Penpal

by Dathan Auerbach

  beepbeep! … beepbeep! … beepbeep!

  My watch!

  The last alarm for the day was sounding. I smashed my fingers on the buttons, but the cold had numbed my hands, and fear had clouded my mind. I couldn’t remember how to stop it. Hundreds of times … I had silenced that alarm hundreds of times, but there I stood fumbling and trembling, unable to end its high-pitched death knell.

  “Stop it!” Josh pleaded.

  “I’m trying …” I whimpered.

  The rustling behind us began to move. It was getting closer now. I tore at my wrist and yanked at the plastic clasp and rubber band until it finally came off. With a whipping of my arm, the watch landed and sunk into the water.

  But it was too late; the crunching and snapping was right next to us now. We had nowhere to run anymore. I closed my eyes tightly, squeezing tears out of them, which rolled down my face. Defeated and terrified, I collapsed at the base of the tree and wrapped my arms around my knees, pressing them to my chest. A figure appeared in my peripheral – emerging from its hiding spot on the side of the same tree that we had hoped would conceal us. I turned my head so my eyes could take it in.

  It was a deer.

  I stared at it in disbelief, and it stared back at me in what might have been confusion or curiosity. It was the closest I had even been to a deer before – or since, for that matter. Even in the poor light of the pale moon, I could see the texture of its fur and the moisture on its nose.

  “Get out of here!” Josh snarled in a tantrum, apathetically throwing a small stick at the creature. It bounded off into the woods; we could still hear it long after it had disappeared from sight.

  We trod through the woods, moving as the dead might move. Exhausted by both fear and the winter air, we didn’t speak another word until we had arrived at the point from which we had departed; only now we were on the opposite side of the water. The tributary was narrower here, but neither of us wanted to get back into the water to cross. Josh asked me what I thought we should do, but I didn’t respond. I thought that if we continued through the woods along the water, we would get to the lake, and we could just circle around it. But that would take far too long. I didn’t have my watch anymore, so I didn’t even know what time it was; for all I knew my mother could be home already. There was no time.

  “We have to cross here,” I said.

  As quickly as we could, we moved through the water and onto the opposite shore. The earth sloped into the water here, so we were able to simply walk out of it and back onto familiar ground. We took off our swimsuits and were desperate to get into dry clothes that would shield us from the biting chill of the air. I slid on my shorts, but there was something wrong. I turned to Josh.

  “Where’s my shirt?

  He shrugged and gestured toward the water, “Maybe it got knocked into the water and floated into the lake?” As he motioned, I saw one of the pieces of our Styrofoam raft floating in our direction – back toward the lake.

  I told Josh to go back to my house and to say that we were playing hide and seek if my mom was home. I had to try to find my shirt.

  I ran behind the houses and peered out over the water while scouting along the shoreline. It occurred to me that with any luck I might find the map too – if the raft had floated this way, then maybe the map had. I was moving fast because I needed to get home, and I was about to give up when my concentration was interrupted by a sound coming from just behind me.

  “Hello.”

  I whipped around. It was Mrs. Maggie. In the porch light, she looked incredibly frail, and the usual warmth that wrapped her manner seemed to have been snuffed out by the chill. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her without a smile, and so her face looked strange to me.

  “Hi, Mrs. Maggie.”

  “Oh! Hi, Chris!” The warmth and smile had returned to her, even if her memories had not. “I couldn’t see it was you in the dark there. What’re you doing out so late?”

  “J-j-just playing with a friend …” Now that my rapid movements had stopped, the cold had started to creep into me again, and I could feel my teeth chatter against themselves. I was beginning to feel weak; each breeze seemed to drive the icy water on my skin through it and down to my bones.

  “M-Mrs. Maggie …” I thought for a moment and collected myself. “Mrs. Maggie, c-c-an I come inside? I just need a t-towel.” My head began to swim.

  “Not right now, Chris. Your … bother, how do I put this?” She seemed to search for the words, as I half-heartedly searched for my missing shirt and any scrap of paper that might be the map. She spoke out again at the same time I did, and her voice fell dully on my ear.

  “Mrs. Maggie, have you seen—”

  “—om’s home!”

  I felt the world drop out from under me. “Mom’s home!”? Had she just said that? She was still talking, but I couldn’t hear her anymore. I abandoned my search immediately and ran around the side of her house. I could hear Mrs. Maggie running through her house parallel to me. My legs felt weak, but I pushed them hard against her concrete driveway. My stomach twisted when I saw my mom’s car in our driveway, but then I remembered that she hadn’t taken her car. I thundered down toward the street and could hear Mrs. Maggie walking briskly across her frozen yard behind me – the ice-covered grass snapping and crunching beneath her feet – but I didn’t look back.

  Instinctively, I ran around the house and went to the backdoor. I eased it open. I couldn’t hear anything – no yelling, no talking, not a single sound. I slid into the bathroom that connected to my bedroom and cracked the door open. I heard Josh yell, and I flung the door open the rest of the way.

  “You scared the crap outta me!” he protested.

  “Is my mom home?”

  “No.”

