Write This Down (19 page)

I read the email over and over again. There's a winner for each age, so five winners total, and I'm the winner in the twelve-year-old category. In order to accept my prize of two hundred dollars, I have to electronically sign and return a form saying that this is completely my own work and not copied from anywhere else (which of course it isn't) and that I'm giving my permission for publication (which of course I am). If I choose to decline, an alternate will receive the prize in my place. Like anyone would decline two hundred dollars and publication in the biggest newspaper in the state of Colorado!

I should call Kylee! She'll be as happy for me as I am for myself. Maybe even happier.

First, though, I find the message I sent to them with my essay attached, so I can read what I wrote over again and imagine it in print on the op-ed page for hundreds of thousands of readers to see.

I'm five, and I'm afraid of the dark.

That's a good first line. I really think it is. Even those two literary agents would have to say it was.

I read on about Mrs. Whistlepuff and the flashlight Hunter gave me. And then I read the part about how Hunter changed, and how he quit cross-country, and how my father looked at him with disgust in his eyes, the look—even though I didn't say this in my essay, because I didn't know it yet—of someone who was about to say that his son was the biggest disappointment of his life.

The girl in the essay doesn't know why her brother changed.

The girl who wrote it does.

What will Dad do when he reads it? How will Hunter feel when he reads it?

I know this sounds crazy, but somehow I never really made the connection between “getting published” and “having other people read what I've written”—not just reading my name on the byline and being impressed that I got published, but reading the published piece itself.

Other people, like my father.

Other people, like my brother.

Not imaginary readers in far-off places, but actual people I actually know.

The people I actually wrote about.

*   *   *

I have to talk to someone.

I text Kylee back:
I'm OK. More later. You
+
Tyler
=
Cute.

Kylee has been the person on the whole entire earth who has believed in me most as a writer. But she's not the person I need to talk to now.

The person I need to talk to is Ms. Archer.

My parents must have a phone book. A phone book gets delivered to the doorway a couple of times a year in a plastic bag, and my mother recycles the old one and puts the new one somewhere. But where?

I find it on a shelf in the kitchen where my mom sticks all kinds of stuff she doesn't know what to do with. When I search the A's, there are a lot of Archers listed, at least twenty. I can't remember Ms. Archer's first name. But then I see Ilana Archer, and I know that's her.

Is it okay to call her at home? On a weekend? And not just any weekend, but the first weekend of Thanksgiving break? Maybe she's traveling to visit her family. I don't know if she has a family; she's never mentioned a husband. But everybody has some kind of family. Does she never mention hers in class because she doesn't think families are the kind of thing teachers should talk about?

Would she think families are the kind of thing writers should write about?

When I finally make myself dial her number, I almost hang up after two rings but I wait, and then on the third ring, someone picks up and a voice says, “Hello?”

“Ms. Archer?” I ask.

“This is she.”

“It's Autumn. Granger. From your class. From your journalism class. At school.”

I can't stop myself from babbling, but she says, “Autumn!” as if she's pleased to hear from me, but maybe a little perplexed, too.

“What's up?” she asks then.

“There's, well, something I want to talk to you about.”

“What is it?”

I don't want to tell her on the phone. I want to tell her in person. I want to see her face when I'm doing the talking, so that I'll know what she really thinks, from seeing it in her eyes, not just hearing her voice coming through the phone. It's weird, but I want to see her long earrings dangling as she speaks. In class when she nods her head, they bob, and when she shakes her head, they sway.

“Would it be possible … It's the kind of thing I'd rather tell you in person. I mean, I know you're busy and all. With Thanksgiving and everything. But it can't wait till after the break.”

Please please please please please please say it's all right and you can meet with me now, today, right this very minute!

“Could you meet today?” she asks.

“Yes!”

“At a coffee shop, perhaps?”

“Yes! Like, at the Spotted Cow?” It's the only coffee shop I can think of that I can ride my bike to without my parents having to drive me. “Like—now?” So I don't drop dead of a heart attack from the agony of wondering what I should do.

“The Spotted Cow in half an hour,” Ms. Archer agrees.

I click off the phone, my pulse throbbing as if Hunter were beating out the rhythm of a rap number inside my head.

“I'm going for a bike ride!” I call to my mom, who is lost in the most recent issue of
The New Yorker
, a magazine I hated until I opened the essay contest email half an hour ago. Well, maybe I still hate it a little bit.

“Wear your helmet!” she calls back, as if there has ever been a time in all my twelve years when I haven't.

*   *   *

Ms. Archer is there when I arrive, sitting at a table near where Kylee and I—and Cameron—sat on the night of the gig.

“What would you like?” she asks, standing up to head over to the counter to buy me a latte or a steamer. She already has her own cup of what looks like plain black coffee. She's not wearing one of her flowy skirts; she has on jeans and a dark blue sweater. But she does have long silver earrings with tiny dangling bells.

“I'm fine,” I say.

All I want is to tell her what this is about.

I sit down.

“You know that contest?” I ask.

“What contest?”

“The one for the personal essays? Written by kids?”

“Of course,” she says.

I hand her the email, which I printed out at home, and watch as she begins to read.

“Oh, Autumn!” She looks up at me, her face wreathed with smiles. “Congratulations! This is wonderful news! Thank you so much for sharing it with me in person!”

“Thanks,” I say, wishing I could be as happy for me as she seems to be. “It's just that … I don't just get a prize for winning. I get published, too.”

“I know! Autumn, I'm so proud of you. I think every writing teacher dreams of playing some role in her students' first publications.”

“But … the thing I wrote. It was about my family. Well, mainly about my brother.”

I'm glad I remembered to bring a copy with me. Wordlessly I hand it to her and wait as she reads it. She's already read the Mrs. Whistlepuff part before, but it's the new part that matters. She reads slowly, her face without expression. Then, when she's done, she looks up at me and I can tell from the way she tilts her head to one side that she gets it.

