True Letters from a Fictional Life (13 page)

It crossed my mind in
the morning to play sick, to take a day at home to figure out how to deal with everything. I wouldn't have had to do anything desperate, like when I held a thermometer to a lightbulb in sixth grade. “James, you have a 112-degree fever,” my mother had sighed. “We'll bury you out back.” This time I could've honestly said I felt too ill and tired to concentrate—my eyes burned from lack of sleep, and I felt wired and exhausted all at the same time—but I wanted to act as if everything were normal. And if I got the chance, I wanted to beg Theresa again to keep her mouth shut.

I got a lift to school with my dad that morning to avoid having to drive in with Derek. A kid in a white parka with
the hood pulled up walked into the building just ahead of me. Aaron's shrine greets students who enter through that door. It's the first thing you see. The boy in front of me stopped short and his bag fell from his hands.

“OMG,” I heard him gasp. It wasn't clear whether he was impressed or horrified. He took his hood off just as I passed, but I'd already recognized the voice. Aaron Foster.

“Hey!” I slapped his arm. “You're back from the dead!”

“James, who did this?” he hissed. “This is so incredibly embarrassing. Where did they find that photo of me?” He pointed to one that showed him laughing with his eyes half closed and his mouth wide open. “Did they call my dentist or what?”

“Aaron!” a girl squealed from down the hall. Others picked up her shrill cry. I backed away as four girls hugged him and cooed and stroked his head.

“Um, are you responsible for this?” Aaron asked, twirling a finger at the photos and flowers, candles and quotes.

“We didn't want anyone to forget about you or what happened,” one of them explained.

“That's so incredibly nice of you,” Aaron gushed. “And I'm going to take it all down now because I'm back”—he knelt and began tearing photos off the poster board—“and it is time we all just move on.” He handed them each a plastic daisy. “These are gorgeous. And who found this quote?” It was written in white ink on black paper:

I will not leave South Africa, nor will I surrender.

Only through hardship, sacrifice, and militant action can freedom be won.

The struggle is my life. I will continue fighting for freedom

until the end of my days.

—Nelson Mandela

No one knew who'd found the quote or put it on the poster. “Well, it doesn't really matter,” sighed Aaron. “I'm just overwhelmed. Thank you.”

Aaron got a lot of attention during first period—we had English first thing and Breyer made a big deal of him—but by second period it was as if he'd never been gone. The same people who had ignored him before the incident ignored him once again, but that afternoon he stopped me in the hall.

“James, I'll bring back your sweater. My mom had it dry-cleaned.” He hesitated. “Thank you for calling that day. My mom is really sorry for what she said on the phone. I yelled at her when she told me about it, and she's super embarrassed.”

I waved it away, but I was glad his mom felt bad about it.

“She was just upset, you know?” Aaron shrugged.

“Totally. I get it.” But his mother was not forgiven. “Thanks for taking care of my sweater. I've missed it. And I have your PEZ dispenser.”

“It's a gift from me to you.” Aaron laughed.

Hawken interrupted us. “Where were you at lunch, Liddell?”

“The library. I had a bunch to do.” I acted as if that were normal. “I wasn't hungry,” I added, which was true.

Hawken frowned and poked my chest. “You look terrible, man. You really didn't eat lunch?”

“I ate some coffee earlier.”

“You ate coffee.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled, walking away. I didn't feel like talking. “I'll catch up with you later.”

Later turned out to be right after school. I got a text from Hawken:
U home can i come over?
This was not like him. Hawken usually just showed up.

Yup!
I replied. Sure enough, when he arrived, he looked worried. He tried to smile at me, but it was the kind of smile that accompanies bad news. “You here alone? Your parents home?”

“Just Rex. He's out back somewhere.”

“Cool. Can we talk up in your room?”

I felt a hole opening in my gut and numbly led the way upstairs. Before he sat down next to me on my bed, Hawken pulled a folded envelope from his jeans' pocket. That bad news smile again. “This was waiting for me in the mail when I came home from school today.” He handed me the envelope. His name and address were in type, not handwriting, and there was no return address.

