Write This Down (18 page)

“I'm sorry this happened, Officer,” Dad says. “I know my son is sorry, too.”

“Thanks for bringing him home,” Mom adds.

The officer says, “Well, we were all young once,” as if all young people break the law and smash up automobiles. Then she says good night and leaves.

I can't miss out on what's going to happen next, so I take my chances and creep into the living room and do my trademark small-little-ball thing on a corner of the couch. My parents and Hunter don't even seem to notice. I've heard people say, when they can't stop looking at something, “It's like the way you can't stop looking at a car wreck.” I've never had any desire to look at a car wreck. But I can't stop looking at what's happening
after
this car wreck, to my family.

“Hunter,” Dad finally says, “I'm too upset to talk to you right now. As long as I live, I pray I never have to go through another night like this, wondering if my son is alive or dead. I hope that by morning you'll come up with something to say that will make us understand why on earth you thought you had a right to defy our rules, wreck our car, and break our hearts.”

With that he turns and walks heavily up the stairs to bed. Dad knows how to make an exit.

Now it's just Mom and Hunter. And me, but I don't count. I'm still wearing my cloak of invisibility.

“Hunter,” she says in a low, wobbly voice, “how could you?”

Hunter's ears flame scarlet. “Dad had no right to make me miss my gig just because he doesn't like my grades. I didn't even fail anything. I only got two D's. Two!”

“Of course he had a right!” Mom says. Gone is the mother who was trying to take Hunter's part yesterday, suggesting he shouldn't be “grounded,” he should just “limit his activities” so he could concentrate better on school. “He's your father! He cares about you! He wants to help you make the right choices in life to give you the best chance at realizing your dreams!”

Hunter laughs then, as if what Mom said is the most hilarious thing he's ever heard.

I hear myself opening my mouth. “That's true,” I chime in, like a little echoing parrot. “That's exactly what he said.”

Both Mom and Hunter ignore me.

“He loves you,” Mom insists.

“No, he doesn't.”

“Of course he does! Just because parents have rules and try to enforce them, it doesn't mean they don't love their children. It means the exact opposite.”

“Well,
I
know the things he says when he thinks I'm not listening,” Hunter retorts. “And the things you say, too.”

“Like what?” Mom's tone is challenging, trying to call Hunter's bluff.

“This past summer?” Hunter prompts her. “The night before school started? I came downstairs after you guys thought I was asleep, to ask you something. I forget what it was, something stupid, probably, because you both think anything I really care about is stupid.”

“Hunter,” Mom tries to interrupt, but he doesn't stop.

“I was still on the stairs, and I could hear you talking, and I heard what Dad said, what both of you said.”

I pull in a deep breath. Whatever Hunter is going to say next, it can't be good.

“What did we say?” She looks uneasy now, as if she's trying to remember that overheard conversation and can't come up with anything but knows there might well be something he heard that she and Dad hadn't meant for him to hear.

“
You
said you hoped I'd have a better year in school this time.”

“Well, that's not so terrible,” I say, even though my previous comment wasn't appreciated. I so much want whatever Hunter overheard to turn out to be not as bad as he's making it out to be.

“And
Dad
said…” Hunter pauses, and the muscles in his jaw tighten in that exact same way Dad's do when he's upset and trying unsuccessfully to get his face back under control. “
Dad
said, ‘With his dropping out of cross-country, it sure isn't looking like it so far.' And
then
he said, ‘The biggest disappointment of my life has been Hunter.'”

For a moment nobody speaks. I swear, even the refrigerator stops its humming. Even the clock on the kitchen wall stops its ticking.

“Oh, Hunter, sweetie, oh, Hunter, he didn't mean it—”

“And then
you
said, ‘I know.' That's what you said, Mom. You said, ‘I know,' like you were agreeing with him. Like I was the biggest disappointment of your life, too.”

