Write This Down

by Claudia Mills

  Maybe now she’ll say she liked the lead-paned windows. Or that mine was by far the best of the four dream pieces. Or that if I revised the opening to delete the dream, she’d want to read more.

  She doesn’t.

  “Don’t give up,” she says. “Promise me you won’t give up.”

  But The New Yorker rejected my poems, and Olivia scooped the Kylee article, and Ms. Archer picked Kylee’s review over mine. Now two agents with a combined eighteen years of experience made fun of my novel in front of a packed auditorium. I haven’t proved a thing to Hunter. I certainly haven’t made Cameron fall in love with the wonderfulness of my words.

  Without a syllable, I turn away from her and head outside, where it’s raining now, and I pedal home.

  22

  November 15 falls on a Tuesday. If the essay contest people are going to notify winners by “mid-November,” this is as “mid” as “mid” can be. I check my email all day long—before classes, after classes, surreptitiously under my desk during classes: nothing. Maybe they’ll tell us by snail mail, not email? But when I check the mail first thing when I get home after school: nothing. The New Yorker editor emailed me on a Saturday, so maybe the contest judges work odd hours, too. But when I go to bed at ten, I’ve still heard nothing. I reach for my phone to check my email first thing when I wake up Wednesday morning, and keep checking it all day Wednesday. Ditto for Thursday.

  Nothing.

  It’s starting to look as if I have a clean sweep of failure at everything.

  After ballet on Thursday I go to Kylee’s house for dinner, and we make necklaces together with the beautiful handcrafted glass beads she got at the bead show in Denver. She keeps saying that the agents were wrong and my novel is wonderful, but it’s hard to let myself believe her. Well, if I’m no longer going to be a writer, maybe I can be a necklace maker. I don’t think there’s as much rejection in necklace making. There isn’t any equivalent to a New Yorker necklace magazine. As far as I know, there aren’t any brutally honest necklace agents.

  * * *

  Friday is the last day before our weeklong Thanksgiving break. It’s also the day of the middle school dance, when Cameron might or might not be there, and the band might or might not play his song, and he might or might not ask me to dance. It’s a day fraught with fraughtness.

  We get our report cards eighth period, which for me is science with Mr. Cupertino. Isabelle is the only one of my friends who is in that class with me. Even though parents can check grades on Infinite Campus, we get a paper printout of them in an envelope for us to take home for our parents to sign, in case there are some parents who aren’t as obsessed with Infinite Campus as my parents are. Plus, some teachers take forever to update the website, which drives parents like mine absolutely foaming-at-the-mouth crazy, but all teachers have to turn in all the grades for report card day. And report card day is when our grades become real and final.

  When Mr. Cupertino hands out the envelopes, I channel Cameron and don’t open mine. I put it in my science binder without even peeking.

  “How’d you do?” Isabelle asks as we head to our lockers after the dismissal bell.

  I shrug. “I don’t know. I haven’t looked yet.”

  She stares.

  I smile.

  Maybe this is why Cameron is the way he is. It’s lovely to feel so strong and pure, indifferent to what everyone else is worried about. Like I’m standing outside in a driving rain and everyone else is huddled under their umbrellas moaning about how wet their feet are getting, and not a drop of rain is falling on me. Or maybe it is falling, and I just turn my face up to the sky and say, Oh. Water.

  Of course, the minute no one is looking, I stand by my open locker, slip the envelope out of the binder, and open it.

  All A’s except for a B in pre-algebra.

  Kylee appears next to me, ready to walk home together.

  “What are we doing this weekend?” she asks. I love that she doesn’t say anything about her report card or ask anything about mine. In her own way, Kylee is as cool as Cameron.

  “Sleep?” I suggest. “You could knit?” Kylee’s parents have allowed her to knit again, with a one-hour-a-day limit.

