Love Letters to the Dead (15 page)

When we got back to my house, Sky tiptoed into my room with me. We sat on my half of the disassembled bunk bed that got split apart when May started high school and moved into her own room. I’d never really put up posters or pictures on the wall the way May had done in her new room, so it looked pretty much the same as it had when we were kids. Pink walls, gauzy curtains, dried flower crowns draped over dusty stuffed animals that looked out from a hammock in the corner, wands made of ribbons peeking out from the top of a pencil holder. I felt self-conscious and flipped off the lights, and plastic glow-in-the-dark stars shone down on us.

Sky and I started kissing. We kept kissing, and kissing, and his hands were everywhere on me, and everything inside of me was hot, like pavement on a summer night. A burning you can’t stop. When Sky paused and asked, “Are you okay?” I noticed how fast I was breathing. I remembered, in a flash, what it was like those nights at the movies, and I thought for a moment that he could see it. That he knew, somehow, all of the things that I’d let happen. That he could tell. But then I saw him just staring at me, worried. “Laurel?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m good. It’s just … intense.”

He’d never have to know, I thought. I could be new. I would be May, the May who was brave and magical. I wouldn’t be me, the one who let everything go wrong. I focused so hard, until Sky was all that I could see. And then I got this feeling that I needed to be so much closer to his body. I wanted our skin to stop keeping us apart. So I kissed him harder, and he kissed me harder, and my clothes came partway off, and he touched me everywhere. It was then that all of the sad things inside of me turned into hungry things.

Finally, after we’d made out and gotten quiet and made out again, when the littlest bit of gray light started to leak in through the curtains, Sky tucked me under the blankets and started to sneak out of the house through the window, so Dad wouldn’t hear him.

“Sky?” I said as he was leaving. I was half-asleep, but I didn’t want him to go. As the night air rushed into the room, it seemed like it could swallow him up and take him from me.

He turned back. “Yeah?”

“You’ll still be here, right? Tomorrow?”

He smiled and kissed my forehead. “No,” he said, “I’ll be at home.”

“But, I mean, you won’t leave me, right?”

“Right.”

When I woke up today to the memory of Sky’s body, all of the sad things in me were still hungry. They started to take everything in—the rain streaking in the sky, the spill of light on the table, the tiniest drops of water clinging to a pine needle on a tree outside my window. Maybe that’s what being in love is. You just keep filling up, never getting fuller, only brighter.

I looked you up, and I found out where the name of your band came from—from this quote, written by a poet named Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” I’ve been thinking about that. About what it means to see the endlessness of each moment, of each piece of it. I want to be cleansed—I want to burn away all of the bad memories and everything bad inside of me. And maybe that’s what being in love does. So that a life, a person, a moment you need to keep, stays with you into infinity. May smiling back at me. The two of us as little girls at Fallfest, with parents who danced. Your song playing into eternity. The night leaves on the cottonwood trees catching the white lights. And every little star that burns hotter than we could know.

Yours,
Laurel

Dear Janis Joplin,

Kristen’s parents have money, but she drives a super old Volvo anyway, because she thinks it’s cool. She has a bumper sticker on the back of it that says
I’M NOT TALKING TO MYSELF … I’M TALKING TO JANIS JOPLIN
. When she and Natalie and I were driving to Garcia’s Drive-In during lunch on Friday (Kristen never ditches classes, only lunch, because she’s a good student and keeping her grades up for college applications), of course we were listening to you. Since Kristen loves you so much, she knows all of your songs, not just the most popular ones. You were singing “Half Moon,” and Kristen turned to Natalie and said, “Did you know that Janis had women lovers, too?” Natalie shook her head no. Kristen continued, saying, “She could have been singing about a woman when she sang this,” as you crooned,
Your love brings life to me
.

Natalie looked off and said, “That’s cool,” trying to sound like she didn’t care. But by the way her face spread with a little smile, I could tell she did think it was really cool. I think Kristen was trying to make Natalie feel like she knew about her and Hannah. Like it was okay.

Hannah got another boyfriend. She has two right now, counting Kasey and the new one, whose name is Neung. She met Neung at Japanese Kitchen, where he’s a busboy and she’s a hostess. Yesterday, we went to his house, Hannah and Natalie and me. It was Sunday, and after we opened the fourth day of Aunt Amy’s advent calendar, I’d asked her if I could go to Dad’s early in the day, so that really I could go and hang out with Natalie and Hannah.

Before we left Natalie’s, Hannah kept trying on new shirts and asking Natalie if she looked fat, and Natalie was getting mad and saying, “Of course you don’t.” Hannah put on a lot of makeup, so she had these crimson lips, darker than bloodred against her pale freckled skin. She looked like someone who was beautiful but trying to show how she hurt.

We walked to Neung’s from Natalie’s, and it was really far. It’s getting cold now even when it’s still sunny, but Hannah didn’t wear enough clothes, so the whole way there she was shivering. Natalie was putting her arms around her to keep her warm, and Hannah was talking about Neung and how his skin is so smooth that when she touches it, she feels like the world will never end. And how he used to be a gangster. Natalie said she didn’t want Hannah going over there alone, which is why we went along. I was glad, too, because I didn’t want her going alone, either. I didn’t know what might happen to her.

