If You're Reading This

by Trent Reedy

  “You’re not nearly as sophisticated as you —”

  “Have you ever had a girlfriend? Or even held hands with a girl? Kissed a girl?”

  I grabbed the Coke bottles and the bag of pretzels and headed out of the kitchen. “None of your business.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought!” Mary called after me. “Don’t ruin your one chance!”

  “Is everything okay?” Isma asked when I returned to the attic. She had sat down on my bed. “I heard shouting.”

  “You heard my idiot sister.” I placed the Cokes on the corner of my desk near Isma and sat down on my chair with the pretzel bag open in my lap. I tilted my head to the side and said in my best ditzy-girl voice, “I’ve learned that it’s best to just, like, totally ignore her or whatever.”

  Isma laughed and handed Dad’s letters back to me. “These are amazing, Mike. What a gift.” She leaned closer. “Thanks for sharing them with me. It sounds like your father was a really great man. Did these letters convince you to play football?”

  “They helped. It’s just frustrating not knowing how many more letters might be coming or when they’ll arrive.”

  “Have you thought about asking this Ed Hughes that your dad mentions?”

  “I doubt he’s sending them. Who would give letters like this to their boss?”

  Isma shrugged. “It seems like the best lead you have so far. If you write down all the people your father lists in his letters, I’ll help you research them at school.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I don’t think he mentions a lot of names, but it would be a start.”

  Neither of us said anything for a moment. The pretzel I ate seemed to crunch into the silence loud enough to shake the house. “So, about that report.” She handed me the bowl of caramel corn. “Here,” she said, holding out her hand for the papers I had next to me. “Trade you.”

  I gave her the report and dug into the caramel corn and pretzels while I watched her read. She’d come over, and we’d talked about everything, and she was sitting on my bed. She didn’t really need to bring caramel corn for a school project. Could Mary be right? Could Isma like me? I took a drink. The soda tasted cold and sweet, burning the way Coke does.

  Finally, she put my report down and had some soda. Light from the window sparkled on the glass and her lips shined a little.

  “What did you think?”

  “It’s good. You’re a good writer.” She flipped through some papers in her binder. “I think a lot of the ideas in the report would make good points for our speech. We could have a PowerPoint slide for almost every one of your paragraphs.” She pulled her laptop out of her bag, opened it, and booted it up.

  “I hate doing slides,” I said. “Last year I had three PowerPoint presentations and had to ride to school really early in the mornings to get on a computer. But at least I got there before Nick Rhodes or Matt Karn showed up in their cars, making fun of my bike.”

  “You shouldn’t pay attention to those guys,” she said.

  “They’re kind of hard to ignore sometimes.”

  Isma pressed her lips together. “They’re such jerks.” Our eyes met. Had she heard what Rhodes said about her in the library the other day? “It’s crap what they do. Teachers think they can fix it by making us watch stupid videos about bullying.”

  “Or when they make us read stories about some kid getting beat up and then ask us, ‘How would you feel if someone punched you to the ground and forced you to eat dog poop?’ ”

  Isma laughed, stood up straight like a soldier, and saluted. “ ‘Gee, teacher, I was going to tape some little kids upside down to a flagpole, pour honey on them, and then dump fire ants all over them, but since I read this sad story, I will study instead. You’ve really turned me around on this one.’ ”

  I laughed. “I think some of the guys who used to beat me up actually got their ideas for new bullying techniques directly from anti-bullying education.”

  “Used to beat you up?” Isma asked.

  “All though elementary Clint and Adam were sometimes jerks, but in junior high I kind of drifted apart from my friends, and then things with those two got really bad. One day in eighth grade, they had me cornered by the bike rack, and nobody was around to help.”

  “Tell a trusted adult, right?” Isma said.

