Sky smiled. “I hope we’ll both find the words for it.”
I had taken off my gloves and was running my hands over the heart he made me. I looked at him, and then I said something I think all the time but always swallow back in. I said, “I love you.” I could see my breath hanging on to the air. Or maybe the air was hanging on to my breath, for warmth.
Sky looked back at me, quiet. He took my hand and we started walking. All of the Christmas lights glowed softer and softer down the street, a path of light fading in front of us. We were halfway down the block when he said, “I don’t think you would love me if you knew me.”
I stopped. “I do know you.”
“If you knew everything I’ve done.”
“What do you mean?”
He was silent.
“Tell me. See if I still love you.”
Then he said, “Well, to start with, I beat someone up. That’s why I got kicked out of my old school.”
“That’s okay.”
“I really hurt him. Really bad.”
“Why?”
Sky stopped a moment. “I don’t know … There was this girl, this girl I knew. I thought he took advantage of her. And once I hit him, it’s like everything I was angry at just sorta came out.”
I nodded. This is strange, but in a way, thinking of Sky getting in a fight like that made him seem fragile. “I love you more,” I whispered, and then I was trying just to listen, to see if he wanted to say something else.
We kept walking through the night quiet. Through it and through it. But I couldn’t stop the feeling that was suddenly splitting inside me.
I said, “I’ve done bad things, too.”
“Like what? You forgot your homework?” he teased.
“No,” I said. And I think I sounded suddenly angry then. Because he stopped.
“She’s dead,” I said.
“I know she is, Laurel,” he said gently. “What happened?”
My chest got tight and heavy at once, and I started to feel spinny. I held on to his arm to stay up.
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you do. You can tell me.”
But I couldn’t. We were driving back from the movies. And we stopped by the tracks over the river, off the old highway. And there were flowers growing out of the cracks in it. And now that I was thinking about it, I really couldn’t breathe. The river was very loud.
Sky was holding on to my shoulders. He was saying, “Laurel.” I tried to suck in the air, tried hard to get it into my lungs. Sky told me to watch my breath. So I breathed and watched it hanging on to the air for a while and didn’t think about anything.
“Laurel. Stay here with me.”
His face was clear, and all of the houses with their Christmas lights faded behind him. With his smallest hands he had opened a door in me, and I cried and cried. He held me there until I laughed a little. Like the whole thing was a joke. I wanted to forget all of it. We kept walking. Along the path of light, I saw every bulb come into focus only as we got close to it. And finally he said, he said it to me, “I love you, too.”
Yours,
Laurel
Dear John Keats,
I am looking out the window at the clouds cracking from cold, letting the silent sun in. Today it’s a new year. I bet in California on New Year’s Day, the air is velvet with warmth. I bet everything glows, and the palm trees stretch off the earth in a new morning yawn. Mom must be waking up there right now, in her new life. And I know I shouldn’t feel this way, but I hope that you’ll get it. I hate her for leaving me.
When we were younger, Mom used to have New Year’s Day tea parties for me and May and May’s friends. I never invited my own friends, because I loved belonging in May’s world. I loved how May would smile at me and drop sugars into my tea. Mom made sandwiches cut into perfect triangles and scones that she served with miniature jellies, which she would take from diners and save up for us. There were always more jellies than we needed. We never ran out of any flavor, not even raspberry. I can’t get those jellies out of my head today. Maybe my mind is holding on to them because I don’t want to think about everything else.
Last night, we all went to Kristen’s house for a New Year’s Eve party. Not a big party. A just-for-us party. And it started off perfect. Kristen lives in the foothills, up by the road where Sky and I drove that first time. You can see the city lights from there, spreading out below you like stars on the ground. Her parents are still in Hawaii, so we had the house to ourselves. We made New Year’s punch, with cinnamon After Shock and cinnamon sticks and apple juice and red food dye. It might sound gross, but it was delicious, and we all got blushed from it. Now that we’d done the rest of the break with families and all, New Year’s felt like it was a holiday made just for us.
