Write This Down

by Claudia Mills

  “I know pot—weed—is legal in Colorado now,” Mom says, unwilling to back down, “but it’s not legal for anyone under twenty-one, and just as with alcohol, there are reasons why certain substances are not available to minors, whose brains and bodies are still growing and developing.”

  “Pot?” Hunter asks. “Weed?”

  “Marijuana,” she explains.

  I know Hunter knows what pot and weed are; it’s just so weird to hear Mom say the words, as if she’s showing off how hip and cool she is.

  For a second Hunter catches my eye and comes close to grinning at me. I almost expect him to say Mo-o-o-m! like when we were younger and she’d snap her fingers to music on the car radio as if that were a cool instead of pathetically uncool thing to do.

  His grin vanishes before it has a chance to happen.

  “Mom, I’m not using drugs. None of my friends are using drugs. Because I sleep late on a Saturday does not mean I’m using drugs. Because I’m in a rock band does not mean I’m using drugs. Because you’re not in love with my grades doesn’t mean I’m using drugs.”

  “But … if you were … I wouldn’t be angry, I promise I wouldn’t. I’d want you to be able to tell me, so I could get you help.”

  Hunter stares at her. I know he’s thinking: In what universe does a fifteen-year-old tell his mom he’s smoked a few joints or had a couple of beers so she can get him help?

  “Don’t worry,” Hunter says, his eyes narrowing with what looks less like anger than hatred. Anger is hot; the look on his face is icy, as if any love he ever had for any of us is frozen solid beneath the groaning weight of an Ice Age glacier. “When I need your help, I’ll let you know.”

  He heads back upstairs, turning away before he can see Mom’s face crumple into tears.

  “Mom, don’t,” I say.

  She wipes her hand across her eyes.

  “I can’t help remembering,” she says in a voice so low I can hardly hear it, “how I’d drop him off at preschool—how he’d cry and cling to my leg and say, ‘Mom, don’t go.’”

  What am I supposed to say?

  “Well, teens are supposed to grow away from their parents,” I try. “Like that pamphlet you brought home?” Yes, I read “Surviving the Teen Years: A Guide for Parents,” too. I’ll read anything if it’s lying around and there’s no other reading material handy. “And you know, hormones…”

  “I just remember,” she says, as if I hadn’t spoken, “how he used to like me.”

  * * *

  I was having a good day until Hunter made his brunch appearance, and now I’m having a bad day. That look of hatred was directed not just at my mother but at me, too. Sometimes I think he hates me most of all, even though all I’ve ever done to him—truly all I’ve ever done—is to get better grades than he does and do the things our parents want us to do, like playing the flute or sticking with ballet. I can’t help that I like playing the flute. I can’t help that I like—well, don’t really mind—doing ballet.

  Dr. Jackson, my principal back in elementary school, used to say the same thing every single day at the end of morning announcements: “Have a good day—or not. The choice is yours.”

  Dr. Jackson obviously didn’t have Hunter as her brother.

  Still, I’m not going to let Hunter ruin a perfect October Saturday any more than he has already.

  I text Kylee: Bike ride by the reservoir?

  She texts back: Can’t. Knitting. Come over here?

  Now I have to decide if I want to spend a crisp, cool, cloudless autumn day watching someone else knit dog sweaters. I decide I don’t. Kylee hasn’t put down her needles since she got that folder of patterns and bag of yarn at the animal shelter. I’ve created a knitting monster.

  Brianna is away visiting her grandparents, and Isabelle has some kind of maybe-flu thing I don’t want to catch. So I’ll just curl up and be a writing monster. I’m not going to write any more poetry until I hear from The New Yorker, so I go back to my novel. I need to get rid of the finding-the-amulet scene in the Tatiana and Ingvar book and launch Tatiana on her next harrowing adventure.

  Dad comes into the kitchen before I can make my getaway. One look at Mom’s blotchy face, and the muscles in his jaw twitch. Dad can handle just about anything Hunter and I do so long as we’re not mean to Mom.