Neung lives in this tiny house with his whole family, his mother and his father and his uncle and his grandfather and his brother and his sister and his sister’s son. Before we got there, all the way down the block, we could smell the hot peppers cooking. His mom and sister were cooking them on the grill outside. They must have been the hottest peppers in the world. As we got closer and closer, our eyes started to burn so badly from the smoke that by the time we made it to Neung’s, our faces were covered in tears, and Hannah’s mascara had streamed down her cheeks.

We played outside with Neung’s little nephew, wiping away pepper tears the whole time. Neung was nice around us, and he picked up his little nephew and spun him like an airplane. He laughed at our chile tears and called us
güeras
, which means “white girls” in Spanish. He did this even though he’s Vietnamese and Natalie’s Mexican, so it didn’t make that much sense.

Then Neung drove us to the 7-Eleven to get Slurpees and cigarettes. Once we were away from his family, Neung started touching Hannah a lot, and calling her baby girl and putting his hand in the back pocket of her jeans when they were walking, which made Natalie roll her eyes at me. When we got back to Neung’s, we sat on the sidewalk and drank the Slurpees, and they all smoked the cigarettes. (I didn’t smoke any, because I don’t actually like them that much. I thought I’d get used to the taste, but I haven’t.) We all laughed about our chattering blue lips. Then it was getting to be nighttime, and Neung said he wanted to be alone with Hannah. So they went inside, and Natalie and I sat on the steps, waiting.

I kept looking up at the moon. It was so bright. Not yet a whole circle, but trying to be. Like it wished so much to be round and full and perfect. I thought about the nights when May would leave to go away with Paul, and I started to worry for Hannah. Natalie was quiet, building a little house out of twigs and smoking a lot of cigarettes. Everything I said seemed to come out of my mouth and fall to the ground in slow motion. When I ran out of things to say, I said, “You love her, huh?” And Natalie kind of nodded, and then she started crying. Really, really crying. I put my arms around her.

She said, “You know when you think you know someone? More than anyone in the world? You know you know them, because you’ve seen them, like, for real. And then you reach out, and suddenly they are just … gone. You thought you belonged together. You thought they were yours, but they’re not. You want to protect them, but you can’t.”

I told her I did know. And in that moment, Hannah came running out. She was giggling too loudly, in a weird way, like she was trying to cover up some big cry. And then she saw Natalie’s face. She said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She just kept saying it. And stroking her hair. “It was terrible. I hated it. All I could think of was you. All I could think of was you. I only love you.”

I tried to look away, and the only other thing to see was the moon.

Yours,
Laurel

Dear River Phoenix,

I read that when you were little, before you were famous, your family moved around a lot. You lived in communes, and then you guys joined a cult for a while called the Children of God. Your family did missionary work for them in Texas, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and finally Venezuela. The cult called your father the Archbishop of Venezuela and the Caribbean, but they didn’t give your family any money to live on, so you and your next-oldest sister, Rain, used to sing in the streets for change. People would gather around to hear the two of you.

Your family quit the cult when your parents heard about what the leader was asking the women to do, “flirty fishing,” they called it, which was to have sex with men to recruit them. When you left Venezuela, your family got back to Florida by being stowaways on a ship carrying Tonka toys. The crew discovered your family, but they were nice to you and gave you some damaged toys for presents.

After the cult, your parents changed your family’s last name from Bottom to Phoenix—to symbolize the mythical bird that rises from the ashes. Then your family moved to Hollywood when you were nine so that you and Rain would have a chance to become stars. You loved to sing together, and you decided you wanted to be an actor, too.

At first, it was hard. Your family had no money, and you got kicked out of your apartments every few months, and you and your sister kept singing on street corners. But your mom got a job working for a casting agency, and then a famous talent agent signed you and Rain and your other two sisters and brother, too. Soon she started getting you small jobs, and then the jobs got bigger and bigger.

When you became an actor, you had the ability to dissolve your own personality and inhabit any character. You were brilliant at it. We can lose ourselves, I guess. And you used that. You found the magic in it.

You and your siblings always supported each other. You loved your family so much and talked about your childhood as being happy. But I wonder if there was something that happened to you when you were little that you couldn’t talk to them about. People have said that a lot of bad things went on in that cult, like the cult leader said it was okay to do sexual stuff with kids. When I read that, it made me so angry. I wondered if there was someone who hurt you. You said once in an interview that you lost your virginity when you were four. But then you took it back and said that it was just a joke. So I don’t know. But maybe there was a time that you needed someone to protect you and they couldn’t.

I am writing to you now because there is something that I can’t talk about, too. Something that I wonder if you would understand. I keep trying to get rid of it, to push it out of my head, but it keeps coming back in. I am worried, because I am falling in love with Sky, but I feel like one day, he’ll find out everything and leave me.

Last night, I snuck out to meet him. Since it was a cold night, instead of walking through the neighborhood, he picked me up and we decided to drive in his truck. We blasted the heater and rolled the windows down and listened to music, and finally we pulled over on a dark street and made out in the car. We made out so much, my whole body was burning up, and the windows were frosted with breath. I finally pulled away from him and sat up a moment. I was trying to remind myself of where I was, and I turned to the glass and drew a heart in it with my finger. That’s when he asked, “Do you want to come over?”