After a while, Kristen wanted everyone to sit in a circle and give our New Year’s intentions. She knows about Eastern philosophy, and she said that when you set an intention, you can create transformation. Like the universe will listen. So we all got these papers she picked out especially for us. Mine had stars, Tristan’s had music notes, Hannah’s had horses, and Natalie’s had a design that looked like brush strokes. Sky’s had a design that looked kind of like fish and kind of like sperm, or at least that’s what Tristan joked. Sky was not really keen on this whole part of the night, since he doesn’t much like things that have to do with talking about feelings around other people. But when I watched him writing down his intention on his paper, he looked serious, like he meant what it said. The plan was we could read what we wrote out loud or not, and then we would burn our papers in the candles that were lit in the center of the circle.
Kristen went first. She said you can also set intentions for people you love. And hers was for Tristan, that he would recognize and use his true gifts and brilliance. That he would become who he was meant to be, even if it took him away from her. She said that he is a very talented musician. Everyone, including Tristan, was quiet when she read this. She threw her paper into the flame.
And then it was Tristan’s turn. He said, “My intention is to handcuff Kristen to the bed every night until I have to unlock her and put her on a plane to New York.” We all cracked up. Kristen looked a little mad that he wasn’t taking it seriously, and maybe also that he brought up handcuffs in front of everybody. But then he got more serious than he ever is about anything and said, “No, all right. This is what I really wrote.” The first part he read is a quote from his second favorite band after Guns N’ Roses, the Ramones. “‘Experiencing us is like having the fountain of youth.’ My intention is that it will always be that way, as long as we live. We’ll get old, but my intention is that we’ll never sell out. That we’ll never get too old to remember who we are right now, together.”
What they read, I think, explains the difference between Kristen and Tristan, which is that Kristen wants to grow into something, and Tristan thinks that right now, being young, is the most real thing. As Tristan put his paper into the fire, he said, “And I might add, I am in love with a beautiful woman. I pray that I will be able to survive losing her. And that she will come back to me if she can.”
Kristen tried to catch tears on her sleeve before anyone could see and said softly, “Your turn, Natalie.”
Natalie didn’t read her intention out loud, but she looked into Hannah’s eyes for a moment as she burned her paper.
Hannah said, “Okay, these are my intentions. I have more than one.” She gazed down and read them off her paper. “For my grandma to get better. For the shadows to stop growing. For people to stop being angry. For the world to be safe for love, every kind of love. For me to be one day brave enough to sing in front of everybody. For Buddy, my beautiful horse and dear friend, to drink from an eternal spring and never die.” Then Hannah kissed her paper before she burned it.
It was my turn next. I was a little drunk from the punch, I guess, but the intention seemed important, like a real intention. I wanted to read it out loud, but I couldn’t do it.
I opened my mouth, but my throat got dry, so I threw the paper into the candle and watched the flame grow with it.
It was Sky’s turn last. He didn’t read his out loud, either, of course. But when he put his paper in, instead of burning inside the candle like it was supposed to, part of the paper flamed up and flew right toward me! I scooted out of the way just in time, but everyone was screaming “Fire!” Tristan threw his cinnamon punch at the paper, which blazed brighter for a moment and then burned out, and the punch soaked my dress. Sky screamed, “Shit!” But after a second we started laughing hysterically, and Tristan said to Sky, “That’s a pretty wild intention you had there, brother.” I wondered what it might have been.
My favorite part of the night came next. We danced to “Sweet Child O’ Mine” in the living room, which was full of windows that show the city star-lights. Natalie twirled Hannah, Tristan dipped Kristen, and even Sky danced with me, and although he’s not a good dancer, it didn’t matter. After a while, everyone let go of the person they were dancing with and we all just danced together. Spinning and dipping and singing like that night was all there was, all there needed to be. I’d have stayed in it forever if I could.
