Dear Reader

by Mary O'Connell

  She couldn’t help but imagine a velvet hair bow sailing on a calm river and chastised herself for living in the confines of her nerd-tastic mind, absorbed in homophones while real life happened all around.

  “Well, I don’t have a boyfriend at the moment.” Her words sounded hollow. “Or at any moment, actually. I’ve never had a real boyfriend.”

  “You’ve mostly gone out with mannequins, then, as well as a few dashing lads from the wax museum?”

  “Yes, I mostly canoodle with dashing wax. How about you?”

  “How about you, Heath?” He mocked her in the syrupy, faux-concerned tone of a daytime talk show host. And she felt herself blush from his unexpected meanness, her face a deep fryer of hurt.

  Heath looked down at the floor. “Sorry. But I’m quite through with love, I assure you, Flannery. You are safe with me even in this particular locale.”

  Great, thought Flannery. Safety. Had she only been imagining their romantic tension, however slight? She faked a smile, as if being unworthy to enchant Heath was a source of terrific relief, and envisioned the girl that had broken his heart as a typical Sacred Heart beauty: smugly entitled, smooth-skinned and excellent at field hockey. Shit.

  Heath looked around the room, at the kissing couple, at the arguing backpackers—more Mount Shasta than Manhattan in their North Face gear and hiking boots—and back at the reception desk, which was clearing out: Life was indeed good, the complaining lady now held a short stack of grayish bath towels and was striding purposefully toward the elevators with a satisfied grimace.

  It seemed like Heath was looking for somebody too.

  “Interesting,” Flannery said, as if coolly. “What has made you turn away from romantic ventures?”

  “Boring story. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl. Boy mourns. Et cetera. There are only five basic plots.”

  Flannery nodded, excited. This was her domain! Love was pure mystery, but plot lines were structured, knowable.

  She mentally crafted her reply before saying it aloud—no more weird blurting for Flannery! She cribbed a line from her own Wuthering Heights essay. “So. Obsessive love and the eventual obsessing over lost love are at the heart of this story. Everything else is exposition and eyeliner.”

  Heath widened his eyes. “Well, you could say that. I mean, I suppose.”

  Flannery cringed and felt her shoulders rise to her earlobes, the old God-I’m-Stupid shrug, and she remembered, too late, that Miss Sweeney hadn’t been in love with that line either. How her red ink had burned! Even in memory her red handwriting looked as jagged as animated flames: For that matter, Flannery, might everything else be mascara and metaphor? Lipsticks and limericks? Please clarify.

  “I suppose it’s the oldest story in the book, Flannery: The one person of all the souls, the living and the dead, who could flip the switch of the world and, ta-da, the lights come on and every little thing—even the dust motes—sparkles away. And that person leaves, and the world is brimming with torments.” Heath looked away.

  “But if music or poetry teaches us anything, it is that our hearts were made to be broken.” Flannery was almost hyperventilating. “It’s everywhere, the ubiquitous quality of heartbreak, the immutable sadness of romance.” Somewhere in the Broadway Hotel and Hostel, and deep into her delusional pilgrimage, Miss Sweeney emerged from her quest for the fifth dimension to offer up a red-pen snicker: Does the word immutable fall into the lexicon of words better read than said? I do wonder, Flannery.

  “Right. Should we explore the immutable sadness of romance? I kid, Flan.”

  Flan: a nickname! She had never felt more like delicious custard!

  Heath hooked his thumb toward the reception desk. “But we really should get our room now that the front desk has cleared out a bit.”

  Flannery breathed in sharply. Our room? The facts of the morning connected in her brain, like the bright, linked ovals of DNA and RNA in her biology textbook.

  • Miss Sweeney goes missing

  • Chapter one of Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights read in Sacred Heart bathroom: surprise!

  • Skip school

  • Take train to NYC to search for Miss Sweeney

  • Meet beautiful British boy with a dubious name; he agrees to help find Miss Sweeney

  • Stand at reception desk at hotel

  “Well, if I got a room,” Flannery said, chastely, emphasizing the singular pronoun, “I would be here when Miss Sweeney returns. I mean, she already has a room here. And I could leave my backpack in the room,” she rationalized. “I don’t need to be lugging around my calculus and econ textbooks.” She chuckled and rubbed her lower back, as if being a good sport about excruciating pain.

