Your family quit the cult when your parents heard about what the leader was asking the women to do, “flirty fishing,” they called it, which was to have sex with men to recruit them. When you left Venezuela, your family got back to Florida by being stowaways on a ship carrying Tonka toys. The crew discovered your family, but they were nice to you and gave you some damaged toys for presents.
After the cult, your parents changed your family’s last name from Bottom to Phoenix—to symbolize the mythical bird that rises from the ashes. Then your family moved to Hollywood when you were nine so that you and Rain would have a chance to become stars. You loved to sing together, and you decided you wanted to be an actor, too.
At first, it was hard. Your family had no money, and you got kicked out of your apartments every few months, and you and your sister kept singing on street corners. But your mom got a job working for a casting agency, and then a famous talent agent signed you and Rain and your other two sisters and brother, too. Soon she started getting you small jobs, and then the jobs got bigger and bigger.
When you became an actor, you had the ability to dissolve your own personality and inhabit any character. You were brilliant at it. We can lose ourselves, I guess. And you used that. You found the magic in it.
You and your siblings always supported each other. You loved your family so much and talked about your childhood as being happy. But I wonder if there was something that happened to you when you were little that you couldn’t talk to them about. People have said that a lot of bad things went on in that cult, like the cult leader said it was okay to do sexual stuff with kids. When I read that, it made me so angry. I wondered if there was someone who hurt you. You said once in an interview that you lost your virginity when you were four. But then you took it back and said that it was just a joke. So I don’t know. But maybe there was a time that you needed someone to protect you and they couldn’t.
I am writing to you now because there is something that I can’t talk about, too. Something that I wonder if you would understand. I keep trying to get rid of it, to push it out of my head, but it keeps coming back in. I am worried, because I am falling in love with Sky, but I feel like one day, he’ll find out everything and leave me.
Last night, I snuck out to meet him. Since it was a cold night, instead of walking through the neighborhood, he picked me up and we decided to drive in his truck. We blasted the heater and rolled the windows down and listened to music, and finally we pulled over on a dark street and made out in the car. We made out so much, my whole body was burning up, and the windows were frosted with breath. I finally pulled away from him and sat up a moment. I was trying to remind myself of where I was, and I turned to the glass and drew a heart in it with my finger. That’s when he asked, “Do you want to come over?”
His mom was sleeping when we got there. In the low light I could see that the house, which looked so perfect on the outside, was different indoors. Every surface was piled high with fading housekeeping magazines, abandoned library books, scattered crafts. A half-finished needlepoint sampler with a scene from summer. A pile of cutout snowflakes and their paper scraps for the winter. Sky wanted to go quickly to his bedroom, but I lingered. I wanted to see everything, as if the house were full of clues to him. Then, in a cabinet crowded with delicate china, I saw that there were soccer trophies and a framed photo of Sky. He was younger, maybe twelve. He was in his uniform, grinning with a ball in his hands. There was something about seeing him like that—the same boy I loved looking out at me as a kid who smiled for the camera. I wanted to pull him out of the picture and protect him from everything between then and now.
“I didn’t know you played soccer,” I whispered. “Are all of those trophies yours?”
“Yeah,” he said, shifting, like he didn’t want to be there. “That was my past life.”
Then he took my hand and pulled me through the maze back to his bedroom. I wanted to know more, but he started kissing me. He started kissing me hard, and hungry, and for some reason it scared me. But I tried to go with it. Because I was in his house. Because I could feel the moths that needed a light beating hard, and I wanted to keep glowing for him.
Soon he had my shirt off, and he had his hands up my skirt, and everything felt confusing. I wanted him to love me. I wanted to be a light. So I told my brain to be quiet. I told my brain to just go somewhere else. And I went. I went somewhere I didn’t mean to go. I went back to May, when we were kids.
I remembered the night I asked her, “If we are fairies, why can’t we fly?”
I was scared that somehow the seventh generation inheritance missed me. That I wasn’t a real fairy and she’d find out. More than anything, I didn’t want her to be disappointed in me.
“Only the oldest child inherits the flight gene,” she told me. “But that doesn’t mean you aren’t a fairy.”
“But you can fly?” I asked hopefully.
“Yeah,” she said.
I was so excited. “Can I see you?”
“No one can see my wings, or it breaks them.”
“Oh,” I said, trying not to show her I was devastated. “When do you use them then?”
“At night. When I know everyone is sleeping and no one can see me.”
“Can I just see you once?”
“You don’t want my wings to break, do you?”
“No,” I said.
But still, I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help how badly I wanted to see her wings. If I saw them, I would know for sure I was part of the magic.
Some nights, I used to beg her to let me sleep in the top bunk with her. I’d climb up the ladder and curl in next to her. After she fell asleep, I’d stare up at the ceiling, looking for patterns in the splotches of paint—a dragon, and the cave he’d set fire to by accident, trapped in his own flames. The princess who would come to rescue him. I’d tell myself stories and try to keep my eyes open all night, so that if May went out on a flight, I wouldn’t miss it. I thought that maybe if I just saw by accident, it wouldn’t count. But eventually, sleep would take over. I’d open my eyes again at dawn, and she would be turning under the blankets.
