by Phoebe Stone
Dear Reni Elliot,
Thank you so much for your passionate letters, all five of them. I thought they were very beautiful. I’m not in opposition to writing to fans when they are as delightful as you are. You seem like such a nice person and there aren’t enough nice people in this world. Although I already have a girlfriend, I still hold your letters special to me. I hope you will not feel baffled by the amount of time it took me to write back. I have been very busy.
Sincerely yours,
Justin Bieber
“‘Sincerely yours, Justin Bieber.’ Isn’t it so cool. Isn’t it the best letter in the world?” says Reni.
“Wow, Reni,” I say. “This is outstanding. Finally. Finally he writes to you. This is wonderful.”
There are some phrases in the letter like “I’m in opposition to” and “I hope you will not feel baffled by” that give me some thought. Some serious thought.
But all I say is “Reni, this proves it. It appears to be a fair world in spite of everything.”
“Yup,” says Reni, flopping her pink high-tops up on the coffee table. “Yup, it is. Really fair. And I’ve been so happy about this letter that I went and did something.”
“What?” I say.
“I got up the nerve and went alone to the Diabetes Walkathon, and you’ll never guess who I walked with the whole way.”
“Who?” I say.
“Newton Mancini. He’s a riot. He’s got this little dog named Bill and he tells all these Bill stories.”
“Reni, this is so cool,” I say.
“Yeah,” she goes, “and he asked me to help him sell sugar-free cookies at his booth at the Spring Fling and I accepted.”
“You did?” I say.
“Yes, I did. I think I always liked that red pizza delivery jacket.”
“So, you’re the pizza stalker,” I say.
“Yup,” she goes. “I guess so.”
“Nice, Reni,” I say, “I’m proud of you. You know what? If you end up marrying Newton Mancini, your name will be Reni Mancini.”
And then we both start roaring away because, when it comes to laughing, Reni and I are tops.
Chapter
Twenty-eight
Oh, but still no word from Henderson. The space that Hen used to occupy is silent and far reaching. When the phone rings, he’s the first thing I think of. And yes, this morning the phone is ringing. The windows are open and I can hear Henderson’s dinosaurs chirping and singing outside in the flowering trees along the street. The phone keeps ringing and ringing. We have a few new electronic devices in our life now. Grandpa has purchased a telephone with a caller ID on it. Finally we can now see who’s calling before we answer.
My grandma and I are sitting on the couch and we both look down at the phone number on the little screen. It’s from New York City. It’s my dad. Grandma and I look at each other and then she says, “Sweetie, let’s not answer it. He just wants to buy the green house on Cinnamon Street for a good price. He wants a bargain. But I’m not selling it to him. I bought it for your mother. I paid for it. It’s mine and I don’t want to sell it to him. And I don’t want to speak to him ever again.”
“Me neither,” I say. I feel a pang down in the distant edges of my heart. It’s another tug that comes with more tears. So much water. I must be the polar ice caps melting. I must be the living proof of the greenhouse effect. Me neither. I don’t want to talk to him either. The phone keeps ringing and ringing, like my dad’s voice repeating, “Okay? Okay? Right? Okay?”
“No, not okay,” I say to myself. “Not okay. Not okay. Not okay.”
Grandpa comes in the room and he stops still and looks at the phone. For some dumb reason, that woman climber comes into my mind again. She would have been the first American woman to climb to the top of Mount Everest. But instead she’s frozen somewhere, lost in time. I went on Google this morning and I found out her name. It was Marty Hoey. She was lovely and young and brave when she fell off that mountain. “Grandpa,” I say out of the blue, “how do you decide to name a bench in South Pottsboro?”
“Well,” he says, “that’s the town planning committee’s job. That’s my department.”
“Could we name a bench after someone?” I say.
“Well, we can talk about that,” he says.
“Good,” I say, “because I want to have a Marty Hoey bench. I want her to be remembered. And I want one for my mother too. I want one for both of them.”
The phone keeps ringing and ringing. Then Grandpa turns off the ringer and all we can see is my dad’s phone number blinking on the little screen. Finally the number disappears.
