When Hannah first moved here in seventh grade, she dated one of the most popular eighth-grade soccer boys. Then she dated another soccer boy and another, and then by the time she was in eighth grade she dated a couple of guys in high school. Even though Hannah could have hung out with anyone at her new middle school, even the popular girls, Hannah said that she picked Natalie because she could tell that Natalie “got it.”
“What’s ‘it’?” I asked.
Hannah shrugged. “What it’s like to be different, even if you don’t want everyone to know it. Like, I knew that I could have Natalie spend the night, and she wouldn’t be too weirded out by the fact that I love my horse and live with my grandparents who are going deaf and have a mean brother who likes to yell a lot.”
Hannah also told me about this guy, Kasey, who she’s “messing around with.” That’s what she says. She met him at her job at Japanese Kitchen when he was there with a bunch of his friends for someone’s birthday. (It’s a good place to go for birthdays, because the chefs cook in front of you and do fire tricks at the table.) He’s in college, so honestly, it’s really strange for him to want to date a girl so much younger. It makes me a little bit nervous for Hannah because of this older guy who May used to date, named Paul. When I asked Hannah why she was dating someone in college, she just laughed and said, “I’m precocious.”
I guess Kasey actually likes Hannah more than just to mess around with, because he sends her flowers—red tulips, which are her favorite. She likes to show them off for everyone at school. Principal Weiner is getting tired of Hannah having deliveries in the office, but Hannah says that the flowers are from her uncle for her to bring to her grandma, who’s sick at home. The principal asks why he doesn’t just send them to the house, and Hannah says that it’s because no one answers the door there, so they would just wilt in the sun. The principal knows Hannah’s lying, but she can’t say much, on account of Hannah’s grandma being sick and her grandpa being too hard of hearing to understand the principal if she tries to complain, and probably too tired to care much, anyway. So as it is, Hannah carries Kasey’s flowers from class to class, puts them on her desk, and slumps down behind them so that the teachers can hardly see her. And she leans over to Natalie’s desk and makes silly faces.
I think Natalie sort of hates the flowers and hates that Hannah gets them. Because she’s always saying how she doesn’t believe in flowers or things like that. But I don’t know if that’s completely true, because she’s making Hannah a painting of tulips in her art class. Natalie showed it to me after school the other day, but she told me not to tell Hannah about it. It’s a surprise. Natalie is really a good painter. The first petal of the tulip already had more shades of color than you could count.
I am at Dad’s this week, which means I usually take the city bus home, because he works too late to pick me up. But today, instead of going right home after school, I walked with Natalie and Hannah to get Dairy Queen. On the way there, Natalie and Hannah kept wanting to flash people. I was scared of doing it at first, but I tried to remind myself to swallow what scares me, the way I learned to do when I’d go out with May. And I ran really fast afterward. I outran Natalie and Hannah every time. They’d catch up to me a few blocks later, still screaming and giggling. And then I’d scream and giggle, too, and the worst part was over, and I was happy to be one of them.
Hannah bought us our ice cream (she looked proud to be able to do this), and then she had to leave to go to work. Even though she’s late for class a lot, Hannah’s always on time for her job. Before she went, she said she and Natalie are going to spend the night at Natalie’s house tomorrow, which is Friday, and that I should come. I was so happy when she asked, because it means that we are becoming real friends.
Dad came back from work a few minutes after I got home from Dairy Queen. He works at Rhodes Construction, fixing the broken foundations of houses and things like that. When May and I were kids, Dad used to walk in the door in the evening and we’d run to hug him. I loved how he’d be covered with sweat and dirt, like he’d been on an adventure. Mom would be making dinner, the smell of fried meat and chili filling up the house. She cooked like a baker, Dad always said. She didn’t throw in ingredients and taste later. Each was perfectly measured.
But life isn’t like that. You can’t be sure how it’s going to come out, even if you do everything right. They turn around on you, lives do. Dad used to come home and look strong from the day of building. Now he looks tired, like a bulldozer ran him over. When May and I were kids, he used to be good to climb on. But now it’s like I’m afraid if I get too close to him, I’ll trip and spill out all the sadness he’s keeping hidden.