I coughed nervously. “I didn't send this to you,” I whispered.

“I know.”

I slipped the letter out of the envelope's ragged end and unfolded it. Sure enough, what I saw confirmed my worst fears—more than one letter had been taken. There was my handwriting. Date:
December 22
. Greeting:
Hey, Hawken.
I skimmed it and went red.
No one makes me happier . . . I just like sitting next to you . . . Your eyes . . . Your smile . . .

“I didn't write this,” I said.

Hawken looked pained.

“I mean, no, obviously I
did
write this. But I didn't
send
this. I never would've sent this to you. I'm really, really sorry.” I held my breath. I hated crying around Hawken. I'd done it before, and I hated it.

“Hey, Liddell, relax, okay? You already told me that you liked me, remember? None of this was news. And everything you wrote was super nice.”

I nodded, my elbows on my knees, my fingers laced behind my head. Hawken put his arm around me. Back in December, we were going to watch some zombie movie up in his room, and we were trying to find a place to put his laptop so we could both see it. I persuaded him that we could both easily fit in this big comfy chair and the laptop could go on the table right by it. So he settled in next to me, cracking up a little, and fifteen minutes later he fell asleep with his head on my shoulder. I put my arm around him, and his head slid onto my chest. He slept curled against me for nearly the whole flick. Zombies tore off children's heads and ate their innards,
and I smiled through it all. When Hawken woke and sat up, I thought he was about to kiss me. Instead, he just rubbed the side of his face, grinned, and groaned, “I fell asleep!” Like it was all totally normal. If it had been Derek—well, it never would've been Derek because he never would have agreed that there was plenty of room for two in that chair. And I never would've wanted to squeeze into it with him in the first place. I had written about all this in the letter Hawken had received, but mercifully, he didn't bring it up.

“I'm sorry you got this, Tim,” I snuffled. “I'm really sorry.”

“I take it this is why you look like you haven't slept in two days.”

I nodded.

“What happened?” he whispered. “Who sent it?”

“Someone got into my desk drawer the other night. They used the pirate key and took all this stuff I wrote. I don't know who. Theresa or Derek or Mark? Topher was up here, too.” I looked at the envelope and pointed to the postmark: Saturday, May 21. “They stole it on Friday night and mailed it out the next day.”

“You sure that's what happened? Maybe this letter got mixed up in your other papers? Maybe you dropped it by accident or left it somewhere?”

“I don't think so.”

“Well, you should just ask everyone. ‘Did you take a bunch of letters from my desk?'”

“Why would they own up to doing it?”

“I don't know, maybe they were out of their mind for a little bit and now they're thinking clearly again.”

I thought about that possibility. “No, that would make sense if they just
stole
the letters. But they made the decision to
mail
one of them. They want to ruin me.”

“Or they legitimately wanted to set us up.”

I pretended to laugh. “Who would think you'd be interested in that, dude?” He raised his eyebrows. “Other than me,” I admitted. “No one. Anyway, this would be a really weird way to go about that, right? That's not what's going on.” I got up and looked out the window. “Did I tell you Theresa confronted me about Topher?”

“Then why aren't we talking to her about all this right now? I thought we had to figure this all out in secret.”

He had a good point. He texted her and found out she was home. On the way to her place, I filled him in about our fight the morning I discovered the letters were gone. “I already asked her about the letters, and she was like, ‘I don't know what you're talking about.'”

“Maybe she wasn't ready to admit it,” Hawken suggested. “Maybe she'll just come clean.”

When we arrived, Theresa seemed totally normal with me. I hadn't seen her at school all day, but she wasn't shooting me glares or slamming the door in my face now. Unfortunately, her mom was home, and we had to spend twenty minutes talking to her in the kitchen about school and college
plans and how our parents were doing. I thought I was going to go crazy, until finally Theresa announced that we were going upstairs to work on something for school. She could've said that fifteen minutes earlier.

