Write This Down

by Claudia Mills

  My first tower topples over when I put the twelfth packet—orange marmalade—on top. My second tower topples over with the eleventh one—strawberry.

  No one has yet said anything.

  If somebody doesn’t say something soon, I’m not going to be able to tell myself that we’re a normal family having a normal breakfast.

  “So,” Dad says, as if we were already in the middle of a conversation and he’s just throwing out a new idea for us to consider. “Sports were just—they were so important to me when I was in high school. I wanted you to have what they gave me. Being on a team. Learning to play as a team. How to win as a team, how to lose as a team. It was just … hard on me, knowing you weren’t going to have the chance for that.”

  Hunter doesn’t say anything.

  “And, yes, I was disappointed that you weren’t even going to give yourself that chance.” His voice is low now. “I wanted that chance for you. I wanted it more than anything.”

  “A band is kind of like a team,” I say, even though no one—as in no one—has asked me to weigh in on this.

  “A band is like a team,” Dad agrees, looking at Hunter and not me as he says it. “Maybe music is for you what sports were for me. Maybe I just couldn’t see that.”

  “Hunter writes songs, too,” I add.

  Mom helps me out. “What kind of songs?”

  “Good songs,” I say. “The band played one at their gig a few weeks ago, and they played it again last night. It was the best song the band played.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned last night. Are we supposed to be pretending it didn’t happen? There are limits to what even good pretenders can pretend.

  “What was it about?” Mom asks Hunter.

  “Nothing,” Hunter growls, but it might be an okay sort of growl. He was never one for Q&A at mealtimes.

  “I didn’t know you were into songwriting,” Dad says.

  This would be a moment where Hunter might say, Further proof that you don’t know anything about me. But he doesn’t. He shrugs. It might be an okay sort of shrug.

  “I’ve written words for some songs,” I say. “But I don’t know how to write music. I think it’s cool that Hunter writes the music, too.”

  “Do you have any other gigs coming up?” Dad asks. The word “gig” sounds strange coming out of his mouth—like when Mom talked about “pot” and “weed”—like he hopes he’s using the right lingo but isn’t completely sure.

  “Moonbeam got us a thing at another coffee shop next weekend,” Hunter says, through a big mouthful of hash browns. When he finally swallows them he says, “So … can I go? Or am I still grounded?”

  Dad exchanges a glance with Mom. “I’d like … to turn over a new page. Make a fresh start. Me with you, you with me. What do you think?”

  Hunter gives a grunt that sounds like an okay grunt. But then he manages a shaky grin and actually says the word “Okay.” And then says the word “Thanks.”

  “How are your pumpkin pancakes?” Mom asks me.

  “They’re good,” I say. They even have pumpkin syrup to go with them, which might sound like too much pumpkin but isn’t. There is no such thing as too much pumpkin.

  “Make sure you brush your teeth when we get home,” Dad says to me. “You have to be extra careful with sticky substances now that you have your braces.”

  And that’s how the rest of the meal goes. Dad doesn’t say anything about grades or college or making sure you have choices in life, but I think Hunter knows that Dad still thinks those things matter. Maybe down deep Hunter knows that they matter. They just aren’t all that matter.

  I can’t finish my pumpkin pancakes even though I adore them; I’m too full. So Hunter leans over my plate and spears a big bite, and that makes me happy. I’m even happier when he reaches over and adds a grape jelly packet to my new tower—number thirteen—and sets a Granger family jelly-stacking record.

  It feels, in its own way, like a beginning.

  I scrambled into my clothes so fast before heading to the restaurant that I forgot my phone, so when we get home and I turn it on, it’s been hours since I checked it last.

  I have a text from Kylee: U OK?

  And I have an email from the Denver Post.

  For a moment I can’t figure out why the Denver Post would be writing to me.

  Then I remember: the essay contest. Is it still mid-November, when they were supposed to notify the winners? Or is it time now to notify the losers?

