Love Letters to the Dead (9 page)

At lunch today, Kristen and Tristan came to sit with me and Natalie and Hannah at our table, and I told them about Evan’s invitation.

Hannah exclaimed, “Mr. Popular is totally trying to get in your pants.”

“Well, I know he gets in his own pants,” I said.

This made everyone laugh, because I never say things like that. Hannah almost spit out her Capri Sun.

“Are you going to say yes?” Natalie asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. Then I asked Tristan and Kristen, “Are you guys going?”

“We’re over school dances, right, babe?” Tristan answered.

Kristen nodded.

“Do you think Sky’s over school dances, too?” I asked.

“Unfortunately, I’d have to answer that in the affirmative,” Tristan said.

Hannah said, “My analysis is that it appears that he’d like to spend as little time at school as possible, since he’s been ditching lunch. And although he has license to stand with the cool kids, he still doesn’t fully belong anywhere and hasn’t relinquished his title of Mr. Mystery. Hence the throng of girls who are always leaning in and touching his arm. But of course, my money’s on you.”

Kristen added, “Mine, too, but I know his type, Laurel. He’s not a girlfriend kind of guy. He’s the type that just, like, has girls sometimes.”

“Is Tristan the girlfriend kind of guy?” I asked, because I was trying to figure out what this meant.

Kristen laughed. “He wasn’t before I met him,” she admitted.

“But she converted me!” Tristan said. “I’m living proof it’s possible.”

“Maybe you’ll convert Sky,” Kristen offered.

“We haven’t even talked since last week. I don’t know if he actually likes me.”

“I hypothesize that Sky
does
like you,” Tristan said. “He asked you to ride in his Chevy lovemobile after all—and the fact that he hasn’t spoken to you since is evidence that you make him nervous. Which is evidence that he likes you. Guys get shy, too, you know.”

It’s hard for me to imagine that I make Sky nervous, but I hope Tristan is right.

When lunch was finished, I still wasn’t sure what to do about Evan. In Algebra, I sat on the other side of the room from him and tried not to look over. After class, I took a long time placing my notepaper in my binder and snapping and resnapping the rings, hoping he’d leave. But when I looked up, he was there.

“Did you get my note?”

I looked at him blankly for a moment. “Yeah.”

“Does that mean yeah you’ll go with me or yeah you got it?”

After what Hannah and Kristen said, I figured my chances of Sky asking were pretty much none, especially since there’s only a week and a half left before the dance. And it seemed hard to say no to Evan and his paper heart. So I said, “Oh. Uh. Yeah, I’ll go.” Then I added, “But I kind of have plans beforehand. So, can we meet there?”

I’ve seen plenty of versions of homecoming dates on TV—the girls in their satin dresses cutting tiny pieces off of rib eyes they won’t finish at somewhere like Outback Steakhouse, drinking Shirley Temples and virgin piña coladas, while the guys scarf their whole plates and then tackle the girls’. And I know that Evan probably has popular friends who do this kind of thing. But what would I say to them?

Honestly, I don’t want him to pick me up, because I couldn’t stand him coming to our quiet house. I don’t want him to see inside it. And I don’t want Dad feeling like he should have to pretend and pull out the camera. We don’t take pictures anymore.

Evan was still looking at me.

I tried to give him a way out. “You know, if you want to ask someone else who can go to dinner first, I totally get it. It’s totally okay.”

Evan just said, “No, it’s cool. You can come out after, right?”

I guess this was the part that really mattered. If he thought we would make out or not.

“Yeah, sure,” I mumbled.

So now, this is going to be my first dance. With Evan Friedman and his jagged red heart. It was supposed to be Sky.

At May’s first dance her freshman year, I watched her get ready in her red dress, not satin, but silk. She was so perfectly alive. Her date, Justin Alvarez, a senior boy, rang the doorbell like he should and pinned on a corsage. I stayed hidden in the door frame, watching. Even though they’d already split up by then, Mom and Dad both wanted to be the ones to see her off to her first dance, so Mom came over that night. She took pictures of May being beautiful. Dad shook Justin’s hand and said, “Be home by twelve.” I had this feeling that the boy dressed in a suit was carrying her away, into her new life that I couldn’t see. I wished I could go.

