“I do remember that, yes.”
“It was even weird for me sometimes, and I’ve known your aunt since I was a toddler. She was practically my aunt, but there were still some days I didn’t know how to act around her.”
“I guess so.”
I wasn’t convinced. Well, part of me was convinced, but the other part of me wondered whether that first part of me was only convinced because it really, really wanted to find an explanation for all of this. Like, really.
“I’m sure he’ll tell you,” Em said. “If he was friends with your aunt, he’s probably grieving too.”
I shoved another small mountain of popcorn into my mouth and lay back on the carpet. I was still angry at Sam and not really interested in giving him an out, so I changed the subject. “One week,” I said when I swallowed. “Can you freaking believe it?”
“I’ve been waiting for this moment since I was six years old and my mom first told me I had to spend nine months out of the year in a jail cell,” Em said. “So yes, I can believe it, because it has been the sole goal of my life thus far. Surviving high school.”
“That has a ring to it. Maybe you should write a book?”
“I should! Young, queer, raised by a country-music-obsessed mother who mostly hated who I became with every ounce of blood in her body.”
“Stop,” I said.
“It’s true. I can’t believe I’m almost out of here. I don’t even have to visit if I don’t want! There are no laws that say I have to visit.”
“That’s true. Do you think you’ll miss it?”
“Absolutely not. The things I’ll miss will stay with me. You. Jackie. Lunch period.”
“I’ll miss how easy it is,” I said. “I mean—I think I will. How I never had to think about anything. You just know what you have to do. You wake up, you go to school, you do your homework. There aren’t any choices.”
“You like not having any choices?”
“I’m just saying that pretty soon people are going to consider us grown-ups. Do you know how to do your taxes? How to relight a pilot light if it goes out? How to change the oil in your car?”
“Okay, first of all: Jiffy Lube. Second of all: you are freaking me out. Can’t you let us just enjoy this small sliver of freedom between the end of high school and the beginning of college? Can’t you just give me these next three months before you make me take a class on how to light a pilot light?”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay, and I love you, but you’re stressing me out.”
Em flapped the edge of our blanket house to get the air circulating. It was getting stuffy, but I didn’t want to leave. I wondered if there could be some version of us, some Em and Lottie in a galaxy far away, who stayed hidden in a blanket fort forever.
I woke up on the floor the next morning, my neck stiff, the ceiling of our fort tucked around me, a blanket again. My phone was chiming its daily wake-up call and I realized this was the last Monday I would ever spend in high school. That both freaked me out and made me unbelievably excited.
I read Aunt Helen’s next letter from the floor.
Lottie,
I hope that felt good. I hope you are enjoying at least some part of these little notes, because I have enjoyed writing them, and I’m sad there are only a few left, because we have to stop somewhere and because twenty-four is the age I was when I first started writing the Alvin books, so that seems as good a place to stop as any.
I left you my journals, and the time has come to read them. If I know you, you might feel more than a little strange at the idea of snooping through my life, but please, I implore you: snoop away. There are things in there that I want you to know, things I never told a single soul and things I’ve saved for you. Because you’re me, really. If I could be your age again we would be best, best friends, the sisters we both never had. We are so similar, and that is why I always knew you’d be the one I told.
Start with the red one.
I think you’ll find it the most interesting.
—H.
I’d read the letter twice more, once standing at the bathroom sink brushing my teeth and once digging in my closet for the sandals I wanted to wear.
I had to hand it to Aunt Helen; it was pretty suspenseful. Wondering what I’d find in the red journal erased all my curiosity at where Em had gone. (Had she left in the middle of the night? Early in the morning? Into thin air?) I was so flustered by the time I got to school that I tried to open the wrong locker for three minutes.
Everything looked different. Everything had a ticking clock over it, counting down the minutes left of high school, of this long and important stretch of time that every single adult in the world assured me was the absolute best years of your life. It didn’t feel like that to me. Maybe it felt that way to a select group of people, the kids who roamed the halls acting like they owned a part of this, the kids who stuck together in packs and wore glossy lip stuff that looked like it would glue their mouths shut.
“Is this really the best it will ever be?” I’d asked Aunt Helen once.
“What, high school? Oh God, no. High school is shit, Lottie. You’ll like college a little bit more. You’ll like your twenties a little bit more. And then you’ll settle in to the life you want, and you’ll like that even more. Hell, if you’re lucky, you might even love it.”
I was late to first period, English with Mrs. Nguyen, a classroom with two doors. I tried to sneak in the back, hoping her back was toward me (she really liked writing on the whiteboard), but I didn’t have any such luck. She was front and center, reading aloud from a paperback copy of To the Lighthouse, a book I still hadn’t read and, let’s be honest, probably would never actually pick up.
Mrs. Nguyen paused just a moment, and I slipped into my seat and slid down, trying to make myself as small as possible.
She kept reading:
“‘What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.’”
She closed the book and held it against her chest, and I wondered how many times she had read that exact copy, because its covers were worn soft and its pages were dog-eared and smudged and she held it not like an ordinary book but like something that had saved her once from drowning, a floating ring thrown into a sea she couldn’t navigate.