be writing to you like we are old friends or something and I’m just catching you up on what you’ve missed. It’s been a week. Just one week since you’ve . . . the ribbons people tied to their car antennas and backpacks are mostly gone. The wind took them away. Your picture will probably be in the yearbook under some kind of heading like: ‘In Memory Of’ or something like that. And then what? We move on? Nothing changes, and everything just keeps growing around us. I keep thinking about your mom. I hope she comes back to group. I hope your dad comes too.
Anyway, today Aggie and I sat together during lunch. It was incredible. I didn’t even realize we were in the same lunch period, and then I saw her. She actually motioned for me to sit next to her!
“Do you think your thoughts are strange?” I asked her.
“Yeah. Sometimes.”
“I feel like I’m thinking things I was trying not to think about and it’s . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Why don’t you want to think about them?” she asked.
“It’s like breathing. We can hold our breath and stop for a second or two, but eventually we have to go back and let the air in. Maybe I can try to not think for a second, but then my thoughts just come right back.”
Aggie smiled. Today, she had on some kind of shiny lip-gloss. I couldn’t stop staring.
“Maybe they keep coming back because they are still forming.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Anyway, let’s talk about something else, okay? Tell me about . . . tell me something that you haven’t told me yet.”
Aggie had just grabbed a large bite full of her tuna and capers sandwich, so she dragged her finger through the air as a symbol of hold on.
“Well, we haven’t been friends for very long, so there’s a lot on that list! I don’t know . . . umm . . . I pierced my own belly button last year, which was a painful mistake.”
“Bloody?”
“Infected.”
“Oh, well, my parents pierced my ears when I was a baby, never even asking me if I was cool with it. Once I was old enough, I unplugged my earlobes just as soon as I could. The hole is closed up now.” I grabbed my earlobe and twisted it toward her. “See?”
“Looks to be,” Aggie smiled. “Oh, I collect envelopes.”
“Like, new ones?”
“No,” she laughed. “The ones from junk mail or bills. It’s the insides that I like the best.”
“The letter?”
“No, the lining of the envelope. It’s always cool patterns and I used to dream of cutting them into tiny squares and gluing them together like a paper quilt. Can’t really say what I would have done with it. I imagine tiny, hidden stories inside the patterns. Like morse code. I’ve always wondered if other people notice how beautiful the inside of an envelope is. My dad knows about my collection, so he always saves them for me. Right now, I keep them in a giant envelope. Oh, my gosh, I just realized how funny that is.”
“Like those wooden Russian dolls that fit inside each other. A doll inside a doll. An envelope inside an—”
“What’s something that you collect?”
“I collect a bunch of stuff, but I used to collect . . .”
“What?” Aggie leaned in.
“Oh gosh, please don’t think I’m strange, but I used to collect my fingernails. Like baby half-moons. I kept them in a cigar box my dad gave me. Weird, I know.”
Aggie grabbed my hand and brought my fingers to her mouth. “How about I add to your collection?”
She pretended to bite my nails, and I laughed hard enough to feel my apple juice slosh around in my stomach.
“I’m glad you moved here,” I said. I could feel my entire face and body blushing. I only hoped Aggie hadn’t noticed.
“Yeah, me too. Hey,” she brought her hands to my cranberry fuzz and sloshed her fingers around. “You getting used to being hairless?”
I smiled. “I keep forgetting that. I don’t really have a habit of checking myself out. Yeah, it’s weird, but I feel more me like this.”
“What do you mean?”
James, I didn’t really know how to answer her. The thing is, there’s something else that’s been kind of growing inside me for a while now, but you know like when you don’t have a word for something, you kind of just twist your way out of that sentence? Am I making sense? Probably not. What I mean is, I feel something in me, something that feels incomplete. Something that feels unspoken. When Dara called me a lesbian, I thought that might be it, except that feeling remained. That feeling that something else is still there waiting to be found.
“You know like when we’re really young and our parents dress us and maybe it’s something we like, but then you look back on pictures taken and you’re like, ‘I would never have picked that!’”
“Definitely,” Aggie laughed.
“Maybe I’m just still figuring out to dress myself. How to look. Even though this haircut was definitely not thought out, I am starting to recognize myself a little more.”
“Hey, do you want to have a sleepover this weekend? If you’re not busy, I mean?”
Oh my gosh oh my gosh act cool, Eleanor.
“Sure, okay.” Inside, every single organ in my body grew teeth and lips just so a smile could form. My lungs, my intestines, my liver were all beaming!
James, have you ever met someone who made you feel like you wanted to understand everything about yourself?
Wednesday, October 27
Dear James,
Today in class, Ms. Raimondo said that there is a book out there for everyone. She said it because when we were discussing a poem by James Baldwin, Greg blurted out—he never raises his hand—that it was just too hard to understand, and poems are only meant for too smart people. Too smart people, James? Ugh, anyway, I’ve never heard of James Baldwin before, but Ms. Raimondo said that we’ll be reading some more of him later in the year and I kind of got excited about that. The poem was called “The Giver”. It felt like a riddle and maybe I still don’t quite get it, but Ms. Raimondo said it’s less about the gifts we give, but rather the action of it. And that the feelings we have when giving the gift aren’t always fully received. Giving gifts don’t always solve the problem, she said. James, I’m not sure why but I felt such relief in this.
This past weekend, I thought about what would have happened if you weren’t my bully and we somehow made our way to friends. We’d share jokes and maybe even read the same books and talk about them and who knows, maybe even study together. And if we had been friends, maybe you wouldn’t have . . . but then when we read this poem, I realized that we
