Love Letters to the Dead

He laughed. “No you’re not. You’re standing here. Right in front of me, in fact.”


I smiled back. I wanted to ask him about his house and the woman who must have been his mother tending the garden in the middle of the night. But of course I couldn’t. So I was quiet for a long moment, noticing things. Like the eyelash on his cheek. And the way his chest looked underneath his sweatshirt. And I forgot I was supposed to be saying something.

“So do you want to go for a drive or what?”

“After school?”

“Yeah. I’ll meet you in the alley.” And with that, he turned around and walked down the hallway.

I glanced back at myself in the murky glass and caught the edge of my grin. My face didn’t look so wrong anymore, and before I turned to go, I noticed the way my eyes are shaped like May’s.

My stomach is flipping all around. I wonder if Sky swerves and runs red lights and stuff like May did. I used to get scared in the car with her and grip on to the handle over the door and hold my breath, but I loved it. I loved the feeling of being alone together in the car, like we could go anywhere we wanted. Just us.

Luckily for me I’m with Dad this week and I take the bus home, so I won’t have to think about what to tell Aunt Amy. I have to go now. The bell is ringing. Wish me luck and bravery.

Yours,

Laurel




Dear Jim Morrison,

I waited at the edge of the alley after school, and Sky pulled up in his truck. A Chevy. Kristen was there, smoking, and she gave me a quiet wink. I got in and looked at Sky. I wondered if he could hear how hard my heart was hitting my chest. Like my ribs really were a cage, and my heart wanted out. When the ignition turned, the music came on loud. I asked Sky who was singing, and he said it was the Doors, and the song was called “Light My Fire.” He said, “If you love Kurt, you’ll love Jim Morrison, too.” He was right—I do love you.

All of a sudden we were out of the lot and on the highway next to the mountains, flying. I put my hand out the window, and then I put my head out. I felt my hair blow behind me and the air rush into me, and I forgot for a moment to worry about how I was supposed to be. Because I was perfect right then. Everything was. And Sky was a perfect driver. Not scary. Just steady. And fast. I wanted the music to last forever.

When I brought my head back in, Sky looked at me and kind of smiled. “Sit closer,” he said. So I moved to the middle of the bench seat, and everything slowed down except the car. The song and its drums were going. He put his hand on my thigh. High up. Right on the skin where my skirt ended. His fingers moved, just the littlest bit. Such a little bit that if I looked down, I probably couldn’t even have seen them moving. But I felt them, just enough that I knew he knew what he was doing. He’d done this before.

For a moment, I went somewhere else. I remembered how it felt, those nights with May, when we were supposed to be at the movies. I got scared suddenly, and I tried not to let Sky know that I was breathing too fast. I stared straight ahead at the road and imagined I was above the earth, looking down through the window of a plane. The road would look like a streak of lightning laid across the land. Sky’s truck would be a tiny toy car.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“Nothing…”

“Do you want to go somewhere?”

“No, I like driving.”

And then he took his hand off of my leg, and his hand found mine, and he held on to it, and he seemed like an anchor to the earth. I was back in the car with him, and he kept driving, fast but never faster, and never slower. He stayed just right the whole time.

Yours,

Laurel




Dear Amy Winehouse,

In a way you were like the singers from the sixties, like Janis and Jim, and from the nineties, like Kurt, because your fearlessness seemed like it came from a different time. When your first album was released, you still looked innocent, a pretty girl who said she thought she was ugly. But by the time your second album came out, it’s like you’d invented a new person to be. You would step onstage in your little dress, sipping a drink, with your big beehive hairdo and Cleopatra eyeliner, and sing with a voice that poured out of your tiny body. You wore your clothes like armor, but in your songs you opened all the way up. You were willing to expose yourself without caring what anyone thought. I wish I was more like that.