Write This Down (4 page)

She picks up the chalk and writes on the board: “The worst—or best—gift you ever received.”

I make a brainstorming list, starting with the worst gifts because bad things are always good to write about. I think best when I have a pen in my hand. Sometimes it feels like I have to have a pen in my hand in order even to
think
, that I don't even
have
an idea until I write it down.

Mitten
, I write. That was the name of the guinea pig I got for Christmas when I was nine; he died a week later.

Electric toothbrush.
From my dad, of course.

Holes
, the book.
It's a great book, but Aunt Liz sent it to me three years in a row. She must really like it.

Okay, now I should try to think of some good gifts.

My first Moleskine notebook.
That was my best-ever gift, from Kylee, two birthdays ago.

My writer mug from Hunter.

Kylee is still knitting, but I can tell from the way her forehead is scrunched up that she's ready to leap into writing soon.

Olivia turns around and shoots her an annoyed look, as if the click of Kylee's needles is keeping her from coming up with an amazing bad gift/good gift idea. This time I hear what she whispers, while jerking her thumb in Kylee's direction: “Granny.” She and Kaitlyn both crack up, but they snicker so quietly that Ms. Archer doesn't notice.

I feel my face flushing with sudden heat. I don't think Kylee heard, and if she did, she probably wouldn't care. She'd just say,
My grandma loved to knit, and I'm glad I'm like her.
If she knew how angry I feel right now at Olivia, she'd be puzzled, like,
Who cares what Olivia thinks about anything?
That is another huge difference between Kylee and me. And maybe I wouldn't care if Olivia said something like that about
me
—except that I would—but I totally care if she says it about
Kylee
. I think when we love someone we care about them more than we do about ourselves.

Suddenly, I know what I want to write about.

I want to write about my best gift
ever
.

Now I can't stop my pen from flying across the page.

I'm five, and I'm afraid of the dark, because as soon as it's dark, there's this cubbyhole in my bedroom under the eaves behind a little square door with a little round doorknob, and when it's totally dark, the doorknob turns, and the door creaks open, and Mrs. Whistlepuff comes out. She's all made of a cold, cold wind, a bad-smelling wind, like the wind that blows in from a garbage dump. She tries to blow my covers off, and no matter how I pull on them to hold them tight, I can feel her tugging, too. I know if she gets the covers off, she'll breathe on me, and if Mrs. Whistlepuff breathes on you, you die. I can't scream because Mrs. Whistlepuff sucks all my breath away, and I can't tell my parents because my father took the night-light out of my room because five-year-olds are big girls who don't need night-lights anymore. I have to be a big girl now, even if it means Mrs. Whistlepuff is going to kill me.

The only person I tell is Hunter. He's eight, and he's not afraid of anything.

He doesn't laugh. He doesn't say, “There's no such person as Mrs. Whistlepuff.”

He rides his bike all by himself to the store a few blocks from our house and comes back with something hidden under his jacket. My parents don't know where he went, and they're furious, and they take his bike away for a week, because he's not allowed to leave without letting them know where he's going.

The thing he had hidden under his coat is a flashlight. For me. And batteries, too, and he even knew which kind of batteries to get, and how to put the batteries in, with the plus and minus ends in the right place, and everything.

Now when it's dark, dark, dark in my room, and I hear the doorknob turn and the door start to creak open, I shine the flashlight over to the cubby, and Mrs. Whistlepuff has to go back inside and stay there.

And she never bothers me again.

The end.

Except it's not the end. The end is how Hunter read my poem aloud to his friends, and they all laughed.

I don't have that flashlight anymore. I'm not sure if Hunter bought it for me with his birthday money or swiped it the way he swiped a chocolate bar—and got in big trouble—a few weeks later.

I just remember how bright its beam was.

I just remember how it let me be safe in my bed again through the night.