“What should I do?” I ask her.

Ms. Archer is the wisest person I know, and she's a published writer, so she probably deals with this kind of question all the time.

“I can't tell you that,” she says.

I should have known that was what she'd say. If she wouldn't even tell me what my Mrs. Whistlepuff essay was supposed to be about, she's not going to tell me what to do here.

I won't let her off the hook so easily.

“What would
you
do, if
you
were me?”

“Oh, Autumn, I can't tell you that either.”

She insists on buying me something to drink and eat, so I order the same chocolate-raspberry-hazelnut steamer I had on the gig night, only this barista isn't as flexible as the gig-night guy, and she says she can't mix flavors. If you have to have just one flavor, it might as well be vanilla, so that's what I end up with. I don't order any of the pastries in the case, even though there are almond croissants. There's a kind of terrible stress that makes you eat three pieces of coconut cake, but there's an even more terrible kind of stress where you can't bear the thought of eating anything at all.

“A lot of people publish things about people in their own lives,” I say, hoping I'll get a clue by trying out different thoughts and seeing some involuntary flash of approval or disapproval in her eyes.

“True.” No flash.

“And if everyone wrote only cheerful nicey-nice things about their lives, then—I don't know—all the people who have un-nicey-nice things in their lives will feel even more lonely, like, oh, look how happy everyone else is all the time, so why am I the only one who's so miserable?”

I think back to the day in class when we talked about personal essays. I was the one who said people like to read them so that they'll feel a connection with someone else who has struggled with a hard thing in life and made it through.

I might see a tiny positive flash in Ms. Archer's eyes this time. Her earrings gleam.

“True,” she says again.

“I saw this cartoon once,” I say. I think I may have seen it in
The New Yorker
that day I was trying to read their nonrhyming poems. “In the cartoon, there's this author at a book signing, and her parents come up to her, and they say, ‘If we had known you were going to be a writer, we would have been better parents.'”

It isn't as if I didn't give my family fair warning I was going to be—that I
am
—a writer.

Ms. Archer laughs. Does this mean she agrees that brothers have no right to complain when their sisters publish essays about them? Or just that she thinks the cartoon is funny?

“It's shallow to care about being published, right?” I ask her.

“What do you think?”

Well, whether it's shallow or not, and whether Cameron would care about it or not, I do still care about being published. And I bet a lot of other writers, throughout the history of the world, have cared about that, too.

“No,” I say, answering my own question. “Or, maybe, not in a bad way?”

Ms. Archer nods this time, which I don't take as a nod of approval, more a nod of understanding what I'm saying and why I'm saying it.

It's really helping me to talk this over together, even though the conversation so far has been entirely one-sided.

“But…” I say.

But then there's my parents and Hunter actually
reading
this. There's the dark secret Hunter carried inside that is sort of laid out here for everybody in the world to know. It's not really my story to tell; it's Hunter's story, if he ever wants to tell it. And yet it is my story, too, because it made him change toward me, and that's what the essay is really about. When you're in a family, it's not clear where one person's story begins and another person's story ends.

“But…” I say again. I don't finish the sentence.

Ms. Archer doesn't finish it for me.

“But…” she echoes.

I swallow down the dregs of my steamer. I've gotten no clue from Ms. Archer, really. None. We get up to go.

“I have to return the form by the Sunday after Thanksgiving,” I tell her. “I have to let them know either way by then.”

“I hope you'll make the choice that feels right for you,” Ms. Archer says.

She was nice to meet with me on a Saturday, and to buy me a steamer, and to listen as I tried my best to think this thing through. But in the end she was no help.

Neither choice feels right to me.

Both choices feel as wrong as wrong can be.

 

30

We're going to be spending Thanksgiving at my aunt and uncle's huge house up in the mountains, with lots and lots of relatives there; we're bringing the pies. It'll be good to have all the other relatives around to dilute our family; we're on our best behavior in front of other people. Maybe most families are.

All I can think about as I wake up on Thanksgiving morning and smell the pies baking is:
What should I do, what should I do, what should I do?

Holidays are about traditions. In my family, for Thanksgiving we have three kinds of pie: pumpkin (of course), apple (no surprise there either), and this raisin custard pie that makes this
our
family's Thanksgiving. I always have at least a tiny slice, even though I don't like raisins when they're cooked into things, just because it wouldn't be Thanksgiving otherwise.

All I can think about as we drive up to Aunt Liz and Uncle Steve's is:
What should I do, what should I do, what should I do?

At Aunt Liz and Uncle Steve's house, another tradition is that we all go around the table to say what we're grateful for. A lot of families have a tradition like that, I imagine. After all, the holiday is called Thanksgiving. As with the raisin custard pie, it wouldn't be
our
Thanksgiving if we didn't do this, but the tradition can also be, shall we say, a bit hard to swallow.

Uncle Steve made the rule that we can only say one thing each, because we have a couple of relatives who shall not be named who are what my father calls “pompous windbags” and would talk
forever
otherwise. And hearing a
long
list of someone else's “blessings” can make you start to hate the person just a tiny bit. So the one-thing-to-be-grateful-for rule is a good one. But picking that one thing, to say out loud in front of everybody, can be hard.

It's a total cliché to say you're grateful for your family. But if you
don't
say that, does it mean your family ranks lower on your gratitude list than the clever and interesting thing you say instead? And if you say “my health” (which I would never say, it's more what old people say), then the other old people who have cancer or shingles or arthritis might start feeling even sadder. You don't want to sound boring. You don't want to sound braggy. You don't want to sound smug. I'm telling you, it
sounds
nice to go around the table sharing blessings, but it's more dangerous than you might think.