  I chuckled. “Exactly. So I ran. Lots of times I could outrun them. They’d give up after they chased me and called me names for a while. This time they followed me all the way to the woods north of the school. I tripped on a rock or something and they caught up to me and started shoving me around. Escape was impossible, and I was tired of being beat up. So when Clint shoved me in the chest, I just lost it, decked him, then I kept going. I punched Adam in the nose and he backed up, then Clint came after me again and I slammed my fist into his stomach. Finally, they ran away.” I paused, figuring I wouldn’t tell her how I had been trembling and all full of adrenaline after they left. “And those guys haven’t tried anything like that since that day.”

  “You’re tougher than those guys. You scored a touchdown when none of them could. Anyway,” she said, “let’s get this speech written and this presentation ready!”

  We went to work figuring out what each of us would talk about in our speech. While I wrote a lot of what we’d say, she put together the slides, until we’d finished what already seemed like the biggest, most complicated project of the year. We each had to practice our parts, but we could do that on our own, and we had over a week to get ready.

  Only one thing remained, and it would be tricky to get Isma to go for it. “I still need to type my report,” I said.

  “You want to borrow my computer?”

  I could have sworn she’d read my mind. “Wow,” I answered. “If you’re sure it’s okay. It would really help me a lot.”

  “I trust you,” she said. “Just make sure to get it back to me on Monday. If my dad starts to wonder where it is, I could be in trouble.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “This is going to be cool. I’m glad we did this today.”

  Isma started putting papers back into her binder. “Me too!”

  A loud, low car rumble came from outside. Mom’s ancient Ford Escort with the worthless muffler! What time was it? Working and joking with Isma, I’d lost track of everything and totally forgotten about Mary and Mom.

  “We should be all set,” I said, standing up.

  Isma stood too, and stretched her arms above her head. “Maybe we could meet sometime to practice our presentation.”

  Mom would park the car in the garage. No opener, so it would take her a moment to open and close the door. The back door to the house wouldn’t latch, so we locked it to keep it from blowing open in the wind. Mom would have to walk around the house to go in the front door. It bought some time, but not a lot. “Sure. Here.” I put my hand against Isma’s back. “Let me walk you out.” I had to hurry without letting Isma know I was hurrying, and I didn’t even want her to go.

  Down in the dining room, Mary put on a big, fake grin and looked at me with wide eyes. She didn’t want Mom to catch us either. “Cool talking to you, Isma.”

  Isma stopped. I wanted to push her out the door, but then she’d be onto me. “Good to talk to you too,” she said.

  We were just paces from the front door when it opened. “I’m home, kids,” Mom said in a tired voice. Mary groaned quietly behind us. “I’m actually going out tonight, but what do you say we call for a pizza and …”

  She trailed off when she stepped inside and saw Isma. The silence lasted forever. Isma kept a brave, cheerful face, but even that started to fade in front of Mom’s openmouthed surprise. Great. Mom would flip out, and Isma would think my whole family was completely screwed up.

  The best I could do was try to act normal. “Mom, this is Isma Rafee. We were working on a project for school.”

  “Hello, Isma,” Mom said. She stepped away from the door but didn’t say anything more. Her look of surprise had faded to a sort of blank stare. />
  “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Wilson,” Isma said. Mom stood still and silent as a statue. Isma shot me a questioning glance. Maybe I should have prepared her in case this happened, but I didn’t want to ruin the afternoon by trying to explain my mother.

  “Well, I was just leaving,” said Isma. “Good-bye, Mike. Have a good night.”

  She left before I could say anything.

  “Bye, Isma!” Mary called. Mom closed the door behind her. “Well, that was messed up,” Mary said to us. “Now someone else thinks we’re really weird.”

  “Mary.” Mom didn’t even look at my sister. “Go to your room. I want to talk to your brother.”

  “Mom, you gotta relax,” Mary said. “They weren’t doing anything. He’s, like, a total dork, and so is Isma … kind of … although she actually seems to know about fashion and —”

  “Now!” Mom stomped her foot. The sound echoed through the room.

  Mary rolled her eyes and marched up the stairs, stomping her feet on each step the whole way.

  “You know I don’t like you having people over,” Mom said to me after the door to Mary’s room slammed. “I especially don’t like you having people over without permission. Sneaking around? Lying?”

