Love Letters to the Dead

Dear Kurt, Judy, Elizabeth, Amelia, River, Janis, Jim, Amy, Heath, Allan, E.E., and John,

I am writing to say thank you, to all of you, because I think this will be my last letter. It feels right like that. Yesterday was our last day of school. When the final bell rang, the halls filled up with woohoos. I walked past the screams and cheers and out to the alley to meet my friends. The air hung open in that way where we weren’t sure if we should be somber or celebratory, but when Tristan got there, he walked up to Kristen and slapped her butt and said, “How’s my New York babe?” She smiled. It was their last day of high school, forever. Tristan said that this called for a ceremony, and Kristen agreed.

So we all drove up to Kristen’s house, and Tristan made a tent of little sticks in the yard that he lit up with his kitchen lighter. It would be like New Year’s, but this time we were supposed to burn things we wanted to let go of. Tristan pulled the contents of his emptied locker out of his backpack—algebra quizzes and lab reports and tests with red 68s circled on them—and he started putting them in the fire. Then he pulled out his English paper, one he had gotten an A on, called “I Lost Paradise,” but before he could throw it in the fire, Kristen grabbed it and said, “I’m keeping this.”

“You want my English paper, babe?”

“It was really good.”

He looked at her for a moment and smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Well, who’s next then? I can’t be the only one with something to burn!” The little fire was getting hungrier, eating up the pages. The sun was low and miming the blaze.

Hannah threw in her tests, and then she threw in her dried flowers and cards from boys, and she looked back over her shoulder at Natalie. The fire lit up both of their faces, and Natalie beamed back. Kristen threw in her locker pictures of New York, because now that she’s really going there, it’s not just a dream anymore.

I wanted to take a turn, and I thought about my notebook filled with my letters to all of you. I thought about how they would look, burning in the fire. I wondered if the flame would carry them up to you, wherever you are.

But when I reached for my notebook, I couldn’t do it. Somewhere, it seemed, in my letters to you, was a story I had told. Something true. So I decided that I’m going to turn all of my letters in to Mrs. Buster. School is still open for a few days for teachers to finish their grades, so tomorrow or the next day, I’ll go and leave them in her teacher’s mailbox. For some reason, maybe because she gave me the assignment in the first place, I want her to read what I wrote.

So instead of burning the whole notebook, I took the last blank page out and threw it into the fire. I watched the white page, with its fine blue lines, as it burned. It made me cry for all of you who should have had more time. And for May.

After the fire was done eating my blank page, everyone was looking at me. “I miss my sister,” I said simply, and it was nice to be able to just say it out loud. Hannah put her arm around me as I wiped the tears from my eyes. “She would have loved you guys,” I added.

“If she was anything like you, we would have loved her, too,” Tristan said, and smiled.

When the moment was over, we looked down and noticed that the fire was still getting bigger, so Tristan went to get the garden hose to put it out. He squirted Kristen and made her squeal, and then he squirted us all, and we tackled him for the hose and squirted back. All of our clothes were wet after that, but none of us cared, because it was summer-night warm out.

As the sun fell over the horizon, we went to sit on the deck, and I texted Sky to ask if he would come and meet us. When I saw his truck pull into the driveway, my heart leapt. He walked up wearing his same leather jacket, even on the brink of summer. He looked as beautiful as he did the first day I saw him, but more than that even, because now I knew him.

He came up to sit with us, and the sky opened wide, the way it does in summer, to let a lightning storm in. We all watched it for a while, and Kristen brought out a bottle of her parent’s champagne and popped it, and we toasted each other. I took a sip, but I gave the rest of mine to Tristan.

Then I said, “Hey, Tristan?”

“Yes, Buttercup?”

“I think that next year in college, you should start a band.”

He smiled a soft sort of smile that didn’t go with his normal pointy edges. “You’re right. I should.”

“You could name it the Regular Weirdos.”