LANIGAN BOOKS

Prologue June 1985 She wrote it on a Wednesday night. She had been trying since Sunday. This was the fourth attempt, and she had promised herself it would be the last, because if she did not do it tonight, she would lose her nerve and spend the whole summer hating herself, which would be worse than anything that would happen after she sent it. Her mother was watching something downstairs. The laugh track kept rising through the floor, great waves of borrowed laughter for jokes Melanie could not hear, which seemed about right. Her door was shut. Her desk lamp was on. In front of her was the good paper from her mother’s writing drawer, cream-colored and a little thicker than normal. If she was going to do this, she was going to do it properly, not on lined paper with geography notes still on the back. She wrote fast. The first three attempts had taught her that slow was dangerous. Slow gave her brain time to get involved, and her brain had opinions she did not need. She kept her hand moving. She did not stop. When she reached the end, she put the pen down without reading it back, folded the page twice in tight, careful folds, and held it in both hands. Okay, she thought. Okay. She put it in her school bag, turned off the lamp, and lay in the dark for a long time, listening to the laughter come up through the floor and thinking about Jamie Aldridge. * * * Jamie sat two rows to her left in Mrs. Farrow’s class, and he drew things in the margins of his notebooks. It wasn’t the scribbling everyone did when they were bored, and they were bored all the time. Those were actual drawings. Small exact things made while Jamie seemed to be somewhere else entirely, his hand carrying on with its own private business. Birds. Buildings. Once, near the back of his history notebook, an entire harbor. He had left it open on his desk by accident, and the boats were so small she had to lean in to see them properly. Then he came back and found her bent over his notebook two inches away. She had been mortified. Jamie looked at the page and said, “Oh. That one’s not very good, actually,” and took the notebook back, as though finding a girl with her face inside his harbor was a thing that happened to him regularly. That was what she could not get past. He did not perform anything. Every boy Melanie had ever known performed something — toughness, or funniness, or not caring. Jamie simply existed, taking up exactly the amount of space he needed and no more. She found this so remarkable that she had been watching him since February, trying to work out how he did it. They had had four real conversations. She knew that was a strange thing to know. But she knew it anyway. In the first, he had asked to borrow a pen and then said thank you properly, instead of taking it and turning back around. In the second, they had both reached for the same library book. “You take it,” he said. “No, you.” They had both laughed, and she had taken it. “Tell me if it’s good.” Two weeks later, in the corridor, she told him it was good. “Yeah?” he said. “Cool.” That was the third conversation, and also the fourth. She had replayed them so many times they were starting to wear thin at the edges, like a cassette. She had not told Diane. Diane was her best friend, and they told each other everything, but she kept this one, because saying it out loud would make it a thing, and once it was a thing, it could go wrong. For now it existed in a place where nothing had gone wrong yet, and Melanie was in no hurry to leave. The letter was not her asking him out. She wanted to be clear about that, at least with herself. She only wanted him to know that she thought he was different. That she noticed things. That she thought about him more than was probably normal. She had kept it vague enough that if he did not feel the same, he could let it go and they could both pretend it had not happened. She was almost sure she had kept it vague enough. She did not put his name on the outside of the fold. That felt too exposed. Addressing it made it real before it had arrived. She had not written his name inside either. * * * Thursday was the last real day before summer. Field day in the afternoon, the whole grade out on the lower field, and then it would be done. Six weeks of Diane’s back garden and the community pool and her mother asking every three days whether she had thought about what subjects she wanted next year. Melanie had been planning it for two weeks. The bags would be piled by the gym doors during field day the way they always were, one big heap while everyone was outside. She would find Jamie’s, put the letter in, and be gone before anyone saw her near it. By the time he found it, she would be home. Ideally, she would be in a different country. She knew his bag. Dark green canvas with a tear on the strap. She had noticed it one afternoon when he dumped it outside the gym, and her brain had simply kept it. Her brain kept everything about Jamie Aldridge without being asked. She changed in the girls’ change room while Diane talked about the summer. Olivia’s party. The twins from Grade Nine. Whether Sarah’s older brother had actually said what Sarah claimed, or whether Sarah had, as