  Heath laughed. “Dear Lord, as a side job, do you yodel down the steep, rocky riverbank?

  Flannery squinted. What?

  “Because you are highly esteemed at calling bluffs. Flannery, I was obviously joking about getting the room. Not that I wouldn’t want to. Get a room.”

  Flannery was the caller of bluffs! A girl yodeling from steep cliffs. She tried to mentally stow away Heath’s words—Not that I wouldn’t want to. Get a room—so that she could marvel at them, later, when life resumed its regular shape. For now there was nothing left to do but stroll over to the reception desk, shuck off her backpack, and ask the clerk: “Do you have any rooms just for the day, maybe just till afternoon? I don’t know how much time we’ll need.”

  The clerk appeared to be choking on a sudden laugh.

  Heath glowered. “She doesn’t mean it like that, Mate.”

  “You can’t just pay for a block of time during the day,” the clerk said, managing to sound both bored and lecherous. “You’ve got to check in and pay for a night’s lodging.” His hair looked dirty (though artfully arranged), but his skin had a scrubbed, post-facial glow. His shirt cuffs were turned back far enough to reveal his tattooed forearms. “We are not an hourly facility.”

  Heath leaned in over the desk. “You’ve made that clear.”

  Being mistaken for a person purchasing an hourly hotel room for sexual relations was an unfamiliar embarrassment, a mixed blessing edged with the thrilling weirdness of the day. Heath defending her honor wasn’t bad either.

  Flannery shrugged. “I won’t be using the room at night. I’m looking for my teacher, actually.” She smiled up at the desk clerk and curled in her shoulders, trying to appear smaller, deferential. “Her name is Caitlin Sweeney. She checked in not too long ago.”

  “I can’t, for security reasons, confirm who is or who is not a guest at the Broadway Hotel and Hostel.”

  “Top-notch security at this institution, Flannery,” Heath stage-whispered. “This poseur fancies himself Homeland Security.”

  “Thanks, anyway,” Flannery told the clerk. “We’ll just hang out in the lobby and wait for her.”

  “Yeah.” The clerk yawned, his mouth stretched wide, and let out the faintest growl as he finished exhaling and drew his lips back together. “That’s not a possibility. The lobby area is not for the general public. The lobby is for guests of the hotel only.”

  Heath brought his fist down on the reception desk: “Come on, Mate! You can’t possibly be serious.” He raised his hand to indicate the general commotion in the lobby and common area. “How can you possibly tell who is or isn’t a paying guest?”

  Flannery looked at Heath and imagined the two of them later that night, paying guests staring down at Broadway from a hotel room with gauzy white curtains pushed to the side.

  Emboldened, Flannery nodded at the desk clerk. “You know what? A room for the night, then.”

  “Alright, well, we do have a vacancy. A private room. Luck be a lady.” He snapped his wrist and flung imaginary dice across the counter. “Sooo, first I’ll need to see your IDs.”

  Flannery felt a magnanimous sorrow for anyone following the usual trajectory of his or her day. She dug her driver’s license out of her wallet and handed it to the clerk. Her hand trembled, but just a li
ttle—the day!

  “I don’t happen to have my identification on me,” Heath said. “And I’m not staying in the room, anyhow.”

  The clerk nodded in his fatigued, seen-it-all-before manner as he made a copy of Flannery’s license.

  “No ID, Heath?” Flannery smiled up at him. “When you chop me up and stuff my body in a dry-cleaning bag there will be no evidence you even existed.”

  The desk clerk abandoned his hipster composure and laughed in a companionable way.

  Heath glared at him. “I’m always afraid I’ll lose my passport if I carry it with me, and trust me, I didn’t anticipate the odd magic of this day.”

  She looked up at him. “That makes two of us.”

  “Three of us, actually,” the clerk said, stone-faced. “Your room comes to one hundred fifty-seven eighty-three.”

  “Wow,” Flannery said under her breath.

