Write This Down

by Claudia Mills

  I don’t cook, except for my killer French toast, but I recognize those as names of spices. My essay needs more than a spice. It needs the central ingredient. Right now it’s like chicken soup without the chicken.

  “But now I see,” Ms. Archer says. “I was wrong before. Take out the bits about the spiders and the chairlift. Those are red herrings. They lead us in the wrong direction.”

  Isn’t that always the way it is when you write? She wants me to take out the very things I worked so hard to add in.

  “This isn’t about fear,” she says as she hands my essay back to me. “It’s about love.”

  12

  I end up writing my personal essay on something entirely different. Well, maybe not entirely different. I write about “Goofus and Gallant,” and how hard I tried to be like Gallant when I was little, but how now I feel kind of sorry for Goofus and sick and tired of Gallant, too.

  I write it late that night, after the band concert, where my flute solo went great and Hunter wasn’t there to hear it, claiming he had too much homework. Mom and Dad let him get away with not coming because they’re so desperate to believe Hunter actually cares about homework and is actually doing any of it.

  The essay is definitely about something. It’s about how people aren’t all bad or good, how the lines between bad and good get blurred all the time, and how that’s a good thing.

  But I think I spelled the point out too clearly.

  When we hand them in on Friday, I want to ask Cameron what he wrote about, but I don’t want to sound like a total stalker girl. I do peer over at his desk as casually as I can so that I can read the first line: My mother says the first thing I ever loved was rocks.

  In my view, that is a wonderful first line.

  Does he still love rocks? Rocks are sort of a strange thing to love. But one of the things I love best about Cameron is that he’s not afraid to be strange.

  As she collects our essays, Ms. Archer says, “I can’t wait to read these!” I hope she likes mine, whether I spelled out the point too clearly or not.

  When she has them in a tidy pile on her desk, she holds up a flyer. “Breaking news: This was in my mailbox this morning, an announcement of a contest for, yes, personal essays! From the Denver Post. And—this is the best part—the contest is for essays from young writers ages twelve to sixteen. In other words, writers like you.”

  The deadline for the contest is one week from today, Friday, October 21. They’ll let the winners know by mid-November. Winners will get their work published on the op-ed page of the newspaper—that’s the page opposite the editorial page.

  Ms. Archer says we have to submit the essays ourselves, only one essay per applicant. I copy down the website address she gives us. Olivia copies it down, too, of course. Cameron doesn’t. Kylee doesn’t either.

  I have my “Goofus and Gallant” essay completely done, so I could send it off today as soon as I get home from school. But maybe I should wait first to see what grade Ms. Archer gives it. If I can only send in one essay, I want to make sure the one I send is my very best. I don’t think this one is as good as the essay I started about Mrs. Whistlepuff, the one I didn’t know how to finish. So maybe I should try to finish that one instead.

  But how?

  That’s what I need to figure out. Because it’s hard not to feel that this contest flyer, showing up in Ms. Archer’s mailbox at this very moment, is a sign from the universe for me.

  A sign for me, not for Olivia.

  * * *

  The band comes over to practice at our house again on Saturday afternoon. This time I do not change into a flowing, poetic-looking dress for possible admiration by observant older brothers. What I should do is stay in my room as far away from the band as possible or, better still, go to Kylee’s house and watch her knit. I could also text Brianna and Isabelle to see if they are free, but lately all they want to talk about is the Southern Peaks seventh- and eighth-grade fall dance, which is a whole month away. Mostly, though, I don’t text anybody because I just want to be where the band is in case David says anything about me to Hunter, or Hunter says anything about me to David. I can’t help myself, but I do.

  Before they arrive, I grab my Moleskine notebook, to make sure that it’s not out of my possession for one single solitary second. The couches in the family room aren’t right against the walls; my mother thinks they’re more “inviting” if they’re positioned at an angle. So there’s space for me to hide behind one of them, cozy on the carpet between the back of the couch and the bookcase, where nobody can find me, for who’s going to go looking for a book during a band practice? I bring a couple of pillows from the couch with me to make it more comfortable.