  In the past I would have said, Write, but I still feel too terrible from Calling All Authors, which should have been titled Destroying All Authors. I didn’t end up actually burning my novel—I couldn’t do it—but I don’t want to write anything ever again, except what I have to write for journalism class. As it turns out, I’m not someone who thrives on massive rejection and gets stronger and tougher from brutally honest criticism. I’m someone who thrives on encouragement and praise. Of which lately I’ve been getting precisely none.

  I push these thoughts from my mind. “And tonight we have—”

  “The dance,” Kylee says. “Are we definitely going? Because last time—”

  “This dance will be different,” I promise. “The sixth-grade one was just supposed to be an experiment to see how we’d do.”

  Kylee laughs at the obviousness of the experiment’s results. We’re outside now, in the mob of kids searching for their parents in the long line of cars idling in front of the school. I’m glad Kylee and I live close enough that we can walk.

  “There won’t be any sixth graders at this one,” I tell her. “Just seventh and eighth graders. No popcorn war. No punch disaster. This will be a dance where people actually dance.”

  It might even be a dance where Cameron dances with me.

  “Okay,” Kylee says. “We’ll go. But we’re not standing by the refreshment table. And if Henry Dubin asks me to dance, I’m just going to say … What am I going to say?”

  “You’ll say that you’re sorry, but you were just about to go to the bathroom.”

  “What if I get back from the bathroom and he asks me a second time?”

  “You’ll say that you have to go to the bathroom again. It must have been something you ate.”

  “So you’ll be out there dancing with Cameron”—I haven’t told her my fantasy, but she figured it out on her own—“while I’m spending the night in the bathroom pretending to have diarrhea?”

  “Yes,” I say. “That’s the plan.”

  People walk past us, still talking about their report cards.

  “I had an eighty-nine, and I can’t believe she didn’t round it up to an A…”

  “Mr. Pearson only likes you if you laugh at his jokes, and, believe me, they are the dumbest jokes you’ve ever heard…”

  “My dad is going to kill me…”

  We’re crossing the bridge on the creek a block away from the school. Yes, our school was built on a flood plain. Any time we get a long rain kids start hoping the school will be flooded and classes will be canceled. It’s never happened yet, but it might someday.

  “Look,” Kylee says, stopping suddenly, halfway across the bridge. “Is that Cameron?”

  There’s a kid, facing away from us, standing on a flat rock in the middle of the creek.

  It is Cameron.

  “What’s he doing?” Kylee asks.

  He’s stacking rocks, one on top of the other, placing each one carefully on the one below so they’re perfectly balanced. He’s not arranging them in order of size, little ones on top of big ones. That would be too boring. That would be too easy.

  My mother says the first thing I ever loved was rocks.

  The wind has come up, but Cameron isn’t wearing a jacket. His tennis shoes must be soaked with the creek water rippling against them.

  Now I see there are several rock towers in the creek, each one constructed from five or six rocks, each one different. Did Cameron make them all? He wouldn’t have had time to make them all today; the bell rang just ten minutes ago. Does he make a new one every day? Or is there a community of rock artists, who might even be strangers to each other, coming in solitude to make their own rock sculptures and then go on their way?

  “What if someone comes and knocks them down?” Kylee asks in a low
voice. “Or the wind topples them over? They’re not held together with glue or anything.”

  I don’t answer. I’m too busy watching Cameron, who clearly doesn’t care about permanence or publication, who wouldn’t be upset by what two literary agents said about him if he even bothered to listen.

  The rock formations are beautiful, but it’s even more beautiful to watch him in the process of creating, like watching a ballet with only one lone dancer on the stage, and no audience.

  Except for us.

  As Cameron places the final rock on top, he stands back to survey his work. That’s when he looks up and sees us.

  It would be wrong, it would feel crass, to shout a big friendly greeting. Hey, Cameron!

  Kylee seems to know this, too. She’s intuitive that way, plus she’s not a shouty person in the first place.

  He raises one hand to us in a silent gesture.

  We give small waves in return.

  “Let’s go,” I whisper.

  We keep on walking.

  “That was cool,” Kylee says a block later. “Sort of … magical.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “It was.”

