Love Letters to the Dead (12 page)

Yours,
Laurel

Dear Amelia,

I have to tell you about Halloween. My costume was a big hit! Everyone at the party truly loved it. I explained to all of them that I wasn’t dead, only somewhere still circling in the air.

Natalie was Vincent van Gogh, which meant she taped a bandage over her ear to make it look like it was cut off and splattered paint all over her clothes. Hannah was Little Bo Peep, which meant she braided her hair in pigtails and wore a tight blue dress. Hannah’s boyfriend, Kasey, was a sheep, because she made the costume for him. He looked pretty funny with his little fuzzy cotton ears and his neck and shoulders that are so big they blend into each other. When we walked in tonight, to the house that he shares with four other guys, Hannah jumped on him, and he picked her up. He called Hannah “Jailbait” as a nickname, like “How’s my little Jailbait?” which made his friends laugh. Hannah laughed, too, although Natalie did not.

Some other people at the party dressed up as characters from Candy Land—Queen Frostine, Princess Lolly, and Lord Licorice. I thought this was the coolest. Kasey and his friends knew how to throw a party right. Even though their house is pretty dirty, it wasn’t just the typical college guy party with a keg of beer. For Halloween, they’d made it special. There were bowls of M&M’s everywhere, and hot chocolate that was spiked. I kept looking around for Sky, wondering if he’d come, wondering if one of the people behind the masks across the room was him, but when I checked the way they walked, none of them were right. I decided I needed to distract myself from looking for him, so I went bobbing for apples. May and I used to fill up a washtub and put apples in it and practice, any time of year. I was always great at it, even when I still had my baby teeth.

I started bobbing, and the boy dressed as Lord Licorice bobbed down next to me. The top of his feathered hat kept bumping my aviator cap. And sometimes, when we’d look up at the same time, his dark eyes seemed like they were trying to make holes in me. I would let them burn until the holes got too deep, and then I’d put my head down again. When I finally got an apple and came up triumphantly, Lord Licorice was still bobbing, and I saw Sky standing there, right above me. I had the apple in my mouth when he said hi.

Normally I would have felt embarrassed or maybe guilty that I was bobbing for apples next to Lord Licorice, but I was feeling very brave dressed as you, and very cool. So I put down my pilot glasses as I took a bite out of the apple in my mouth.

I said, “Let’s go flying.” I guess at that point I might have been a little bit drunk, too.

Sky said, “The ceiling might get in our way.”

So I took his hand and pulled him out the front door. And then I started running. Sky stopped following near the edge of the yard, but I ran down the street with my arms out like wings, laughing. I didn’t care. I was happy. By the time I got to the end of the block and onto the next one, I was above the earth. I could see the treetops, I swear. I could see the streets crisscrossing. The houses were like toys, and pretty soon the whole earth had become a map.

When I finally landed, Sky was standing there, waiting for me at the edge of the yard, which just a moment ago was only a tiny square. I forgot to mention that Sky was dressed as a zombie rocker, which just meant he looked cool in his leather jacket, like he usually does, and had drawn some crisscrosses on his face with what looked like black marker.

“How was the flight?” he asked.

“You should have come,” I said, out of breath. “I almost made it around the world.”

“Who was that pirate boy in there?”

“He wasn’t a pirate, he was Lord Licorice. Didn’t you ever play Candy Land?”

“It looked like he thought you were the candy.” His voice sounded disapproving, in a way that I liked. It meant that he was protective of me, or maybe that he wanted me to himself.

I could feel myself blush, and I hoped he couldn’t see in the dark. I fidgeted with my aviator cap. “We were just bobbing for apples.” I put my aviator glasses on over my eyes. “Anyway, you’re the one who doesn’t want to be my boyfriend.”

“How do you know?”

I shrugged. “You’re not like that.”

“What if you’re wrong? What if I am?”

“You are?”

There was a moment of quiet. “Well, I am now.”

“So am I,” I said softly, and I fell into him so he’d catch me, a swoony kind of fall where you don’t hold your body up, and I laughed. He lifted the glasses back off my face, and we kissed, and I felt his cold hands slip under my shirt, onto my stomach. I felt his hands warmer on my back, and I felt his lips on my neck, and I felt like I’d landed in my body for the first time. Against his hands, it was something new to me. Sky made me feel clean, a first-snow kind of clean that covered everything. I remembered how it was being above the trees, which were making a good sound, a rustling sound, a leaves-turned-brown-and-ready-to-fall sound. “Listen,” I said.

Yours,
Laurel

Dear River Phoenix,

Maybe this is weird to say, but when I was younger, before I’d ever kissed, sometimes I’d imagine kissing you. Now that I kiss in real life, I’m happy to say that it’s a lot like I’d hoped it would be.

My boyfriend, Sky—my first boyfriend—he is perfect to me. It’s been two weeks since the Halloween party where we got together. And now, we’ve gotten to kissing everywhere. Kissing in the alleyway between classes, when no one is there, and the sun makes spots in the bright middle of my eyelids. Kissing in his truck that smells like thousand-year-old leather. Kissing when it’s dark and I crawl out of my window. (I’ve gotten good at it at both houses. At Aunt Amy’s my window pushes up, but at Dad’s I have to unhook my screen, the way that I used to see May do.) I love these middle-of-the-nights with Sky the best. Everything else is sleeping, and the whole world feels like our secret. It reminds me of the feeling I used to get when May and I would sneak into the yard to collect ingredients for fairy spells.