  “What did he say this time, Suzanne?” Dad asks.

  “Oh, nothing really,” Mom replies. “The usual.”

  “The usual,” Dad repeats. I know it makes things worse that how Hunter acts isn’t even surprising anymore, just how he is. Dad forces a smile. “Autumn, do your mother and me a favor and always stay as sweet a kid as you are today.”

  I don’t think of myself as particularly sweet, but maybe on a sweetness scale of 1 to 10, a kid who makes French toast for her parents and helps her dad rake leaves without being asked would score at least an 8.

  “What do we have going on this afternoon?” Dad asks Mom.

  “I promised Hunter I’d take him out driving.”

  Dad shakes his head, not overruling her, but more like he’s perplexed by the whole Hunter situation. “Maybe someone needs to learn that ‘the usual’ isn’t the way you earn time behind the wheel.”

  “Things will be better when he gets his license,” she says.

  Why on earth would Mom think that?

  “If he has more independence, more autonomy, maybe he won’t need to say and do things that are … you know … so hurtful. Anyway, I promised, and I like to keep my promises if possible, and he really wasn’t that rude or disrespectful.”

  Dad cocks his eyebrow the way he does when Mom goes into her protective Mama Bear routine.

  She continues, “And tomorrow he’s practicing with the band for most of the day at Timber’s. They have a gig in two weeks!”

  Now Dad really looks bewildered. I don’t think he had thought of Hunter’s band as a real band, the kind of band that real people would ask to play in real places. It’s the first I’ve heard about the gig, too.

  “Where?” is all he says, but I can hear that he wants to say On what planet?

  “The Spotted Cow coffee shop in the strip mall where the Chinese restaurant is,” she says. “I don’t think they’ve been hired, exactly. It’s more the kind of thing where you just show up and play.”

  “Okay,” Dad says. “That makes more sense.”

  I feel a twinge of pity for Hunter. What Dad said was hardly terrible, but it’s clear from what he didn’t say that he thinks the band—which is the only thing in the world Hunter seems to care about right now—is a hopeless cause.

  Even though Hunter has been nonstop mean to me for weeks now, I’m glad the band has a gig. I really am.

  10

  Our personal essays are due on Friday. In journalism class on Monday, Ms. Archer hands out copies of a couple of published personal essays that she thinks are models of everything a personal essay should be. One of them is about the day someone realized that she was more racist than she had thought she was. It made me squirm, in a good way, because the author was willing to be so honest about something bad about herself. I’m not so good at owning up to my faults. The other essay is light and funny until the very end, when it stabs you in the heart. The author’s cat does all these hilarious and ridiculous things but then goes outside one day and never comes back.

  “What’s this one about?” Ms. Archer asks, after she finishes reading the cat essay out loud to us.

  I’m not sure. I think it’s about how it’s worth it to be fully alive, even if there are risks involved. But I stay a quiet lurker.

  “Cameron?” Ms. Archer asks, even though, as far as I can tell, Cameron hasn’t given any signal that he has something to say. He’s still just doodling, doodling, doodling.

  He answers without looking up. “It’s better to go outside and get hit by a car than to live your life trapped inside. It’s better to die all at once, not by inches.”

  I love his answer. I love that it’s what
I was going to say, only in different words. Now I wish I had raised my hand, so he’d know that he and I thought the same thing.

  “All right,” Ms. Archer says, once we’ve talked more about the two sample essays, with Olivia raising her hand four times to offer her insights about their structure. “Let’s do another freewrite. Disregard everything we said in analyzing these two pieces to death”—is that a jab at Olivia? Oh, I hope it is!—“and write your little hearts out. Here’s your prompt for the next few minutes: something you don’t like about yourself.”

  I should have known she’d do that one, given that I had just been thinking how I don’t like writing bad things about myself. Especially when I’m sitting next to Cameron and he might look over and see what I’m writing, not that he’s ever given any sign of interest in me—well, until our last conversation about Hunter.

