I’d missed most days of school last week, and now that I was back in the swing of things, I couldn’t help but notice how many people seemed interested in me. Abe too—when I saw him in the hallways, he was constantly surrounded by a small gathering of people I didn’t recognize. I even saw someone handing him an Alvin book, but I turned away before I could figure out what they wanted. I would recognize those covers from miles away, from outer space, and I was mortified to think they might be asking Abe to sign it. Not like he would, of course.
I really, really hoped he wouldn’t.
I got to my study period before anyone else and took a seat near the back. I took out To the Lighthouse, a book I was supposed to have finished last week (a bereavement absence gave many leniencies for missed assignments). I’d only read a paragraph before my phone buzzed.
The text was from Abe.
Meet me in the bathroom.
A weird text to get from your brother maybe, but I knew he meant the second-floor boys’ bathrooms. They were kept locked and supposed to be only for teachers, but Abe was so well liked (and Aunt Helen was so recently deceased), I had a hunch he’d weaseled his way in.
I let the study hall teacher know where I was going, and then I made my way to the second floor. I knocked on the door to the bathrooms and waited—nothing. I knocked again. Then I called his phone and heard the buzzing from within.
“Open up!” I hissed when he answered.
The door opened a minute later, and he pulled me inside, locking the door behind me.
“Well, this is a nice surprise!” he said, leaning up against a sink like this was his private office. “How’d you know where to find me?”
“You literally just told me.”
“Can’t be too careful, though,” he said.
“What do you want?”
“Just to see my sister. Is that a crime now?”
“Have you been to any classes today? You look pretty comfortable in here.”
“Relax, I’ve been to all my classes. We just haven’t gotten a chance to talk lately, and Mom possibly let it slip that the letters Harry gave you in his office were some kind of list from Aunt Helen? I was just curious.”
“Oh.”
I hadn’t told my brother, hadn’t told my father, had kind of given the Cliff’s Notes version to my mom and Em and Sam. They still felt just too private a thing, too close to me.
I had the next one with me now, in my back pocket, waiting for the right moment. A chance to be alone. I’d gotten home late last night and didn’t want to rush through it.
“They are, kind of. Lists. More like . . . things to do.”
“Things to do.”
“Like, going to the party. That was one of them.”
“What else?”
“Different things. I think she just wanted to make sure I was okay. You know. When she knew she wouldn’t be here.”
“Oh,” Abe said.
“What do you mean?”
“I just said oh.”
“But you said it like it meant something.”
“Well, it just makes sense.”
“What makes sense?”
“Mom told me, you know, and it just made me wonder. Why she had left something like that to you and not to me.”
“And now it makes sense?”
“Because she thought you would have needed it more.”
“Oh.” A track record of panic attacks and the kind of anxiety that didn’t let you sleep. Obviously people had known, my family had known, Em had known. But to hear it like that from my brother? It was just . . . something. I didn’t know what it was.
“It’s not a bad thing,” Abe said quickly. “I shouldn’t have said it like that.”
“No, it’s totally fine. It’s just a thing. It’s not a bad thing,” I repeated. And it wasn’t a secret, I reminded myself. One of the downsides of having such a close family: things weren’t secret.
“I’m sorry. But you’re doing so much better now, so probably she just wanted to check in with you.”
“Yeah, probably,” I said, thinking my aunt had probably not written twenty-four letters for the simple purpose of checking in with me.
“What are you supposed to do next?”
“I don’t know; I haven’t read the next letter yet.”
“I’ll go!”
“What?”
“This is perfect; nobody ever comes in here, so you’ll have privacy. I’ll go, and then we can just talk later, okay?”
I could tell Abe felt bad. He was practically tripping over himself to get out of the bathroom (four things he hated the most: hugs, confrontation, hurting people’s feelings, and people who dog-eared the pages of books). I barely had time to say good-bye before he disappeared out the door.
Now that I was alone in the bathroom, though, I saw Abe’s point. I had privacy, I had time, I had toilets: What else could I really ask for? I pulled myself up to sit on the row of sinks and started reading.
Lottie,
There are many different types of writing. Light-hearted, serious, believable, fantastical, political, romantical . . . I’ve spent my life writing about a little immortal boy and his sister, Margo, and I’ve had such a nice time doing it. Writing isn’t for everyone. It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. It takes a little bit of talent, but mostly it takes practice and determination. There’s a saying, something about talent and work and the ratio of 10 percent to 90 percent, respectively. I agree with that completely. I’ve watched hugely talented (more talented than I, certainly) people do nothing at all with their writing, and I’ve watched people who can’t write a proper sentence chug through it and patch together a story and go on to become a best-selling novelist (no names). You can see, then, how perseverance is really the key to any sort of success.