  But the clerk looked over Flannery’s shoulder to a newly arrived mom and daughter duo. The mom looked sporty and hopeful in her Puma jacket and jeans, but the teen embodied any Sacred Hearter: a girl sullenly daydreaming about staying at a generic and familiar Hampton Inn, a girl with the confidence to be openly disdainful—her arms crossed over her chest, her lips pursed in the sourest kiss as she gazed around, assured of her superiority over her fellow travelers at the Broadway Hotel and Hostel. Flannery could imagine the backstory, the mom saying, Come on, Olivia/Emily/Hannah, we’ll have fun, and Olivia/Emily/Hannah saying FINE to get her mom to zip it, and now here they were at the Broadway Hotel and Hostel, with the mother’s smile looking a little tight now, and both of them fully cognizant that all those Yelp reviews were useless because you never quite understood how things were going to be until you opened the door.

  Flannery handed over her parents’ credit card, reserved for emergency purposes, and this was certainly one, although she couldn’t imagine how to explain the bill to her parents or if she would even need to. The old ways were gone.

  “Mmmm, no. This won’t work.” The clerk chuckled and tapped the card. “The name on this doesn’t match your license. Curious. I wouldn’t have guessed you were engaged in identity theft.”

  “Um, it’s my mom’s,” Flannery said. Mortified, she dropped the card when he handed it back to her, and conked her head on the reception desk as she went to pick it up.

  “Oopsie!” Heath reached for his wallet. “Do you need some cash?”

  “Oh, no thanks!” She said it far, far too brightly, and though she didn’t have enough cash to pay for the room, she didn’t want to take Heath’s money, and, O, her bravado was vaporizing and the mom and daughter duo were totally eavesdropping, and God, where was Miss Sweeney? But just as Flannery was being sucked into a vortex of blundering doom, the desk clerk showed some mercy, or perhaps he’d simply grown weary of dealing with them.

  “Look, you two can stay for a while and wait for your teacher. Whatever.”

  Flannery whispered her thanks, but Heath was more exuberant: “Well, thank you for your change of heart, sir.” He put his hand to his heart with lavish sarcasm. “Truly, your kindness knows no reckoning.” Heath turned and pointed at the long banquette across from the reception desk. “I suppose we should wait a bit for her, now that we’ve got clearance. Our Miss Sweeney would probably appreciate it.”

  Flannery grasped onto the pronoun our, closing her eyes for a second and cherishing the cozy plural sound as she sat with Heath and opened Wuthering Heights.

  Seven

  Dear Reader, after my devil-worshiping Prince Charming walked away, I was all alone again, the damsel in distress. I was disappointed that Brandon’s voice was free-floating, that he hadn’t physically appeared again, but his voice was such a comfort that I wanted more of his words. And so I took a seat on the long banquette across from the reception desk. I unzipped the coat pocket closest to my heart and took out the Ziploc bag that shrouded my most precious possession. (Yes, aside from the Nardil and my credit card, it was my only possession. But in any circumstance it would have been my personal shroud of Turin, only better, not a mere sweat-stained image of Brandon’s face but proof of the inner workings of his heart.)

  Just the week before, after all our lost years, I’d received a random, rambling missive from Brandon written on a soft stack of cream-colored bar napkins and stuffed in a business-sized envelope from an establishment called Emmerson Bigguns in Urbandale, Iowa. I had to sound out the lofty moniker as I stood at my mailbox … Wha … Oh, God.

  Perhaps a collective of ironic hipsters owned the bar and were simply offering up satirical commentary about restaurants staffed by young women wearing bra tops and Daisy Dukes—Helloooo, Hooters!—by lowering the bar, by plunging the bar into the lithosphere with the grossest possible name, a name that called to mind jackasses with backward baseball caps snickering and nodding oh yeah, as busty waitresses served up Buffalo chicken wings and Budweisers. Brandon’s name, scrawled in unfamiliar handwriting and spelled incorrectly, was on the upper left-hand corner above the business logo.

  I unzipped the Ziploc and took out the napkins. I arranged them in chronological order in three curved rows on the padded bench. (Perhaps it looked like I was setting up to do tarot card readings at the Broadway Hotel and Hostel, because the desk clerk looked over and raised one hand in consternation—GOD! What now?)

  Was it condensation from a cold beer glass that had wrinkled the napkins and, here and there, smeared the blue ink? Did Brandon holding the pen too intensely give the napkins all their soft rips and tears?