“Did you fly tonight?” I’d whisper.
“Mmm-hmm,” she’d murmur.
And I’d imagine her adventures.
I was staring up at Sky’s ceiling now, trying to find pictures in the walls the way I used to do, when he asked me, “Laurel?”
I tried to shake myself out of it. “Yeah?”
“Where did you go?”
“Nowhere. I’m here.”
“You left me.”
“No, I … I didn’t mean to…” I started crying. I couldn’t help it.
“Laurel, what’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to wipe the tears away.
I had that same feeling that I did when I was a kid. She was a real fairy, and I was faking it. I knew that eventually, Sky would find out.
“You can’t always do this,” he said. “You can’t just disappear on me.”
“I’m sorry.”
I pulled him closer and tried to keep kissing. Sky’s hands were hot on me. I wanted to like it, but the world was spinning. I tried to focus on his face, but I couldn’t. I was going backward through a tunnel. I was seeing magic carpets, riding on one with Aladdin. I was seeing May, her lips turning dark with lipstick. May leaving the movie theater in Paul’s car. I saw her look back at me, and all of a sudden her smile that had looked so bright seemed scared.
“We don’t have to have sex if you don’t want to,” Sky said.
“Okay.”
“But you have to talk to me.”
“I—I don’t know what to say.” I wondered again how he knew May. I couldn’t help it anymore. After a moment, I asked, “Sky? What was your old school?”
“Sandia.”
My heart stopped for a beat, or maybe three. It was true. “So you went with May.”
“Yeah,” he said.
I imagined him seeing her, tu
rning a corner in the hallway. She would be wearing her pink sweater, cut to show her collarbone, her hair flowing behind her. She would have taken his breath away. I wonder if when he sees me coming around a corner, sometimes he thinks for a moment he sees her there.
“I bet everyone loved her,” I said.
Sky was quiet.
“Right?” I asked softly.
“Yeah,” he said. “Do you want me to take you home?”
“All right,” I said. “I guess.”
So we drove in his truck, the quiet of the night stifling us. I wished that I wouldn’t have been weird. I wished that I hadn’t broken the spell. I was scared, and there was nothing to stop it.
We pulled up in front of my house.
“Good night,” Sky said. “Get some sleep.”
And I snuck back into our house full of shadows.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Kurt,
I have this picture of you in my locker, with Courtney and baby Frances. You are holding her in your arms, peering down at her. Courtney is leaning over your shoulder, looking, too. Her shirt is cut to show her stomach, which has FAMILY VALUES written on it in black scratchy letters. It would almost be ironic, but it’s real at the same time, because you are there, Kurt and Courtney, with your baby girl. Your family got broken when you were a kid, but then you made your own. And at the same time, you became a father, in a way, to all of us. I know you didn’t want that. But you couldn’t help it. You didn’t want to be the spokesperson of a generation. But you couldn’t help singing.
I don’t know anyone who has a perfect family to start with. And I think that’s why we make up our own. Regular weirdos together. I feel that way about my friends.
Yesterday was the last day of school before Christmas break. We all met in the alley after school to celebrate. I made everyone clove oranges, which are oranges with cloves pressed into the skin and ribbons attached to make them into ornaments. I felt like making them because May and I always did at Christmastime. I put Kristen’s cloves in so that they spelled NYC, which is where she wants to go to college. Tristan’s said Slash.
For vacation, Tristan and Kristen are going to Hawaii with her family. They’ve been dating since the beginning of high school, so I guess her family lets him go along to stuff like that. It’s funny to me, because when I think of Hawaii I think of hula, and neither of them seems like the type for leis or swimsuits with birds-of-paradise. Tristan says that he’s going to stay in the hotel room and order piña coladas and watch Oprah reruns all day, but Kristen has to finish her college applications. She says he better watch on mute.
Tristan smokes pot a lot and didn’t take the right tests, and he likes shop and art the most of his classes. But more than that, even, he likes rock music and playing guitar. I think he really wants to be a musician, but not just because he wants to be famous. He wants to be one because of what Slash said, about how being a rock star is the intersection between who you are and who you want to be. He plays guitar so well, you wouldn’t believe it. But he doesn’t have a band. And he doesn’t try really hard to get one. He mostly plays alone in his room instead. That’s what Kristen says. I think he does this for the same reason Hannah doesn’t turn in her work when her teachers say she is smart. I think a lot of people want to be someone, but we are scared that if we try, we won’t be as good as everyone imagines we could be.
Kristen is different. She studies all the time, and she got a 2180 on her SAT. She’s always talking about going to Columbia. She flips through magazines and cuts out pictures of people who look like they’d live in New York or other cities where things happen. She lets me and Natalie and Hannah come over to her house after school sometimes, and we always just get a snack then sit in her room and actually do homework. Her bedroom walls are covered with the magazine pictures, so that the walls don’t end at the walls. They go outward, to a dream of somewhere else.
