Love Letters to the Dead(44)

“You broke them.” May was crying, too.

“I can fix them! Can’t I fix them? Isn’t there a way?”

May looked into my face. I was crying harder than she was. She wiped the tears from my cheeks. She said, “Maybe I can find a way to sew them. They might be crooked, but maybe they could work again.” And she gave me a list of things to find for sewing and said to go get started. She was going to take out the wings and have a look.

It was at that moment that I understood what the wings were. They would never work again. Because they were made up, and the magic spell that May had cast to make me believe, it was broken. But neither of us could admit it. Neither of us could stop pretending for the other. She had crutches after that for a month. As she’d hobble through our house, I kept telling her that I was sorry. But she’d tell me it was okay—her wings were working again, and by night she’d be soaring.

Yours,

Laurel




Dear Amy Winehouse,

Your parents got divorced when you were nine. Your dad had been seeing another woman for almost your whole life. He said later that it didn’t even seem like the divorce affected you that much when you were a kid, but that somewhere deeper maybe it really did. You sang a song about it called “What Is It About Men.” The song talks about your destructive side that comes from a past that’s “shoved under” your bed. “History repeats itself,” you sang. I wonder if that’s true. If there’s a hurt that’s buried in us, maybe it keeps finding its way through.

You said this thing once: “Often I don’t know what I do, then the next day the memory returns, and I am engulfed in shame.” I feel like that. I keep thinking about May, how she tried everything and how she was bright and beautiful. But then it keeps coming in, what happened to her that night. I keep seeing her falling. I keep feeling like I did that day when I was seven. She could fly, and I broke it.

I have a new favorite song of yours that I’ve been listening to over and over—“He Can Only Hold Her” for so long. The man in the song tries to love the girl, but she’s not really there, not all the way. She’s running from something inside of her that he can’t see. I think that there’s something like that inside of me.

On the first day back at school today, I wore my new sweater that Mom sent me for Christmas. I cut the neck off and pinned a patch to it, like May’s first-day sweater, and I snuck into May’s room, and for the first time I put on some of the lipstick she left on her dresser—Cover Girl Everlasting. I kept imagining what it would be like when I saw Sky. We’d kiss by his locker. He’d say I looked beautiful. I’d say I was sorry. That I didn’t mean to scare him on New Year’s. I’d had too much to drink. He’d say he was sorry for what he said about May. He’d say he meant to call. And we’d be able to forget about all of it. He loved me. He’d said so, after all.

But all morning he was nowhere. And all day, nothing made sense. At lunch, Hannah started flirting with one of the soccer boys, and a few of them, including Evan Friedman, came over to our table. I felt him looking at me and heard his friend whisper something and snicker. I just tried to avoid eye contact. Hannah was bragging about Neung, how he’s a gangster and stole Christmas presents for his nephew and a gold necklace for her. (She hasn’t been back to his house since that night they hooked up, but I guess she sees him at work, and she told me if it’s slow sometimes they still make out a little in the back.) Everyone was impressed by this, except Natalie, who said that’s not the Christmas spirit, and if it were her and she had no money for gifts, she would have made her nephew something instead. What Hannah didn’t tell everyone was that on New Year’s Eve, she and Natalie had kissed out in the open, like the promise of a world where Natalie was the only one.

I didn’t say anything about Sky. When they asked where he was, I just shrugged. When they asked if I was okay, I just smiled. In spite of everything, I was still hoping that he’d come up and wrap his arms around me. I was trying to concentrate on specific things, like the thread unraveling on the seam of my new sweater, to remember that I was still there.

Finally, in eighth period, I went to chorus with Hannah. Last semester we had PE, which is over now. “Thank god we’re done with that,” Hannah said. She was excited for chorus since she loves singing, and she said what’s great is that in a chorus full of other voices, you can sing without feeling self-conscious.

As we walked into the room, I saw him. Sky. I didn’t expect it. The electives are shared between all of the grades, but I thought he’d take shop or art. Maybe those classes had filled up. He was all the way across the room, talking to a couple of other juniors. I kept waiting for our eyes to catch. But all class, he didn’t look at me, not even once. Mr. Janoff and Mrs. Buster, who co-teach, grouped us into altos and sopranos and so on, and when we started to learn our first song, “A Whole New World” from Aladdin, that’s when it got really bad. I felt like something was stuck in the back of my throat. I couldn’t sing, or even breathe right. I was gasping and looking across the room at Sky, not looking at me. Like I didn’t exist. I wondered if I wasn’t really there. I kept telling myself to get on the magic carpet and fly above everything. I could feel the hot breath of a shadow on me as I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on the voices, tried to pick out each voice from the whole chorus of them, blended together. I could hear Hannah near me, singing in her sweet soprano. I could hear the boy from Bio who sells fake acid. And I thought I could hear Sky. The lyrics to the song said not to close your eyes. But when I opened mine and looked at him, he was staring down at his sheet music, not even moving his lips. The song said that there was a whole new world to share. Sky looked blurry across the room. A fading photograph.