Grandma smiles at me and says, “I’m not selling to him. Ever. But I was actually going to talk to you about selling the green house to someone else possibly. We have a private buyer.”
“We do?” I say and I feel another tug, another pang pinging pinging inside me.
“Yes,” says my grandma. “There’s a family in North Pottsboro and, honey, they seem very nice.”
“You want to sell it to them?” I say.
“Well, only if you want to. But it might be useful to have the money. Then we could buy something bigger for the three of us.”
Grandpa looks at me very carefully, like I’m a complicated map he’s trying to read in the car with only a flashlight.
“You know the lady downstairs?” says Grandma.
“Yes,” I say. “The one who hates Grandpa.” Grandpa tilts his head and raises his eyebrows and looks pleased.
“Yes,” says my grandma, swirling around. She puts her elbow on Grandpa’s shoulder and leans her head on her arm and smiles up close into Grandpa’s face. “Yes, that lady hates hates hates your grandpa. Mean old Grandpa. BUT she absolutely loves me.”
“She wants to sell her condo downstairs, pal, and your crazy grandma wants to buy it. Anyway, I don’t know why that lady hates me. I always brought her mail up for her and I even walked her dog sometimes. But she’s a space cadet and she got scared off by the asbestos thing your grandma dragged us into. I told you there would be problems, baby doll.”
“Well, it’s not a problem, dear. Her condo is wonderful. It’s much better than this one. It’s full of light, honey. It has two and half baths and a large living room and big kitchen, and there’s even a room where someone could put a balance beam and floor mat for practice, if that someone wanted to.”
Suddenly my grandma and grandpa come up and stand close around me, like we’re in a football huddle. We push there, the three of us, in a tight circle. On both sides I can feel them standing by me.
I keep quiet for a minute, listening to the words pour over me now like warm rain. I think about the house on Cinnamon Street. I wrap my arms around it and hold it against me for a moment. I push my face against the walls and I rest my forehead along the roof. Then I open my arms, and like a dream, I let the house go. It floats out of my arms and away into the clouds, just like in The Wizard of Oz, and when that green house lands, it will belong to someone else and it will have another chance at life and a whole new start.
Chapter
Twenty-nine
At four thirty on Thursday, May 20, one month before school lets out, Henderson comes home. “He arrived on the train,” Reni says to me on the phone. “He likes to ride on trains cause he’s a doofus. He says he looks out the window as they are moving along and it releases his unconscious so he can write. You know Henderson. He has these geeky theories about everything.”
“Unconscious?” I say. “Does he look any different?”
“Kind of,” says Reni. “He’s, like, taller, I think. And maybe a little more Henderson-ish, if you know what I mean. He says his confidence is up a few notches, which is going to make things impossible around here.”
“Oh,” I say, “did he mention anything about me?”
“You? No. Why should he? He says he’s glad he went away. It’s changed everything. He has already gotten two letters from Agarina.”
“Agarina?
” I say. “Does he, um, talk about her much? ”
“Yeah,” goes Reni, “he’s all Agarina this and Agarina that. He’s finished his novel. He’s got one hundred and twenty pages written and it even has a ‘The End’ at the end. There was so much robot blood in the end, I had to skip a bunch of pages. I was, like, ‘Barf bag, please.’ ”
“Oh,” I say yet again, wishing there was some other word that would come out of my mouth, but oh describes it all, all the regret and mistakes on my part. Oh carries with it the empty sound of my own idiot head knocking against my own idiot inner brick wall. Oh.
“Hey, Agarina must be cool,” says Reni. “She edited the book for Henderson and she cut out the story about the girl who had her foot stuck in the elevator. I was like, ‘Thank you, there is a god.’ Finally I’m not caught in Henderson’s novel anymore.”
“Oh,” I say again. “Are they, um, dating?”
“It sounds like it,” says Reni. “Honestly, I can’t think anybody in the world would want to date him.”
“Yeah,” I go.
“It’s weird. It’s like thinking of your parents making out. You start thinking about it and then five letters pop into your mind. G.R.O.S.S.”