  This time the guys hang out in the family room first, rather than the kitchen, before heading downstairs. Mom is baking brownies for them—not healthy brownies either, but her great oozy-fudgy kind—and they aren’t quite out of the oven yet.

  They talk about the gig, the gig, the gig, which is a week from today. It’s so boring I tune out their conversation and tune in thoughts about my Mrs. Whistlepuff essay. What can I add to make its larger significance more clear?

  But then another Hunter memory comes to me, a much more recent one, and it all seems to connect somehow, and my hand flies across the page as if my brain isn’t even doing the writing. It’s like I hear this voice in my head dictating the words to me, this voice in my head urging me, Write this down.

  I’m twelve now, and Hunter is fifteen. Mrs. Whistlepuff is gone forever. But the brother I loved is gone, too. He still sleeps in our house and eats at our table. But he’s mean to me all the time, and I don’t know why.

  One day last summer Hunter was off at cross-country practice—our dad made him go. It was so hot the tar in the asphalt in the driveway was bubbling. It was so hot there was a power outage in our subdivision because the AC in everybody’s houses had to work too hard.

  My brother came home from practice at five. His hair, which is longer than it used to be, dripped with sweat. His face was streaked with dirt.

  Dad said, “Hunter, I’m proud of you for sticking it out on this hottest of days.”

  Hunter said, “I’m not sticking it out. I quit.”

  Dad said, “What do you mean, you quit? You made a commitment!”

  Hunter said, “You made the commitment, not me.”

  Then Dad stalked out of the room with this look of total disgust on his face. As long as I live, I hope nobody ever looks at me that way, especially nobody in my family. Though, actually, that’s exactly the way Hunter sometimes looks at me these days.

  I thought Hunter might run after him and say, Dad, I changed my mind. I’ll stick it out. Really, I will.

  He didn’t. He just stood there looking as furious as I’ve ever seen a person look, like he had a dragon inside belching flames as scorching hot as Mrs. Whistlepuff’s breath was freezing cold.

  But he also looked like he was going to cry tears as scalding as Mrs. Whistlepuff’s breath was icy.

  If I still had that flashlight, I’d give it to him to scare away that dragon. Or maybe I’m the one who needs to have that flashlight to scare away Hunter’s dragon when it breathes fire at me.

  But I don’t have it. Or at least I can’t find it.

  I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to find it again.

  I’m writing so intently that I’m only jarred back into consciousness of the band’s presence by hearing Cameron’s name.

  What did I just miss?

  “I brought another song of his. I think this one’s good enough for us to play at the gig,” David says.

  I try to piece the conversation together. So Cameron does write songs. And the band is going to play one! Now I’ll have to perch at the top of the basement stairs when they finally head down and listen to the practice to try to figure out which song is his. I don’t dare to hope the song Cameron wrote for the band is about me. No, it couldn’t be.

  But what if it is?

  T
hey’re back to talking about playing a tune from some band I never heard of, and then they’re tromping down the stairs making almost as much noise with their feet as they’re about to make with their music.

  I’m getting ready to escape from my hiding place, which is feeling more cramped by the minute, when Hunter reappears in the room, calling downstairs to the others, “I’ll just be a sec. There’s a record I want you to hear.”

  Hunter is totally into vinyl these days. He saved a bunch of Dad’s old records when Mom was going to donate them to Goodwill in one of her decluttering fits.

  Then it registers.

  The records are on the bottom shelf of the bookcase.

  The bookcase where I’m hiding.

  This is when I wish I had Tatiana’s magic wand, captured from Ingvar, to make myself invisible, or her amulet to ward off danger.

  But I don’t.

  His eyes widen when he sees me. “What the—”

  “I was just writing,” I say, holding up my notebook as proof, at the same time that I’m clutching it to my chest in case he makes a snatch for it.

  “You were just spying,” he says.

