what do your words say?
When Kate was in fifth grade, she had bought a book called How to Improve Your Vocabulary in Ten Minutes a Day. Well, it had actually been a booklet, and her mom had bought it when Kate spotted it in the grocery store checkout line. Kate hadn’t particularly cared about improving her vocabulary, she’d just wanted to buy something, and she knew her mom wasn’t going to buy the Twix bar she’d initially had her eye on.
But reading the booklet on the way home from the store, Kate had gotten interested. She believed automatically what the author, Eugene K. Watsonberg, said—that words were important. “Words say something,” Eugene K. Watsonberg had written. “What do your words say about you?”
At home, Kate had gotten out a brand-new notebook she’d been saving to start a new project in. Kate loved starting new projects, which is why she always kept notebooks handy. For her last project, she’d drawn an intricate map of her neighborhood, complete with trees, mailboxes, and yard art, and had spied on her neighbors and recorded information about them. Unfortunately, her neighbors didn’t come out much, so that particular project had petered out after three days.
To be honest, most of Kate’s projects fizzled after three days, which had been true (sort of) of her Improving Her Vocabulary project as well. Except that even after Kate had stopped picking a new word from the dictionary every morning to memorize and use at least five times during the day, she still kept noticing interesting words and kept a list in her head of her favorite and least favorite words. Her favorite words included cashmere, blue, rodeo, and sizzle. Her least favorite words were pimple, mucus, and fink.
Now that she was in seventh grade and turning into a songwriter and a poet, Kate thought she ought to write down her special words in a poetry notebook. She would carry the notebook in her backpack so she would always have her words with her. She got this idea on a Saturday morning, and she liked it so much, she immediately hopped out of bed and went looking for her mom, whom she found in the kitchen looking through a book of wedding cake recipes.
“Are you going to the store today?” Kate asked her, not even bothering to say “Good morning” first. “Because I need a new notebook. For school.”
Mrs. Faber looked at Kate and raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t I buy you ten new notebooks, each a bright neon hue, at the beginning of the school year, which was”—and here Mrs. Faber checked her watch—“a mere two and a half months ago?”
“It’s December second, Mom,” said Kate, pointing to the calendar by the refrigerator, which she noticed was still on the November page. She walked over and flipped it to December. “So I’ve been in school three months. Time for a new notebook!”
Mrs. Faber squinted her eyes at Kate. “You’re starting a new project, aren’t you? I can tell by the look on your face. You can’t fool me.”
“At least I don’t want horseback-riding lessons,” Kate replied, smiling in what she hoped was a winning way. Kate’s big dream in fourth grade had been to learn to ride a horse, but when her mother had finally signed her up for lessons, Kate discovered she was scared to death of horses. Unfortunately, Mrs. Faber had paid for the lessons in advance and the money was nonrefundable. It was Kate’s most expensive project, and her mom had never let her forget it.
“True enough,” Mrs. Faber said, standing up and stretching. “In comparison, a notebook is a cheap and easily attainable thing. And I’m going to the grocery store after lunch, so I can pick one up for you then.”
Kate took a deep breath. She knew she was pushing it, but she had a vision for her notebook, and it didn’t involve the $1.99 kind you got at Food Lion. “I was sort of hoping you might take me to Hobson’s. I’ll buy the notebook with my own money and everything. I just need you to drive me.”
Hobson’s was a store for people who liked paper and pens and rubber stamps and India ink. It was sort of like an art store and sort of like the fanciest Hallmark store in the world. Kate loved it. There were stacks of thick, creamy paper, which sold for twenty-five cents a sheet: dove white, pearl gray, lemon yellow, pale blue. There were fountain pens with nibs that Kate knew she was far too messy to use, but she liked the idea of. You could buy charcoal pencils and sketchbooks there, and brushes and watercolor kits. There were journals and diaries and notebooks, of course, with lined or unlined paper and thick cardboard covers—some plain and brown, others with famous paintings on them.