I feel a terrible sadness. How can Henderson ever forgive me for being so stupid? Have I ruined everything? “Reni, I’m going over to Pottsboro Park. I need some air. I want to do some cartwheels. I need to do some cartwheels. It’s been ages and ages and ages since I did any cartwheels. If you want to talk more, I’ll be near the Bonnie Benton bench.”
I can’t really talk to Reni about what is happening inside my loony head. My own stupidity caused me to lose what I didn’t even know I had. I was blindfolded, baffled, and blundering. I feel like an apple tree that was full to the top with apples and then someone came along and shook that tree and every apple came crashing to the ground. Every apple is gone out of my branches. And I am a four feet seven and one-eighth inches apple tree standing here with nothing in my leaves but wind. Wow. I wish I could tell Henderson that. He’d be like, “Hey, that’s a good line.” He says writing a good line is like coming across this uncut diamond waiting there in the gravelly earth. Wow. I couldn’t talk about this with anybody but Henderson. I wish he hadn’t gone away. No, I’m glad he went away. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what I’m doing.
When I get to the park, I can’t believe how green it is. The grass has that new-haircut, ears-sticking-out, fresh clean look about it. Henderson. Henderson. It will be good to run this out of me, to tumble and flip and do front tucks and aerials and handsprings, millions and trillions of them, until I’m so exhausted I won’t feel this unbearable longing, this unbearable feeling of I don’t know what. If I have lost Henderson before I’ve even had him, then what will I do? Maybe I could get him back. I could have ten T-shirts made, saying things like HENDERSON, I DIDN’T SEE. I DIDN’T KNOW. Another one would say, HENDERSON, I LOVE YOUR NAME. I LOVE YOUR NOVEL. I LOVE YOUR FLANNEL SHIRTS, YOUR SMILE. I LOVE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND DINOSAURS AND VOLCANOES. I am a girl volcano doing hundreds and hundreds of cartwheels, and every time my feet go over my head, I feel like a flipping Ferris wheel. My world turns over and the park turns over and the sky and trees turn over. And I long to turn back what happened, the way it happened.
I do five more handsprings, five aerial cartwheels, and five backflips and by then I am so exhausted, I go over to the park bench and throw myself down
Agarina. Girl poet. Disguised stalker. Thief. Still, I’m the fool who didn’t know her own heart. I close my eyes and let my hair fall back behind me. I look up at the sky. Unchanging forever sky, there above me always, even as my whole world collapses, turns over, changes, and shatters.
Suddenly, I notice there is a digital camera sitting on the park bench beside me. Weird, I’m thinking. Someone has lost a camera. I look around for anyone, but the park is empty. There is only wind here and trees blowing, and a kind of strange silence.
“Hello?” I call out. Well, if someone left a camera here, I should take it to the lost and found. Shouldn’t I? I think about picking it up and then I finally do. It’s a typical Canon digital, like ones I’ve seen around. Thinking maybe I can figure out who owns it by looking at a photo, I push the ON button. The wind in the trees roars around me, and the leaves sound like they are being washed clean with wind. The camera lights up. I hit the PLAY button, and a photo pops up on the screen. In the photo I can see someone is drawing a big heart on the cement with a piece of pink chalk. Underneath the heart it says Thinking of you.
I take a breath. I’m sort of trembling like the leaves around me. I hit the button, and the next photo appears on the screen. It shows someone again. I can’t see a face, just hands and a torso. Someone is holding a huge bouquet of purple striped tulips. Underneath at the bottom of the photo, it says, I picked these in winter for you.
I hit the button again, and this time there are chocolates with the initials JB impressed on them, arranged in lines to make letters and words. The chocolates form the words Miss you. I close my eyes and bite my lip and then I open them and hit the button again.
In the next photo, someone is hidden behind a large piece of paper. On the paper it says, I never had a job as a messenger for the assistant principal. I hit PLAY again. I came to South at lunch because I wanted to be with you. I close my eyes again, and this time I start crying.
