It’s Monday, and I’m heading to my second-period class: journalism. I feel tingly nervousness every day when I walk into class knowing I’m going to see Cameron, but I feel it even more today at the thought that he might have heard my poem and made fun of it. Or heard my poem and thought it was wonderful. Or maybe he didn’t think anything about my poem at all.
He’s already there, hunched over his journalism notebook. He’s doodling, and his doodles are super intricate and detailed. I think they should be hung in an art museum. He wears his hair longer than most of the other boys, not too long, but reaching past the collar of the Oxford-weave button-down shirts he wears every day (not grungy T-shirts), and his bangs cover his left eye.
Ms. Archer had us sit in the same seats every day at the start of the school year to help her learn our names, and now we sit in the same seats every day from habit. There’s really no way I could switch seats now—it would be too bizarre—so I make myself sit down at the desk next to Cameron, who is right by the window. Kylee’s on my other side, but she’s not here yet because she has P.E. first period, which is really gross, because then you’re sweaty for the rest of the day. There are showers in the locker room but nobody—nobody—has ever—ever—used them. I’m lucky I have P.E. seventh period, so only the kids in my eighth-period science class have to smell me.
So right now it’s me and Cameron.
Right now it’s Cameron and me.
I usually don’t speak to him first; I wait to see if he’s going to speak to me.
Sometimes he does, but he just says hi, and sometimes he doesn’t even say it, just gives me a sort of salute with his left hand (he’s left-handed) or a brief nod.
Today he doesn’t. Not a good sign.
I make a big show of opening my journalism binder and pretending to look at my notes from last week on Q&A interview pieces. Yet I can’t help but take a peek at what he’s doodling. It’s a complicated pattern of autumn leaves. I know they’re autumn leaves because he doodles with colored pencils—he has a set of twenty-four pencils, all perfectly sharpened—and he’s using two shades of red and two shades of orange.
Autumn leaves. Like me, Autumn?
Maybe this is a good sign. Maybe it means David told him about my poem, and he knows I like him, and he’s starting to wonder if he also likes me.
Kylee arrives, panting into her seat just as the bell rings. She looks at me, her eyes big with questions. But I don’t have any answers, so I shrug, and class begins.
Ms. Archer gives us a warm, welcoming smile. She is my favorite teacher ever. She’s beautiful, with flawless, warm brown skin, short-cropped hair, huge dark eyes, and impossibly long earrings she wears to go with her flowing skirts. I’d love to dress exactly like her, but my mom won’t let me wear big earrings, and if I wore skirts like hers it would be pathetically obvious I was trying to copy her. But someday, when I won’t look so much like a copycat, I’m going to be a total copycat, and dress that way.
But she’s my favorite teacher not because of how she looks. She knows everything there is to know about writing. She’s published poems in literary magazines, and she wrote a short story that was picked for a collection of best stories from the West. And she’s not just smart, she’s wise, even though she’s not super old—maybe in her late twenties.
For a moment I wish I could tell her about Hunter and Cameron and everything, to see what she’d say. But I don’t want her to think I’m weird and my family even weirder.
“Good morning, class,” Ms. Archer says, once she has our attention. “Today we’re going to start our two-week unit on personal essays, short pieces that tell the reader a true personal experience of the writer. I’m going to start us off by saying something that may strike you as surprising. Are you ready for this? Even though you’ll be sharing personal experiences, a personal essay is not about you.”
I write that down in my binder. I’m a good note taker anyway, but especially in Ms. Archer’s class I try to write down every word she says. Cameron doesn’t take notes; he spends most of class gazing out the window or doodling, even though I know from how good a writer he is that he must listen to Ms. Archer, unless he knows everything she says already. Kylee doesn’t take notes either. She asked Ms. Archer if it was okay if she knits in class, and Ms. Archer said yes. Kylee listens best when she’s knitting.
“Do people want to read a personal essay to learn about you?” Ms. Archer asks. Right away she answers her own question. “No. Unless you’re already famous, they have no idea who you are. They don’t have any reason yet to care about you or anything you’ve experienced.”
Tyler Shields, who sits in front of me, calls out, “Then why do they read it?” Tyler is the best in the class at direct, blunt questions the rest of us would be too embarrassed to ask.
Ms. Archer turns to the class. “Anybody? Personal essays are loved by many readers. I know I turn first to a personal essay whenever I pick up a magazine or a newspaper. Why?”
The room is silent, except for the soft, steady, rhythmic click of Kylee’s needles.
No one volunteers to answer until Olivia Fernandez lifts her hand into the air. Olivia is a terrific writer, but there’s something about her that sets my teeth on edge. Maybe it’s just that she is a terrific writer and I’m jealous? Okay, I’m jealous. But she’s also just so sure of herself all the time; she’s always the one waving a hand in the air—except she doesn’t wave it; she raises it in this slow, almost leisurely way. Oh, and in addition to being a fabulous writer, she’s also gorgeous. Like, model-level gorgeous, with waist-length raven-black hair, a glowing olive complexion, and impossibly blue eyes. I don’t think she likes Cameron the way I do, but if she did, my chances with him would be pretty much nil.
“Personal essays have a theme,” Olivia says. “They take the writer’s personal experience and find some universal truth in it.”
“Good, Olivia. Very good,” Ms. Archer says.
I think I might have something to add, but I’ve become shy in this class because I don’t want to say something dumb in front of Ms. Archer or Cameron. But Ms. Archer is good at reading faces, and mine must be giving me away, because she says, “Autumn?”