When she got back that night at two a.m., she tiptoed into her room. She’d called Dad and told him what a great time she was having and begged for a couple extra hours. He’d finally agreed and gone to sleep, but I had been in bed waiting up, my eyes open to the moonlight. I heard her and pushed open her door. She said, “You have to hear this.” She put on a CD and played “The Lady in Red.” Over and over and over. I lay on her bed and watched her unpin her hair, placing freed bobby pins on the dresser, and wiping off the lipstick. When her curls were a mess over her shoulders, she lay in the bed next to me, starting the song over again and closing her eyes. She fell asleep in her red dress. I saw the hem of it with its sequins crumple between her thigh and the sheet. I thought she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I wondered if anyone could ever think that about me.

Yours,
Laurel

Dear Allan “Rocky” Lane,

I wanted to know who you were, besides the voice of Mister Ed, so I looked you up online. I found a picture of you, and I was surprised to see you were really very handsome. A Western man. Rough and kind at once. Up until then, I had only seen the face of Mister Ed when I pictured you in my mind. But I discovered you were a boy who grew up in Indiana and left school because you dreamed of becoming a Hollywood star. Before you were Mister Ed, you were Harry Leonard Albershart from Indiana, and then Allan Lane the actor, nicknamed Rocky. The article said you made thirty B Westerns—the low-budget kind—riding a horse called Black Jack through movie sets. It’s strange the way even dreams turn into jobs.

When you were on set shooting all of those B movies with titles like
Desperadoes’ Outpost
and
Frontier Investigator
, I wonder if in your head you were riding a real horse across the desert, galloping off to somewhere else. It might not be what you’d imagined when you wanted to become a star, but when you were Mister Ed, you galloped yourself into the living rooms of so many people who loved you. I know that.

Aunt Amy has watched your show since she and Mom were kids. I think it reminds her of when the world seemed safe. The way you make us laugh, it’s clean—a talking horse goes to a dentist, makes phone calls to movie stars, watches too much TV. Nothing really bad ever happens.

I wish that Aunt Amy could meet somebody like you. Someone who could make her laugh and look good in his cowboy hat as he tipped it toward her. If you were here, you could do your Mister Ed voice and make her crack up. Instead, Aunt Amy just has the Jesus Man, who never calls back.

When I see her putting on her apron in the morning to go to work, I can see the days stretch ahead of her like a desert. Even if it didn’t come perfectly true, you got to live close to your dream. But she works at the Casa Grande diner, where people go for lunch, people who seem like they wish they were meant to go to lunch somewhere else. The cooks put too much chicken salad on the sandwiches. A huge ice cream scoop of it, over a slippery tomato. They don’t bother spreading it out. And the whole thing slides off.

Last weekend, she asked me to come and visit her there. It was near the end of her shift, and I was one of only four tables. Across the room, there was a man wearing a tee shirt that said
ABSTINENCE: 99.9% EFFECTIVE
, with a picture of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. When his iced tea was empty, he sucked at the crushed ice through a straw. He sucked out all the liquid the ice was willing to give up. When no refill came, he snapped his fingers. Aunt Amy probably didn’t like him on account of his shirt, and she walked over without her iced tea pitcher and told him that was rude. They got in an argument, and the manager ended up giving him his glass of tea for free. Another table sitting next to me sent back their fries because they were too crispy. I watched Aunt Amy behind the counter. She sneezed into her hand, and then when she thought no one was looking, she subtly touched the new plate of fries. It surprised me that someone who believes in Jesus would do this. But it’s a hard job.

