When I walked in the house that night, I found my dad sitting alone at the kitchen table. He had a book open in front of him like he was reading, but upon closer inspection I saw that it was the operating manual for our stove. He was just kind of staring at it, like he had grabbed the first thing he’d found, like it was just a prop to convince the casual viewer that he was doing anything other than sitting, being sad, doing nothing. I wanted to tell him what was in Aunt Helen’s letters. I wanted to show him—look, see, she’s not really all gone yet—but I couldn’t bring myself to speak. I didn’t want to interrupt him, intrude on whatever thoughts he was lost in. So I went upstairs.
That night, alone in my bedroom, I read the next letter from Aunt Helen.
As usual, the sight of her handwriting made my breath catch in my throat.
Dear Lottie,
Nothing like a good book, huh?
I’ve been asked a hundred million billion times—where did you get the idea for Alvin Hatter? Is he based on a real person? He seems so real!
I can think of a million characters who have seemed as real to me. Edmund in Narnia—such a little shit but at least so unabashedly true to his every desire. He’s the realest one of them because he makes mistakes, he owns up to them, he forges forward even when his brother and sisters hate him for it. Alice in Wonderland—real enough to cry an entire lake’s worth of suffering, real enough to make an entire imaginary world seem similarly real. Milo in the Tollbooth land—real enough to admit the hardest thing in the world, that contentment sometimes leads to the sharpest of boredoms, that often our own brains are our very worst enemies.
I could go on and on. But I think that is the best compliment to give a writer—your characters seem so real. That’s what makes a book, isn’t it? That’s why I’ve read PRIDE AND PREJUDICE a thousand times and STILL can’t figure Mr. Darcy out. That’s why we return again and again to Middle Earth, to Discworld, to Never-Never Land.
I’m rambling again. It’s so easy to ramble in these, you see, because I have an endless supply of blank paper and a love for filling it up with ink. And I don’t have to imagine any scenario in which you don’t read every word, and happily, because they’re my letters and I’ll be gone when you read them and then it will be up to you. Does that make any sense? It’s late. I guess I’m getting tired.
Is Alvin based on a real person? Oh, of course, and of course not, because everything we can ever write is just a mixture of all the things we already know and all the things we’re just guessing at. It’s contrariwise, as Alice would say.
But let’s suppose for a minute that he is real.
Let’s suppose for a minute that the idea of a forever boy wasn’t entirely ludicrous.
What would YOU do, Lottie, if you were immortal?
What would you do if you knew you could not be hurt doing it?
I think you should do something a little reckless. Just a little, to see how it feels.
—H.
I went to school Monday wondering what I could possibly do that was reckless enough as to be a little unsafe, not reckless enough as to cause me any real harm. I kept coming up blank.
First period Em and I had history together. We sat in the back, and I passed her a note that said:
I have to do something a little bit reckless. Any ideas?
She read, considered, then wrote:
I know exactly what to do. Your aunt would approve.
What?
Secret.
This is terrifying.
That’s a good sign.
When?
After school. We’ll have to swing by your place first to pick something up.
Pick what up?
Secret.
Em looked too pleased with herself, which made me nervous.
There were a lot of things Em might consider an appropriate amount of reckless. Skydiving. Bungee jumping. Zip-lining.
All things Em would find perfectly acceptable for a Monday after-school event.
Em jabbed me in the side with a pen and handed me another note.
It said:
Relax. I know you.
That was true. Em did know me, and she wouldn’t take me skydiving.
She would never take me skydiving.
I scribbled a quick message and threw it back at her:
Is it skydiving??
She read it, rolled her eyes, and didn’t look at me for the rest of the class.
When the bell rang I tried to grab her arm, but she was excellent at evading me. It helped that she was so fast. She was out of the room before I’d even packed up my things. I started rushing, shoving my history book and notebook and pen into my bag quickly so I wouldn’t be alone for too long. I’d already been approached by four people telling me how sorry they were about my aunt, and I’d only been at school an hour.
It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate it.
Because I did.
But it also made me a little angry.
I mean—it was bad enough that she was dead. I didn’t really need the constant reminders.
The thing we needed from my house was small enough to fit in Em’s backpack, which, to be fair, was kind of a big backpack. I had no idea where she was heading, but I’d decided to go with it.
Em drove a black Jetta she’d bought secondhand with her own money (she’d worked at a juicery in town since she was fourteen, “Not because I think juice cleanses work, Lottie, but because everybody else does.”). She’d named the car Joan Jetta, something she thought was very clever, and she told anyone who showed even the slightest interest.
“Are we going alone?” I asked when she merged onto the highway.
“Jackie has dance—”
“I can’t believe you’re actually dating a ballerina.”
“And Abe said he’s been spending too much time with you as it is. And I’ve been getting the feeling you need some alone time lately. And yes, I’m dating a ballerina and you’re clearly jealous.”