I swallow hard before I make myself answer. “People like to read personal essays because they don’t feel so alone then? Someone else has made it through the same thing they’re going through. Or maybe it’s a different thing, but it’s still hard. Or maybe…” I’m not sure if what I’m saying makes any sense. I wonder if Cameron is looking over at me as I’m speaking; my hands feel sweaty, as if I just came from P.E. like Kylee. “It’s just so real—someone else felt something so real. Maybe it’s not a bad thing, or a hard thing, but it’s a real thing, and the reader is feeling real things, too, and so he or she doesn’t feel alone.”
Now I can’t help but glance over at Cameron to see if he’s nodding, but he’s still hunched over his doodles. Maybe he wasn’t even listening to anything I said. Kylee is nodding, of course. Olivia whispers something I can’t hear to Kaitlyn Ellis, who sits next to her—something snarky? She can be snarky sometimes.
A moment goes by as Ms. Archer lets my comments settle.
Then she smiles again.
“Exactly. People read personal essays to learn something about themselves.”
She goes on to tell us that personal essays are about two things: the thing that happened, and what it means. If you just write about something that happens, without having it mean anything, what you have is an “incident,” and that’s not enough for a personal essay. But you can’t explain the meaning in any super-obvious way, like stories for little kids that spell out the moral at the end. You have to be subtle. You have to say it without saying it.
“Okay,” she says. “Now that I’ve totally overwhelmed you, let’s do a freewrite.”
She has us do freewrites in class a couple of times a week. She doesn’t read them or grade them; they’re just for us, to turn on our writing brains and get our writing juices flowing.
“Forget everything I just said,” Ms. Archer goes on. “Don’t worry yet about what anything means. That will come later. It’s better if it comes later. I’m going to give you a prompt, and I want you to do nothing for the next ten minutes but see where that prompt leads you.”
She picks up the chalk and writes on the board: “The worst—or best—gift you ever received.”
I make a brainstorming list, starting with the worst gifts because bad things are always good to write about. I think best when I have a pen in my hand. Sometimes it feels like I have to have a pen in my hand in order even to think, that I don’t even have an idea until I write it down.
Mitten, I write. That was the name of the guinea pig I got for Christmas when I was nine; he died a week later.
Electric toothbrush. From my dad, of course.
Holes, the book. It’s a great book, but Aunt Liz sent it to me three years in a row. She must really like it.
Okay, now I should try to think of some good gifts.
My first Moleskine notebook. That was my best-ever gift, from Kylee, two birthdays ago.
My writer mug from Hunter.
Kylee is still knitting, but I can tell from the way her forehead is scrunched up that she’s ready to leap into writing soon.
Olivia turns around and shoots her an annoyed look, as if the click of Kylee’s needles is keeping her from coming up with an amazing bad gift/good gift idea. This time I hear what she whispers, while jerking her thumb in Kylee’s direction: “Granny.” She and Kaitlyn both crack up, but they snicker so quietly that Ms. Archer doesn’t notice.
I feel my face flushing with sudden heat. I don’t think Kylee heard, and if she did, she probably wouldn’t care. She’d just say, My grandma loved to knit, and I’m glad I’m like her. If she knew how angry I feel right now at Olivia, she’d be puzzled, like, Who cares what Olivia thinks about anything? That is another huge difference between Kylee and me. And maybe I wouldn’t care if Olivia said something like that about me—except that I would—but I totally care if she says it about Kylee. I think when we love someone we care about them more than we do about ourselves.
Suddenly, I know what I want to write about.
I want to write about my best gift ever.
Now I can’t stop my pen from flying across the page.
I’m five, and I’m afraid of the dark, because as soon as it’s dark, there’s this cubbyhole in my bedroom under the eaves behind a little square door with a little round doorknob, and when it’s totally dark, the doorknob turns, and the door creaks open, and Mrs. Whistlepuff comes out. She’s all made of a cold, cold wind, a bad-smelling wind, like the wind that blows in from a garbage dump. She tries to blow my covers off, and no matter how I pull on them to hold them tight, I can feel her tugging, too. I know if she gets the covers off, she’ll breathe on me, and if Mrs. Whistlepuff breathes on you, you die. I can’t scream because Mrs. Whistlepuff sucks all my breath away, and I can’t tell my parents because my father took the night-light out of my room because five-year-olds are big girls who don’t need night-lights anymore. I have to be a big girl now, even if it means Mrs. Whistlepuff is going to kill me.
The only person I tell is Hunter. He’s eight, and he’s not afraid of anything.
He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t say, “There’s no such person as Mrs. Whistlepuff.”
He rides his bike all by himself to the store a few blocks from our house and comes back with something hidden under his jacket. My parents don’t know where he went, and they’re furious, and they take his bike away for a week, because he’s not allowed to leave without letting them know where he’s going.
The thing he had hidden under his coat is a flashlight. For me. And batteries, too, and he even knew which kind of batteries to get, and how to put the batteries in, with the plus and minus ends in the right place, and everything.
Now when it’s dark, dark, dark in my room, and I hear the doorknob turn and the door start to creak open, I shine the flashlight over to the cubby, and Mrs. Whistlepuff has to go back inside and stay there.
And she never bothers me again.
The end.
Except it’s not the end. The end is how Hunter read my poem aloud to his friends, and they all laughed.
I don’t have that flashlight anymore. I’m not sure if Hunter bought it for me with his birthday money or swiped it the way he swiped a chocolate bar—and got in big trouble—a few weeks later.
I just remember how bright its beam was.
I just remember how it let me be safe in my bed again through the night.
Cameron is writing now, too, intently bent over his page, his hand at that awkward angle left-handed people use when they write. I still don’t know what he’s writing about. He acted pretty normal today, all things considered—that is to say, normal for someone who isn’t like anybody else I’ve ever known. Maybe David took pity on me and didn’t tell him? Maybe David told him, and Cameron didn’t even care?
Somehow that last possibility seems the worst of all.