started doing it after I read a book about Abraham Lincoln. He used to scribble angry letters to cabinet members, pouring his guts onto the page, saying everything that had been rattling around his head, and never send them. Then he'd go talk to the guy calmly.

The key to that desk drawer is one of those old antique jobs with a long hollow shaft and a clover head. It once belonged to a pirate, I'm pretty sure. Just in case anyone gets nosy, I keep it with my house key in my pocket.

From where I sit and scribble every night, I can see out my window, up the hill into the woods. It's not just a backyard with some trees. It's a forest that sweeps north, practically unbroken, to the tundra. A few miles from my house, Vermont's two biggest highways and two big rivers converge. Snow to our west melts into the White River and splashes into the Connecticut, the river that drains the northern hills. My dad calls our valley the Shire, because he says we live such cozy little lives, like a bunch of hobbits sipping tea by potbellied stoves in our burrows. He's right, in some ways. But
everyone else calls the place the Upper Valley.

When I was about ten, I was looking out my bedroom window when the whole snowy world glowed blue beneath a full moon. A moose cow and her calf emerged from the trees and loped along our yard's edge, then slipped back into the forest. I watched them trudge up the wooded hillside until I couldn't tell their legs from saplings, their bodies from the shadows. Now, whenever I pass that window, I peek out to see if they're there, standing on the shore of that sea of trees that laps at our lawn. One day, my dad says, that forest will swallow up all our little roads and houses. It took me a long time to realize that he meant lifetimes from now, not so much “maybe by next September.” Still, I think about it every time I mow the grass and every time I help my dad repair our old stone wall. It falls apart ten yards into the woods, where it once separated sheep pastures that hemlock, maple, and ash have already reclaimed.

Hawken caught up to me
in the hallway on the way to English on Monday afternoon.

“Did you read that play?” he demanded.

“Yeah.”

“All of it?”

“Yeah, I liked it.”

“Quick summary, please?”

“Oh, boy . . .”

Just then, Aaron Foster came out of a classroom and swished down the hall in front of us. He was wearing skinny black jeans, a lavender V-neck sweater, a gray scarf, and white tennis shoes, no socks. The snow hadn't even melted yet.

Hawken grabbed my arm and opened his eyes and mouth wide, as if the stars and planets had aligned before him. I honestly didn't know what was wrong with him until he leaned into the stare and then slowly turned his head from Aaron to me.

Feeling sort of sick, I looked at the ground and whispered, “Stop.”

I should've handled it differently. I should've smacked him in the head or tripped him or something to at least acknowledge he was being funny. I knew he wasn't actually suggesting that I date Aaron Foster, but it was like a bad dream coming true. We walked a few yards in silence.

“Hey,” Hawken whispered. “I was only kidding.”

In ninth grade when Aaron arrived in our school, fresh from California, he was always scribbling in his own notebook, usually with a purple gel pen, making a show of being a writer. He hung out with this girl Lisa Schultz, who's friends with Theresa. She's pretty cool most of the time, but she wears combat boots and somehow she got a tattoo on her bicep when she was fifteen. She dates boys, which confuses them. Anyway, Aaron and Lisa would sit around writing together. He would stare at my friends and me for a bit, eyes narrowed, then go back to scribbling. There was another Aaron in our class back then, Aaron Gillespie, so to distinguish between the two, Aaron Foster was quickly dubbed “Gay Aaron.”

That nickname died out eventually, but I still never went out of my way to talk to him. The few times I
had
to
speak to him, I looked over my shoulder, wondering who was watching.

He still hadn't looked back at us when he reached our classroom, opened the door, and disappeared inside. I glanced back down the hall, but the only other people were way at the other end, so they couldn't have witnessed the exchange between Hawken and me. But who knew? Maybe some kid had been stuffed in a locker during lunch and had observed it all through the vents.

There were two empty seats left when we got into class: one on either side of Aaron Foster. Hawken and I settled in to his left and right. We still had a couple of minutes before class began, and Mr. Breyer wasn't even in the room yet, so Hawken scooted his chair next to Aaron, leaned across his desk, and demanded, “Hey, you two. What happens in the play? For real. He might give us a reading quiz. I don't want to fail again.”