Cameron is writing now, too, intently bent over his page, his hand at that awkward angle left-handed people use when they write. I still don't know what he's writing about. He acted pretty normal today, all things considered—that is to say, normal for someone who isn't like anybody else I've ever known. Maybe David took pity on me and didn't tell him? Maybe David told him, and Cameron didn't even care?

Somehow that last possibility seems the worst of all.

 

5

After school on Tuesday I'm sitting in the backseat of my mom's Subaru Outback, eyes scrunched shut, waiting to die.

“Hunter,” Mom says to my brother, who is at the wheel. “You need to check the mirrors.
All
the mirrors. Rearview mirror.
Both
side mirrors.”

“There's nothing to see!” he snaps. “We haven't even left the driveway yet!”

“And we're not
going
to leave the driveway until you do as I say.”

Our mother isn't generally the control-freak type. It's more that she's overprotective. When Hunter and I were little kids getting ready to cross the street, she'd make us look both ways not once but twice. Look left, look right, look left again, look right again, and
then
we could put one toe off the sidewalk.

“Why don't you drive, Mom?” I suggest, opening my eyes. Usually I keep completely quiet in the car when Hunter is driving, both because I think he needs all his concentration to avoid killing us, and also because I feel embarrassed for him, having to learn such a big, new hard thing with an audience watching every single minute. But I'm still furious about his meanness to me last weekend. My Mrs. Whistlepuff freewrite only made me even angrier at this new, nasty Hunter who showed up at the start of the school year and took my real, true brother away.

“Why don't you shut up, Autumn?” Hunter says.

He didn't use to say things like that to me. He used to say things like that to other kids when they picked on me for being too tall, too skinny, too quick to cry. Years ago, when Charlie Munch on our street called me “Skinny Minnie,” Hunter, without missing a beat, called him “Chunky Monkey,” and just like that Charlie's nickname became “Chunk”
forever
.

“Hunter, don't talk that way to your sister,” Mom says. To me she says, “He has to log fifty hours behind the wheel before he can get his license. There's no way he can get that many hours if he doesn't do some of the driving when we go out on errands. Honey, check the mirrors so we can go.”

Hunter gives a huge sigh, but he does look in the general direction of the mirrors.

“Okay,” Mom says. “Start backing out the driveway. Slowly.”

The car leaps backward, like a racehorse galloping in reverse out of the gate.

Mom and I shriek simultaneously. “Brake!” she shouts. “Hunter, brake!”

Whiplash time. My head jerks forward as the car screeches to a halt, still in the driveway.

“
Ease
on the gas,” she says. “Don't press the pedal down all the way. Just press it down a little bit.”

“If I drive any slower, Autumn's going to be late to her orthodontist appointment,” Hunter points out.

The appointment is at four, and it's already three forty-five, although we climbed into the car ten minutes ago. It took that long for Mom to give all the instructions that Hunter is ignoring. But the office is just ten minutes away, and it doesn't matter much if we're late when my orthodontist is also my dad. And it's not like Hunter cares whether I get there on time; he just wants Mom to stop talking and let him start driving.

“Better late than dead,” I chirp.

Okay, I didn't need to say that. But he didn't need to tell me to shut up either.

“If thou wouldst shut thy trap,” Hunter snaps, “'twould be a most excellent idea.”

Now,
that
was low. I cannot believe he's sitting there teasing me even more about my “Ode to Cameron.”

I hate you
,
Hunter,
I want to say, but Mom doesn't let us use words like “hate” or “stupid” or “shut up.” Apparently “shut thy trap” is acceptable, or maybe she's too stressed with the driving lesson to notice.

So angry I can hardly breathe, I pull out my Moleskine notebook, which I'm never going to let out of my sight ever again. If I can't say what I want out loud, at least I can say it in writing.

Tuesday, October 4. Hunter driving,
I write at the top of the page.

I cross out
Hunter driving
and write
Hunter trying to drive
.