Diane put it, gone completely mental again with the wishful thinking. Melanie said the right things. Inside she was coming apart. * * * The bags were exactly where she knew they would be. She walked over as though looking for her own, crouched, and scanned for dark green canvas. There. She had to move two other bags to get to it. Dark green canvas, a torn strap. Enough to make her certain. She unzipped the front pocket. Empty. She slipped the letter in and zipped it shut. She stood, walked out to the field, and felt wild with it, in the best possible way. * * * She played terribly. She was usually decent at volleyball, decent enough that Mrs. Farrow had once said, “Good serve, Melanie,” which had carried her through most of April. But the ball kept arriving from impossible angles, or from easy angles made impossible because her mind was still inside the school, by the gym doors, in the front pocket of a dark green bag. Every serve, every whistle moved her closer to the moment he would find it. Diane kept looking at her from the other side of the net. Melanie smiled back, the way a person smiles when everything is fine, and she has not just put her whole life inside a folded piece of cream-colored paper. Then the day ended, all at once, the way school days did. People poured out of the building shouting about summer, about the pool, about who was going to Olivia’s. Melanie was near the edge of the field when she heard the laughter. It came from the far end, near the baseball backstop. Group laughter had its own sound. She knew that before she turned. Ordinary laughter broke apart, but this stayed together. It moved as one thing, heavy and pleased with itself, meant to travel. She turned. A crowd had formed. Almost everyone from Mrs. Farrow’s class, with a few Grade Sevens pressing in because Grade Sevens could smell disaster through brick. Boys and girls in a tight ring, all facing the center. The teachers were somewhere else, the way teachers always were at the exact second they were needed. Kevin Marsh stood in the middle. Of course it was Kevin Marsh. She knew him from the back of his head, from the square set of his shoulders, from how he made his body larger when people were watching. He had one arm lifted, and in his hand was a piece of cream-colored paper. For a second her mind refused it. The paper could have been anything. A note from home. A worksheet. Some other girl’s private, hopeful, stupid thing. Then Kevin started reading. He used a voice. High and pinched, halfway between a princess and a dying cat. “I think you’re different from everyone else,” he read, dragging out different until the word became diseased. “I notice things about you that maybe other people don’t.” The boys exploded. One of them clutched his stomach. A girl near the front put her hand over her mouth, but her eyes were bright. The sound reached Melanie in pieces. Laughter. Whistles. Oh my God. Someone saying, “Read the good bit again.” Kevin looked delighted. He had found a match and a building made of paper. Melanie stopped walking. She had reached the edge of the circle, and nobody had noticed her yet; they were all turned inward, warmed by the little fire Kevin had made. She could see the letter clearly now. Her careful folds pulled open. Her Wednesday-night handwriting held up in the hard June sun. Kevin licked his finger and turned the page over, making a show of it, though there was nothing on the other side. That got a laugh too. “I think about you more than I probably should.” This time the noise was enormous. Melanie felt the words leave her and become his, and that was worse than the laughing, worse than the faces. The words had belonged to her in her bedroom. They had been awkward and too much and hers. Kevin’s mouth turned them into something filthy, something anyone could touch. He held the page higher. “And it’s signed.” Her skin went cold. Kevin looked around the circle, savoring it. “Signed, Melanie.” The name landed. There was one clean second while the whole field took it in. Then everyone turned. Melanie stood at the edge of the crowd with her gym shirt sticking to her back and her hands hanging uselessly at her sides. Kevin saw her. His grin widened. “Well, well,” he said. “There she is.” A few people laughed simply because he had said her name. He bowed toward her with the letter. “Melanie’s in love.” “I’m not,” she said. Her voice was too small. It barely reached him. Kevin pressed the paper to his heart in an ugly imitation of tenderness. “She thinks about someone more than she probably should. That’s serious. That’s practically marriage.” “Shut up,” Diane said from somewhere behind her. Kevin ignored her. He had an audience and a victim. “So who is it, then? Who’s Melanie’s big mystery man?” Someone began making kissing noises. Another boy groaned gross with such force that people laughed harder. Melanie saw three girls from the other class whispering, already storing the story for the phone calls they would make that evening. By dinner it would be everywhere. By Monday it would have grown new parts. Kevin pointed at the nearest boy. “Is it you, Craig? Are you the lucky man?” Craig threw up both hands. “No way.” “Don’t be