He used to love to play jokes on all of us, like switching salt with sugar (he did this so much that we got used to shaking it out on our hands and licking it to determine which was which). Mom got annoyed by it, but May and I thought it was funny. He’d hide his alarm clock on the weekends, under a couch cushion or something, and we’d have to go running through the house to find it when the alarm went off. Or sometimes he’d poke holes in the apples in the fridge and stick gummy worms in. This was our favorite, because it meant candy. He doesn’t do that sort of stuff anymore, but he still kisses my forehead when he walks in the door. Then he asks about my day, like he knows he should, and I do my best to make it sound good.
Tonight I made microwave mac and cheese with little mini hot dogs for us for dinner, which is our favorite. We still have food in the freezer from May’s memorial nearly six months ago, but I don’t think either of us wants to eat it.
“So you’re making friends?” he asked over our mac and cheese.
“Yep.” I smiled.
“That’s great,” Dad said.
“Actually, I was going to ask you, can I spend the night at my friend Natalie’s tomorrow?”
Dad hesitated a moment, and I crossed my fingers under the table. Finally he said, “Sure, Laurel.” He paused and added, “I don’t want you cooped up with me.”
Then he turned on the baseball game—he’s a Cubs fan, because he grew up in Iowa near their farm team—and I watched with him while I did my homework. Dad used to give me “baseball is like life” lectures, but he doesn’t do that anymore. Now we just watch in silence. I guess some things turned out too sad even to be explained with a bases-loaded strikeout.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Kurt,
Last night, I got drunk for the first time. When I got to Natalie’s for the sleepover, we walked to the grocery store, which felt too cold in that air conditioner way. We walked half shivering down the liquor aisle, and Natalie pulled a bottle of cinnamon After Shock off the shelf and into her halfway-on hoodie. Then we took it to the bathroom and peeled off the label so it wouldn’t beep. I ignored my quick-beating heart and tried to act normal, like I’d done this sort of thing before. I didn’t say anything about the woman’s feet with mom sneakers and a little girl in the next stall. Then we just walked right out.
We went back to Natalie’s house, where we were alone, because her mom was on a date that night. Natalie said that means she doesn’t get back till morning. We climbed up onto her flat roof with the bottle. The After Shock had cinnamon-flavor crystals in the bottom, and when I first took a sip it burned like someone lit a sweet fire in my mouth. I swallowed fast and didn’t make a face, and I didn’t tell them that it was my first time ever drinking. I thought if May did it, I could, too. How bad could it be? So I let the liquor burn down my throat and into my stomach. It made me laugh and got my body loose, until I forgot to be afraid. We lay down on our backs to watch the planes pass overhead and made up a song about them. I don’t remember the words, though I keep trying. I do remember that Hannah’s voice sounded like the cinnamon crystals, sweet and full of fire. I think she really could be a singer.
I am not sure what happened next, but then we were down from the roof and Natalie and Hannah had gone into the backyard to jump on her old trampoline. I was in
the front yard on a hammock swinging, and the stars were buzzing toward me.
I remembered how May would sneak out at night and I’d wait up in bed until I heard her come back in. Usually I’d just listen to her tiptoe down the hall and close her door, and then I’d know that I could sleep because she was safe. But once in a while, and this is what I loved the best, she’d come to my room instead and whisper, “Are you up?” My eyes would pop open, and I’d whisper that I was, and she’d come to lie on my bed. I remembered how her breath would smell sweet and hot, like alcohol, I guess. How a smile would spread slowly across her face and she’d laugh in a whisper and slur her words a little, like every sound led into another. As she’d tell me about her adventures—the boys and the kissing and the fast cars—I pictured it sort of like I did when we were little kids, when I believed that May had fairy wings and I’d imagine her on her flights through the night, swooping under the stars.