“By alone time, do you mean alone time with you?”
“Of course I mean alone time with me. Gross, do you want alone time with, like, just yourself?”
“That’s actually what alone time is, you know. Like—alone.”
“Whoever invented alone time did not have a best friend as interesting as I am.”
Em liked being alone when she was sleeping. Other than that she was either with me or Jackie or with various members of the track team.
She wouldn’t tell me where we were going. All I knew is that we were headed toward the ocean. She stopped at a drive-through and bought us fries and salads (I never asked questions when it came to her culinary preferences), and we ate them in turns, passing each between us. I found myself wondering, not for the first time, what the rest of my aunt’s instructions would be. And also—why had she written the letters in the first place? Because I couldn’t deny that it was nice to have them, but it was also sort of frustrating. Was there something obvious they were doing that I wasn’t smart enough to see yet?
But at the same time I found myself wishing they would never stop, because as weird or creepy as it might have been to get messages from beyond the grave, I missed my aunt too much to say good-bye quite yet. And so much of her writing was public and popular. . . . I liked that these were just for me.
“Lottie, seriously? You have such a problem sharing,” Em said, grabbing the almost-empty carton of fries from me.
“Sorry,” I said. But I wasn’t sorry. You should never apologize for fries.
“We’re almost there, anyway. Are you excited? Any ideas?”
I looked around the car for a landmark, but all these little seaside towns started to look alike after a while. I hadn’t been paying attention; I had no idea what exit we’d gotten off.
“I don’t know where we are,” I said.
“Seriously? You are so unobservant.”
“Are we going to the Nautilus?”
“We are nowhere near the Nautilus,” she said, sighing. “I worry about you. If your phone died and you woke up in the middle of nowhere, you would literally never find your way home. You would end up in Tibet.”
“Tibet?”
“Yes. I am absolutely certain that you would end up in Tibet. And then you would ask to borrow a stranger’s phone and you would try and call me, but we both know you haven’t looked at my phone number since the day you saved it to your phone. That’s the problem with all of us.”
“That we don’t memorize phone numbers anymore?”
“No. Yes. Well—that is one of the problems with all of us.”
“Someday I’d love to hear your breakdown of all the things that are wrong with people nowadays.”
“It’s a long list.”
“And really, where the hell are we?”
Em didn’t answer but pulled her car into a dirt parking lot. She chose a spot in the shade and turned to look at me.
“Do you remember that place your aunt used to take us swimming? We were young, you know, I hadn’t even come out yet, but my mom knew, and she was already convinced I was going to the special hell they have for people who like people with the same genitalia as them. Because it’s so important, you know? What our genitalia looks like. It’s, like, a very big deal to the big guy.”
It made me uncomfortable when Em got like this, so down on her mom, but I couldn’t really blame her. Her mom really did think like that. It was so sad.
“I remember.”
“Well,” she said, and swept her arm in front of her.
“You want to go swimming? That’s not really that reckless.”
“No, I don’t want to go swimming,” Em said. “Just follow me.”
We got out of the car. It was hot and a little muggy, and I thought we were heading down to the beach, but Em led me up a little path that led to the top of a cliff that overlooked the water. We got sweaty and out of breath almost immediately. We passed a few people coming down, but when we finally got up there, we were alone.
Em took a bathing suit out of her backpack and handed it to me.
She smiled her special kind of smile, the one where her face got darker and her eyes got very bright and you were suddenly absolutely terrified of whatever it was she was planning.
Then it dawned on me.
“Absolutely not!” I shrieked, backing away from the cliff’s edge, throwing my bathing suit at her.
She caught it with one hand and said, “Get naked, Lottie. We’re doing this.”
“We are not doing this, Em. If you think I’m jumping off this cliff . . .”
“I know you’re jumping off this cliff, Lottie. I can see the future, and it very much consists of you and me jumping off this cliff.”
“You’re insane. We will literally break our entire bodies.”
“Oh, relax. I’ve done it before. Abe did it when he was twelve. Don’t tell your parents that. Nothing is going to happen to you.”
“That water is freezing. And very, very far away.”
“Trust me, Lottie. You will be perfectly fine. All we have to do is jump far enough to clear the rocks that stick out—”
“Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.”
“I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.”
“Says the lady who’s about to push me off a cliff!”
“I would never push you off a cliff. We are going to jump. Together. It’s going to be great. And don’t you see the parallel here? It’s kind of ingenious.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t know what I’m . . . Alvin Hatter and the House in the Middle of the Woods!”
Oh. Right. At the very end of Alvin Hatter and the House in the Middle of the Woods, the Overcoat Man catches up to Margo and Alvin. He knows they’ve found a way to get into the house that holds all the magic of the world, and he wants them to tell him how. In a final life-and-death struggle, the Overcoat Man pushes Margo to her death over the cliff and then flees. But of course she doesn’t die, because she’s already drank the Everlife Formula, and she’s immortal (Alvin drinks it right after this, because he can’t deny the appeal of not dying when pushed off cliffs).