cruel,” Kevin said. “She used the good paper.” The boys roared. “Brian? You’ve got Melanie writing love letters now?” Brian made a gagging sound and bent over. “Careful,” Kevin said. “You’ll break her heart.” He went around the circle like that, one boy after another, holding the letter up between them all. Each denial made the next one louder. Every boy understood the rule at once: refuse fast, refuse with disgust, refuse as though Melanie herself were the joke. Boys who had never managed to be funny in their lives suddenly found rhythm, because cruelty supplied the timing. “You, Paul?” “I’d move schools.” “You, Mark?” “I’d rather kiss Farrow.” That one nearly broke the circle open. Kevin glanced at her after each answer, checking the damage. She knew he was checking. He wanted to see her cry. A girl crying at the edge of a field on the last day before summer would have made the whole performance perfect. She would not give him that. Her eyes burned, and her face felt wrong, too hot and too exposed, but she fixed her gaze somewhere near Kevin’s shoulder and let the noise pass through her. Somewhere in that ring of faces was a boy whose stomach had dropped the moment Kevin unfolded the page. Melanie’s eyes passed over him without stopping, just like her eyes passed over most boys, on their way to find Jamie’s. Jamie stood on the other side of the circle, half hidden between two boys. He was not laughing the way the others were laughing. That was what she saw first, and for one foolish second it almost saved him. His face was serious. His eyes went to the letter, then to Kevin, then briefly to a boy two places down from him who had gone pale. He looked the way a person looks when they know something is wrong but cannot pinpoint it. Guilt, maybe. Or something close enough to it that Melanie could not tell the difference. She had watched him for months. She knew the small changes in his face when something reached him, and something had reached him now. She was sure of it. She was sure of everything that afternoon. She would stay sure of it for forty years. For one second she thought he might speak. He could have said, “Give it back.” He could have said, “Leave her alone.” Nothing grand, nothing brave. Three words would have done it. He could have stepped forward and made the afternoon divide into before and after. Kevin reached him. The crowd felt it too. Something passed through them, and the sound narrowed. Everyone liked Jamie. Jamie was easy to like. He did not shove, did not shout, did not need to win every sentence. That had been the whole point of him. Kevin pointed the letter at his face. “Jamie Aldridge. Could it be you?” Jamie looked at Kevin. Then at the letter. Then, just once, at Melanie. It was very quick. Nobody else would have caught it. She caught it. There he was. The boy who drew harbors in the backs of notebooks. The boy who said thank you properly. The boy who took up exactly the space he needed and no more. He smiled. Small, easy. “Me?” he said. “No chance.” The circle burst open. Someone slapped his shoulder. Someone shouted, “Saved yourself, Aldridge.” Kevin laughed so hard he had to fold the letter against his leg. Jamie’s smile stayed exactly where it was. Melanie looked at him and understood something with a kind of terrible calm. She had been right about him in almost every way. He was different. He was gentler. He did notice things. He simply did not perform unless the price of refusing became too high. And then he performed beautifully. The thought went through her with such force that the field seemed to move away. The boys, the girls, Kevin holding her letter, Jamie’s careful face — all of it pulled back, as though she were seeing it from the wrong end of a telescope. She had given him the most private thing she owned. He had handed it back to the crowd without touching it. Kevin finished his interviews. Every boy said no. Most of them laughed. A couple didn’t, and she never learned whether that was decency or the fear that the letter had been meant for them. “Well, there you go, Melanie,” Kevin called. “Nobody wants you.” A few people made small, wounded noises, pretending sympathy. “Poor Melanie. Poor, desperate Melanie.” That word did it. She could feel it attaching itself to her name. Diane pushed through the edge of the circle. “Give it back, Kevin.” He lifted the letter above his head. “Diane wants it now.” “Give it back.” Diane’s voice had gone flat and dangerous. For half a second, Kevin measured whether the game was still worth it. Diane had brothers in high school. Diane had no fear of being disliked. Diane also looked, in that moment, entirely capable of biting him. He tossed the letter toward Melanie. It fell short and landed in the grass. Nobody picked it up. That was the final cruelty. The paper lay there between them all, open to the sky, and everyone looked down at it as though it were something dead. Melanie stepped forward. Bent. Picked it up. Her fingers were steady. She hated that they were steady. She folded it once along one of its ruined creases and held it at her side. Then she walked away. She did not run. Running would have given them an ending. She walked past Diane, who said her