Kate wanted a notebook with lined pages, college ruled, with a cardboard cover she could decorate herself. She also wanted a new pen, felt-tipped, fine line, black ink. No, blue ink. Indigo blue, a color she was sure she could only get at Hobson’s. Just the other night on the phone, she and Matthew Holler had agreed that the right pen was very important when it came to writing poetry. Matthew, she’d learned, used any pen handy for doing homework, a pencil for math, and a Pilot Precise V5 when he was working on a poem.
Mrs. Faber poured herself a cup of coffee. “I’ll take you to Hobson’s on one condition,” she said after a minute of thinking about it. “You tell me what the notebook is really for.”
“Words,” said Kate. “It’s for writing down words.”
“Could you be more specific?” Mrs. Faber asked. “You’ve just summed up the use of almost every notebook on the planet.”
“What about notebooks for writing down numbers?” Kate asked.
Mrs. Faber sighed. “Okay, yes, you’ve got me there. Do you want to go to Hobson’s or not?”
“It’s for writing down good words,” Kate said quickly, not wanting to irritate her mom any more than she already had. “Beautiful words. Like words you would use in a poem.”
Now, Mrs. Faber liked poetry. She still had all her poetry books from her college English classes tucked away in the family-room bookshelf, including The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I and Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop, a book that Kate had read bits and pieces of and pretty much liked except for when it got boring.
“That’s a good reason to get a new notebook,” Mrs. Faber agreed. “Well, let me take a shower and try to look respectable. If we’re going to Hobson’s, I should at least put on some mascara.”
“You don’t need makeup, Mom,” Kate said. “You are a natural beauty.”
Mrs. Faber laughed, like she thought Kate was joking around. Actually, Kate wasn’t, but you couldn’t say something like that and sound all serious about it. People might get the wrong idea about you if you said that sort of thing in a serious tone of voice. They might figure out that you loved them.
It was like carrying a bird in her backpack—something light, with wings, and filled with bits and pieces of songs. All day on Monday, Kate was aware of her new notebook as she went from class to class. She practically expected it to fly out into the hallway and dart from locker to locker.
She wanted to show it to Matthew Holler, but she couldn’t. Which, she thought, wasn’t exactly fair, since in the time that she and Matthew Holler had been friends, he had shared all sorts of things with her.
The day Matthew had grabbed Kate’s hand and pulled her out of the cafeteria, he had taken her to the school’s audiovisual lab. Brenner P. Dunn Middle School was famous for its state-of-the-art technology. People moved twenty miles just so their children could go to Brenner P. Dunn Middle School and get their hands on its computers and digital recording equipment. Every time there was a school assembly, the principal went on and on about the fascinating and educational projects students were doing in the audiovisual lab. “We are the middle school of people’s dreams,” she liked to say.
Matthew Holler’s fascinating and educational project involved a lot of noise at very loud levels. Guitar noise, drum noise, and some noise that sounded like a tractor running over half a dozen metal trash cans. “It’s industrial,” he explained to Kate, and Kate had nodded as though she halfway knew what he was talking about. She didn’t, but she didn’t care. All she cared about was that Matthew Holler wanted her to hear his music.
&n
bsp; “It’s really cool that you’re into music and everything,” he’d said to her as they listened to screeching brakes whining over a battalion of guitars. “I think you’re the first girl I ever met who played guitar.”
She almost said, “Flannery does too,” but she stopped herself. She didn’t know if Matthew Holler and Flannery knew each other, but it occurred to her that they might be each other’s type. Kate suspected that if Matthew found her interesting, he’d find Flannery very interesting.
“I don’t know many people at all who play guitar,” Kate said. “I’ve sort of been hoping I’d meet some other guitar players one of these days.”
That sounded stupid. That sounded so dumb Kate thought she might cry. But Matthew Holler just said, “Yeah, it makes a big difference in life when you find your tribe. I don’t have one friend who’s not completely obsessed with music.”