  23

  I wonder sometimes what other families are like. I’ve been to Kylee’s house, of course, and to Brianna’s and Isabelle’s and other friends’ houses over the years. But you never get to see what those families are like when you aren’t there.

  Here’s what I’m wondering about today: In other families, do people know so much about each other? Like, do most kids bring home their report cards and everyone sits around sharing their grades in a little report card ceremony? Or do most parents talk to each kid in private, so Billy doesn’t know Sally’s grades, and Sally doesn’t know Billy’s? Are there families that believe in privacy?

  My family doesn’t. Or even if we believe in privacy, somehow it turns out nobody ever has any.

  Hunter isn’t home when I get there, and Dad is at work, so I leave my report card on the kitchen table for Mom to see.

  “Very nice, sweetie,” she says, after studying it for a minute, as if it takes a full minute to analyze a line of A’s with one B. I bet she waited to comment because part of her wants to say, What happened in math? But she knows it would be unfair to make a stink about my one B when Hunter will be lucky to have a single B.

  My mother sets my report card back on the table and laces her fingers together in a tight weave. “I just hope…” she says.

  She doesn’t need to conclude the sentence because, even after how awful Hunter has been to me, I’m still hoping the exact same thing. Maybe Dad didn’t really mean the threat about grounding him if his grades weren’t acceptable. Our parents have never been ones for threats, but Brianna’s parents make threats all the time that they never follow through on, like “If you can’t stop texting while I’m talking to you, I’m going to cancel the text feature on your phone.” I’ve heard that one at least three times, and I don’t even go over to her house very often.

  “He just wants what’s best for Hunter, you know,” Mom tells me then. “What’s best for both of you. We’re proud of your grades, of course, but middle school grades … they don’t follow you through life the same way that high school grades do. Hunter’s grades count. And we wouldn’t be so hard on him if we didn’t know he’s bright enough to do better if we could just get him to focus.”

  It feels strange to be talking with my mother about my brother as if we’re two adults. But I know she knows I’m worried, too.

  “Maybe it will all be okay,” I say. But then I realize: she already knows what his grades are. The Infinite Campus website would be totally updated now; the report card is printed right off it. What she hopes is that Dad won’t freak out too much about them.

  “This band,” she says, still flexing her clenched fingers. “I’m not sure if it’s the source of the problem, or if it’s a positive thing. I generally think people should follow their dreams, though I know your father worries about this particular dream. And the other boys in the band … Don’t tell Hunter, but I talked to their parents, and they all seem to be doing fine in school right now, even Moonbeam.”

  The way she says “even Moonbeam” cracks me up. There’s so much suggested by that one word: “even.”

  She smiles. “That name! Oh, well, one thing about names is you can change them whenever you want and then change them back again. I was Suzy-with-a-y in third grade, and then Suzie-with-an-i-e in sixth grade, and then Suze in high school, and now I’m Suzanne. And if I went through a New Age phase and decided to call myself Starshine, I could be Suzanne again any time I wanted. It’s easy to change a name.”

  She opens her hand to smooth my report card sheet.

  “Unlike a grade.”

  * * *

  Dad gets home before Hunter does. I’m in the kitchen, helping Mom dice carrots and celery for another healthy Asian stir-fry. I can tell from the grim set to his jaw that he checked Infinite Campus and already knows what Hunter’s final grades for the trimester turned out to be even without a paper printout.

  “Maybe,” Mom says, once Dad has shrugged off his jacket and hung it on the hook by the back door, “we can just let him play for Autumn’s dance? He’s worked so hard for it. And we don’t have to call it ‘being grounded.’ We can just say we’re limiting outside activities for a while so he can focus better on his schoolwork.”

  “Kylee’s parents limited knitting for a while,” I pipe up. “Because she was getting carpal tunnel syndrome from making all those dog sweaters. But they let her finish making the sweaters first. And now they’re letting her start knitting again.”

