CHAPTER 1
Walking to our mailbox always feels longer than walking back. I take the same path both ways, past fields and fence line, but steps can’t measure how fast I want to get there. It’s the wanting, not the distance, that matters.
Everything around me is set to change. The maples covering the mountains started to pop, little bursts of red, yellow, and orange poking through green. I saw my breath this morning, a puff of smoke. The wind smells almost like snow. And when I wrap my sweatshirt tight, the envelope pressed to my chest crinkles like dry leaves.
Dear Andy,
Guess what?
That’s how my letters always start. They’re not like texts, where you get right to the point. There’s more waiting. Not only in the time it takes to stretch whole sentences across a blank page, but in the trip that page takes from my desk to our mailbox and all the way to the Starshine Center in New Hampshire, where Andy can pick up a pen and write back.
I can’t text him anyway, even though Mom and Dad got me a phone for my birthday this month, one of those simple ones with no apps at all, only their numbers and my best friend Maya Gonzalez’s already programmed in. Andy doesn’t have a number anymore. His cell phone’s just one thing they took away, and they won’t give it back until he’s done with what they want him to do, until he figures out how to get better. “Getting better” is probably like walking to the mailbox—wanting to reach somewhere so bad but no matter how hard you try, you feel like you’re wading through fallen leaves.
Still, I like Andy the way he is—how he wears his baseball cap crooked and sets up a tent in two minutes flat and pretends to steal my nose with his finger and thumb even though I’m twelve and he just turned eighteen. Will he still do those things once the Starshine Center has made him new?
Mom thinks Andy’s homesick, even though he never says it. “He misses things we take for granted,” she tells me, knotting her fingers together, her eyebrows pinching into that space above her nose that’s always wrinkled now. “Tell him about those things.” So I write: Sunny sneezed while I was brushing her face so now I have horsehair AND snot all over my shirt.
I write what I know will make him smile. Because even though he wasn’t doing much of it by the time he left, Andy loves smiling.
Proof: His letters back always start with a joke.
He hides the answer, written upside down at the end, to keep me reading. It’s not like he has to—I already hold each of his words in my head as carefully as I hold Dad’s homemade anise candies on my tongue, trying to make them last.
LOVE,
ANDY
It’s bright today, and a little cold; stalks of corn shiver and shine like the sea. But the air feels good too, so I tip my head back and squint into the blue. I was born on a morning like this. That’s how I got my name: Claire. In French, it means “bright and clear.” “That’s what you were from the beginning,” my parents always say. “You still are.”
They don’t see how my insides flutter when I think about Andy, or school, or how to keep Sunny and Sam safe in our barn instead of sending them to a new one.
They don’t see the birds in there.
Sparrows that soar over our barn can actually fly to the tops of clouds, then plunge back to earth. And that’s exactly what my flutter feeling is like: It sweeps in from a place beyond me and gets under my skin, shaky as wings.
I don’t know exactly where my sparrows go when they leave. But they visit more and more now that Andy’s gone.
By the time I get to the mailbox, my hair’s tangled under my chin. I brush it back, pull the metal door until it squeaks open, slip the letter in. Next comes my favorite part. It was Andy’s favorite too. He was the one who explained we had to tip the red flag up with our fingers so that Mr. Meyer, who’s been driving mail around our back roads since Mom was my age, knew he needed to stop and take what we’d left inside.
Dad says we used to fight over who got to put up the flag, but by the time my memory kicks in, Andy was already letting me do it every time, lifting me at the waist so I could reach as high as I needed.
I raise myself a little on my toes now, even though I don’t need to anymore, and push the flag up myself.
Dear Andy, I wrote this time.
Guess what? I miss you.