Kate didn’t know if she was completely obsessed with music or not. At home her parents mostly played the classical radio station, so when she was downstairs that’s what she listened to. She had a boom box in her room, which she kept tuned to KISS 101.5, which claimed to play “the biggest hits to hit your eardrums,” with commercial-free Mondays and Top-40 Tuesdays. But ever since she’d started playing guitar and writing songs, she found herself getting irritated with the songs on KISS 101.5. Most of the words were dumb, and it seemed like every song they played was either about falling in love or falling out of love or getting your heart broken.
“What radio station do you listen to?” she’d asked Matthew after they left the media lab and were walking down the hall to their fifth-period classes. “Because I wish there was a station that played something good all the time.”
“I listen to K-DUCK,” he told her. “It’s a college station, 88.9. There’s always something different on it. Like, one afternoon you’ll turn it on and there’s punk, and the next day you turn it on at the same time and there’s classic rock, or maybe bluegrass. I hate it when it’s bluegrass, but I listen to it anyway. You never know what you might learn.”
So another thing Matthew Holler had given Kate was a new radio station to listen to. At first she hadn’t liked K-DUCK very much. She’d sit on her bed and listen, but a lot of times she didn’t know what she was listening to, and there was something about the songs that didn’t exactly belong in her room. It was weird to listen to the pounding drums and screeching guitars and the singers going on about things Kate could hardly understand, and then glance over at her bookshelf and see her complete set of the Little House on the Prairie books and her My Little Pony collection, which she’d had since kindergarten. Kate’s bedroom and K-DUCK were not a good mix-and-match combination, that much was clear.
But she kept listening. She figured out the K-DUCK system. All the announcers were college students, and there were different announcers every day. Their shows were two hours long, so if you tuned in at four and didn’t like what you were hearing, you might as well turn off the radio until six.
Without realizing it, Kate started to like almost everything she heard, even the stuff that at first had sounded too fast and loud. You just had to get used to some music before you could appreciate it. It was hard to explain, but some of the loudest, fastest songs made her feel stronger, the way her boots did, the way playing guitar did. It was like the music got into your blood or something, she thought.
But her favorite K-DUCK show was on Thursday nights. The announcer was a girl named Lindsey, and her show was called Girls with Guitars Unplugged. Kate loved almost every song she heard. They were the kind of songs she was trying to write, songs that were about people doing things or thinking about things or just living their lives and sometimes being happy, sometimes sad.
One night Kate’s mom walked into her bedroom while Kate was listening to Girls with Guitars Unplugged and doing her pre-algebra homework. Mrs. Faber opened her mouth to say something, but suddenly closed it again. She tilted her head toward Kate’s boom box and listened for a few seconds. She sat down on Kate’s bed and listened some more. When the song was over, she said, “I love Joni Mitchell. She’s a genius.”
“You know who that was singing that song?” Kate was amazed. She had no idea her mom had any musical knowledge whatsoever. She’d thought music was just background noise to her mom, something to keep a room from feeling too quiet.
“Oh, sure,” Mrs. Faber replied. “I listened to Blue every day when I was in high school. It was the soundtrack to my life.”
“Is Blue a Joni Mitchell CD?”
Mrs. Faber laughed. “Well, at the time it was a Joni Mitchell record,” she said. “But yes, it’s probably the greatest Joni Mitchell CD ever.” Then Mrs. Faber paused and looked sad for a minute. “It just occurred to me that I really miss it.”
The next day when Kate got home, her mom was in the kitchen frosting a cake in the shape of a duck. There was music on the CD player, but it wasn’t Bach or Beethoven or any of those classical guys her mom usually listened to. After a minute, Kate recognized the voice.
“You got that Joni Mitchell CD, didn’t you?” she asked her mom, who was humming under her breath as she painted an orange bill onto the duck cake.
“Yep,” her mom answered. “This is the fifteenth time I’ve listened to it today.”
“You must be very happy,” said Kate, reaching into the mixing bowl to snag a glob of frosting with her finger.