  So I sit there paralyzed.

  What don’t I like about myself?

  My flat chest. As if I’m going to write about that!

  Being too tall. It’s pitiful to care about something so trivial.

  Okay. Maybe what I don’t like about myself is that I do care about a lot of shallow, pitiful things. I do care too much about what other people think about me. When you get right down to it, my get-published-soon plan is about impressing other people, especially other people named Cameron and Hunter and Olivia. But what’s the point of being a writer if you’re not going to try to connect with a reader, preferably with lots of readers? The authors who wrote the racism essay and the cat essay—didn’t they care about being read by other human beings? If they didn’t, why did they have their essays published rather than leaving them in a drawer? Most writers are not like Emily Dickinson.

  Then I see that Cameron has written something: something very short, in the far corner of his blank page. It looks like a haiku.

  I roll my shoulders and rotate my head as if I’m doing some physical therapy exercise to help with writer’s block, holding the pose for an extra second as I strain to read what Cameron has written. But his writing is sort of like calligraphy, with fancy little flourishes that make it hard to decipher, especially if you’re pretending not to be trying to read it in the first place.

  Then Cameron turns his paper toward me.

  I feel myself flushing scarlet. He must think that’s just the color I am all the time: beet red.

  I could try to act puzzled—Oh, wait, did you think I was looking at your paper?—but there’s really no point to that now. So I just read what he’s written.

  I can’t see myself

  Only what the mirror shows

  But all mirrors lie

  I love it.

  If The New Yorker published haiku—and I didn’t see any haiku there either—they would definitely publish this. It’s so deep and wise and true. It takes the whole “what don’t you like about yourself” prompt and turns it inside out. How can we know what we like or don’t like about ourselves, when we can’t even see ourselves, we can only see what the mirror shows? And what Cameron wrote connects with what I didn’t write, about how I care too much about what other people think.

  I can’t help smiling at Cameron.

  “It’s beautiful,” I whisper.

  Cameron doesn’t return my smile or acknowledge my praise. He starts doodling all over the rest of the page and keeps on doodling. And for the first time this trimester, I don’t write anything either. Instead I just sit and chant Cameron’s haiku over and over again to myself.

  Then in the last minute of class, I write a mirror haiku of my own:

  No mirror shows me

  An image more real and true

  Than one that is cracked.

  I can’t help myself: just before the bell is about to ring, I turn my paper so Cameron can see it.

  As I suck in my breath, he reads it and gives a curt nod. Of approval? Or just acknowledgment?

  I like his haiku better than mine. But I like mine, too. I think it’s deep. I think it’s even profound. I like that we wrote them, side by side, together, on the same day.

  11

  Ms. Archer gives us class time to work on our personal essays on Thursday. Kylee lets me read what she’s done on hers so far. It’s about knitting—surprise, surprise. It’s about how she learned to knit, taught by her Chinese grandmother, who died earlier this year.

  Kylee is half Chinese (her mother) and half not Chinese (her father). Some kids and even some teachers expect Kylee to be a math-and-science whiz because she’s part Asian, but she’s not at all mathematical or scientific, and neither is her mom. Kylee says that’s a stereotype, and even though it’s a positive stereotype and not a negative one, it’s just as annoying.

  Her essay is good. It’s sweet and touching and really sensory. You can feel the warmth of the tea she’s drinking as she knits, and how it’s a metaphor for the warmth of the relationship she had with her grandmother.

  But is it about something? Or is it just an incident?

  Right now my piece about Hunter and Mrs. Whistlepuff feels like an incident, too: here’s a nice thing my brother once did for me. Mine is even more of an incident than Kylee’s. You could say that hers is about the value of passing on family traditions, about how little things like knitting together can feel so big when someone is gone and only the memory remains. Kylee’s piece starts with the line “Po Po died last May.” That lets us know right from the start the essay is going to be about surviving loss.