  Well, what if I was? A person is allowed to spy on somebody who might be making fun of her to somebody else who is the brother of the person she is in love with. Right?

  “As if I’d want to spy on you and your dumb friends,” I say with as much haughtiness as I can muster.

  Hunter’s face registers new understanding.

  “You were spying on David,” he says. “Give it up, Autumn. Like you’d ever have a chance with Cameron. The stuff he writes is actually good. Unlike a certain so-called poet.” In a warbling falsetto, he begins a screeching tune, “Oh, Cam-er-on! I love theeeee!” He’s clearly doing his best to sound like a dying cat.

  “Hunter!” one of the guys bellows from the basement. “Are you coming or what?”

  Hunter grabs one of the records and disappears without another word. Which is lucky for him, as my eyes are glittering with tears of a fury so pure and poisonous one drop could kill him dead.

  * * *

  I’m back upstairs in my room, with the door slammed shut. If only I had a lock! But Mom doesn’t believe in locks on bedroom doors. Hunter wanted to get one last month, and she said, “Family members don’t lock their doors against other family members.” But I’m locking my heart against Hunter right now.

  It’s been a whole two hours since I checked the emails on my phone, probably the longest ever since I sent my poems to The New Yorker almost two weeks ago.

  When I check my phone now, my inbox has one new message.

  It’s from The New Yorker.

  It’s been nowhere near two to six months. Maybe they love my poems so much they have to publish one of them right away? Maybe they hate my poems so much they have to reject all of them right away? The editor sent the email on a Saturday. Do all editors work on weekends? Or was this editor just so excited by my poems he couldn’t wait until Monday to let me know?

  Before I let myself read the message, I stare at the sender’s address for one long moment: my first email from The New Yorker.

  How many writers my age are even getting emails from The New Yorker?

  Then I read it.

  My poems don’t suit their “current publishing needs.”

  That’s all they say.

  I didn’t realize how much I’d been counting on a yes from The New Yorker until now, when I’m staring down at my phone and rereading that message over and over again. For the past two weeks, every day was a little more special, knowing that this was the day I might hear the news that my Cameron poems would be published in the most prestigious poetry magazine that there is.

  I try to tell myself, Okay, The New Yorker didn’t like my poems. Frankly, I don’t like their poems either. I knew it was a long shot, trying to publish rhyming love poems nowadays. Like Miniver Cheevy and Moonbeam, I was born too late.

  But the more I read over that one short line, the more it hurts. Couldn’t they have said something encouraging? Commented on my promise as a poet and suggested that I might consider branching out a bit and writing poems that don’t rhyme? Asked me to try them again with other material?

  I click on the file I sent them and read through my six rhyming Cameron poems, trying to imagine an editor sitting in a faraway New York City office coming upon them amid thousands of other poems sent in by other wannabe poets.

  Is Hunter right that they suck? Or is Hunter wrong?

  Did Cameron tell David he hated my poem? Or did Hunter make that up?

  Right now it feels like Hunter was right, about everything.

  I don’t plan to cry.

  But somehow that’s what I’m doing as I imagine the New Yorker editor reading my poor little rejected poems aloud to the guy sitting next to him, borrowing Hunter’s quavery falsetto voice, and the other guy laughing for a brief moment before cheerfully going on to reject the next poem, and the next poem, and the poem after that.

  13

  On Monday Ms. Archer hands back our personal essays.

  I get an A on mine. Maybe the A is partly because I had to put the Mrs. Whistlepuff essay aside at the last minute and start all over again, an A for effort. But it doesn’t really matter because I already sent my expanded Mrs. Whistlepuff essay to the Denver Post contest last night. I couldn’t sleep, thinking about Hunter’s meanness and the New Yorker rejection. So at two in the morning I slipped out of bed, turned on my computer, and did the deed.

  Kylee got an A on her essay, too. I don’t know what Cameron got on his. I do know he stuck it inside his journalism binder without even looking at it. (Ms. Archer hands them back to us facedown, to protect each student’s privacy from prying eyes—like mine.)