Mrs. Faber grinned wildly. “Ecstatic,” she said. “I’d forgotten how music makes you feel. I mean, music that really gets inside of you.”
So that was another thing from Matthew Holler, Kate figured. He’d given Kate K-DUCK, which in turn had given her mom Joni Mitchell back.
Kate knew she should really show Matthew her notebook. She knew it was her turn to share something. But her notebook was so new. It was still as fragile as a tiny bird in its newness. Almost anything could break its wings: a swift fall to the ground, the wrong word.
Kate would find something else to give Matthew. But not the notebook. Not yet.
The first thing Kate gave Matthew Holler was a rock.
It wasn’t just any rock. It was the blue rock she’d found on the beach when she was seven. It was round and mostly smooth and for a long time Kate had slept with it under her pillow for good luck.
She knew it was a good thing to give to Matthew, because in the three weeks that they had been friends she had learned that he was the sort of person who liked arrowheads and bird feathers and interesting-shaped sticks. She had learned that he liked old things better than new things and that what he wanted for Christmas this year was a wooden box he had seen on eBay. It reminded him of a box his grandfather had that had originally been his great-grandfather’s.
“You should write a poem about that,” Kate had told him, and Matthew said he might, seeming interested in the idea.
So when Kate was looking through her jewelry box for an old bracelet she’d forgotten about that she’d just remembered and found the blue rock, she knew immediately it was the sort of thing that Matthew would appreciate. She gave it to him the next day before his Spanish test.
“For good luck,” Kate told him, handing him the rock and feeling the tiniest twinge of regret that she was giving it away and it would never be hers again.
The twinge turned into a note of alarm when a girl Kate had never seen before walked by and said, “Hey, Mattie! Come talk to me at lunch!” The girl was pretty, much prettier than she was, Kate thought, and Matthew’s eyes followed her as she walked down the hall.
“Who was that?” Kate asked, even as she insisted to herself that she shouldn’t even care. It wasn’t like she owned Matthew Holler. It wasn’t like he couldn’t be friends with other people.
Matthew shrugged. “Emily,” he said. “Just somebody I know.”
Then he held the rock up and examined it. “I can’t believe you found this,” he said. “I never find good rocks.” Slipping it into his pocket, he slammed closed his locker door. “Are you sure you want
to give it to me?”
Kate nodded. “Yeah. I just wanted you to have something that was, I don’t know, good.”
Matthew grinned. “I like getting stuff that’s good. Mostly what people give me are T-shirts and socks. It’s pretty depressing.”
“Yeah, whatever happened to toys?” Kate said. “Even if we are too old for them, I guess.”
They walked down the hall together. When Kate reached her classroom, she said good-bye and hurried to her desk, pulling her new notebook and pen out of her backpack.
Roca, she wrote, and then, azul.
Bella, she wrote, saying it softly under her breath. “Bella.”
“La roca azul esta bella,” Matthew had said right before they’d reached her class. “Gracias.”
The blue rock is beautiful, he’d said.
Thank you.
Sometimes it seemed to Kate that her life was all about being friends with Matthew Holler, but it really wasn’t. For instance, she was also becoming friends with Lorna, who Kate liked because Lorna was an intellectual and a writer and didn’t like to talk about boys and who had a crush on who. Kate did not want to talk about boys or about being friends with Matthew Holler. She thought that too many words might ruin things. So in that regard, Lorna was the perfect person for her right now.
What Lorna liked to talk about most of all was food. Food was to Lorna what music was to Matthew Holler. She brought interesting lunches to school and shared them with Kate: burritos and chimichangas, curry and naan bread, Greek salads with black olives and feta cheese. Lorna made her lunches herself. “My mom hates to cook,” she told Kate. “I do all the cooking in my family. My mom pays me twenty-five dollars a week to make dinner.”
“You get paid to make dinner?” Kate asked.
Lorna shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a great cook. If things don’t work out for me as a writer, I’ll probably end up being a chef.”
The Kind of Friends We Used to Be Page 8