Penpal

by Dathan Auerbach

  Every light in the house was on.

  I knew my mom was awake, and I knew I would have to explain, or at least try to explain, where I had been, and I couldn’t figure out where to start. My run became a jog, which became a walk. I ducked under the lowest branch of a large pine tree that stood outside our property, and carefully lifted the metal latch to the gate on the chain link fence that enclosed our backyard. Slowly, I pushed open the gate in an effort to quiet the squeaking hinges. In about fifteen seconds, I would knock on my back door and attempt to explain myself, but I was still reflexively trying to avoid being caught.

  I saw my mother’s silhouette through the blinds, and although I was worried about how to explain things to her, it suddenly didn’t matter to me anymore. I was home – it was over.

  I walked up the couple of steps to the porch and put my hand on the doorknob. I turned it thinking that it might be unlocked since my mother was awake; there was no sense in delaying the inevitable. There was no reason to knock. It turned the full motion, and I felt a mixture of both relief and apprehension. I was just about to push the door open when two arms wrapped around me and pulled me back, away from the door.

  This couldn’t be happening; I had evaded and outran my imaginary pursuers countless times in my nightly scramble from the woods, but this wasn’t imaginary. I looked at the silhouette in the window and tried to reach out. The arms constricted around my chest and lifted me off the ground while I struggled against them. I looked down at the appendages that had ensnared me – they were small, but there was something covering them.

  It looked like fur.

  I squeezed my eyes tightly shut. This can’t be happening! my mind roared. The monsters were just pretend! I opened my eyes again and looked at the arms that were crossed over my torso. It was fabric, not fur, but this brought no real comfort – I was still being restrained. I still needed to get free. I screamed as loudly as I could, “MOM! HELP ME! PLEASE! MOM!” The feeling of being so close to safety only to be physically pulled away from it filled me with a kind of dread that is, even after all these years, indescribable.

  The door I had been torn away from opened, and a flash of hope shot through my heart. But it wasn’t my mom.

  It was a man, and he was enormous. I thrashed violently and kicked at the shins of the person holding me. But even if I succeeded in escaping my captor, I knew that I would also have to get away from the person who had just come out of my house – this hulking figure who was now steadily approaching me. He reached his hand out for me, and it extended out of the shadow that had been cast on him by the porch light just above his head. It was a cruel and cracked claw, badly burned, with the consistency of a plastic bag that had melted and cooled.

  Up until that moment, I had never imagined that I could be in any legitimate danger from which my mother could not rescue me. But as I watched the man close the distance between us, and as I felt my captor’s grip grow ever-tighter, my fear was joined with rage; my mother simply could not be gone.

  “Let me go! Where is she? Where’s my mom? What’d you do to her?!” As my throat stung from screaming and I was drawing in another breath, I became aware of a sound that had been present for longer than I had perceived it.

  “Honey, please calm down. I’ve got you.”

  It sounded like my mom.

  The arms loosened and set me down, and as the man who had been approaching me leaned down and put his hand on my shoulder, he eclipsed the porch light with his head, allowing me to see more than just his frame. He was a large man, with a tremendous burn scar on his left arm. I broke my eyes away from it and moved them up to his badge; he was a police officer.

  I turned to face the voice behind me with hope that was still tempered by fear.

  It really was my mom. The dark brown curls of her hair brushed my face as she knelt down to embrace me. I was finally safe. Tears started flowing down my face, and I sobbed heavily while the three of us went inside.

  The backdoor opened to a narrow hallway. On the right was a door that opened to a bathroom, which was connected to my room via another door. There was a faint smell of mildew that emanated from the bathroom; nightmares of villains and ghouls that hid in my bathroom meant that I would never draw the curtain closed when I wasn’t in the shower, and would only mostly draw it closed when I was. Because of this, water collected in its folds and filled that whole area of the house with the faint smell of watery rot. To the left were our washing machine and dryer. My cat was sitting on top of the dryer, and I gave him an absent stroke as I walked past and turned left toward the dining room.

  We sat at a table that my mother and I used as a dining area when we ate and a workstation when I had school projects. It was a fairly large, square table that had been painted white, but there were several spots where daily use had started to chip the white paint away, revealing layers of different colors on top of the original coat – whatever that might have been. One area looked almost like a cross-section of a Jawbreaker candy – with its concentric and rainbow colored rings, though my idle or nervous hands had helped along that more excavated section whenever I sat at the table to do homework or have a serious talk with my mother. Historically, the more nervous I was, the more frantically I dug. I learned that night that the first coat of paint was yellow.

  “I’m so glad you’re home, sweetie. I was worried I’d never see you again.” She had begun to cry as well. “Where did you go?”

  “I … I don’t know … I don’t know what happened.” My fear of the whole event being ineffable was coming true.

  “What do you mean you don’t know what happened? Where have you been? Oh, look at you. You’re filthy!” She surveyed me now that we were in better light. “Oh God! Your feet!”