  “All right, intrepid scholars,” Ms. Archer says. “Next up, we’ll be spending two weeks reading and writing reviews.”

  “Reviews of what?” Tyler wants to know. “Video games?” he asks hopefully.

  “Of anything!” Ms. Archer replies. “Video games, books, films, plays, restaurants, shops, services. Anything where you think your opinion might be helpful to someone trying to decide whether to purchase or attend or engage with that thing.”

  As soon as she said “books,” I thought about the book I love best and would most want to tell the world about: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. But most people already know about that book. Shouldn’t the review be about something new? I feel too shy to ask.

  “A review, say, of a book”—Ms. Archer must be reading my mind—“must be more than just a summary of the plot, though you do want to give the reader a sense of what the story is about, while avoiding spoilers that would destroy the reading experience. Above all, the reader wants your opinion about the plot, the characters, the theme, the writing style. But a review also needs to be more than just your opinion: I loved this, I hated that. Your opinion needs to be supported with details and examples. Why did you love this? Why did you hate that?”

  Tyler calls out another question. “What if you hate the whole thing?”

  Ms. Archer laughs. “It’s true that reviews make a stronger impression if they take a bold stance rather than being timid or wishy-washy. But you also want to be fair. Readers want to be able to trust your judgment as being impartial rather than biased.”

  Olivia raises her hand. “Is anybody going to be reading these reviews?” she asks. “Except for you, of course? And other kids in the class?”

  “I’m glad you asked,” Ms. Archer says. “One appealing feature of review writing is how easy it is to publish reviews online these days, on sites like Goodreads, for books, or Amazon, for just about anything, or on a business’s own website. But the ease of posting your review doesn’t mean you should compromise your standards as writers. You wouldn’t want to post anything on which you wouldn’t be proud to sign your name.”

  It would be fun to post a review online. But I don’t think a review posted on a website would count as a real publication.


  “I’ll also be evaluating your reviews,” Ms. Archer continues, “to see if any of them might be right for the Peaks Post.”

  The Peaks Post is the Southern Peaks Middle School paper. Ms. Archer is the adviser for it, as well as our journalism teacher. The editors for the paper are eighth graders who already took the journalism class last year; regular school events are covered by students who signed up to be staff writers. I haven’t done that, maybe because Hunter calls it the Pukes Post. Anyone can submit features, reviews, or op-eds to the paper at any time. Then the byline reads “Special to the Peaks Post.” Sometimes articles in the Peaks Post are picked up by the grown-up paper in town, the Broomville Banner, which would be a pretty amazing thing to have happen.

  Now I definitely need to think of something to review other than Wuthering Heights. There is no way that either the Peaks Post or the Broomville Banner would want to publish a review of a book written centuries ago.

  Ms. Archer gives a smile that seems to say she’s sure she’s going to find at least one publishable review from someone in our class. Then she says, “I’m going to give you a few minutes to brainstorm ideas for what you might want to review with the people sitting near you. Try to think of something where you might have special expertise that could inform your evaluation. Or something unusual that others might not think of reviewing.”

  I’m sitting next to Cameron, of course, and Kylee is on my other side. Olivia, Kaitlyn, and Tyler are right in front of us. So we pull our desks together in an awkward circle.

  I wish Olivia sat on the other side of the room.

  I wish Olivia weren’t even in our class.

  “What are the rest of you thinking about doing?” she asks. I notice she doesn’t tell us first what she’s planning to do. Maybe she has some idea so wonderful she wants to keep it to herself.

  To my surprise, Kylee, who is usually even quieter than I am, which is saying a lot, says without a moment’s hesitation, “I’m going to review Knit Wits.”

  Everybody else looks blank. The name sounds just like “Nitwits.” Only I know that it’s a new shop in the mall that has every kind of yarn on earth, made of wool not just from sheep but also from alpacas, llamas, Angora rabbits, even camels.