But it was a big deal. It settled something inside him.
He wears contacts during the day now, but his hair is still on the longish side. My sister, Kerry, used to say he hides behind it. When Rev was eight, he told Geoff he didn’t want anyone to ever be able to hurt him again. Kristin signed him up for martial arts the next day. He’s kept up with it, almost to the extreme. If the glasses and the allergies and the shyness had you thinking loser, you wouldn’t say it to his face. He’s built like an MMA fighter. Add a best friend with a record—me—and most kids at school give him a wide berth.
Also ironic, because Rev is about as aggressive as an old golden retriever.
I move over to give him room to sit down, and he drops onto the step beside me.
“What were you reading?” he says.
He must have seen me from across the yard. I hesitate before answering.
And that’s ridiculous. He knows every secret I have. He watched my family fall apart, including my mother’s misguided attempts to glue the pieces back together. He even knows the truth about Kerry, and I thought I was going to take that to the grave with me last May.
I still hesitate. I feel like maybe I’m breaking a confidence if I tell anyone about the cemetery girl.
Not like I even know who she is.
I deliberate for another moment. Rev doesn’t say anything.
Finally, I pull the slip of paper out from beneath my leg and hand it to him.
He reads silently for a minute, then hands it back. “Who is she?”
“I have no idea.” I pause. “The daughter of Zoe Rebecca Thorne.”
“What?”
I turn the letter over in my hands, sliding the paper between my fingers. “I found a letter sitting against a gravestone last week. I read it. It was talking about . . .” I hesitate again. No matter what Rev knows, it was easier to talk about life and death with an anonymous reader. I have to clear my throat. “It was about losing someone suddenly.”
“And you thought of Kerry.”
I nod.
We sit there in silence for a while, listening to the moths dance against the lightbulb. Somewhere down the road, a siren flares to life. Just as suddenly, it’s gone.
Rev says, “But this is a different letter?”
“Yeah. I wrote back to the first one.”
“You wrote back?”
“I didn’t think she’d read it!”
“What makes you so sure it’s a girl?”
It’s a good question. I’m not entirely sure. Then again, his first question was Who is she? “What makes you so sure it’s a girl?”
“The fact that you wouldn’t be sitting here mooning over a letter from a guy. Let me see it again.”
I do. While he reads, I play his words back in my head. Mooning? Am I mooning? I don’t even know her.
“‘Sometimes I feel like the girl,’” he quotes.
“Exactly.”
“This is notebook paper,” he says.
“I know.” The cemetery is local. It has occurred to me that she might be another student at Hamilton High School.
“Dude. She could be, like, eleven.”
Okay, that hasn’t occurred to me.
I snatch the letter back from him. “Shut up. It doesn’t matter.”
He sobers. “I’m just yanking your chain. She doesn’t sound eleven.” He pauses. “Maybe that letter was left for you.”
“No, she was pretty pissed that I wrote back.”
Now he hesitates. “I don’t mean that she left the letter for you.”
It takes me a second to figure out his tone. “Rev, if you start preaching at me, I’m going in the house.”
“I’m not preaching.”
No, he’s not. Yet.
He still has that old Bible I found him clutching in my closet. It was his mother’s. He’s read it about twenty times. He’ll debate theology with anyone who’s interested—and I’m not on that list. Geoff and Kristin used to take him to church, but he said he didn’t like that he couldn’t live by his own interpretation.
What he didn’t say was that looking up at a man in a pulpit reminded him too much of his father.
Rev doesn’t walk around quoting Bible verses or anything—usually—but his faith is rock solid. I once asked him how he can believe in a providential god when he barely survived living with his father.
He looked at me and said, “Because I did survive.”
And there’s no arguing that.
I’m wishing I hadn’t told him about the letters now. I don’t want a religious analysis.
“Don’t call it God, then,” he says. “Call it fate. Don’t you find it interesting that of all the people who could have found that letter, you did?”
This is one of the things I love best about Rev. He’ll never force anything on anyone. I nod.
“Do you want to write back?”
“I don’t know.”
“Liar.”
He’s right. I do want to write back.
In fact, I’m already planning what to say.
CHAPTER SIX
I’d say you’re kind of dark, but I’m writing to a girl who leaves letters in a cemetery, so I guess that’s a given.
You said you were wondering if my pain was anything like yours.
I don’t know. I don’t know how to answer that.
You lost your mother. I haven’t lost mine.
Don’t you think it’s funny how people say “lost” as if they were just misplaced? But maybe it’s a different meaning of “lost,” in that you don’t know where they went. My best friend believes in God and heaven and eternal life, but I’m not sure how I feel about all that. We die and our bodies are absorbed back into the earth in some kind of biological cycle, right? And our soul (or whatever) is supposed to go on forever? Where was it before?
My friend would die if he knew I was talking to you about this, because this is the kind of thing I won’t discuss with him.
If I’m being strictly honest, I’m about ready to crumple up this letter and start over.
But no. Like you said, there’s some safety in writing to a complete stranger. I could fire up the computer and Google your mom’s name and probably find out something about you, but for right now, I like it better this way.