Making Faces(9)

Rita's face fell, and Fern rushed to console her.

“But it's awesome that Ambrose would quote . . . Lord Byron . . . in a letter . . . to you, I mean,” she reassured haltingly. Actually, it was pretty awesome. Fern didn't think many eighteen-year-old guys regularly quoted famous poetry to beautiful girls. She was suddenly very impressed. Rita was too.

“We have to write him back! Should we write a famous poem, too?”

“Maybe.” Fern pondered, her head tilted to the side.

“I could make up my own poem.” Rita looked doubtful for several seconds. Then her face lit up and she opened her mouth to speak.

“Don't start with roses are red, violets are blue!” Fern warned, knowing intuitively what was coming.

“Darn,” Rita pouted, closing her mouth again. “I wasn't going to say violets are blue! I was going to say, ‘roses are red and sometimes pink. I'd really like to kiss you, I think.’”

Fern giggled and swatted her friend. “You can't say that after he's just sent you She Walks in Beauty.”

“The bell is going to ring.” Rita slammed her locker shut. “Will you please write something for me, Fern? Pleeeeeaase? You know I'm not going to be able to come up with anything good!” Rita saw Fern's hesitation and begged sweetly until Fern caved. And that's how Fern Taylor started writing love notes to Ambrose Young.





1994





“Whatcha doin'?” Fern asked, plopping down on Bailey's bed and looking around his room. It had been a while since she'd been in there. They usually played outside or in the family room. His room had wrestling paraphernalia, primarily from Penn State, all over his walls. Interspersed with the blue and white were pictures of his favorite athletes, shots of his family doing this and that, and piles of kid's books about everything from history to sports to Greek and Roman mythology.

“I'm making a list,” Bailey said briefly, not lifting his eyes from his task.

“What kind of a list?”

“A list of all the things I want to do.”

“What do you have so far?”

“I'm not telling.”

“Why?”

“'Cause some of it's private,” Bailey said, without rancor.

“Fine. Maybe I'll make a list too, and I won't tell you what's on it either.”

“Go ahead.” Bailey laughed. “But I can probably guess everything you're gonna write.

Fern snatched a piece of paper from Bailey's desk and found a Penn State pen in a jar of change, rocks, and randomness that sat on his nightstand. She wrote LIST at the top and stared at it.

“You won't just tell me one thing on your list?” she asked meekly after staring at the paper for several minutes without coming up with anything exciting.

Bailey sighed, a huge gust that sounded more like a perturbed parent than a ten-year-old boy. “Fine. But some of the things on my list I probably won't do right away. They might be things I do when I'm older . . . but I still want to do them. I'm going to do them!” he said emphatically.

“Okay. Just tell me one,” Fern pleaded. For being a girl with such a good imagination, she really couldn't think of anything she wanted to do, maybe because she went on new adventures every day in the books she read and lived through the characters in the stories she wrote.

“I want to be a hero.” Bailey looked at Fern gravely, as if he was disclosing highly classified information. “I don't know what kind yet. Maybe like Hercules or Bruce Baumgartner.

Fern knew who Hercules was and she knew who Bruce Baumgartner was too, simply because he was one of Bailey's favorite wrestlers, and according to Bailey, one of the best heavyweights of all time. She looked at her cousin doubtfully, but didn't voice her opinion. Hercules wasn't real and Bailey would never be as big and strong as Bruce Baumgartner.

“And if I can't be a hero like that, then maybe I could just save someone,” Bailey continued, unaware of Fern's lack of faith. “Then I could get my picture in the paper and everyone would know who I am.”

“I wouldn't want everyone to know who I am,” Fern said after some thought. “I want to be a famous writer, but I think I will use a pen name. A pen name is a name you use when you don't want everyone to know who you really are,” she supplied, just in case Bailey wasn't aware.

“So you can keep your identity a secret, like Superman,” he whispered, as if Fern's storytelling had just reached a whole new level of cool.

“And no one will ever know that it's me,” Fern said softly.





They weren't typical love notes. They were love notes because Fern poured her heart and soul into them, and Ambrose seemed to do the same, answering with an honesty and a vulnerability she hadn't anticipated. Fern didn't innumerate all the things she/Rita loved about him, didn't rave on and on about his looks, his hair, his strength, his talent. She could have, but she was more interested in all the things she didn't know. So she carefully chose her words and crafted questions that would allow her access to his innermost thoughts. She knew it was a charade. But she couldn't help herself.

It started with simple questions. Easy things like sour or sweet, winter or fall, pizza or tacos. But then they veered into the deep, the personal, the revealing. Back and forth they went, asking and answering, and it felt a little like undressing--removing the unimportant things first, the jacket, the earrings, the baseball cap. Before long, buttons were undone, zippers were sliding down, and clothes were falling to the floor. Fern's heart would flutter and her breaths grew short with every barrier crossed, every piece of metaphorical clothing discarded.