The car is finally inching backward at a pace slow enough to satisfy Mom. But now we're at the end of the driveway, and Hunter is going to have to pull out into the street. Hunter can barely drive, let alone drive backward, not to mention turning backward into traffic. Okay, there isn't any traffic on our quiet cul-de-sac, but there
might
be.

I try to think of the best words to describe exactly how my insides feel, both from how Hunter is driving and from what he just said.

Butterflies fluttering.
I cross it out. Cliché. Plus, butterflies are too sweet and gentle for this utter upheaval of emotion. More like
Elephants stampeding
.

Heart banging around in my chest like a tennis ball in a dryer.
Great line. But as often happens when an especially wonderful line springs into my head, I have a bad feeling I read it in a book somewhere.

Hunter makes it out of the driveway, and we're on the street now, waiting at the stop sign to turn onto a bigger road, a road that will have actual cars on it driven by actual other drivers.

“No!” Mom's voice cuts through my thoughts as Hunter creeps forward. “Wait! Don't you see that Honda?”

“It's a million miles away! Maybe two million!”

“No, it's not!”

“Mom, I could have pulled out ten times already. Look, it's
still
a million miles away.”

“Wait until I tell you. I mean it, Hunter. Wait!”

Heart beating against my ribs like a bird trapped in a too-small cage.

Stomach choked with molten lava about to erupt.

“Okay,
now
,” Mom says.

The car gives another wild leap as Hunter makes his turn and starts to speed down the busier street.

“Slow down! Slow down! Slow down!”

Why has the road suddenly become incredibly narrow, the parked cars looming on the right, ongoing traffic hurtling toward us on the left?

“You're too close!” Mom reaches over and grabs the wheel. The car swings away from the parked brand-new Audi it was about to total and veers in the other direction over the centerline. I close my eyes and brace myself for the sound of the crash. But I squint one eye to see the two of them, four hands on the wheel, swing it back into our lane.

“Mom,” Hunter says, “it's better to hit a parked car than a moving car.”

“At least the moving car has a chance of getting out of the way,” she fires back.

“Um, it's better not to hit either one,” I say.

Hunter's ears flare red. I hope being mad won't hinder his efforts to avoid hitting anything.

Without taking his eyes off the road, he says, “You know what, Autumn, great critic of other people's driving? Thy poetry sucks. And guess who else thinks it sucks? Cameron's brother told me Cameron thought your poem sucked, too.”

“Hunter,” Mom says in a warning tone. “Suck” is another word on Mom's forbidden list.

But it's not the word I care about. Is Hunter telling me the truth? Did David really tell Cameron about my poem and Cameron thought it was bad?

I don't mind if the car crashes now, which it very well might.

“Hunter, it's a yellow light. Stop! It's going to change any second. Stop!”

Hunter accelerates and makes it through the light just before it turns red.

“See?” he crows as he zips close to an enormous truck barreling toward us from the opposite direction.

If only the
New Yorker
poetry editor read my poems the very first thing when he got to his office Monday morning and showed them to a bunch of other
New Yorker
poetry people, and they already decided to accept one for publication! If only he's emailing me right now to tell me! I know that can't happen—well, it
could
happen, but it would be ridiculously fast after they said “two to six months” on their website. But I glance at the email alert on my phone just in case.

Nothing.

Two minutes later I check again.

Still nothing.

 

6

It's dinnertime, with the whole family sitting at the table: me, Dad, Mom, and Hunter. We don't have dinner together every night in my family, because a lot of the time this year Hunter is hanging out with the band, and I have ballet or a flute lesson, or I'm at Kylee's house. But it means a lot to Mom that we try to sit down for dinner a few times a week.

My mother is taking a cooking class called Secrets of a Healthy Asian Kitchen, so she's made some kind of stir-fry with hormone-free chicken, lots of organic veggies, and brown rice, which is healthier than white rice. She's always reading up on nutrition and deciding that everything in our lives would go better if we were gluten free, or had less dairy, or ate more nuts and olive oil. The stir-fry smells yummy, but I never feel like eating anything after I've gotten my braces tightened.