I can barely read what the next photo says. It shows just a torso of someone wearing a T-shirt. I have to push the ENLARGE button to see the letters clearly. Printed on the T-shirt are these words: THUMB, I HOPE I WILL NOT BORE YOU WITH HOW TOTALLY, TOTALLY I ADORE YOU. THE FUNNY WAY YOU HAVE OF TALKING, THE CUTE WAY YOU HAVE OF WALKING. PLEASE DO NOT FEEL THAT I AM STALKING YOU. LOVE, HENDERSON. My eyes are full of tears. They fall all over the camera and all over my hands.
I hit the PLAY button again, and the next photo shows someone hiding behind a large paper fan, and the note Henderson borrowed is pinned across the fan. It says, I am your biggest fan. Henderson. Henderson.
One more time I hit the PLAY button and there is Henderson wearing another T-shirt, and on this T-shirt it says, WILL YOU GO TO THE SPRING FLING DANCE WITH ME TOMORROW NIGHT?
I look around the park. Nothing moves but the leaves in the trees, sighing, cooing, whispering. I get up and run to the center of the green. I hold out my arms and I shout, “Henderson. Henderson. My answer is yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”
Chapter
Thirty
By the time I get back to our condo building, it’s getting dark. But it’s a quiet, warm darkness, the kind of darkness that might be inside a soft flower bud just before it cracks open and blooms, the kind of darkness that is saving safely all sorts of things for tomorrow.
I go up the elevator, then decide to hit the ROOF button, and I push open the door to the night sky. The whole world is covered in a glittery dome of stars. I almost get scared looking up at them. Where do they begin and where do they end? What would the edge of the universe look like? Henderson has lots of theories about this. He ought to know. He’s the one who owns a piece of the sky, his own meteorite, a falling star of his own. It came to him in a box from Iowa. But how many millions of miles beyond that had it really traveled? Like that song, Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket. Henderson.
I go downstairs and walk into our apartment. Grandma and Grandpa are playing Trivial Pursuit again. It’s a close game. The question that just came up is “How long was John Lennon’s hair on his first American tour?” For some reason, seeing them sitting there battling it out over this question gives me a nice warm feeling, like just for this moment, every star in every universe is in the right place.
When Henderson comes to get me the next night, I’m all ready. I’m wearing once again the green silk prom dress, which my grandma had cleaned and pressed for me while I lay sick in bed.
I hear noises outside our apartment, thumping and the sound of papers shuffling, and so I open the door to find my friend Henderson, o
wner of an eBay falling star, lover of astronomy, volcanoes, dinosaurs, old movies, rocks, Ben Franklin, new big words, robots, sushi, garbanzo beans, his own novels, and me. Me! He’s maybe a little taller, maybe a touch goofier, but also more sure and happier. Why is he so happy?
“Hey, Thumb,” he says.
“Hey, Hen,” I go.
We ride the Toot Toot Tourist Trolley over to North Middle, and the whole way there, people keep taking our photograph. One lady calls out, “It’s such a riot. He’s so tall and she’s so tiny. Are you going to a prom? Can I take a picture?”
On the trolley sitting next to me, Henderson gets out three candy bars from his pocket and says, “Pick your favorite, but I should warn you the PayDay bar is three weeks old.” He puts his head against the glass window, where behind him all of South Pottsboro blurs by. As he leans his head back, he’s watching me in the reflection in the windows opposite us. It feels nice to have a reflection of somebody looking at my reflection like that. “You finished your novel?” I say.
“Yeah, do you want to hear the ending? “
“Duh,” I say. “You needed to ask?”
Writers always seem to carry with them various samples of their work. Ask any one of them. They are always ready to give a lengthy reading. Henderson unfolds a piece of paper from his flannel shirt pocket and begins to read to me. “‘Now, Rowan knew he was not a robot because when he bled, his blood was not blue. No, his blood was red. Rowan in the end was human. After all the suffering caused by all those menacing robots from planet Zing Zong, Rowan knew it was now possible to look directly at Zandra, Zandra the Princess of Jupiter, the one he had loved all his life. He reached out to take her hand. True, he was covered all over with scars and scratches and stitches, but then, in a way, so was she.’ ”