When I looked up from where I was on the hammock, all of a sudden the stars started buzzing too loudly, and I didn’t feel right. I wondered if this was what it was really like for May on those nights, if the stars spun around her until she was dizzy and she didn’t know where she was anymore.
I was scared suddenly and I couldn’t keep my head straight. I worried that bad things were coming into my mind, so I went to find Hannah and Natalie. When I walked through the wooden gate into the backyard, I saw them there on the trampoline. They were kissing. Real kissing. And jumping all at the same time. They looked up for an instant and saw me watching, and then they kind of fell. Natalie started screaming. She had chipped her tooth on Hannah’s tooth. She started looking everywhere for the lost piece of her tooth. I tried to help find it, but it was nowhere on the smooth black surface of the trampoline, and it was nowhere in the dirt. She got worried that she swallowed it. And Hannah got worried that I would tell everyone at school what Natalie had been doing when she chipped her tooth, even though I swore I wouldn’t. Hannah started telling me I had to kiss Natalie, too, or else I would tell. I couldn’t be the only one who wasn’t kissing, she said. But I didn’t want to. They weren’t listening. Natalie grabbed me and said she was going to kiss me to seal the secret. Suddenly it was hard for me to breathe. I gasped for air. I ran.
I ended up in the park near school. I sat down on the swing and started swinging as high as I could, higher and higher, until it felt like the night was rushing into me, until it felt like I would go all the way over the bar. And then I jumped, and flew, and landed in the sand. I climbed onto a jungle gym like the one that used to be our ship when I would go to the park with Mom and May. We had to sail through a sea full of sea monsters to rescue the mermaids. And I started to cry.
The air smelled like fire smoke and fall leaves. It smelled a way that makes you feel how the world is right up close, rubbing against you. My head was starting to really hurt. It was late, and I didn’t know what to do, so I went back to Natalie’s. She and Hannah were asleep on the trampoline. I crawled underneath and slept on the ground.
The next day when we woke up with dew on our clothes, Natalie’s mom was making pancakes and bacon and called us in for breakfast. It smelled in the kitchen the way you want home to be. She said we were silly girls for sleeping outside. She was being nice, I think, because of her date. Natalie’s mom doesn’t look like other moms. Natalie said she works as a secretary in a law office, but for the weekend morning, she was wearing a shirt knotted above her belly button with cutoffs, and her dark hair up in a high ponytail. We all ate and were pretty quiet, just answering her mom’s questions, which were too cheerful. When she asked Natalie, “What happened to your tooth?” Natalie looked nervous for a minute. I knew it was my chance to show her I would keep their secret, so I said, “We got burgers from McDonald’s, and hers had a bone in it!” Hannah started laughing and said, “Sick, huh?!” I think since her mom felt guilty about sleeping over at her date’s house, she didn’t notice that we were guilty, too. Hannah picked a leaf out of my hair and handed it to me. Its veins threaded in tiny patterns through the yellow skin.
We never talked about the kissing, and at school on Monday, we acted normal. I made sure to have enough money for Nutter Butters at lunch, and I shared them with my friends. I looked at Sky and laughed when Hannah said he was undressing me in his mind. It was like nothing had happened. I tried not to, but I noticed the tiny piece of one of Natalie’s perfect teeth missing.
Kurt, I have this feeling like you know May, and Hannah and Natalie, and me, too. Like you can see into us. You sang the fear, and the anger, and all of the feelings that people are afraid to admit to. Even me. But I know you didn’t want to be our hero. You didn’t want to be an idol. You just wanted to be yourself. You just wanted us to hear the music.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Judy Garland,
When parents talk about their pasts, the stories start to stick in your head. But the memories that you inherit look different from the now-world, and different from your own memories, too. Like they have a color all their own. I don’t mean sepia-toned or something. My parents aren’t even that old. I just mean that there is something particular about their glow.
When I think of the stories that I know about your childhood and your family, I see them in almost the same color that I see my parents’ stories. I’m not sure why, but maybe it has to do with the happy-sad of it all. Or maybe it’s because of how my mom used to say that your movies gave her hope when she was younger.