  Dear Caitlin, Did you know what the big rule of e-mail is? Something will go wrong and your words to one person will be read by every person in your contacts. I Googled you on my phone and I got your e-mail from Sacred Heart High School but I am sending this snail mail I THINK.

  I read your syllabus online and I know I have the right Caitlin Sweeney. You are torturing your students with your favorite books. BTW having your home address on Google is prob a bad move unless you have a pitbull or are married.

  But then your last name might be different, maybe or maybe not. I’m getting MARRIED this summer, My wife 2 be Megan who is very intelligent and beautiful is keeping her own last name and who can blame her for not wanting Marzetti-Corcoran. Never enough boxes for all the letters. She’s a marine 2.

  So you are a teacher? It seems like you could have stayed in Kansas for that. I thought you would do something more exciting.

  I just asked Tyler the bartender if they have any envelopes. Ex-Marine. He’s checking in the office right now. Also FREE SHOTS.

  I am on last day of leave for my mom and Liesel’s wedding. They got married in Iowa today, and I am at this bar across from the Holiday Inn and all because our Kansas governor is against Marriage Equality and also not big on poor kids having a decent school lunch what a total douche.

  Long road from here to there and back again and if you are wondering here is how it happened. That last night I saw you I walked all over the city the next day.

  FEELING THE SHOTS PRETTY HARD BECAUSE I DONT DRINK ANYMORE I’M INTO FUCKING YOGA DON’T LAUGH.

  NYC is a good place to get lost or to fucking off yourself NOT THAT I DID. The crowded blocks are good until you look at all the faces and think I am not me I am not me. I am that fucking guy across the street I’m floating outside my fucking body. Or worse I have no mask now. I’m straight up the fucking crazy guy.

  And I kept walking and in Times Square I saw the recruitment office and I walked in.

  The guy working that day was a marine. There was a watercooler and I was so thirsty Caitlin. I drank like a camel.

  Mom was SO PISSED it was fucking epic. She was all: DO NOT LET THAT STUPID RICH GIRL RUIN YOUR LIFE. Does the truth hurt?

  My dad thought you were great that one time he met you but consider the source. Short story long I went to basic training at Parris Island in S.C. the whole time thinking is this me? Maybe Mom is right and maybe this is a terrible idea but 2 late for that now.

>   Mom was still SO MAD at me but she and Liesel came for graduation and afterward at the reception with all the other parents wearing American flag ties and necklaces and such Mom drinks way 2 much red wine and says I wish my son wasn’t doing this and 9/11 was an inside job no really I’ve done the research. Good times.

  And then I think I’m going to Germany but long story off to Kandahar instead. I meet Megan and she is an angel in my life but still sometimes I float outside my body like my arms aren’t attached to my body and for no reason. Unlike with my knee, totally fucking fucked from fucking football.

  The bartender is back with the envelope and a stamp. He’s looking at my phone where I Googled your address and writing your address on the envelope. Now he is writing my name in the corner of the envelope. He keeps stopping and saying that is one fucking long name. He asks are you ready to send it and I say no not yet and he says Shakespeare fucking lives.

  You have always been in my thoughts.

  You were too smart for me but why did I never see you at home afterwards? Bad timing I guess or maybe you never visit your parents, those jerks. Do you still go to church? Not me I am a fucking atheist these days but having church wedding to keep the peace and also I still pray and also I want to see you one last time before I get married. This is a dare to myself to see how stupid I can be. How can I fuck up my life? I will write a letter to Caitlin. I will write a letter to lying Caitlin. But I don’t mean that. Except kind of.

  Flying KCI to JFK overnight layover before arriving in Kandahar on Wed. afternoon. Meet me at the gates of Columbia or at the big church or the phone store or the book store or wherever the hell you want. Do you remember that shitty hotel? But it was great too and do you remember how we loved each other then? I do. My man Tyler just asked if I was writing a fucking novel. THE END. B M-C

  He seemed smitten with the word fuck, which I found juvenile and disappointing, the frat boy vernacular writ large. And he’d written nothing about Afghanistan, and I wondered about so many specific things, like had he ever seen any girls on skateboards? I knew that Afghani girls were forbidden to ride bicycles yet allowed to ride skateboards, and I imagined Brandon walking down the street, uniformed and smiling politely at little girls in layered dresses and head scarves executing their perfect pop shuvits and ollies.