  I open the email.

  It begins, “Congratulations!”

  I’ve won first prize.

  Me.

  29

  Standing there by my unmade bed, I feel my smile spreading ever wider, like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, who disappears and only this huge, toothy grin remains.

  I read the email over and over again. There’s a winner for each age, so five winners total, and I’m the winner in the twelve-year-old category. In order to accept my prize of two hundred dollars, I have to electronically sign and return a form saying that this is completely my own work and not copied from anywhere else (which of course it isn’t) and that I’m giving my permission for publication (which of course I am). If I choose to decline, an alternate will receive the prize in my place. Like anyone would decline two hundred dollars and publication in the biggest newspaper in the state of Colorado!

  I should call Kylee! She’ll be as happy for me as I am for myself. Maybe even happier.

  First, though, I find the message I sent to them with my essay attached, so I can read what I wrote over again and imagine it in print on the op-ed page for hundreds of thousands of readers to see.

  I’m five, and I’m afraid of the dark.

  That’s a good first line. I really think it is. Even those two literary agents would have to say it was.

  I read on about Mrs. Whistlepuff and the flashlight Hunter gave me. And then I read the part about how Hunter changed, and how he quit cross-country, and how my father looked at him with disgust in his eyes, the look—even though I didn’t say this in my essay, because I didn’t know it yet—of someone who was about to say that his son was the biggest disappointment of his life.

  The girl in the essay doesn’t know why her brother changed.

  The girl who wrote it does.

  What will Dad do when he reads it? How will Hunter feel when he reads it?

  I know this sounds crazy, but somehow I never really made the connection between “getting published” and “having other people read what I’ve written”—not just reading my name on the byline and being impressed that I got published, but reading the published piece itself.

  Other people, like my father.

  Other people, like my brother.

  Not imaginary readers in far-off places, but actual people I actually know.

  The people I actually wrote about.

  * * *

  I have to talk to someone.

  I text Kylee back: I’m OK. More later. You +Tyler = Cute.

  Kylee has been the person on the whole entire earth who has believed in me most as a writer. But she’s not the person I need to talk to now.

  The person I need to talk to is Ms. Archer.

  My parents must have a phone book. A phone book gets delivered to the doorway a couple of times a year in a plastic bag, and my mother recycles the old one and puts the new one somewhere. But where?

  I find it on a shelf in the kitchen where my mom sticks all kinds of stuff she doesn’t know what to do with. When I search the A’s, there are a lot of Archers listed, at least twenty. I can’t remember Ms. Archer’s first name. But then I see Ilana Archer, and I know that’s her.

  Is it okay to call her at home? On a weekend? And not just any weekend, but the first weekend of Thanksgiving break? Maybe she’s traveling to visit her family. I don’t know if she has a family; she’s never mentioned a husband. But everybody has some kind of family. Does she never mention hers in class because she doesn’t think families are
the kind of thing teachers should talk about?

  Would she think families are the kind of thing writers should write about?

  When I finally make myself dial her number, I almost hang up after two rings but I wait, and then on the third ring, someone picks up and a voice says, “Hello?”

  “Ms. Archer?” I ask.

  “This is she.”

  “It’s Autumn. Granger. From your class. From your journalism class. At school.”

  I can’t stop myself from babbling, but she says, “Autumn!” as if she’s pleased to hear from me, but maybe a little perplexed, too.

  “What’s up?” she asks then.

  “There’s, well, something I want to talk to you about.”

  “What is it?”

  I don’t want to tell her on the phone. I want to tell her in person. I want to see her face when I’m doing the talking, so that I’ll know what she really thinks, from seeing it in her eyes, not just hearing her voice coming through the phone. It’s weird, but I want to see her long earrings dangling as she speaks. In class when she nods her head, they bob, and when she shakes her head, they sway.

  “Would it be possible … It’s the kind of thing I’d rather tell you in person. I mean, I know you’re busy and all. With Thanksgiving and everything. But it can’t wait till after the break.”