But aside from Alvin Hatter, I’ve really been writing all my life. You have my journals now (not quite time to read them yet) and my computer, and I really think I’ve written about a thousand times more words than I’ve actually seen published. That’s a good thing. There’s a lot of junk in my brain that needed to come out before the really good stuff could find its way.
So, something easy next:
Write in your journal, Lottie. You used to do it all the time, and I think it might be good for you.
Who knows, maybe you’ll even discover your own immortal boy.
Love, H.
My first journal was a gift from Aunt Helen when I was eight years old. I filled it with glittery cat stickers and stick figure drawings and profound musings on the day, like: Peter Garbo is an idiot and Abe eats his own boogers and If I could be any animal in the world it would be a cat with wings. Rainbow wings.
When I had filled it up, I presented it to Aunt Helen proudly, and she pretended to be floored by my observations.
“This is great stuff, Lottie. Someday you’ll look back on this and be happy you wrote it all down.”
She bought me another one, and I went through two or three a year until I was fifteen and it suddenly felt like all the things I wanted to write about were too heavy for the paper. My anxiety was worse than ever, my brain was a treacherous place to navigate, and I thought those feelings might be better left trapped inside me than free to fill up a page.
So I piled the journals in a box in my closet.
I hadn’t looked at them in years, but that night I took the last half-finished journal from the box and went into the attic, which was hot and stuffy but at least afforded the maximum amount of privacy, and I wrote.
Or—I tried to write.
My pen hung an inch or so above the paper, but I couldn’t think of anything to do with it. Where there used to be words, there was now only a quiet kind of emptiness. My ears were fuzzy and ringing slightly, like how I imagined it would sound to be buried alive.
I’d been thinking a lot about death lately. About the many different ways a person could die.
I’d been doing so well keeping my anxiety under control, but then Aunt Helen had died, and it was like a flood had washed into my brain.
Now all I could think about was being buried alive and getting cancer and even the most obscure, unlikely deaths, like elevation sickness on Mount Everest and spontaneous human combustion.
I tried to focus on the blank page in front of me but instead of being comforted by that finite expanse of white, I imagined it stretching out to fill up the room, choking me in its blankness, taking over everything.
I closed my eyes and squeezed the pen tighter in my hand, and then I opened my eyes and wrote:
I miss Aunt Helen a lot.
And then:
I feel like I didn’t do enough.
But what else could I have done? I wasn’t a doctor, and even if I were, they said Aunt Helen’s cancer was the type you couldn’t cure.
So why did it feel like I was somehow to blame? Why did I find it so hard to forgive myself for something I had no control over?
I’m so sorry.
I don’t know why I’m sorry.
But I am.
I jumped off a cliff the other day and I thought it would be terrifying, but for the first time in a long time, all the worries just melted away. It was like I was suspended even as I was hurtling through the air. Like I found some kind of peace even as everything was screaming.
Maybe that’s the point. Maybe when things are fine, that’s when I can’t handle it. Maybe I mess up all the good things because my brain doesn’t know how to process them. Maybe I can only be truly happy when everything is hanging on by a thread.
I don’t know. It’s been a while since I’ve done this, and I’m not sure I’m making any sense. If you were here now I guess I would just try and make it really, really clear that I loved you.
And I don’t know why I always feel so afraid.
I don’t know how to calm down.
I don’t know how to stop thinking about everybody dying, about Abe dying and Em dying and my parents dying and even people I don’t know dying, people all over the world. I read that over 150,000 people die every single day, and I don’t like that thought, all of those bodies just stopping throughout the day, going limp or dropping to the ground. We are going to run out of places to put them. We are going to need another Earth. We are going to have to figure out how to live on the moon.
I put the pen down again and closed my eyes so tightly that spots of light danced on the insides of my eyelids. Aunt Helen, I knew, wrote every single morning of her life, at her desk with a cup of coffee and her hair in a bun and sometimes still in pajamas. When I was younger I would sit underneath her desk with LEGO bricks or a coloring book, and the sound of her pens scratching across the paper would lull me into a calming trance.
“Are you writing more Alvin?” I’d say. Before I could even read for myself, Alvin was read to me. The final book, the sixth book, ends unresolved. Alvin and Margo stand in front of their grandfather’s burned-down house and absorb the knowledge that they have lost everyone; they are truly alone.
“I’m trying,” she would always answer and peek down under the desk, smiling at me. “It’s not coming very easily.”
“They have to end up happily ever after,” I’d say. “On an island.”
“An island? Why an island?”
“That’s a happy place to end up. Like, they had a really hard time and now they just get to relax.”
“That’s a nice idea,” she’d say and go back to writing.
If only it were that easy. If only we all ended up on islands, our own private islands with nothing but sunshine and sea.
I thought Aunt Helen would have approved of that ending. At least more so than the one she got.