I try one more time. I'm supposed to be good at words, though lately words haven't worked out for me the way I spent my whole life dreaming they would. But if I ever needed a reminder of how powerful words can be, this is it.

“Hunter,” I say, “Mom didn't mean it that way. And Dad didn't mean what he said either. People say things they don't really mean all the time.”

Things like:
I wish you were dead
.

Mom is crying now in this wordless way, with her face all contorted and no sound coming out. I'm not crying. I want too badly to find words to say that could somehow make this be all right. But that's the thing about words. They can't ever really erase other words. They can scribble over them, but they can never make them totally go away.

Hunter juts up his chin, as if daring us to say another syllable. Then he stands and walks away, clomping up the stairs to his room, while we listen to the silence.

 

28

I sleep in late on Saturday. I'm stunned when I look at the clock: 11:30. Stunned both because I've never slept this late before in my life, and because it's the exact same digits I saw when I woke up to find that Hunter had disappeared. Was that really just twelve hours ago?

I'm afraid to go downstairs, but I don't have any choice. So I do.

I don't see anybody. My chest tightens. For a moment I wonder if Hunter could have stolen Dad's Jeep and run away with it in the night while the rest of us were sleeping. Maybe my parents are off desperately trying to find him.

Then I see Mom, poking her head from the garage into the kitchen, dressed in slacks and a yellow sweater, her face normal looking as if the events of last night had never happened. “Go throw some clothes on, sweetie. Your dad and Hunter are in the car. We're heading out for brunch. We didn't want to wake you, but we'll wait for you to come with us.”

Maybe I should let them go without me. Maybe they need to talk without me there.

But I'm part of this family, too.

Three minutes later, I've pulled on a pair of jeans and a ratty sweater, jerked a comb through my hair, and done the world's fastest brushing of teeth. I'm in the backseat next to Hunter, with Dad at the wheel, which is much better than being in the backseat all by myself with Hunter at the wheel.

Dad drives to this mom-and-pop breakfast place named Ya-Ya's that's usually really crowded on weekend mornings and doesn't take reservations, but for some reason today, when the hostess lady asks, “Party of four?” and Dad nods, she leads us to a booth right away.

Maybe it's a good omen. I try not to believe in omens, good or bad, but I'm grateful that we don't have to wedge ourselves into the little bench by the front door trying to think of what kind of conversation to make on the morning after Hunter wrecked the car and told our parents that he heard them say he was the biggest disappointment of their lives.

Of course, we're still going to have to talk once we settle into the booth, but maybe the talking thing will be easier in a restaurant than it would be at home. We can't shout in a restaurant. We can't get up and stomp away from the table. We can't do or say anything that would make other people look at us funny.

Our parents sit on one side; Hunter and I sit on the other. It takes everyone a while to decide what to order, except for me, because I already know I want the pumpkin pancakes. Mom finally picks eggs Benedict, and Dad picks a Denver omelet. I thought maybe Hunter would refuse to order anything, like in a Gandhi-style hunger strike, but he orders fried eggs, bacon, hash browns, and a side of pancakes. And after all, for whatever reason, he did agree to come. As far as I know, nobody had to drag him bodily to the car.

We tell the waitress our order just as if we were a normal family.

I have a strange thought: We
are
a normal family.

This
is
what normal families do. They order bacon and eggs. They say terrible things that hurt each other. They feel horrible afterward. And then they try somehow to make it better.

For a while, nobody says anything. This might be the most awkward moment of my twelve years on this earth, which is saying a lot given a certain very recent, very awkward moment with a certain boy at a certain dance. So I do what I do whenever we come to Ya-Ya's for breakfast. I make a tower out of the jam and jelly packets, trying to see how tall I can build it before it topples over. It's interesting that it always does topple over, given that the packets are all the same size and shape and perfect for stacking. But at some point they eventually do.

My first tower topples over when I put the twelfth packet—orange marmalade—on top. My second tower topples over with the eleventh one—strawberry.