  Please please please please please please say it’s all right and you can meet with me now, today, right this very minute!

  “Could you meet today?” she asks.

  “Yes!”

  “At a coffee shop, perhaps?”

  “Yes! Like, at the Spotted Cow?” It’s the only coffee shop I can think of that I can ride my bike to without my parents having to drive me. “Like—now?” So I don’t drop dead of a heart attack from the agony of wondering what I should do.

  “The Spotted Cow in half an hour,” Ms. Archer agrees.

  I click off the phone, my pulse throbbing as if Hunter were beating out the rhythm of a rap number inside my head.

  “I’m going for a bike ride!” I call to my mom, who is lost in the most recent issue of The New Yorker, a magazine I hated until I opened the essay contest email half an hour ago. Well, maybe I still hate it a little bit.

  “Wear your helmet!” she calls back, as if there has ever been a time in all my twelve years when I haven’t.

  * * *

  Ms. Archer is there when I arrive, sitting at a table near where Kylee and I—and Cameron—sat on the night of the gig.

  “What would you like?” she asks, standing up to head over to the counter to buy me a latte or a steamer. She already has her own cup of what looks like plain black coffee. She’s not wearing one of her flowy skirts; she has on jeans and a dark blue sweater. But she does have long silver earrings with tiny dangling bells.

  “I’m fine,” I say.

  All I want is to tell her what this is about.

  I sit down.

  “You know that contest?” I ask.

  “What contest?”

  “The one for the personal essays? Written by kids?”

  “Of course,” she says.

  I hand her the email, which I printed out at home, and watch as she begins to read.

  “Oh, Autumn!” She looks up at me, her face wreathed with smiles. “Congratulations! This is wonderful news! Thank you so much for sharing it with me in person!”

  “Thanks,” I say, wishing I could be as happy for me as she seems to be. “It’s just that … I don’t just get a prize for winning. I get published, too.”

  “I know! Autumn, I’m so proud of you. I think every writing teacher dreams of playing some role in her students’ first publications.”

  “But … the thing I wrote. It was about my family. Well, mainly about my brother.”

  I’m glad I remembered to bring a copy with me. Wordlessly I hand it to her and wait as she reads it. She’s already read the Mrs. Whistlepuff part before, but it’s the new part that matters. She reads slowly, her face without expression. Then, when she’s done, she looks up at me and I can tell from the way she tilts her head to one side that she gets it.

  “What should I do?” I ask her.

  Ms. Archer is the wisest person I know, and she’s a published writer, so she probably deals with this kind of question all the time.

  “I can’t tell you that,” she says.

  I should have known that was what she’d say. If she wouldn’t even tell me what my Mrs. Whistlepuff essay was supposed to be about, she’s not going to tell me what to do here.

  I won’t let her off the hook so easily.

  “What would you do, if you were me?”

  “Oh, Autumn, I can’t tell you that either.”

  She insists on buying me something to drink and eat, so I order the same chocolate-raspberry-hazelnut steamer I had on the gig night, only this barista isn’t as flexible as the gig-night guy, and she says she can’t mix flavors. If you have to have just one flavor, it might as well be vanilla, so that’s what I end up with. I don’t order any of the pastries in the case, even though there are almond croissants. There’s a kind of terrible stress that makes you eat three pieces of coconut cake, but there’s an even more terrible kind of stress where you can’t bear the thought of eating anything at all.

  “A lot of people publish things about people in their own lives,” I say, hoping I’ll get a clue by trying out different thoughts and seeing some involuntary flash of approval or disapproval in her eyes.

  “True.” No flash.

  “And if everyone wrote only cheerful nicey-nice things about their lives, then—I don’t know—all the people who have un-nicey-nice things in their lives will feel even more lonely, like, oh, look how happy everyone else is all the time, so why am I the only one who’s so miserable?”

