The letter was waiting on Nat’s bed when she got home from school.
Her dad must have picked up the mail while she was gone. She didn’t notice it at first, because she was still thinking about Harry.
Or rather, about his former life, when people called him Harriet.
When people thought he was someone who he wasn’t.
Hair, she thought, and giggled.
“How was your day?” Nat’s dad had asked when he’d picked her up at three o’clock. He was on the scooter. The crowd was even bigger than before. They were shouting and waving, although Nat’s dad appeared not to even notice. Sometimes he was impenetrable, like he was encased in a soundproof bubble. “Tell me everything! Was it great?”
“Dad,” she said, “just go. Go! I’ll tell you at home. I’ll tell you later.” She looked at the crowd. “From now on, I want to walk home,” she added. “This is ridiculous.”
Everyone had seen Nat climb onto the back of XAN GALLAGHER’s scooter.
And just like that, everyone knew.
She also felt that they were somehow disappointed, and she hated that she felt badly that she wasn’t someone more exciting, even if only for a second.
Well, she thought, too bad for them. At least she’d had one whole day when she could just be Nat, and not NATALIA ROSE, DAUGHTER OF XAN GALLAGHER.
Nat’s insides felt like a piece of twine that had been tied into such a complicated knot that it was hard to tell if it was a knot-tied-on-purpose or just an unfixable mess. And seeing the letter lying there on her bed, with Solly’s familiar handwriting on the front, didn’t make it better.
If anything, it pulled the twine tighter.
Nat’s dad was in the kitchen, cooking chicken. Specifically, cooking four chickens at the same time. They smelled delicious. He was singing a song from the last movie he had done, which was an animated film about a mouse who thought he was a rat. “I’m not who you think I am,” he sang, “I’m not who you want me to be, but the glorious part of all of this heart, is that under my fur, I’m just meeeeeee.”
“DAD,” she yelled. “I can’t even think.”
“Sorry!” he called back.
“You’re turning Canadian already,” she said. “Sorry yourself.”
“Sorry for being sorry! Yep yep.”
She could tell even from her room that he was smiling.
“Sorry for YOU,” she said. “You great big nut. I never said you should mail that postcard to Solly!”
“Sorry!” he yelled. “SOOOOOOORRRY!”
“Stop!” she yelled back.
Nat picked up the letter and inspected the handwriting. It was written in purple pen. Solly always used purple. The swoops and swooshes were as dramatic as she was. Nat sniffed it and then felt weird about that. It probably smelled like the mailman’s hands! What was she thinking?
It actually smelled like grapes.
She held the letter up to the light. Solly had already broken the rules. For one thing, the whole point of the Great Postcard Project was postcards. The letter was heavy, and when she squished it around with her fingers, she could feel something in the envelope that wasn’t paper. She wanted to see what it was, and she also didn’t want to see.
“I’m going outside,” she told her dad. “Go ahead and serenade the chickens if you need to.”
Nat’s head spun a little as she stepped out the door. She had no idea why she felt so strange. The letter was as heavy as lead.
She walked over to the edge of the clearing and sat on a big rock that had a view through the trees to the ocean. The rock was warm from the sun. It was a little bit windy, enough that the envelope flapped in her hands, like it wanted to blow away.
She looked for whales’ fins in the waves.
Every single day, since the day the whales had come, she’d gone down to the beach to sit and wait for them to come again. But they hadn’t.
Not yet.
Today she didn’t even feel like going down there. Too much had happened.
School had happened.
XAN GALLAGHER, outed as her dad, had happened.
And Harry was once called Harriet.
Harry, Harriet.
He was Harry. He was 100 percent Harry.
Harriet was a mistake, that’s all.
A mistake that clung on to school records and in the minds of people who didn’t get it. But Harry wasn’t Harriet.
“Harry, not Harriet.”
She said that part out loud, partly to try it on for size, and partly because it was almost a tongue twister. “Red leather, yellow leather,” she said.
She tore open the envelope. The thing inside along with the folded paper was a bracelet. It was made from string that was the color of a brown paper bag. It was tied into knots. There were three beads on it. One said B. The next said F. The third was another F.
BFF.
But were they? Still?
After what Solly did?
“I don’t think so,” said Nat. She threw the bracelet into the bushes. It got hung up on a branch briefly, and then it fell out of sight. She felt bad about that for a split second, and then she didn’t.
Nat unfolded the letter and began to read, even though the wind kept flapping the paper in her hand and her hair into her eyes, like it was trying to demand her attention.
Sooooooo Natters,
Guess what?
Some BIG things have happened since you left. Why did it take you so long to send your address? I was going CRAZY.
The things are Super Huge Things (SHTs).
The hugest.
The MOST HUGE things to ever happen to a person, short of being murdered in the woods. LOL! Not that being murdered in the woods would be funny, but you know what I mean.
Anyway, the first SHT is that I kissed Evan Walker at the pier. We were just hanging out, you know? (His mom is my mom’s new BFF. They met at hot yoga.) (His mom has had her entire face filled with fat from her own butt. She looks like a wax museum person who was too close to the heater and who has started to melt. Not kidding.) Sooooo, we were like walking and talking and then he was standing right next to me, pointing at some boat or something, and then BAM his lips were on my lips! It was weird but so good and good and weird. I don’t even like-like Evan Walker. But I like-liked kissing him. It is ever complicated, like you’d say.
The second even bigger thing is that I got my period. The very next morning. AFTER THE KISS. I went to the bathroom and THERE IT WAS. Did the kiss make me a WOMAN? I can’t wait to see how big my boobs are going to be. If they are bigger than Mom’s, she’s going to freak.
I feel TOTALLY different. Like GROWN UP. You know?
Do you have your period yet? You’d tell me, right?
There was a big scribbled-out sentence here. Solly had crossed it out every which way so it was impossible to read. There was only one letter that Nat could make out, which was a capital L.
The scribbled-out bit was the worst part of the letter.
Mom is having surgery on her face to make her lips bigger now. She is going to look so stupid. In related news, Mom is still terrrrrrrible. The worst. She says hi!
I have to go. The whole class is going to the market today. We have to buy four different kinds of vegetables and then make it into soup for homeless people. I’m going to buy beets so my soup will be gloriously pink.
I LOVE YOU!!!!!!!!!!!
Love,
Me
PS—Now that I’m a woman, I’ve decided that from now on, I’m going to use my full name, Soleil. Pronounced “Sol-yay.” ☺
SMOOCHES, BABY!
Soleil (SolYay!)
PPS—Write back and tell me all the SHTs that have happened to you.
Nat carefully refolded the letter, making each crease doubly sharp with her fingernails. She wanted to call Solly and shout at her. She wanted to say, “What is with this dumb bracelet? We aren’t even friends now!”
She took the phone out of her pocket and looked at it.
She had had the phone for exactly one year.
A lot can happen in a year, she thought. Sometimes, too much.
Instead of dialing Solly though, she pressed the contact button for Bird (Mom). She wanted to tell Bird (Mom) about Harry. Bird would know the right things to say. She would probably understand.
She wanted to tell Bird (Mom) everything.
And she didn’t want to tell Solly anything at all.