When the clock turned to midnight, we shouted and kissed, and do you know what? I saw Hannah throw up her hands and throw back her head, like she forgot that there was anything to be afraid of, and she pulled Natalie in and kissed her.
I kissed Sky, and he pushed my hair back from my face, which was a little sweaty from the cinnamon and the dancing. He said it in my ear, for the second time ever. “I love you.” He said it hard, like he meant it, and like maybe it hurt. It made me want to stay right there, with his voice in my ear. I would have given him every part of me if he wanted it.
When the song ended, Tristan started it over, and Kristen set the clock back three minutes, and we had another midnight, all hugging and kissing each other, and then we had another and another, until we were so tired from dancing that everyone collapsed.
I’d kept drinking and drinking the punch, and I guess by this time I must have been pretty drunk, because when the music finally stopped, the world was spinning.
Natalie and Hannah fell asleep wrapped around each other on the couch, and Kristen and Tristan went to go to bed in her room, but I wasn’t tired. I told Sky I needed some air, so we went out to the balcony and leaned over the city. “Sky,” I asked him, “what was your intention?”
He looked at me for a moment, deciding. “If I tell you mine, will you tell me yours?”
I nodded that I would.
“My intention was to learn how to feel again like I felt when I was eleven and my dad took me to my first concert. The Stones. I wasn’t even into music then. But something about that night, it got into me. My intention was not to hate him so much that I can’t remember that feeling, and feel it again sometime.”
“What was the feeling?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Like loving something so much that you want to create it. I mean, not it exactly, but like you want to do something. I mean, I was eleven. I don’t know if I knew that then. But I knew that it was the best night of my life.”
I wanted to hold his heart in mine and to make a safe place for it. “You’re going to create something great. You’ll be an amazing writer.”
Sky smiled at me. “Your turn,” he said. “What was yours?”
“It was sort of long. It was about this John Keats poem that we read in English, the one that ends with ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’ I’ve been thinking about what that means. And then, when we were writing stuff down, I thought I understood it all of a sudden. The intention said, ‘Truth is beautiful, no matter what that truth is. Even if it’s scary or bad. It is beauty simply because it’s true. And truth is bright. Truth makes you more you. I want to be me.’”
When I finished, I was waiting for Sky to say something, but he just looked at me for a minute. “That’s pretty,” he finally answered, “but I don’t really get it. I mean, what is the truth you’re scared of?”
I shrugged. I thought somehow he’d understand. I thought somehow those words would have been enough to tell him everything I couldn’t say. “I don’t know,” I replied.
“If you want to be you, you can tell me. I want to know you.”
I wanted to tell him, but the story seemed to start such a long time ago. It didn’t fit into my mouth. It didn’t fit into my brain, even. It started when I figured out how things could get broken. When suddenly May couldn’t protect me anymore. It started when knowing that was sadder than all of the things themselves. My thoughts were spinning away, and then it hit me. She’s gone. I tried to push the reality away, but it was so heavy, I could barely breath.
“Laurel,” Sky said, “talk to me. Stop disappearing. Tell me something. Anything.”
I was spinning again. I started going backward, everything from the past blurring into the present, and through it all was the worst guilty feeling. I had to make it go away. I had to find May.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell you a secret.” I leaned into him and whispered, “I’m a fairy.”
Sky looked at me and raised his eyebrows.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” I said. “Watch, then, I’ll show you.” I got up and climbed onto the low wall at the edge of the balcony. “Close your eyes, and I’m going to fly off of this.” I ignored the voice in the back of my head that said, Only your sister has wings. It made me mad.
“Laurel, get down from there!” Sky said, from what felt like the distance.
“No. I want to fly. I want to fly like May,” I said, and started crying.
Sky came over and grabbed me, pulling me off the edge. I tried to hit him. I tried to hit him and hit him, but he wouldn’t let me. He held me tighter, so I couldn’t move.
