The decisive strikes of Auntie Ruth’s Harley-Davidsons later that Friday morning announce her presence well before the basement door swings open and she barks, “Okay, girl, enough is enough.”

I crank up the volume on my tape recorder, still playing and replaying Nocturne, and turn my attention back to my handwritten essay on The Bluest Eye.

Auntie Ruth drops her lipstick-red backpack on the floor, where it lands with a thump. She pulls out a stack of books from the backpack: Unbroken. Seabiscuit. “Laura Hillenbrand. Chronic fatigue syndrome. She still created.” When Breath Becomes Air hits my bed, nearly grazing me. “Paul Kalanithi. Lung cancer. He still created.”

“Shouldn’t you be at work?”

“I’m having some work done at my shop. You should come see.”

I don’t respond. With a sigh, Auntie Ruth settles uninvited on the edge of my bed. Her voice gentles, as she rests her hand on my calf, the candlelight glinting off her wedding band. “You’ve locked yourself in your tent.”

“This isn’t a tent,” I tell her.

“Are you sure?” She glances around in all of its candlelit wonder. “You’re right. It’s more like a yurt, but girl, there’s a world outside.”

“Have you talked to my jailers?”

“Have you?”

Here’s the woman who’s maintained a safe border between her militant singleness and her well-meaning friends and family who’ve wanted to set her up over these last few years. I call her on it now. “But don’t you love your own tent, too, Auntie Ruth?”

Auntie Ruth flattens the rumples on the bedcovers, and I’m sure she won’t reply. But she surprises me. “You know, I was perfectly fine on my own. After so many years being single, I thought that love wasn’t meant for me. But then, along came Amos, barreling into my auto shop, Mr. Big Shot, Mr. I Own Every Dealership in the Northwest. I kept ignoring him, and he kept coming back. And then, one day he told me about his 1937 Bugatti 57S Atalante.”

“The one he found in a barn.” We all know this family legend.

“The one that was a rusted piece of mess. He presented it to me as a special project for us to refurbish together.”

“Bait.”

“Courtship.”

“Wooing,” I say, my eyes widening.

“Yes, wooing.” The candles on my bedside table flicker. Her eyes grow misty. “That was just so, so … so specific to me. Like he knew the way to my heart would never be through a diamond bracelet or clichéd roses. Like he wanted me to know that he loved how I rebuild things. Like he wanted to get to know me. Honestly, I don’t believe in a second big love like that.”

“Do you want to be alone?”

That question startles Auntie Ruth into silence until, slowly, she says, “All of the men your mom’s been setting me up with? They’ve all been—well, most of them—perfectly wonderful. I haven’t been ready.”

“You’ve been scared.”

“That’s right.” She looks at me meaningfully. “I just don’t know if I could ever recover if my heart got shattered a second time.”

“What if it doesn’t?”

“Exactly,” Auntie Ruth says, leaning forward. “What if it doesn’t?”

My own question, reflected back at me, cracks my defenses wide open. I liked my Life Before, my secret plan to be a foreign correspondent who tells the stories about the hardest places of our planet, and maybe, just maybe, in that way, helps the world. Blaming everyone else—my parental jailers, my princess sister, Auntie Ruth, Josh himself—is a heck of a lot easier than admitting I’m scared of Life After.

“What if I get that sick again?” I ask, tenting myself in the safety of my arms. I rest my chin on my knees. “What if my body really reacts next time?” (What if I die?)

“What if it doesn’t? What if you’re okay?”

There they are again, my words, used not against me but for me.

Auntie Ruth bends down to collect her backpack. “Gastrodiplomacy.”

“Gastro what?” I ask, lifting my head.

“Diplomacy. Winning the world over one bite at a time. It’s a real thing. NPR did a piece on it.” Auntie Ruth whips out a printout of the story before I can make excuses: limited tech time, bad Wi-Fi connection in the basement, massive amounts of homework. “See? Studies show that people actually think better of a country after eating their cuisine. When Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, she created a program to send chefs to cook for foreign dignitaries. And”—she taps a section highlighted in hot pink—“some universities teach courses in gastrodiplomacy. Like American University, in DC.”

“I cook soup.”

“Even your Souper Bowl Sundays have meaning. You’ve done about a billion bake sales to get the word out about so many issues. And more than that, you try to get people involved.”

I am absolutely still now, hearing the echo of Josh from weeks and weeks ago, pointing out that I didn’t just report what happened; I wanted to change what happens. I hug my knees even tighter to myself, missing that boy fiercely. Missing myself even more.

Auntie Ruth continues relentlessly, “When you think about all that, isn’t it funny how you’re uniquely qualified for gastrodiplomacy? You know how to research issues, you know how to connect people to causes in a nonthreatening way through food, and you know how to tell a story.”

“I doubt my parents are going to let me go away to college now.”

“No. No. No.” Auntie Ruth slams one booted foot on the ground, startling me. “Your family is all no-no-no. Can’t. Won’t. What if. It makes me wonder if I am literally and truly from a different planet sometimes. And you.”

“I’m no better?”

“The absolute opposite. You were scared to be in the tent in the Serengeti when the lions sounded like they were surrounding us. But you went out first thing the next morning to get me coffee when I was scared to take one step outside.”

“The tour guides told us it was safe.”

“But did you see me going out? You did that all on your own, like the most intrepid war correspondent.”

“Which I can’t be anymore.”

“Fine. I suppose, if you want, you can be the princess.”

“Yeah, I’d take being Roz any day now.”

“Princesses are locked in towers or put in deep sleep, waiting for someone to rescue them. I should know. It took years to convince your dad that I didn’t want or need to be pampered. Being pampered is a prison in its own way, you know.”

That’s hard to deny when I look around my bunker, tricked out with everything a girl could want except for her freedom.

“So why not try this on for size?” Auntie Ruth holds up her article on gastrodiplomacy. “Or something else entirely? Give me one good reason.”

I have no answer, but my traitorous stomach growls as if it’s ready to be the first teen gastrodiplomat on this planet.

 

DEAR JOHN LETTER

VERSION 2

Dear Me,

Where’d you go, Viola Wynne Li? Where did you go?

Viola