“But we’re not Margo, Em. We are going to die.”
Em kept trying to give me the bathing suit, and I kept pushing it back at her. Finally she threw it at my feet and took her clothes off. She was wearing her own bathing suit already: black with teal polka dots. She shoved her clothes in her backpack and crossed her arms, staring at me.
“Em . . .”
“Look, Lottie, I get it. I get that you’re scared of hurting yourself and you’re scared of dying, but you can’t go through life that way.”
“I can absolutely go through life without ever jumping off a cliff,” I argued.
“Yes, you can, but you can’t go through life without taking risks. And this is a risk, sure, but it’s a relatively small one compared to the risk of getting into an accident every time you get in a car or the risk of losing your luggage when you go on a plane or the risk of getting a paper cut every time you pick up a notebook. Life is a risk, Lottie. Sometimes you have to answer its call.”
She had gotten more and more exaggerated throughout the speech, and by the time she finished she had jumped up on a rock and was practically screaming.
“Did you practice that?” I asked.
“Obviously, yes. On Jackie in fourth period.”
I stared at her for a minute. She was an inimitable staring-contest contestant; she could go without blinking for hours.
“Okay, fine,” I said, already pulling my shirt over my head, kicking my shorts down to my ankles.
“Fine, fine, fine,” before I could change my mind.
“Fine, fine, fine,” before I could think of the million reasons this was a terrible idea.
Em picked my bathing suit off the ground and held it out for me as I stripped naked. She’d seen me naked a hundred times, but I appreciated that she squeezed her eyes shut (and held her breath, like a dweeb) until I snapped the shoulders of the suit, signaling that I’d gotten it on. She had brought my one piece, a very old suit that was starting to fade. I felt twelve in it, like a kid only playing at the idea of maybe one day being an adult. Em turned around and raised her eyebrows and whistled in appreciation.
“Oh, shut up.”
“Can’t a friend tell a friend she looks like a super cutie?” Em said. Then she dug around in her backpack for her phone, and we took a photo of the two of us. Okay, we took about ten photos, smiling in some and laughing in some and making weird faces in some. Then Em tucked the phone back in her backpack and took my hand. “No more stalling.”
My stomach flipped over as she pulled me closer to the edge.
“What about your bag?”
“There’s no one around. We’ll come back and get it after we jump.”
“What if we die?”
“Then we won’t be around to care about the bag. Win-win.”
I looked down and my stomach flopped again and my heart started racing like mad. I couldn’t do this. If the fall didn’t kill me, the heart attack would.
“What about . . . I mean, we’re going to be wet. So. We’re just going to be really wet.”
“There are towels in my trunk. Relax. I’ve thought this through. You need to breathe.”
I tried to, but my lungs weren’t working right. They’d taken the afternoon off. They’d found something better to do.
“On three,” Em said.
I missed my aunt.
“One . . .”
I didn’t want to die.
“Two . . .”
I wasn’t like Margo.
“THREE!”
I was doing this.
Em gripped my hand tighter and pulled me forward, and I bent my knees and jumped, propelling myself off the cliff with a force that came from somewhere foreign, somewhere new. The air was instantly colder, the wind rushed by my ears in a strange, long howl that mixed with Em’s whoop of pure joy, every color of the world blending together before my eyes and mixing into one beautiful blue and green and red and yellow blur until—
We hit the freezing-cold water with an unexpected jolt.
My mouth filled with salt and bubbles, and every inch of my skin was on fire, some strange confusion between freezing and boiling. And Em’s hand had slipped from mine, and I didn’t know which way was up. When I opened my eyes everything was dark. I paddled frantically toward the surface but it wasn’t the surface, so I turned around but that wasn’t the right way either. I had survived the fall, but I was going to die anyway; I was going to drown out here. That seemed exactly like something I would do. If only I had Em’s fearlessness or my brother’s strength or my mom’s perseverance or my dad’s dumb luck. If only I had something . . .
I almost screamed when I felt something wrap itself around my arm (tentacles? teeth?), but you can’t scream underwater, and it came out as a gurgled moan. Then something was pulling me up and up and up, and my head broke the surface of the water and without meaning to I was laughing, laughing, laughing and breathing deep gulps of air and alive, really, and so happy I could cry.
Em was laughing too, and throwing her arms around me and kissing my cheek and practically pushing me under the surface again. We swam and kicked our way to the shore and pulled ourselves onto the rocks there, both just happy in that moment to be alive and together.
Is this what you meant? I thought to myself, a question for someone who would never be able to answer me. Is this what you wanted me to do?
Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t, but at any rate, it felt okay.