“Well?” she said. “You’re about to start your lives, leave high school behind. Some of you will leave town, make new friends, see new places. Certainly you’ll do things now that you’ve never done before. So: what is the meaning of life?”
According to Alvin and Margo’s mother, the meaning of life was simple but one that evaded the large majority of people, because they were looking for something complicated and deep and heavy. But the meaning of life wasn’t any of those things, she had told her children, right at the very end of Alvin Hatter and the Overcoat Man, right before she and her husband disappeared. The meaning of life was something simple: keep going, be nice, make friends.
Sometimes I thought that was too neat a package, too simplistic, something easy for people to understand but lacking true meaning. Then other times it made perfect sense and it came into the utmost clarity: sharp and focused and so, so obvious.
Near the front, Evan Andrews raised his hand. I had forgotten we were supposed to be answering a question.
“Yes, Evan?” Mrs. Nguyen said.
“I think the meaning of life is to try to be happy,” he said. A few kids nodded; one kid snorted.
Mrs. Nguyen pointed at the snorter. “Do you disagree, Lilah?”
“The meaning of life is family,” she said, but you could tell she didn’t really believe it. Lilah was an aforementioned lip-gloss girl. I’d never seen her have a kind word for anyone.
“Family is important,” Mrs. Nguyen agreed. “And so is happiness, Evan.”
“So is money,” someone shouted from behind me. I didn’t turn around to see who.
“Money is certainly a factor,” Mrs. Nguyen agreed. “Anyone else?”
She looked at me for a fraction of a second, just long enough for me to know what she wanted from me. She wanted Alvin’s mother’s answer, the six-word phrase printed and reprinted a million times on everything from T-shirts to tote bags to coffee mugs, the neat package, the bow tied into a ribbon on top of perfect wrapping paper. More than anything she wanted that answer to be the right answer, like I could confirm that for her, like I could possibly tell her what was the right answer and what was the wrong answer, like I had any say over that. In reality there were a hundred meanings to life, and they were all true for different people, they were all valid for their own confusing reasons.
Next to me, Mae Bryant raised her hand. I hoped she would say it so I didn’t have to, because I knew everyone in the class would swivel to look at me, to see if I agreed or started to cry or ran screaming out of the room, I don’t know.
“Yes, Mae?” Mrs. Nguyen said.
“‘Keep going, be nice, make friends,’” Mae said, in a voice that sung and twisted her words into the air, spilling each like little gems.
And yes, every single person in the class turned around to look at me, and I looked only at the top of my desk, pretending to be fascinated by what I found there, pretending that my folded hands were a very recent discovery, not wanting to give them the satisfaction of seeing my face and its current state of pinkness.
“Very good,” Mrs. Nguyen said, her own voice shaky and uncertain now, because sometimes when we get what we thought we wanted, we realize that it’s actually so different than how we imagined it would be. “Can anyone tell me what Mae is quoting from?”
“Duh,” Lilah said, because she was the exactly the type of person you might imagine saying duh, and not ironically.
“I’d prefer a title,” Mrs. Nguyen said, losing her patience.
“Alvin Hatter,” Evan said. “The second one.”
“And do you think that quotation has a point?” Mrs. Nguyen asked the class.
He muttered his assent, and I tried not to feel annoyed: of course Mrs. Hatter had a point. If she didn’t have a point, one of the only things she said in the entire series (before she and her husband were spirited away by the Overcoat Man) wouldn’t have resonated with as many people as it did. People with tattoos. People with permanent ink needled into their skin.
Keep going.
Be nice.
Make friends.
Really, what else was there?
I somehow got through the week. The last week.
The red journal sat open on the bed, and I sat on the bed in front of it, my legs tucked under me and the last day of school behind me and just the weekend left before the graduation ceremony on Monday night.
I hadn’t read it yet.
I’d picked it up a dozen times, and every time I’d been too scared of what I would find in its pages.
It felt like—
Here it was.
Here were all the answers to all the questions I’d been asking myself.
But I could only put it off for so long.
I opened to the first page and saw the date; she would have been almost my age, just a teenager. It was written in the summer, and the very first line was this:
Finally school’s out, and I can relax. Every year seems to be longer, is this normal? I hate math and I hate history and I hate chemistry, so basically there’s nothing I like. I like eating. Maybe I’ll be a professional eater.
It made me laugh, trying to picture Aunt Helen strapped to a table, a hundred hot dogs in front of her, tucking a napkin into the collar of her shirt.
It made me laugh and then it made me stop laughing, because I kept reading and the next part of the entry said this:
I’ve been spending a lot of time with that new kid, the one who moved here not too long ago. He’s okay. He also hates math and loves eating. He has a pet turtle too. Sam says if he goes away on vacation, I can watch him.
I stared at the journal, still open, its pages worn and wrinkled and yellowed and I was too scared to move or get off the bed because almost twenty-five years ago, when my aunt was a teenager, she had written in her journal about a boy named Sam.
Sam.
Sam.
Sam.
And then, just for good measure, just so I couldn’t try to explain it away, just so my brain couldn’t hatch any sort of explanation for how the hell a boy I knew now, a boy I’d met and hung out with and knew now was mentioned in my aunt’s twenty-five-year-old journal, there was a picture.
She’d taped a picture into the journal.
Her. Him. Sam.
Sam.
Her, my age.
Sam, his age.
Somehow.
Somehow his age. Then and now.
For a hundred million reasons, and not one of them one that I understood, I pushed the journal off the bed and crawled under my covers and burrowed down until every inch of my body was covered.
And then I unburrowed myself and I grabbed the journal again, carefully peeling the picture away from the page it was stuck to. I brought it as close to my face as I could, until it went all blurry, and then I held it at arm’s length. And then I smelled it. And then I licked a corner, I don’t know, because what else was I supposed to do?
This was Sam—my Sam! This was the Sam I had been going out with, spending time with, the Sam who had let me ride on the handlebars of his bike, who had split a pizza with me, who had taken me to see The Little Prince and the Glass House. That was Sam.