  “We weren’t sneaking. I never —”

  “I come home and find my son has some girl over, and who is this person in my house? I don’t know. Could be anybody.”

  “Mom, Isma’s all right.”

  “How do I know that?” She unslung her purse from her shoulder and dropped it on the dining room table. “I don’t know anything about this girl because nobody asks me if she can come over, nobody tells me anything about this strange person. This is why you wanted me to go out tonight, isn’t it? So you and her could —”

  “It’s no big deal, Mom. We were just working on —”

  Mom glared at me and pointed toward the door through which Isma had just left. “She’s one of them, Michael!”

  I hoped maybe I was misunderstanding her. “One of who?”

  “Those … people.” She nearly spat when she said “people.” “They killed your father and then …”

  It was as if Nick Rhodes or Hailey Green or one of the other idiots at school had just possessed my mother’s mind. How could she be saying what I thought she was saying? How could she even think that? “Isma is not —”

  “The arguing! The disrespect!”

  “Do you even know how Dad died?” I shouted. “Nobody will tell me. I wish —”

  “He was killed in the war, Michael.”

  “Yeah, I get it. He died for no reason in a useless, endless war.”

  Mom stomped her foot. “Don’t you dare say anything like that ever again! Your father died fighting for freedom.”

  “What does that mean? What actually happened to him?”

  Her face screwed up like she was in pain. “What? I don’t know. Why would I want to know every little detail —”

  “Well, I can tell you this. He did not die fighting an American girl like Isma!” I didn’t wait around to hear any more, but ran toward my attic.

  “I forbid you from talking to or seeing that girl again!” Mom yelled after me.

  I stopped for a moment in the hallway upstairs. I heard Mom call Derek, saying she couldn’t go out that night. She claimed to be too tired.

  I climbed the steps to my attic, tired of my mother.

  Up in my attic, I put on one of Dad’s old metal CDs. Then I cut loose on my punching bag, throwing the right side of my whole upper body forward to slam my fist into the fabric, then following it with a bunch of low jabs, right and left and right and left. I twisted my lower body around, turning my upper torso the opposite way for balance as I swept my right leg up in a kick. “Almost sixteen …” Another kick. “Can’t have a simple homework meeting with a girl.” I threw a fast series of punches, right-left, as fast as I could. “Can’t date …” Right-left, right-left. “Hardly any friends.” Punch-punch. A kick with the knee. “Got to sneak around to play football like a normal guy.” Punch-punch-punch-punch-punch. “Never do anything!”

  I pressed my fists to the side of my head so hard that my arms shook. A bead of sweat ran down my cheek.

  “Mike?” Mary said quietly from the other side of the sheet.

  I was not in the mood to listen to my snotty little sister’s I-told-you-sos. “Go away!” The music stopped. “I said get out of here!”

  “Trust me,” she said, “the last thing I want to do is hang out in your weirdo attic. The mail came while you and Isma were … doing whatever you two were doing up here.”

  “We were just working on a project for —” Why explain myself to her? “Just leave!”

  “You got another letter. Doesn’t say from who.”

  I whisked the curtain aside and snatched the envelope from her fingers.

  “Who keeps sending —”

  “None of your business,” I said. She always hated hearing about Dad, so why should she be in on his letters now?

  “Whatever.” She rolled her eyes. “In a normal family, people would just text or email.”

  “This isn’t a normal family.”

  “I know.” Mary stopped halfway down the stairs. “About Isma … What Mom said about her is way messed up.”

  She left me staring after her. Something was rotten in the state of Iowa when my sister and I actually agreed on something.

  I looked at the new envelope in my hands. This one was thicker than the others, but it had been addressed with the same sloppy handwriting, the same Iowa City postmark, and no return address. Trying to calm myself, I sat down at my desk and opened the envelope. Again, no note had come from whoever had mailed this letter. I remembered Isma’s suggestion about contacting Ed Hughes. Maybe that would lead to some answers.

  For now, I took out the message that my father had written years ago. He had said that part of the point of these letters was to give me advice. I hoped he had some answers to all the questions I had about how I was supposed to handle life. About how I was supposed to deal with Mom.