  I think back to the day in class when we talked about personal essays. I was the one who said people like to read them so that they’ll feel a connection with someone else who has struggled with a hard thing in life and made it through.

  I might see a tiny positive flash in Ms. Archer’s eyes this time. Her earrings gleam.

  “True,” she says again.

  “I saw this cartoon once,” I say. I think I may have seen it in The New Yorker that day I was trying to read their nonrhyming poems. “In the cartoon, there’s this author at a book signing, and her parents come up to her, and they say, ‘If we had known you were going to be a writer, we would have been better parents.’”

  It isn’t as if I didn’t give my family fair warning I was going to be—that I am—a writer.

  Ms. Archer laughs. Does this mean she agrees that brothers have no right to complain when their sisters publish essays about them? Or just that she thinks the cartoon is funny?

  “It’s shallow to care about being published, right?” I ask her.

  “What do you think?”

  Well, whether it’s shallow or not, and whether Cameron would care about it or not, I do still care about being published. And I bet a lot of other writers, throughout the history of the world, have cared about that, too.

  “No,” I say, answering my own question. “Or, maybe, not in a bad way?”

  Ms. Archer nods this time, which I don’t take as a nod of approval, more a nod of understanding what I’m saying and why I’m saying it.

  It’s really helping me to talk this over together, even though the conversation so far has been entirely one-sided.

  “But…” I say.

  But then there’s my parents and Hunter actually reading this. There’s the dark secret Hunter carried inside that is sort of laid out here for everybody in the world to know. It’s not really my story to tell; it’s Hunter’s story, if he ever wants to tell it. And yet it is my story, too, because it made him change toward me, and that’s what the essay is really about. When you’re in a family, it’s not clear where one person’s story begins and another person’s story ends.

  “But…” I say again. I don’t finish the sentence.

  Ms. Arc
her doesn’t finish it for me.

  “But…” she echoes.

  I swallow down the dregs of my steamer. I’ve gotten no clue from Ms. Archer, really. None. We get up to go.

  “I have to return the form by the Sunday after Thanksgiving,” I tell her. “I have to let them know either way by then.”

  “I hope you’ll make the choice that feels right for you,” Ms. Archer says.

  She was nice to meet with me on a Saturday, and to buy me a steamer, and to listen as I tried my best to think this thing through. But in the end she was no help.

  Neither choice feels right to me.

  Both choices feel as wrong as wrong can be.

  30

  We’re going to be spending Thanksgiving at my aunt and uncle’s huge house up in the mountains, with lots and lots of relatives there; we’re bringing the pies. It’ll be good to have all the other relatives around to dilute our family; we’re on our best behavior in front of other people. Maybe most families are.

  All I can think about as I wake up on Thanksgiving morning and smell the pies baking is: What should I do, what should I do, what should I do?

  Holidays are about traditions. In my family, for Thanksgiving we have three kinds of pie: pumpkin (of course), apple (no surprise there either), and this raisin custard pie that makes this our family’s Thanksgiving. I always have at least a tiny slice, even though I don’t like raisins when they’re cooked into things, just because it wouldn’t be Thanksgiving otherwise.

  All I can think about as we drive up to Aunt Liz and Uncle Steve’s is: What should I do, what should I do, what should I do?

  At Aunt Liz and Uncle Steve’s house, another tradition is that we all go around the table to say what we’re grateful for. A lot of families have a tradition like that, I imagine. After all, the holiday is called Thanksgiving. As with the raisin custard pie, it wouldn’t be our Thanksgiving if we didn’t do this, but the tradition can also be, shall we say, a bit hard to swallow.

  Uncle Steve made the rule that we can only say one thing each, because we have a couple of relatives who shall not be named who are what my father calls “pompous windbags” and would talk forever otherwise. And hearing a long list of someone else’s “blessings” can make you start to hate the person just a tiny bit. So the one-thing-to-be-grateful-for rule is a good one. But picking that one thing, to say out loud in front of everybody, can be hard.