And when I stopped, when I went limp in his arms, he lifted my face and said, “Laurel, I can’t do this. I can’t be with you if you’re going to be like this.”
“Be like what?” I asked. “How am I?”
“Like your sister,” he said.
“You don’t know what she was like. You didn’t really know her.” I paused. And then I asked, more quietly, “How did you know her?”
Sky just shook his head. “Come on,” he said. “You need to go to sleep.”
I was so tired all of a sudden, and so scared, and so ashamed. I could feel everything that’s bad about me and wrong and everything that I know I shouldn’t feel, all of the ways that I am angry at her rushing toward the surface. I followed him inside and lay on the couch. He brought me some water, and then he told me, “I’m going to go home.” I got the worst sinking feeling, like I’d ruined everything.
“Please don’t leave me.”
“I’m tired,” he said.
“Sky,” I said, “Sky, May wasn’t like that. She didn’t do it on purpose. She was good. She wasn’t like me.”
He just nodded. “All right, Laurel.”
“You know how good she was, right?”
Sky squinted back at me, like he didn’t know who he was looking at.
“Say yes,” I said, frantic.
“Yes,” he said. But then he added, “She wasn’t perfect.”
I wanted to scream that he was wrong, but I couldn’t find my voice. I kept hearing his words echo in my head as I lay on the couch watching him walk away from me. I kept hearing it all night, until I finally fell asleep, and woke up from a dream where May came back, her fairy wings shimmering and intact. She said she hadn’t died after all. She’d just flown away for a bit.
I called Sky this morning, but there was no answer.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Kurt,
Today is a day when the world turns out to be flat. January fourth. It’s a taking-down-the-Christmas-tree day. We waited too long this year, until all the pine needles were brittle and shedding so hard they fell past their snow-white sheet and onto the carpet, and finally started to show up in the kitchen. Neither Dad nor
I had the heart to do it. Until I woke up this morning and I knew it couldn’t go on any longer—Dad and I looking at each other over Rice Krispies and not saying anything about the dying tree or taking it down, not saying anything about anything, me just putting my ear to the cereal bowl like I used to and making some lame joke about snap crackle pop.
So today when I woke up early, I went in my pajamas and started unscrewing the base, and by the time Dad walked out I had the whole tree over my shoulder, and it was raining its needles all over the cream carpet as I carried it to the door.
Dad asked, “What are you doing?”
“Taking down the tree.”
“Here, let me help.”
“No,” I snapped, without meaning to. “I can do it myself.”
When I got outside, I didn’t know what to do with it. So I went to the toolshed and looked around until I found a saw. I laid the tree down on the cement and started tearing through its trunk, until it was in jagged pieces. The smell of pine was overwhelming, like the tree’s heart was leaking out. I piled the series of sawed-off limbs next to the trash.
When I went inside, Dad was vacuuming up the last of the needles on the floor. The sound covered my stomach’s growl as I walked past him and into the kitchen to pour some Rice Krispies.
Dad came in and poured himself a bowl. He was wearing his work clothes, ready to go. “What do you have on the docket for your last day of vacation?” he asked, looking at me expectantly.
“Oh, just a little TV in my pajamas,” I said, giving him a weak smile. I don’t have to go back to school until tomorrow, thanks to teacher planning day.
“Where’s that boyfriend of yours?” Dad asked. “You think you might want to bring him around in daylight hours one of these days?”
“Uh-huh,” I said, my heart plunging into my stomach. I didn’t want to tell Dad the truth, that Sky hadn’t called me back in five days.
And then, as I picked up my spoon to try to force down some cereal, I saw it. One of the little plastic spiders I’d given Dad for Christmas, floating in my bowl. He must have snuck it into the cereal box. I did my best to laugh, and then I looked up at him. He was smiling so hopefully. “Gotcha,” he said, before he left for work.