I think that it makes Tristan feel like she doesn’t want to be here, with him. But the thing is, even though Kristen wants to go, I think she wishes he would come, too. See, last month she gave Tristan this stack of college applications in the cafeteria at lunchtime. She smiled a little smile and said, “Hey, baby. I got you something.” Like it was a good surprise. Then she pulled them out from behind her back and handed them to him.
He took the stack of papers. He said, “What’s this?” already with an edge in his voice. He flipped through them and then he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I can see the headlines now! Tristan Ayers attends backwater bumfuck college in the city of Poughkeepsie.” He said it like he was joking, but his voice had a razor in it. Then his eyes got really angry, and he turned to Kristen and said, “That shit’s not even in New York City.” Like, Who do you think I am?
Her eyes were still as usual. She said, really quietly, “It’s close.”
“It’s not close. It’s a fuckin’ world away.”
She told him he could transfer after a year if he got his grades up. Tristan just looked at her and said, “I’m not good enough for you. We both know it.” He tore the stack of applications in half. And threw them on the table and walked out.
Kristen turned her head and watched him go. Finally she said, so close to her breath you could barely hear it, “You’re wrong.”
I’d never seen her cry or get emotional in front of people. Her face always looks the same. But when she swept the torn papers into a neat pile and then off the table, she wiped her eyes with the long sleeve of her gypsy shirt. She walked through the cafeteria and threw out the applications in the trash by the door.
Now they both act around each other like you do when you know something is going to end and you’ve decided not to know. But for today, they are still here. We were happy, smoking cigarettes and laughing in the alley under the December sky, bright with possible snow. Everyone liked their oranges. Hannah laughed at hers, which I had decorated with a stick horse made of cloves.
When Natalie walked up, she was carrying a painting-sized package, wrapped in a sheet with orange paisleys on it and tied with an orange cloth bow. She giggled and pushed it toward Hannah and said, “Open it.”
Hannah looked suspicious, like she was worried that suddenly everyone could see through her. Even with our friends, Hannah still likes to pretend that she and Natalie aren’t in love like that. Finally she untied the bow and pulled off the sheet and screamed, “Oh my god!” like she didn’t know how to take it. Maybe no one had given her something that good before. It was the tulip painting Natalie had made her in art class.
Natalie shifted back and forth between her feet. “You don’t like it.”
But Hannah kept looking at it, like she didn’t want to take her eyes away. The way there were so many shades of color in the tulip petals, opening and closing at once, it reminded me of the feeling of watching a sunset—you are in awe of something so beautiful, and at the same time, you know that particular sunset will only be there for a moment.
Hannah said, “Thank you.” She meant it. She could have cried, I could see, but she was in front of everybody, so she shook herself out of it.
When we were walking to the parking lot, Natalie said to Hannah, “I made the tulip that way, I made it a painting, because now you’ll always have it. It can’t wilt or die.” Natalie had taken what’s ephemeral and turned it into something that Hannah can keep. Hannah looked at Natalie like she was trying to make herself understand what it means to have someone love you like that.
At least that’s what I imagined, because I know that it can be hard to believe that someone loves you if you are afraid of being yourself, or if you are not exactly sure who you are. It can be hard to believe that someone won’t leave. Since that night at his house a week ago, things have been strange between me and Sky. He’s trying to act like they’re not, and when I asked him if he was mad at me, he said, “No. Forget about it, all right?” So I am trying my best.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Rive
r,
I watched My Own Private Idaho last night. In the movie, you’d changed, like I have. You weren’t the kid from Stand by Me anymore. You’d grown up, and I could see that it hurt. You play Mike, a narcoleptic who lives on the streets as a hustler. The movie opens on an empty open road. You are stuck there, alone, waiting for sleep to take you over. The clouds roll away, so fast through the wide-open sky.
When you fall to sleep by the side of the road, you dream of your mom rubbing your head, telling you everything will be okay. “I know you’re sorry,” she says. In the movie, your mom abandoned you when you were little, and you want more than anything to find her.
My mom went away, too. I know how it feels to be sorry for something you can’t say. If I could have walked through the screen, I would have taken you in my arms. And I knew what you meant when you said, “The road never ends.” I know a road like that. It’s the last road I drove on with May.
It stretches past the cottonwood trees lining the river and the railroad tracks and the bridge. It stretches past when me and May were kids making spells, past climbing trees and picking apples and past the first time I saw her wearing lipstick, past the look on her face when she met Paul, past the movies that we never saw. It goes into a place where none of it ever existed, where it always did, where there is no such thing as time, but just a feeling that goes on forever. A feeling I can’t escape from. I’m sorry. I made her leave me.
It’s the feeling that I am afraid will make Sky go, too, eventually. And it’s the feeling that was with me all night when Tristan and Kristen took us to a senior’s party before they left for their trip. They said it’s a big holiday party that happens every year, where they like to go to watch the straight-edge kids cut lose. It was at a huge house with a Christmas tree and parents who were out of town and spiked eggnog and lots of kids I’d never seen before, some of them from other schools, I guess. Kristen wore a necklace that lit up with mini Christmas lights. She’s the kind of girl who can do stuff like that and make it seem cool, paired with her long tangled hair and her broomstick skirt.