She loved to watch them with us, so I don’t only know you from The Wizard Of Oz. We saw you in everything—Easter Parade, Babes on Broadway, Meet Me in St. Louis. On movie nights, May and I used to get up from the couch and sing along with you—“Zing zing zing went my heartstrings,” May would belt out as she pranced through the living room.
Mom said that when she was a little girl, she wanted to be like you. My dad came from a pretty perfect family, but Mom didn’t, and maybe that was the biggest difference between them. Mom grew up here, in Albuquerque. She never told us specifics, but her own mom (who died when I was little) was more or less an alcoholic, and I think her dad was pretty hard on her and Aunt Amy before he got cancer. He died when she was eighteen and Aunt Amy was twenty-one. Afterward, Mom’s mom kept drinking too much, Aunt Amy found God and got a job as a waitress, and Mom moved into a studio apartment and got a bartending job so she could start saving up money to go to California to follow her dream of becoming an actress.
In the meantime, she took acting classes and starred in shows at the local theater. Her best part came right after her twentieth birthday. She played Cosette in Les Mis, and the papers gave her rave reviews. She saved them in a scrapbook that she used to show to us when we were kids.
One night, Dad stopped into the bar where Mom worked. He was passing through town, back in what he called his “wild days,” when he rode his motorcycle across the country. Based on the old pictures, May and I thought he was quite a stud. Mom must have thought he was, too, because when he came into the bar, she asked him to come and see her in Les Mis the next night.
Dad said it only took the length of the performance for him to fall in love. When it was over, he was waiting outside of Mom’s dressing room with a bouquet of daisies. She invited him over to her apartment, and they stayed up late, stargazing on the roof of the building and talking. After that, Dad found a job in town working on a construction crew for a new hotel, and he saw Mom as much as he could. They rode the tramway to the top of the mountains, watched the watermelon-colored sunsets, and danced in Mom’s little studio to Beatles songs. Four months later, Mom found out she was pregnant with May, and they decided to get married.
When Mom told the story, she said that she’d always wanted a home, but it wasn’t until she had us that she knew what that meant. Now that I’m writing it down to tell you, it seems like a tragedy. But when we were growing up, we thought it was romantic. May would ask to hear the story over and over, and Mom loved to tell May how she wa
s the spark that started it all. “You were ready to come into the world, and so you did. We have you to thank for us, baby girl.”
When we were little, Mom still used to go to auditions sometimes for theater productions or local commercials. Once she got a part in a commercial for the Rio Grande Credit Union. They shot her waking up on the steps of a new house in her pajamas, saying, “Am I dreaming?” Then a lady dressed as the credit union fairy drops keys into her hand. We’d squeal when the ad came on TV, saying, “Look, it’s you, Mommy!”
But mostly the auditions didn’t work out, and she’d come home like a balloon whose air had been let out. Eventually, she said that she’d missed her window, and that if you want to be a real actress, you have to live in California. She took up painting instead and got a job filing papers in a doctor’s office. She said that she thought being a mom was her real job. She said that we were her greatest accomplishment.
Mom would say all the time how she wanted us to have happy childhoods, happier than her own. Sometimes she’d ask us if we were happy, and we’d always say yes. Still, she said that she wished she could give us more. She liked to talk about somedays. Someday we’ll have a house with a pool. Someday we’ll learn to ride horses. Someday we’ll have beautiful dresses with sequins head to toe, like the ones on TV. Someday we’ll go to California. We’ll see the ocean together.
She and May and I used to talk about it, planning the perfect road trip. Mom would say that the waves sound better than trains at night and better than rain and better than a crackling fire. We used to plan how, when we had the money, we’d get on I–40 and just drive. We’d stop along the way at Arby’s for “roast beast” sandwiches (we called them that because of How the Grinch Stole Christmas). We’d get a hotel room and stay up all night watching movies and drinking sodas with ice from the ice maker, and the next day, we’d drive all the way to where the land meets the water.