  Now that I think of it, my piece is about the exact same thing. The person I loved is gone, like Kylee’s grandmother, but in a different way. My piece is about surviving loss, too, about how people who once loved you may not love you anymore, but you still love them because of things they did back when they did love you. Though right now I have to admit I don’t feel a whole lot of love for Hunter, just this sickening kind of hurt inside me.

  But I don’t think any of this comes through now, the way I’ve written it.

  I gather up my essay and my writing notebook to take them over to Ms. Archer’s desk. One of the reasons she gives us in-class writing time is so that we can conference with her as much as we need to.

  Olivia is already talking to her, of course, leaning forward in the conference chair, tossing her long dark hair as she gestures animatedly. Olivia talks one-on-one to Ms. Archer every single in-class-writing day. I guess she’s entitled to. Half the time Ms. Archer is sitting there waiting for someone to talk to her, so it isn’t as if Olivia is taking time away from anyone else. But it makes her seem needy or greedy, soooo eager to be the teacher’s pet. I know, I know. I shouldn’t think such hateful things about Olivia, because down deep—well, not down all that deep—I’m as needy and greedy and teacher’s pet-y as she is.

  When Olivia is done—she used up seven whole minutes—I plunk myself down in the chair next to Ms. Archer’s desk. Wordlessly I hand her my essay. I added some stuff to it since the freewrite. I put in some of the other things I was—am—afraid of, like spiders and eyeballs (if I ever need glasses, I’m never getting contact lenses) and chairlifts where your feet hang down. At the end I added the thought about how I don’t have the flashlight anymore, just the memory. Other than that, though, it’s pretty much the same.

  It’s the tensest moment in a writer’s life: to sit there watching someone reading what you’ve written. The only thing even tenser is if they’re reading something you’ve written about your life.

  Ms. Archer isn’t reading fast or slow, and she doesn’t show any reaction. I can’t stop my eyes from trying to read upside down, so I can be reading exactly what she’s reading, exactly when she’s reading it.

  She looks up when she’s done and smiles.

  “This is lovely, Autumn. So many vivid details to let the reader experience a five-year-old’s fear. Even as we know there is no such person as Mrs. Whistlepuff, you’ve made us believe in her. You’ve done a deft job of showing the family dynamics with so few words: ‘my father took the night-light out of my room
because five-year-olds are big girls who don’t need night-lights anymore.’ And you’ve made us love Hunter.”

  Ms. Archer always starts with the positive. That’s good, but it makes me wonder if she means the nice things she says, because she really does find something nice to say to everyone.

  “But?” I ask, prompting her for the criticism I know is coming.

  “What do you think it needs?” She turns the question back at me.

  “It’s just an incident? It’s not about anything?”

  She considers this. “It’s about overcoming fear?” she suggests. “And how sometimes, as Beatle Ringo Starr once sang, ‘we get by with a little help from our friends’? How could you bring out that idea a bit more?”

  I shake my head. That’s not what it’s about, not for me.

  “Or?” she asks.

  “It’s about my brother. How he used to be. Versus how he is now…”

  Even as I say it, I know this is not the right kind of about-ness. About-ness isn’t supposed to be personal; it’s the universal truth you’re trying to share with the reader. That’s what Ms. Archer told us the day we did the best-or-worst-present freewrite.

  I’m so tuned in to Ms. Archer that when she gives a slight nod, I know she’s not nodding for what I said, but for the ellipsis points at the end of it, for how I realized myself that it wasn’t enough.

  “Actually,” I say miserably, “I don’t think it’s about anything that anybody except me would care about.”

  That’s why I came to you. Tell me what it should be about. Tell me how to fix it. Tell me what the universal truth is supposed to be.

  “Maybe…” she says.

  Tell me, tell me, tell me!

  “Maybe you’re not ready to write this yet. Let it simmer. Let it stew.”

  It’s due tomorrow!

  “What it means will come to you,” she continues. “You’ll wake up in the middle of the night someday, some month, some year, and say, ‘Cumin!’ or ‘Coriander!’”