  The tightness in my stomach relaxed, and I could feel my whole body slump a little in relief. Had I heard Mrs. Maggie right? I supposed that it wasn’t very surprising that she could be wrong about mom being home when she had trouble remembering what my name was. Josh had already changed his clothes and was looking much more comfortable than I felt. I went into my closet, stripped the wet clothes off, and put some dry ones on. It couldn’t have been more than five minutes later that my mom came home. We’d actually gotten away with it, even though we’d lost the map.

  “Couldn’t find it?”

  “No, I looked hard, but I didn’t see it. I saw Mrs. Maggie, though. She called me Chris again. She’s pretty scary at night.”

  “Don’t you ever make fun of her like that. Understand?!” Josh whispered in a mocking tone so that my mom wouldn’t overhear.

  We both laughed, and he asked me if she had invited me in for a snack, joking that the snacks must be terrible since she couldn’t even give them away. I told him that she hadn’t – that I had actually tried to invite myself in and been rejected – and he was surprised. As I thought about it, it really was surprising. Nearly every time we had seen her, she had invited us in for snacks, and here I had invited myself, and she said no. But she had evidently thought that my mom was home, so maybe it wasn’t so strange that she didn’t want me to come in.

  The subject turned to what had happened in the woods. We discussed it at the lowest possible volume; we were no longer sure about what we had heard. When Josh mentioned the Roman candle, it occurred to me that the lighter I had taken on the raft might still be in my pocket; even if we had gotten away with our secret mission, if my mom found a lighter in my pocket, the penalty would be severe.

  The fact that I had thrown my watch into the water and would have to explain why I no longer had it was slowly presenting itself to my attention, but I subdued its nagging while I grabbed the shorts off the floor and patted my pockets. I felt something, but it wasn’t the lighter. I squeezed it and felt it crinkle in my hand. From my back pocket, I removed a folded piece of paper, and my heart leapt. The map? I thought desperately. But I watched it float away. As I unfolded the paper, my palms began to sweat as I tried to understand what I was seeing.


  Drawn on the paper inside of a large oval were two faceless stick figures holding hands – one much bigger than the other. The paper was torn so a part of it was missing, and there was a number written near the top right corner: either “15” or “16.” I nervously handed Josh the paper and asked him if he had put it in my pocket at some point, but he scoffed at the idea. I put the question to him again, hoping he would change his answer – that he had just forgotten that he’d done it. He denied it again and asked why I was so upset. I pointed toward the smaller stick figure and what was written next to it.

  It was my initials.

  Josh kept talking, but I wasn’t really listening anymore – my eyes were stuck on the piece of paper. I had to continuously and actively refocus my vision, which would blur as my mind meandered trying to make sense of it. I put the drawing in my collection drawer, and Josh went home the next day.

  I had always attributed the odd exchange with Mrs. Maggie to her being sick – the product of a mind too young to understand and a mind too old to remember. She was such a lonely woman, and although I was too young to appreciate that fully, there must have been some part of me that did, because I never went out of my way to correct her when she called me by the wrong name.

  That night was the last time I saw Mrs. Maggie. It was the last time her yard would be transformed into an arctic kingdom by her poorly timed sprinklers. But, as a kid, you just accept that people come and people go. That’s just the way the world is – they have their own lives, and as they live them, sometimes that takes them out of yours. Only later do you look back and ask yourself: what happened? Where did they go?

  I didn’t understand why Mrs. Maggie had left. I didn’t understand what I was watching weeks later when I saw men in strange, orange biohazard suits carry what I thought were black bags full of garbage out of her house, leaving the whole neighborhood blanketed in a faint but festering smell of decay. I still didn’t understand when they condemned the house and boarded it up.

  But I understand now. I understand that I had simply gotten the warning wrong. I thought she had tried to alert me to go because my mom was home. But that was wasn’t it. I had heard what I’d been listening for, just as Mrs. Maggie had always seen what she was looking for. Had I been listening more attentively and less selfishly, had I had the capacity to recognize just how profound her confusion and loneliness really were, then maybe I would have heard the warning that she was really giving me – even though she didn’t realize that it was a warning. She never said “Mom’s home.” She had told me, with an explosion of misguided joy, what could only be meaningful to me now that I can’t do anything that would truly matter.

  Those men weren’t carrying garbage in those bags. I am as certain of that as I am of what Mrs. Maggie said that night and who had really come home, regardless of what name she called him.

  That night, she told me, “Tom’s home.”

  Screens

  At the end of the summer between kindergarten and first grade, I caught the stomach flu. The sickest I had ever been up to that point was the week in kindergarten that I had been stricken with a sore throat, but the stomach flu was an entirely different challenge. It has all of the components of the regular flu; however, with the stomach flu, you throw up into a bucket and not the toilet because you are sitting on it – the sickness gets purged from both ends. I stayed in bed for almost ten days, and just as it seemed that my body had fought the plague into submission, it was granted an extension, albeit in a different form.

  One morning, just a day or two before school resumed, I woke up and began to panic, thinking for a moment that I had gone blind. My eyelids were so fused together by the dried mucus generated during the night that I couldn’t open them – I had to pry my eyelids apart with my fingers. I had pinkeye.