  Sunday, July 4, 2004 (329 Days Left)

  Dear Michael,

  Happy 4th of July! And greetings from my new home in the city of Farah. These have been a few of the craziest weeks of my life. If the rest of my time here goes like this, I will have many stories to tell when I get home. I only pray that I’ll be able to tell you all of them in person.

  Of course, if you’re reading this …

  We spent about three weeks in the city of Herat in northwest Afghanistan, where I last wrote to you. I miss that place already. The base there was a nice place with a great chow hall in the basement, rooms with air-conditioning, and showers available whenever we wanted them. Hot water, even. The city is pretty advanced as far as Afghanistan goes. A lot of the streets are paved, and we could even go to the little shops a few times.

  That didn’t last, since orders came down for us to pack up and prepare to move to Farah. So we drove south through the blazing-hot Afghan desert. If you’ve seen photographs of the surface of Mars, that was what it looked like out there.

  Little Mikey, the seven-year-old version of you, who’s at home right now as I write this, thinks I’m super brave. He thinks I’m fearless because I’ve gone to this war. Of course, that’s how I acted when I left, so that I wouldn’t scare you all. But now that you’re old enough for the truth, I need you to know that I was terrified on the mission south to Farah. That was the first time when we were all really out in the open on our own. If the Taliban would have ambushed us along the road when all we had was one combat squad with some cooks and medics, and all of us in weak little civilian Toyota trucks, we’d have all been killed. The convoy made it safely, though.

  The city of Farah is a crazy place. It’s not as large as Herat, but it’s a lot bigger than any of the villages we drove through on the way. It has two streets that have recently been paved, the bazaar road and one cross street. The rest are bumpy and made of dirt and rock. Al
most all the buildings are one-story mud brick, all hidden away behind mud-brick walls.

  I can’t believe this is where I’ll be living and working for the next year. Our base here isn’t even finished yet. We have no air conditioners and it gets up to about 120 degrees some days. We have no refrigeration, so we’re stuck with field rations for every meal. Our well isn’t deep enough yet, so it often goes dry. Because of this, we get a shower once every three days, and then for a maximum of three minutes of water use. If the well goes dry on your scheduled shower day? Go pound sand. See you in three days.

  I was down at the bazaar here in Farah yesterday and these two young Afghan men came up to me. You know how you can just tell when someone wants to fight? I knew they were mad about something. Now, I had my M16, and neither man seemed to have any weapons, but I couldn’t be sure that they were unarmed, and I didn’t know how many of their buddies were around. So I smiled, said “Hello, friend” in their language, and reached out to shake their hands. They wouldn’t shake, but still acted mad. I kept smiling, kept calling them friends, and insisted they shake my hand. In the end, we were able to buy our stuff and leave without fighting and without having to be all arrogant while bossing people around.

  Fighting is horrible, Michael. Never start a fight or be one of those guys who enjoys fighting. Still, at the same time, those people who say violence never solves anything are full of crap. When a fight is unavoidable, when you’re being attacked, or when there’s absolutely no way out of a situation without being totally dishonored, then make sure you WIN the fight. Fight one on one, never with a group. And unless you’re wrestling around with a guy on the ground, never punch or kick a man who’s down. Let a guy get up first. Tear into him hard and beat him until he gives up. Then stop immediately.

  Of course, never, ever hit a woman. Not even if you think she deserves it. Actually, don’t even think that, or joke about it or allow others around you to joke about it. Even if a woman is attacking you, and you risk taking on some injuries to yourself, even then, never hit a woman.

  Our base is so far out west, so far away from our main base at Bagram, that it is hard to arrange support flights. That means all our food is shipped in by slow trucks, and the chaplain for our Iowa task force will only be visiting once or twice through the whole deployment. We had our first church service sitting in the blazing-hot ammo bunker that we’ve built. There we were, sitting on cans of 5.56 rounds or on crates of Claymore antipersonnel mines, saying the Lord’s Prayer. It is a humble church, but I think every one of us meant those prayers more than at any other time in our lives.