She said, “Don’t ever do that again!”
“But I won, right?”
May said, breathlessly, “Yeah. You won.”
After that, I don’t think we ever played again. And after that, I knew that Mark would definitely never love me. I’d changed.
I heard Sky’s voice, echoing after me. What the fuck are you doing? I just kept running, faster than I knew I could, sucking the cold air into my lungs. Down neighborhood streets, through the shadows cast by crooked tree branches, past the houses in a row that seemed like they would be safe inside. Until all I could hear was myself breathing, as loud, it seemed, as an ocean.
Luckily for me, Aunt Amy was late to pick me up, so by the time I ran back to the parking lot, she wasn’t there yet. Sky and Francesca and those other girls were gone. Aunt Amy felt bad for being late, so she asked me if I wanted to get fries. I did. And then I wished I could go home, home where Mom would be making enchiladas for dinner and May would be setting the table, folding the napkins into diamonds like she would.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Kurt,
You had a daughter, and now you’ll never get to know her. You won’t see what she’s going to be when she grows up. You won’t be there to make dinner together when she comes back from the pool in the summer smelling like chlorine. And when she rides her bike with no hands and flies over the handlebars, you won’t make it better. You won’t be at her chorus concert, with all the other parents on the sweaty gym floor, watching her face when she closes her eyes and lets her voice out. You won’t watch her walk through new snow in your backyard or lie down to make an angel. You won’t see her fall in love for the first time. And if her heart gets broken and she curls under the flannel sheets she just washed and cries, you won’t hear her. When she needs you, you won’t be there. Don’t you care? How could you do that to her?
Do you know what she’ll have instead of her father? Your suicide note. Did you think of that when you wrote it, that those words would shadow her whole life?
You wrote that you have a daughter, full of love and joy, kissing every person she meets because everyone is good and will do her no harm. You said that terrified you, because you couldn’t stand the thought of her growing up and becoming like you were.
But did you think about the fact that when you wrote those words, when you took your life, you stole the innocence you loved her for? That you forever changed her heart full of joy? You were the first to do her harm. You were the first person to make the world dangerous for her.
I don’t know why I’ve written you all these letters. I thought you got it. But you just left, too. Like everyone does.
I walked into May’s room tonight, once Dad was asleep, and I tore your poster off the wall. I tore it to shreds and I threw it out. And I sobbed until I couldn’t sob anymore. And now, that particular poster is gone forever. And I’m sorry.
It can’t be undone. We can’t put it back, and we can’t bring you back to life, and I hate that. And I hate you for it, too. There, I said it, I do. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wonder if your daughter has forgiven you, because I don’t know if I could.
The truth is, I don’t know how to forgive my sister. I don’t know how to forgive her, because I don’t deserve to be angry at her. And I’m afraid that if I am, I will lose her forever.
Yours anyway,
Laurel
Dear Heath Ledger,
The Dark Knight was on TV tonight. I watched it with Dad. One thing that we can still do together is watch movies. Those and baseball, but the season doesn’t start again for another few weeks. When the movie ended and the credits came on, Dad said, “The world has changed, hasn’t it?” before he got up to go to bed. That sentence seemed to carry the weight of everything we can’t talk about.
Dad used to be happy. A man with a family. Superheroes used to be indestructible. They didn’t lose the loves of their lives, or let good people die, or give up on their morals, or have to grieve. And storybook villains used to be simply evil. Not humans twisted into something terrifying. But The Dark Knight is like a grown-up version of a superhero story. Batman is broken, too—he loses the woman he loves, and he has to frame himself for murder in order to save hope for the city. You play the Joker, the evil figure, and you are brilliant at it.
The movie scared me, to tell the truth. You scared me. I want to say what I could take from it, but I can’t. All there is is this deep-in-my-stomach feeling of terror, and this fear that there is no really happy ending anymore.
It’s the second week of March. Spring should almost be here, but the air has held on to its cold, wind coming in gusts to scare off the buds that might want to start blooming. It’s been a long time since I’ve written one of these letters—almost a month. I guess after I tore up Kurt’s poster, I didn’t feel like it anymore. Until I watched The Dark Knight and started thinking about you. I first got to know you from that movie 10 Things I Hate About You, and I always remember that scene where you jump up on the bleachers and sing “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” to the whole girls’ soccer team to capture the heart of the girl you like. But after that, even though you got a lot of offers, you wouldn’t do any more teen movies. Instead, you ate ramen noodles in your apartment and waited. You didn’t just want to be famous, you wanted to be true to yourself. And eventually you got more roles, better ones, and you became the kind of grownup that made growing up seem okay, like you don’t have to lose your spirit in order to get older. You became the kind of father that any daughter would have wanted to have. When they found you in your apartment, dead from too many pills, I really did think it was an accident. I don’t think you meant to go.
I read about how you were planning to buy a garage for your daughter in Brooklyn so that you could make it into your own private drive-in theater together. When I think about that, it almost makes me cry. How you would have parked there with her, the two of you in the front seat passing popcorn and eating Red Vines and laughing at a cartoon flickering on the screen—the sort of story that ends like it’s supposed to, unlike the ones that haunt us as we grow up.
This month has passed by in a blur, but I guess there are a few new things to tell you about. One thing is that Hannah decided that she thinks bruises are pretty. She’s started painting them onto her cheekbone with eye shadow. They look real, too. Natalie tells her not to, but she loves her so much that she only kisses them and tells Hannah she’ll make it better. Sometimes we want our bodies to do a better job of showing the things that hurt us, the stories we keep hidden inside of us.