  I looked down and winced. The tops of my feet were caked in a thick, dark coat of my own blood that had already begun to crack with the pattern of damaged glass. As I moved my feet against the linoleum, I could feel that the blood was acting as an adhesive, and I could hear the sound of my skin peeling free from the floor as I lifted them.

  “You went into the woods? Baby, we’ve talked about this. I can’t believe you.”

  “Mom, I didn’t! I don’t know what happened!” I protested.

  This was quickly becoming an argument, and neither my mother nor I was feeling up to it.

  “It’s okay … It’s fine, honey. Just don’t ever do this again, okay? I … I’m not sure me or my shins could take it …”

  A little laughter broke through my sobs, and I smiled a bit. “Well, I’m sorry for kicking you, but why’d you have to grab me like that?”

  “I was just afraid that you’d run away again. You had just come home; I wasn’t about to let you run off again after what you wrote!”

  I was confused. “What do you mean?”

  “We found the note you left on your pillow,” she said, and pointed at the piece of paper that the police officer was sliding across the table.

  I picked up the note and started to read it as my mother and the police officer walked into the kitchen. The note said that I was unhappy and that I never wanted to see her or any of my friends again. It was a “running away” letter. While the policeman exchanged a few words with my mom, I stared at the letter. I didn’t remember writing any letter. I didn’t remember anything about any of this. But there were many times when I would do things at night that I couldn’t recall.

  I kept reading the letter as I thought about how I would sometimes use the bathroom without remembering getting up, or would wake up and be so tired that I didn’t remember the ride to school. But this was different. This was wrong. Even if I sometimes went to the bathroom at night and didn’t remember, or even if I could have gone into the woods on my own and gotten lost – even if all these things were true, one thought repeated endlessly in the background of all the other questions and doubts that filled my mind:

  This isn’t how you spell my name … I didn’t write this letter.

  Balloons
>
  When I was five years old, I went to an elementary school that, from what I’ve come to understand, was really adamant about learning through activity. The school was part of a new program designed to allow children to rise at their own pace, and to facilitate this, the administration encouraged teachers to come up with inventive and engaging lesson plans. Part of the underlying rationale, I think, was that if the teachers could trick the students into forgetting that they were at school, or that they were doing homework, the students would be more enthusiastic about their work.

  Moreover, if the students cultivated an eagerness for school right out of the gate, then the general apathy that has its way of creeping into most students as the years go by could be staved off. To this end, each teacher was given the latitude to create his or her own themes that would run for the duration of the grade, and all the lessons in math, reading, etc., would be designed in the spirit of the theme. These themes were called “Groups.” There was a Space group, a Sea group, an Earth group, and the group I was in, Community.

  Regardless of the creativity of the curriculum, in kindergarten in the United States, aside from very basic writing skills, you don’t learn much except how to tie your shoes and how to share, and as a result of that, most of the grade isn’t very memorable. This is particularly true if you enter kindergarten with most of the writing skills that they expect you develop by the time you have exited. As one of the students who was in this position, I find that as I look back now, I remember the people fairly well, but the actual curriculum remains mostly a mystery to me. But perhaps this isn’t all that unusual.

  I do remember two things very clearly: I was the best at writing my name in the correct way, which I had mastered some time before entering the grade; and the Balloon Project, which was really the hallmark of the Community group, since it was a clever way to show how a community functioned at a very basic level.

  The concept of the Balloon Project was fairly straightforward. Each student would release a balloon with a note attached, and then would wait for a response from whoever happened to find the balloon. We would ask them to enclose a picture of their area, if possible, and provide a return address so we could become penpals. The teacher would post each picture on a large map that she had hung on one of the walls in the classroom, and this would help us see not merely how far the balloon had traveled, but how important communication was in bringing a community together.

  I remember our project being on a Friday because the culmination of weeks of discussion and preparation for this exciting event made it feel as if I was having a three-day weekend. The rocky start with which I had begun kindergarten had finally smoothed, and I talked excitedly with my friend Josh each day as we eagerly awaited the Friday launch.

  The morning of the launch, all the students walked into the classroom and saw that there was a fully inflated helium balloon tied off with ribbon taped to each desk. Our tables were laid out in a grid, and so the balloons had the same arrangement as planted trees in a lot; from the right angle they would all line up, but if you moved just a little to your left or right, they would fan out, and you could see them all again.

  We had known about this project since the first week of class, so we had known, at least abstractly, what to expect on Balloon Day. Despite this foreknowledge, however, walking into a classroom full of balloons gave the room the same ambiance as that of a birthday party, and in response, the kids behaved as if it were one.

  The balloons were all different colors, and upon seeing this, the students began bartering heatedly with one another for their favorite colors almost immediately. It took the teacher much longer than normal to organize and stifle the students, but gradually we were subdued at our desks and were asked to take out our assignments for that day.