Aaron laughed politely and drew little circles on the cover of his notebook. He wasn't used to being included in our conversations, though it wasn't all our fault. Soon after he'd arrived, he'd called Hawken a retard. I remember Hawken looking as though Aaron had spat in his face, but before he could say anything in response, Derek pinned Aaron to a locker and whispered a threat that began
Listen, you little fairy
and then dropped so low I couldn't hear the rest. Meanwhile, I had turned to Hawken and offered this heartfelt comfort: “You are not what he just said.” I'm sure that reassurance
made him feel all better.

That was at the end of ninth grade, when we were all smaller and stupider. If we held grudges for all the idiotic things we said and did as freshmen and sophomores, the hallways would be silent. No one would be talking to anyone else. Hawken certainly wouldn't be talking to Derek or me. A few months before we stuck up for him against Aaron, the two of us had been demolishing a bag of tortilla chips in my kitchen. My mom came in and asked how Hawken was doing.

“Good,” I said with a mouthful of chips. “Hawken's just Hawken.”

“He doesn't seem upset in class?” she asked. “He's not getting teased?”

“Tim Hawken?” Derek asked. “No. Of course not.”

“His mom says he's having a hard time. Some kids have been giving him trouble because he goes for help with reading.”

Derek and I glanced at each other. He grimaced. We often joked with Hawken that his reading problems made him special. “You're just a special kid,” we'd said a few days earlier, cracking up. “Your specialness makes us love you even more. Dr. Seuss says you're one of the most specialist specials there is!” I remember Hawken laughing along with us.

“Naw, he's fine,” I said.

“Well, he might be playing it tough at school, but he's having a rough transition. So look out for him.”

Derek and I quit that kind of joking around from then on. I've never apologized to Hawken for the crap we said to him. I don't know how.

But either Hawken had forgotten, or he never mentioned it. He felt comfortable enough to demand emergency reading assistance, anyway. “Come on,” he pled. “Seriously. This is why they put us you-try-so-hard readers in class with you you're-so-good readers. You're supposed to be helping me. A quick summary. Go!” I shook my head helplessly, and Hawken reached across, grabbed Aaron's arm, and shook him. “Aaron! C'mon, man. Rescue me!”

Aaron looked over at me. “I don't even know where to begin. I mean, it's Shakespeare. It's kind of complicated. . . .”

Mr. Breyer walked in.

Aaron whispered in a hurry, “Everyone falls in love but they fall in love with the wrong people.”

“No kidding, Foster,” whispered Hawken. “But what about the play? The play!”

Aaron laughed out loud.

“You both suck at this,” muttered Hawken just as Breyer called out, “Split a piece of paper with a friend and number it one through five! A quick reading quiz. Hawken! Let's go, kid. Head off the desk!”

As we were leaving class, Breyer called Hawken aside. I stopped, too, ready to chat. “Hey, he'll catch up with you, James,” Breyer said gently.

So, I waited out in the hall. And five minutes later, when
Hawken came out, he had black shadows under his eyes that I'm not sure had been there before. He turned down the hall without noticing me, and I had to walk fast to catch up with him. “Hey, man,” I said. “You okay?”

He didn't answer right away. “He doesn't get it. He just thinks I'm lazy. Like I don't even try to do the reading.”

I walked in silence with him for a bit.
You
don't
try to do the reading
, I wanted to say.
You get everyone to do it for you
. Instead, I said, “He knows that you have, like, a reading disability, right?”

“Yeah, but I don't think he knows what that means. Anything he assigns us to read takes me, like, three times as long to read as everyone else. So I try to skim it. Or I find summaries online. Or I ask for help from you guys. Otherwise, all I would do all day is sound out words, sound out words, sound out words. It's exhausting.”

“I could read out loud to you,” I offered.

“I have audiobooks a lot of the time. I have one for this play. That's what he was just on my case about. But it rots. It takes forever to listen to those things. And the Bruins were on last night . . .”

“Oh, dude.” I pushed him. “My sympathy for you is gone!”

After school that day, Derek, Theresa, Hawken, and I went sledding down the abandoned logging road behind my house. The previous two springs, we had all run on the track team,
but to Mark's delight, track and cross-country had been cut due to budget constraints. The letters to the editor and school board had been fierce but ineffective.