  When I started first grade, it was with a kink in my neck, caused by more than a week of bed-rest, and two swollen, bloodshot eyes. Either of these things individually might have been manageable, but as I walked through the door and into the school, there was a noticeable quieting in my peers’ chatter as they looked at my infected eyes and awkward, hunched comportment.

  Josh had been assigned to another Group, which I had known about for weeks, but eating schedules weren’t determined that far in advance. It wasn’t until my class was brought to the lunchroom that I discovered that Josh had also been assigned to a different eating period. So, due to my affliction and the absence of my tablemate, in a cafeteria bursting with two hundred kids, I still had a table all to myself.

  It’s a bit poetic that it is so easy to take advantage of those who have no advantages to begin with. After the first several days of first grade, I started bringing spare food in my backpack that I would take into the bathroom to eat after lunch, since my school meals were usually confiscated by older kids who knew that I wouldn’t stand up to them since no one would stand with me.

  This dynamic persisted even after my condition cleared up since no one wants to be friends with the kid who gets bullied, lest they have some of that aggression directed toward themselves. There’s an expression that says “you have to have money to make money,” and while friendship itself is surely priceless, making friends seems to operate by the same rules. The fact that I was relatively personable in class did little to counter the fact that most of my classmates recognized me as the kid who sat alone at lunch. I was unable to make friends in class because I was unable to make friends at lunch, and the opposite held true as well; this loop fed itself for weeks.

  In kindergarten, most of my peers had grouped-off with several friends, rather than pairing-off with only one, like I had. This meant that in first grade it would have been difficult to insert myself into their fold, even if I hadn’t been a leper. With no friends, my ability to make any was jeopardized, and as the bullying grew more frequent, potential acquaintances grew more distant.

  I came to dread going to school in the morning, to the point that there was more than one occasion where I cried when my alarm clock signaled the start of my day. My only reprieve was waiting for the school bus with Josh in the afternoon so that we could discuss our continued navigation of the tributary, but this simply wasn’t enough to make the rest of the days bearable. Finally, and unexpectedly, my situation was improved by the intervention of a kid named Alex.

  Alex was in the third grade, though he was bigger than most of the other kids in any grade at my school. His greater size wasn’t just vertical – Alex was fairly overweight. His parents had attempted to hide their son’s mass by outfitting him with oversized shirts that buttoned up the front and didn’t cling to his body so easily or so tightly. However, when he sat down, the fabric would be stressed, and the openings between some of the buttons would purse, which would reveal the fat on his stomach that the baggy shirt was meant to cover. Of course, no one ever pointed this out to Alex.

  Despite his intimidating size, Alex always seemed nice enough. I never saw him pick on another kid, and he didn’t seem to be self-conscious about anything – one of the benefits of not having to worry about being bullied. About five minutes into lunch, sometime during the third week of school, he walked up to my table with his tray and sat down. There were several times when it looked as if he was about to say something, but they were always false starts. He left when lunch was over, and the process began anew the next day.

  I was curious as to why he had suddenly decided to sit next to me, but I was hesitant to bring it up; his company had put an immediate end to the shortage of my food supply, and I would be a fool to do anything to jeopardize this new relationship. Ignoring my curiosity, I tried to strike up a conversation with him several times, but he would only ever respond with enough effort to close whatever subject I had broached. I had never spoken with him at length, and so I was having difficulty determining whether he was distracted by something in his thoughts or if he was simply slow. He wasn’t being rude in his curt replies, but they left no room for an actual dialog to develop.


  Against my better judgment, I confronted him on the third day he sat across from me silently eating his lunch. He seemed at a loss initially, not because he didn’t know the answer, but because he knew I would ask but had not yet thought of how he would respond. After fumbling and stammering for a moment, he simply blurted it out.

  He had a crush on Josh’s sister, Veronica.

  Veronica was in fourth grade and was probably the prettiest girl in the school. Even as a six-year-old who fully endorsed the notion that girls were disgusting, I still knew how pretty Veronica was. When she was in third grade, Josh told me, two boys had actually gotten into a physical fight because of her; it erupted out of an argument concerning the significance of the messages she had written in their yearbooks. One of the boys eventually hit the other in the forehead with the corner of one of the yearbooks, and the wound required stitches to close. While not one of those two boys, Alex, too, wanted her to like him and confessed that he knew that Josh and I were best friends.

  Although he had difficulty articulating it, probably because it was an embarrassing request, I gathered that he had hoped that I would convey his ostensibly philanthropic deed to Veronica, and that she would presumably be so moved by his selflessness, that she’d take an interest in him. If I talked him up to Veronica, he would continue to sit with me for as long as I needed him to.

  Because this was during the time when Josh mostly stayed at my house navigating the tributary with me, I didn’t have the chance to bring it up to Veronica, because I simply didn’t see her. Even if I had, I’m not sure what I could have said that would have worked in his favor, aside from simply saying that he was a nice guy. But I needed to convey the message. It seemed like Alex had taken a liking to me and might continue to sit with me regardless of whether I held up my end of the agreement, but whether or not he realized it, he had done me a tremendous favor, and I wanted to return it.