No one has yet said anything.

If somebody doesn't say something soon, I'm not going to be able to tell myself that we're a normal family having a normal breakfast.

“So,” Dad says, as if we were already in the middle of a conversation and he's just throwing out a new idea for us to consider. “Sports were just—they were so important to me when I was in high school. I wanted you to have what they gave me. Being on a team. Learning to play as a team. How to win as a team, how to lose as a team. It was just … hard on me, knowing you weren't going to have the chance for that.”

Hunter doesn't say anything.

“And, yes, I was disappointed that you weren't even going to give yourself that chance.” His voice is low now. “I wanted that chance for you. I wanted it more than anything.”

“A band is kind of like a team,” I say, even though no one—as in
no one
—has asked me to weigh in on this.

“A band
is
like a team,” Dad agrees, looking at Hunter and not me as he says it. “Maybe music is for you what sports were for me. Maybe I just couldn't see that.”

“Hunter writes songs, too,” I add.

Mom helps me out. “What kind of songs?”

“Good songs,” I say. “The band played one at their gig a few weeks ago, and they played it again last night. It was the best song the band played.”

Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned last night. Are we supposed to be pretending it didn't happen? There are limits to what even good pretenders can pretend.

“What was it about?” Mom asks Hunter.

“Nothing,” Hunter growls, but it might be an okay sort of growl. He was never one for Q&A at mealtimes.

“I didn't know you were into songwriting,” Dad says.

This would be a moment where Hunter might say,
Further proof that you don't know anything about me.
But he doesn't. He shrugs. It might be an okay sort of shrug.

“I've written words for some songs,” I say. “But I don't know how to write music. I think it's cool that Hunter writes the music, too.”

“Do you have any other gigs coming up?” Dad asks. The word “gig” sounds strange coming out of his mouth—like when Mom talked about “pot” and “weed”—like he hopes he's using the right lingo but isn't completely sure.

“Moonbeam got us a thing at another coffee shop next weekend,” Hunter says, through a big mouthful of hash browns. When he finally swallows them he says, “So … can I go? Or am I still grounded?”

Dad exchanges a glance with Mom. “I'd like … to turn over a new page. Make a fresh start. Me with you, you with me. What do you think?”

Hunter gives a grunt that sounds like an okay grunt. But then he manages a shaky grin and actually says the word “Okay.” And then says the word “Thanks.”

“How are your pumpkin pancakes?” Mom asks me.

“They're good,” I say. They even have pumpkin syrup to go with them, which might sound like too much pumpkin but isn't. There is no such thing as too much pumpkin.

“Make sure you brush your teeth when we get home,” Dad says to me. “You have to be extra careful with sticky substances now that you have your braces.”

And that's how the rest of the meal goes. Dad doesn't say anything about grades or college or making sure you have choices in life, but I think Hunter knows that Dad still thinks those things matter. Maybe down deep Hunter knows that they matter. They just aren't
all
that matter.

I can't finish my pumpkin pancakes even though I adore them; I'm too full. So Hunter leans over my plate and spears a big bite, and that makes me happy. I'm even happier when he reaches over and adds a grape jelly packet to my new tower—number thirteen—and sets a Granger family jelly-stacking record.

It feels, in its own way, like a beginning.

I scrambled into my clothes so fast before heading to the restaurant that I forgot my phone, so when we get home and I turn it on, it's been hours since I checked it last.

I have a text from Kylee:
U OK?

And I have an email from the
Denver Post.

For a moment I can't figure out why the
Denver Post
would be writing to me.

Then I remember: the essay contest. Is it still mid-November, when they were supposed to notify the winners? Or is it time now to notify the losers?

I open the email.

It begins, “Congratulations!”

I've won first prize.

Me.

 

29

Standing there by my unmade bed, I feel my smile spreading ever wider, like the Cheshire Cat in
Alice in Wonderland
, who disappears and only this huge, toothy grin remains.