name, past the backstop, past the boys still laughing because laughter took a while to die when everyone was afraid of being the first to stop. Across the asphalt. Through the heavy school door that smelled of varnish, dust, and old lunches. Inside, the hallway was almost empty. A strip of construction-paper suns drooped along the wall outside the Grade Two room. Someone had abandoned a single running shoe by the drinking fountain. From near the office came the scrape of a chair and a teacher’s voice, pleasant and bored. Melanie went into the change room and sat on the wooden bench in front of her locker. The room smelled of damp towels and rubber soles and Love’s Baby Soft, which someone had sprayed too much of after volleyball. A tap dripped at the far sink. She put the letter on her lap. The paper looked smaller now. In her bedroom it had seemed enormous, too large to fit into the world. Now it was only a page, creased and handled, slightly grass-stained at one corner. She thought about tearing it up. She thought about the bin. Instead she folded it again, slowly this time, along the old lines, though they no longer matched. Her eyes kept filling, and she kept blinking until the room sharpened. She would not cry here. She had decided that on the walk across the field. If she cried here, in this room that smelled of other people’s socks, then Kevin Marsh would have the letter and the laughter and Jamie’s denial and her tears. He would have everything. He was not getting everything. Outside, the school year ended without her. Doors slammed. Someone shouted about a towel. The world continued with the insulting confidence of a thing that had no idea what had just happened. She sat there until the school quieted down. Then she picked up her bag, put the letter in the smallest pocket, and went home. * * * She left in August. Her father’s job in another city had been settled for a while. Her parents had planned to tell her once Grade Eight was finished and everyone was calm. They sat her down at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning and told her she would be starting at a new school in September, in a new town. Kingston. Melanie gripped the edge of the table, and for one terrible second her parents thought she was upset. She was not. The relief came so fast she could hardly breathe. Her mother reached for her hand and said she knew it was a lot. Melanie nodded, because that seemed expected. She made her face do what it was supposed to do — shock, a little worry, the correct amount of sadness. She did not tell them they had just opened a door in a burning room. “Okay,” she said. Then she went upstairs, closed her bedroom door, and sat on the bed while relief moved through her whole body, warm and enormous. She would not have to start high school with those faces. Everyone else was going together. Kevin Marsh would be there. Jamie Aldridge would be there. Diane and Sarah and Olivia and the boys who had said “no way” with such impressive speed. The story would travel with them, arriving before she did, folded into the first week, waiting by the lockers, ready to become one of the things people knew about her. She was going somewhere else entirely. Halls where nobody had heard Kevin read her words in that voice. Girls who did not know how to hide a knowing smile. Boys who had never been offered the chance to reject her in public. * * * She saw Diane twice that summer, and she told her the truth. About Jamie, about why she had written the letter, about how he had betrayed her. In August, the moving van came. Her mother packed the good cream-colored paper into a box marked Kitchen/Desk, and Melanie stood in the driveway and watched the men close the back of the truck. Then she got into the car and did not look back. She was fourteen. She thought that meant she had escaped. * * * Then September came, and the new school started. One week became two. Two became a month. The geography changed, and the friendship changed with it, which seemed sad in a distant way, and also merciful. She did not think about Kevin Marsh. She did not think about the circle of boys, or Jamie’s easy smile, or how his own name had sounded in Kevin’s mouth. She did not think about the paper lying open in the grass, with everyone staring at it and no one picking it up. She became very good at not thinking. Better than she had known a person could be. She took the afternoon and made it smaller. Then smaller. Then smaller again, until it was only a thing that had happened once, at a school she no longer attended, in a town where she no longer lived. She could survive almost anything, she was learning, if she could make it small enough. What she kept was not the memory. Memories announced themselves; they arrived with faces and dates. This was quieter. It settled into her without asking. A small adjustment. The volume turned down on a particular kind of hope. She did not notice it at fourteen. She did not notice it at sixteen, or twenty, or twenty-five. By the time she noticed, she had forgotten where it began, and by then she had other names for it. Judgment. Maturity. Sense. What happened when a girl became a woman and learned how the world actually worked.