When the door to her room closed, I got right into it. “Remember I mentioned to you that someone stole letters from me the other night, when you guys were over and we hung out around the fire?”

“You said something about that, yeah.” Theresa nodded, sitting down on her bed.

“Well, Hawken got one in the mail today.”

He pulled it from his pocket, held it up. She reached out for it, and I put my hand on Hawken's arm. “You don't need to read it. But I don't know, maybe you already have. That's what I want to know. Do you have my letters? Did you send this one to Hawken?”

Theresa shook her head.

“Yes or no?”

“No.”

“You're positive?”

“James, I didn't even know you wrote letters.” She sat up and leaned back. “And the only thing I want to steal from you is your hoodie. One day I will succeed.”

Hawken pretended to laugh.

“Why haven't you mailed those letters yourself, anyway?” she asked.

“Because I didn't write them to be read by anyone,” I
mumbled. I looked around her room. Would it be wrong to dump out all her drawers? I rubbed my eyes. I was losing my mind. “OK. I need to go home. Hawken, can we go?”

On the way back to my place, Hawken suggested we talk to Derek. “I'm too angry right now,” I said. “Or I don't even know what. Just worked up. I feel like I drank two pots of coffee and I'm crawling out of my skin.”

He thumped my thigh with his fist when he dropped me off. “Hang in there, Liddell. When you want to talk to Derek, let me know.”

That night, as I lay in the dark listening to branches claw the side of our house, I tried to figure out who was more likely to have committed the crime: Derek or Mark. I couldn't see Mark going through the trouble of looking up addresses, printing out envelopes, and buying stamps. But then again, I couldn't see Derek deciding to torture me just because I'm gay.

That phrase thudded in my gut.
I'm gay. Gay kids get killed.

Years ago, Derek had said that gay people were “an abomination.” I remembered it clearly because I'd asked my mom what
abomination
meant. Around the same time, he told me that gay people were “an American disease.” I related this fact to my parents, and I remember them looking at each other sideways. “That's not true,” my mom said gently. “Derek's parents are very nice, very smart people, but not everything they believe is true.” Derek didn't believe everything his
parents believed anymore—I knew that—but he still believed a lot of it. I didn't know if he still believed in a hell that would punish
me
.

The next day in English, we did a “quick-write,” where you can write about whatever you want for ten minutes and then Breyer asks for volunteers to read aloud what they wrote. This boy who never volunteers put his hand up and, with the brim of his Carhartt hat pulled down over his face, he told us about his older brother and how they go hunting together and he can tell him anything and how even when he thinks his brother will be disappointed in him he's not ever—he's the best brother a guy could hope for and sometimes he lets him ride his snowmobile but not all that often now that he thinks about it, the end.

That piece got me thinking about Luke the rest of the afternoon. Maybe I'd underestimated him. If I told him about everything that was going on, he might back me up when I told our parents and make sure they didn't flip out. When I got home, I took a deep breath, made myself walk up to his room, and dialed his number. He answered right away.

“Oh, perfect. I'm hanging out with your secret admirer.” I could hear a girl laughing and yelling at him to shut up. “Claire saw a photograph of you and declared it was love at first sight. You two have to talk. She's a little unhinged but otherwise a good person.”

Was she hitting him with a pillow? He yelped, and the
phone thumped onto the floor. Sighing, I put my hand over my eyes, cleared my throat.

He picked the phone back up. “You still there?” He giggled.

“Yeah. I was just calling to say hi. But you're busy.”

“Hi. I am a little busy, yes.”

“Okay. When are you coming home?”

“Like the second weekend of June. I got this internship up here.”

“Right, right. I'll talk to you soon.”

“God bless you, James Liddell. God bless you and this country we love.”

“Right, God bless you, too,” I repeated flatly. “Thanks.” And I hung up.

Kim and I chatted online that night while I was trying to study. I would've ignored her first message, but it sort of demanded attention.