Derek and I stopped at Ike's Gas on the way to go sledding. Plastic orange toboggans are among Ike's meager merchandise. I was standing next to Derek as he paid for the sled when the cashier said cheerfully, “Sledding, huh? I didn't know you people liked the snow.”

I was confused, but Derek didn't even hesitate. “No, ma'am. We don't like no snow.” I'd seen variations of this routine many times, and it makes everyone super uncomfortable. Derek's parents forbade him from doing it. I wanted to pick him up and carry him out of the store. “Dat white stuff is mi-tee colb. MI-TEE colb!”

“Dude, let's go,” I interjected. I knew exactly where he was going next.

“But you know what I do loves?” He spread his arms wide. “I loves white folk.
All
you white folk. I loves you.”

The lady behind the counter had gone deep red, and she wouldn't look at us as she handed Derek his change. I grabbed Derek's shoulder and hustled him out of the store.

“Why do you do that?” I asked as we strode to his car.

Derek sneered. “‘I didn't know
you people
like the snow?'
You've got to be kidding me.”

“I mean, it was a dumb thing for her to say, but—”

“You have no idea,” Derek interrupted. He wasn't angry with me. It was a statement of fact. I
don't
have any idea.
I've seen his back stiffen when someone sounds surprised that he does well in school, and sometimes I've wondered what's caused him to fall stonily silent in stores and restaurants.

I'm not sure which is harder for him, though: being black in a state where almost everyone's white or being Christian in a state where so few people go to church. Both of Derek's parents are doctors at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, the big hospital. They're super nice and also super religious. On the way to my house, we drove past Derek's “Sabbath House of Fun,” as he calls it. His mom and dad used to take me there on Sunday mornings if I had stayed over on a Saturday night. And then they would ask me what I learned. Derek stopped talking to me about God years ago. There's still a palm leaf cross on his bedroom wall, but the picture of a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus that used to hang above his pillow disappeared soon after we entered high school.

Theresa and Hawken were kicking a ball around on the driveway when Derek and I arrived at my house. Hip-hop thumped from Hawken's car stereo. He tried juggling the ball with his boots on—it didn't work—and the ball rolled beneath his car. Theresa got down on her stomach on the gritty wet driveway and fished the ball out. She used the outside of her foot to send the ball skidding back to Hawken. He kicked it back under the car.

Derek led the way up the trail behind my house to the sled run. The old logging road tumbles out of an overgrown
meadow. In the summer and fall we sometimes make a little fire there and watch the stars. When you sit on top of the big granite boulder in the middle of the field, you can watch cloud shadows shift across the foothills of the White Mountains. My family doesn't own the property, but I consider the place mine.

Derek and Hawken rode in one sled; Theresa and I rode in the other. These are the usual teams, and they're pretty evenly matched. Derek and Hawken are aggressive sledders, but Theresa's light. We catch enough air on a few jumps to knock the wind out of ourselves upon landing. Normally, we end up lying tangled together in the snow, laughing hysterically.

When we hiked back up to the starting line after our fifth or sixth run, I stretched my arms out and fell backward into a drift.

Hawken jumped onto the empty sled and pointed at Derek, alone in the other. “Just you and me. The Final Race.”

Theresa leaped on the sled behind Derek. “No, Derek and me against you guys!” She was pointing at Hawken and me. Hawken's smile didn't change. It was as though it had frozen to his face. He stared off down the hill. I was supposed to climb on his sled, wrap my arms around him, and careen down the road in a tight embrace. We'd done it plenty of times before.

“I'm sitting this one out,” I said.

“James!” Theresa roared.

“It's all you guys,” I said, and, as she screamed in protest, I pushed her and Derek down the first twenty yards of the run. Hawken leaped up, ran with his sled to catch up, and dived onto it when he was level with them. He'd opened up a lead by the time they screamed around the first corner. I fell backward in the snow and made myself think about Theresa's smile instead of Hawken's.

When they arrived back at the rock, we all agreed it was time to call it quits. We slid down the trail to my house. I could smell wood smoke, and the clouds were still pink, the sky a weak blue. The worst of the winter was over. The darkest part, anyway. Spring would arrive in a few weeks. Life would get easier.