For the first time in forever, it feels like I have magical powers—the ones that May taught me about when we were little. With Sky, I can make the scary stuff disappear. We walk through the neighborhood after dark, and our shadows stand on top of each other, stretching across the whole street. We kiss, and I feel that if my shadow could stay inside of his, then he could eclipse everything that I don’t want to remember. I can get lost in the things about him that are beautiful.

Sky reminds me of you a bit, honestly. How he’s a boy, and strong, and the air makes way for him when he walks through it. But also how there is something fragile like moths inside of him, something fluttering. Something trying desperately to crowd toward a light. May was a real moon who everyone flocked to. But even if I am only Sky’s street lamp, I don’t mind. It’s enough to be what he moves toward. I love to feel the wings beat.

Last night we walked to the park, and we kissed with my back pressed up against the cold bars of the jungle gym. We stopped for breath, and his bottom lip fell a little crooked to the left, like it does. I whispered, “Can we go to your house?”

He sounded uncertain. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“We don’t have to go in. I just want to see it.” I didn’t tell him that I already had, the night that I drove by with Tristan and Kristen at two a.m. I wanted to be there with him.

“I don’t think you understand,” he said finally. “My mom isn’t really … like other moms.”

“How do you mean?”

On the outside, Sky got tougher. “She just has her own way of doing things.” Then he said, “Like, she sings lullabies to the flowers in the middle of the night.”

“Oh. Well, that’s okay.”

“They’re dead now,” Sky added. “Her marigolds are. She sings to them anyway.”

“Maybe we could plant some bulbs for her. Tulips, or something that will grow in the spring.”

Sky wasn’t so sure about it, but I promised him we could just stay in the front yard and we wouldn’t have to go inside, and he finally agreed. So tonight, I snuck out again to meet him, and we drove to his house to pull up the dried-out marigolds and put in tulip bulbs. Earlier today I’d gone into our shed, where Mom used to keep her gardening stuff, and found some stacked in a box with newspaper between them. It was a new moon night, and we worked in the dark, wearing our jackets. As we were patting down the last ones, our nails with dirt under them, we looked up at each other, and our eyes touched, closer than you can get even with skin.

That’s when the front door opened. It was his mother, standing there in her bathrobe, holding a watering can.

“Mom?” Sky asked wearily. “What are you doing?” I think he’d been hoping that she would stay asleep and he wouldn’t have to introduce us yet.

“I wanted to help,” she said innocently.

Then she turned to me and looked me in the face, as if she’d just noticed that I was there. Her expression was warm. “And who is this?” she asked Sky.

“This is Laurel,” Sky said.

“We, um, we planted tulip bulbs,” I said, “so they’ll grow in the spring.”

Sky’s mom smiled and nodded, as if planting flowers in the middle of the night were normal. “Thank you, dear.”

She started to walk up and down the rows, sprinkling the dirt. She sang softly as she went, something about horses in the sun.

“It’s important to sing to them,” she said when she was done. “So that they know you are there.” Then she took her watering can and set it near the front door and just walked back inside.

“So that was my mom,” Sky said.

“She … she seems really nice.”

“You mean crazy.”

“Well, no. But what’s, um, what—”

Sky’s voice turned hard. “That’s just the way she is.”

“Oh.”

I reached out and put my arms around his body. It was then that I could feel that the moths in him, with their wings so paper-thin, will never be near enough to the light. They will always want to be nearer—to be inside of it. It was then that I could feel the lost thing in him. I wanted to put my hand on his chest, against his heart, and touch all the way inside his beating. I wanted to find him. But he stepped back, and his bottom lip, crooked just a little to the left, straightened out.

I felt like there were a million questions and answers and questions all stuck in the back of my throat. But I couldn’t speak from everything being stuck there. I stopped.

“Sky?”

“What?”

I looked at him. And I meant everything. “Nothing,” I said, and then I paused. “Those flowers are going to be really pretty.” The cold night sent a shiver up my spine, and we kissed again.

Yours,
Laurel

Dear John Keats,

Today we got our report cards from first quarter. I had all As, except in two classes. In PE, I had a C-, not because I can’t run fast, but because Hannah and I pretended to forget our gym clothes so many times. And in English I had a B, even though I’ve gotten As on all of my essays. The reason for this is that I don’t talk in class, because I hate the way Mrs. Buster looks at me, so my participation grade was low. And also that I had a missing assignment—a letter to a dead person. It’s one little assignment, and I wish I had just made myself fake it, but I couldn’t. I mean, my letters are actual letters to the people I am writing to. Not to Mrs. Buster. But there is one way to make Dad happy, and also for Aunt Amy to feel sure that I am free of sin, and that’s to get all As. I tried to make sure that my grades were good so that no one would have any reason to worry or ask questions. I hope this is close enough.