  My parents whirl around to look at me. I think for a moment they forgot I was there. One of the things you learn as a writer is how to make yourself invisible so that people will say all kinds of things in front of you. I turned myself invisible once at church. I was sitting in a corner of the church kitchen rolling up silverware in napkins for a church dinner, and I heard the lower elementary Sunday school teacher telling the middle school Sunday school teacher about her marital problems, which would be extremely useful if I were still a writer and planning to write a grown-up novel.

  “Oh, honey,” Dad says. “Let your mom and me do the worrying here.”

  “Fine,” I say cheerfully. Someone in this family has to be cheerful. “How about I go read for a while, and you can call me when dinner is ready.”

  Dad’s face softens. “Believe me, Autumn, the hardest part of parenting is making decisions that your kids don’t like now but will thank you for later.” He gives me a quick kiss on the cheek before I head upstairs.

  It’s half an hour later when I hear the front door open and shut, then voices in the kitchen, and then Hunter’s angry shout.

  “This is so stupid!” Hunter yells. “You’re starting the grounding now? How’s that supposed to help my grades? I don’t have any homework for a whole freaking week! The trimester’s over! What am I supposed to do, sit around staring at you and Mom and Autumn?”

  I hear Dad: “You can’t say we didn’t tell you, as clear as clear can be, what would happen if you didn’t get that missing work completed in time. If we don’t give you some little consequences now, then the world is going to give you some big consequences later.”

  It’s the same thing he told Mom after the dinner-table fight the other night, so either he really believes it or he’s trying very hard to talk himself into believing it.

  I don’t hear the next thing Hunter says or what Dad says after that. I can’t tell if Mom is part of the conversation or not.

  Then: “I have a gig! I can’t miss my gig! It’s a commitment. You’re the one who always tells us we have to honor our commitments!”

  Feet pounding on the stairs.

  Door slamming.

  I hear something that, if I didn’t know Hunter never cries, might sound an awful lot like crying.

  * * *

  Hunter doesn’t come down for dinner.

  “He’ll com
e out sooner or later,” Dad says, as if he’s hoping desperately that this is true. He glances across the table at Mom, but she looks away. I know she’s hoping against hope that he’ll relent on the grounding, but he’s not going to turn back. It’s clear he thinks they should have grounded Hunter weeks ago for his slipping grades.

  Dad sighs then. “If he wants to turn ‘being grounded’ into ‘solitary confinement,’ I guess that’s his choice.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Mom says. “No child of mine is going to go hungry in this house. Grounded or not grounded, he’s a growing boy. He needs to eat. Autumn, honey, if I fix a tray, will you take it up to him?”

  Why does she think he’ll take a tray from me any more than from her?

  On the tray Mom puts a plate of stir-fry and brown rice, a glass of milk, and a cut-up apple, plus a napkin and silverware. I bet if she had a single rose to put in a bud vase, she’d add that, too.

  After I carry the tray upstairs comes the scary part.

  I tap on Hunter’s door. Loud enough that he’ll hear—unless he has his earbuds in and his music turned up high—but still more of a timid plea on my part.

  No answer.

  “Hunter? It’s me. Autumn.”

  No answer.

  I push the door open a crack. Hunter is lying on his bed, glaring at me.

  “Mom sent me with this.” I set the tray down on the floor. There’s no other available surface to put it on, and even the floor is covered with so many dirty clothes I have to push a pair of Hunter’s jeans out of the way with my foot. Then I continue my spurt of tidying by shoving Hunter’s hoodie and a crumpled, smelly T-shirt out of the way, and I sit down on the floor next to the tray, clasping my legs to my chest in my usual scrunched-up little ball.

  “Mom feels bad,” I say.

  Hunter makes no response.

  “Dad feels bad, too.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  At least he’s talking now.

  I swallow hard. “I feel bad.”

  If I thought this might turn into a moment of brother-sister closeness, I was wrong.

  “Shut up,” Hunter says. No genteel “Shut thy trap” this time. Actually, he says, “Shut the something up,” using a word that is so much worse than mere “Shut up” that my mom hasn’t even felt the need to make a rule against it.