Homecoming is this weekend (thank god I’ll be with Dad), but Aunt Amy saw it marked on the school calendar, so she knew it was coming up. After her lunch shift she wanted to give me a little pep talk. She said that if I was going to be attending the school dance, she wanted to remind me to use good judgment. Then she started on a lecture about not dancing too close. “Make sure you leave some room for the Holy Ghost.” You might be laughing at that, but although she tried to smile at me when she said it, I don’t think it was meant to be a joke. She reminded me of the pitfalls of sin, and then asked me if I wanted to go shopping. Even though I need a dress, I didn’t want to go with her, because she disapproves of spaghetti straps, and all good homecoming dresses have them. I knew I’d end up with a church dress that I would feel guilty for not wearing. So I told her I had homework. Then she gave me $20 to shop with, but I didn’t want to tell her that you can’t buy a dress with that much. So I took the $20, and even though I felt bad, I figured I could get Nutter Butters for pretty much the rest of the year with it.

Today at lunch before I went to buy one, I looked for Natalie and Hannah. When I saw them, Natalie was giving Hannah a single tulip. Hannah took the tulip and put it to her face as if to smell it, even though tulips don’t smell. Natalie giggled and said, “Will you go to homecoming with me, dah-ling?”

Hannah dropped the tulip on her tray. She looked at Natalie. “What do you mean?” she asked with an edge in her voice.

Natalie said, “I just think the whole thing of dances is so stupid. I thought we should have fun with it, you know, not worry about boys or anything. We can wear flapper dresses and eat at the fondue place first.” Her voice went up at the end, in a sort of hopeful way. Then she turned to me quickly and said, “Laurel will go with us, too. Sorry I didn’t bring you a flower, Laurel. I didn’t know what kind you like. I stole the tulip from my neighbor’s yard. Mr. Dickie came out and started yelling, so I had to run. He chased me down half a block before his asthma kicked in.”

I tried to laugh.

Hannah said, “Laurel is going with Evan Friedman. Remember? Anyway, Kasey’s going to take me. I talked him into it. He’s borrowing his dad’s convertible. But I guess you can come with us if you want.”

Natalie looked annoyed. “Why would he want to go to a high school dance? He’s, like, nineteen.”

Hannah gave a sly smile and said, “I told him if he came, afterward I’d give him an extra good surprise.”

I could see then that something in Natalie got crushed. The look on her face was like when you just finished making a waffle in the morning, and you got it out of the toaster, and you put on the butter and the syrup and had it cut along the lines into square inches, and you were carrying it into your room, so excited, but then you dropped it facedown on the floor. And you felt so sad about the whole thing, you didn’t even want to make another.

Natalie just said, “Okay, that’s cool. Actually, someone asked me, anyway.”

Hannah looked at her and said, “Who?”

Natalie looked down at the floor, and then back up at Hannah. Her cheeks were red. If she was angry or embarrassed, I don’t know. But it was their moment. So I mumbled something about Nutter Butters and went away.

As I was going up to get in the lunch line, I saw Sky standing there. I started to walk the other way. But I turned back and stood in line behind him. I stared at the back of his head and didn’t say anything for a while. I kept opening my mouth, but nothing came out. Finally, I said, “Hey.”

He turned around, surprised to see me. “Oh. Hi.”

“Hey,” I said again, stupidly.

“What’s up?”

I was trying to think of how to answer that question again, such a terrible question. Instead I said, “So, are you going to the dance this weekend?”

“I don’t know. Are you?”

“Going to the dance?”

He looked at me like,
Yes, obviously
.

“I don’t know, either.” Then I said, “Well, yeah, I guess I am. Someone asked me.”

Sky tensed up, I swear the muscles in his arm got the teensiest bit harder, and he said, “Who?”

“Just this guy.” It was too quiet. So I continued. “But I don’t even know if I want to go anyway. I mean, it’s like that kind of thing that’s never what it’s supposed to be, you know?”

Suddenly, out of nowhere, Sky said, “Your sister was May, huh?”

I felt frozen. How did he know that? No one here has asked me about May, except Mrs. Buster. Maybe Sky had friends who went to May’s old school. He’s a junior, the same age as her. Or maybe he went there before he transferred. It wouldn’t be impossible.