  The preceding Friday, the teacher had sent us home with instructions to write a note with our parents’ assistance. All of the notes had to follow a loose structure, but we were allowed to be creative within those boundaries. My note read something like this:

  At the bottom of the page, I drew a little stick figure saying “Hi!” in a word bubble next to his head, and after a few moments of consideration, I drew a balloon in his hand. On the dollar that I brought from home, I had written “FOR STAMPS” right across the front, which my mom said was unnecessary, but I thought it was genius, so I did it.

  Sitting on each of our desks was a marker, a pen, a piece of paper, and an envelope. The first part of the project for that day was to transcribe the notes we had composed at home, after which we would put it in the envelope and attach it to the balloon. If we wanted to, we could draw a picture on it.

  There was a palette of paint with some brushes and cups of water sitting on a long table just in front of the teacher’s desk for the kids who elected to paint a picture on their note. It was a sunny day, and those who wished to paint on their note were told to finish by a certain time so the letters could be set out to dry in the sun. Only a handful of kids were brave enough to send their art out into the world.

  After the teacher had finished giving us our instructions, most of my peers resumed their rowdy attempt at trading balloons while the teacher began assisting the few students who had “forgotten” to bring their letters to class. As for me, I started on my note immediately because I didn’t want it to be sloppy.

  My handwriting, at least back then, was quite nice. With the guidance of my mother, I had been practicing writing while simultaneously learning how to read for a fair amount of time before I had begun kindergarten. Since the letter was already written, all that was left for me to do was copy it down verbatim. I had broken my left arm some weeks before, so the plaster cast made it difficult to reposition and steady the paper as I went, but finally I simply laid the heavy arm on the paper, leaned on it, and began transcribing, feeling thankful that I was right-handed.

  I took care with each stroke of the pen because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to erase. I had never written anything important in pen before; everything of any consequence that I had ever marked on a page was only as permanent as I wanted it to be. But now, each straight or curved line I marred the paper with had a tint of finality in it, and this only served to threaten the stability of my penmanship even more. But this was the way it had to be.

  Several years before, when the students were still writing their notes in pencil, there had been a storm the day after the balloons were released. Virtually no letters were mailed back. Although there was no way to determine exactly why that had been, it was suggested that the pencil marks washed out much too easily, and so to be safe, we should use ink from that point on.

  I drew the last line on the paper and sat back with satisfaction. I interrupted my teacher’s conference with another student to show her the letter, and she approved enthusiastically and sent me back to my seat.

  With my remaining time, I took to decorating the balloon. Mine was red, and that suited me just fine; with no interest in trading my balloon for another color, I tried to think of what I could draw on it. I decided that Spider-Man would make the most sense. I got to work and spent about two minutes trying to figure out how to draw Spider-Man’s head before I realized that it was impossible.

  Deciding that a plain balloon was actually better than one with a drawing on it, I put the marker away and went to talk to my best friend Josh. It usually took him a little longer to write things because he was left-handed and would occasionally smudge what he had just written as his hand moved against the paper from left to right. I went over to him that day, partially to help him, but mostly because I wanted to invite him to my house after school for what would have been our first sleepover.

  When the teacher told us to return to our desks, I walked back but froze as my letter came into view. It was wet. I looked around to see if someone might betray himself by laughing, but all of my peers were sitting attentively at their desks now. I craned my neck over their workspaces and saw that quite a few kids had painted pictures. I realized that someone wh
o must have been trying to dry a paintbrush had carelessly sprinkled water droplets onto my note. The ink had already begun to run in outward arcs where the water touched it.

  The letter was still legible in parts, but some words were nearly obliterated. Others were simply incomprehensible – rather than being a fan of exploring, according to my letter, I was an avid “explarting” enthusiast. I wanted to know who did this. I felt that I had put more effort into writing that letter than any of my peers, and so for someone to so carelessly deface it was unthinkable. But there were so many kids who had painted pictures on their notes that it would take too long to attempt to figure out who might have vandalized my letter. Attempting to repair, or at least minimize, the damage seemed more pressing.

  There was no time to recreate the letter in its entirety. I thought about rewriting just the damaged parts, but if I crossed them out and tried again, my penpal would think that I didn’t know how to spell. I reassured myself that there would be other letters and other chances and walked quickly to the table where the paints were. I tore off a paper towel and tried to dry off the note as best as I could without smearing the reanimated ink.

  The teacher called us alphabetically to the far side of the classroom. One by one, we stood in front of a wall-sized map of the city and smiled with our balloon tethers held tightly in our fists. The mechanical whirring of the Polaroid camera repeated as each of us had our picture taken. After the film had developed, we put the photographs in our envelopes along with our letters. The teacher handed each of us another letter to enclose, which I imagine explained the nature of the project while also expressing appreciation for their participation in it. The penpals would have been provided with the mailing address of the school and asked to mail their letters promptly so that the project could progress.

  That was the whole project – doing these simple things would allow us to build a sense of community without having to leave the school, and do it safely. We would also practice our reading and writing through our correspondences without even realizing we were doing schoolwork. Everyone – faculty and students alike – loved this project, and it had been a huge success every year, with the exception of the year it stormed.