January 1998

Caitlin

MY CRUSH ON MATT GREW until I could not take the pressure that whirred inside me every time I saw him in algebra. Lauren was in that class and sat in the row next to me. One day in late October, I passed her a note that read MATT IS SO HOT. I AM FREAKING OUT!

Lauren scribbled something quickly and threw the note back to me before the teacher turned around.

I dare you to touch him. No, I DOUBLE dare you.

She had a good point. What did I have to lose? I built up my courage, and then tapped him on his shoulder midway through class. Lauren almost fell off her seat.

“Um, do you have an extra pencil? My tip just broke off,” I lied. I had at least a dozen mechanical pencils in my bag.

He turned around and flashed me a smile that I thought might melt me.

“Here,” he whispered, handing me his. He then reached into his back pocket for a spare.

At the end of class, I offered him his pencil back. “It’s cool,” he said. “Just keep it.”

“Thanks,” I said, hoping he could not feel the heat radiating from my body.

That night, I was trying to concentrate on homework, but could not stop fantasizing about kissing Matt. Finally, I grabbed a black Sharpie and marched into my closet. There, on the wall, I drew an eye with long lashes, followed by a heart and a stick figure, next to which I wrote Matt Johnson and dated it: 10/29/1997. The very next day, he asked me out. It’s like I willed it to happen.

That was October 30, which meant Halloween was our first real date. It was official. We were a couple. I made another note in my closet: Cait + Matt, October 31, 1997.

Our school had a costume party, and I went dressed as a punk rocker. My mom bought me pink hair paint and I wore a blue sequined minidress and leather jacket. Matt borrowed his friend’s football jersey, and his friend wore Matt’s soccer shirt. I thought that was pretty lame. As it turned out, Matt was just really shy. Other than the Halloween party, we didn’t really do anything besides talk on the phone a few times—and even then, I did all the talking. We once met at the food court at the mall with a bunch of other friends but he barely spoke to me, and he never once tried to kiss me or hold my hand. I started to wonder if he even liked me. And then I noticed Drew, who played soccer with Matt. Frustrated, I wrote in my closet: I am still going with Matt, but I like Drew. By the time I dumped Matt, Drew was dating someone else, and I already had a new crush. Nathaniel. We started dating in late November, and then broke up a week later. I still liked him, but so did my friend Chrissy. It was just getting too complicated. By then I had filled up half my closet wall with boy-crazy confessionals. I needed a break.

Taking a break gave me time to think about other things, like school, and softball. I was on the team, but not very good. My coach suggested practicing at home, so I started doing that with my dad on weekends.

We were throwing the ball in our backyard when my dad asked, “Have you heard from your pen pal?” The question startled me. I had not really been thinking about Martin since I sent him my photo. I was too swept up with boys. And then, just like that, his letter arrived the following week.

I could always tell Martin’s letters from the rest of the mail. They looked and felt different—thinner paper, more exotic and colorful stamps. This letter was thicker than the last. I ripped it open and gasped when I saw that he had sent me a photo.

Seeing him standing there dressed in his school uniform changed something in me. Martin was no longer this faceless fantasy—he was real. He looked much younger and smaller than I had imagined—like a little boy in his green shorts and shirt. My very first thought was, He’s so cute! Not in a boyfriend way, more like a little brother. He had written on the back of the photo that it was taken two years before, in 1995, which explained why he looked so young. He also looked quite serious, though I could see the sparkle of a smile in his eyes. I assumed he was standing between his father and probably his older brother, Nation, who looked a lot like Martin, only taller. I ran up to my room and immediately placed this photo between one of me, my brother, and parents taken at my grandparents’ lake house, where we visited often, and another of me goofing around in my backyard with Lauren. I kept all of my favorite photos beneath the glass on top of my desk, so I could see them always.

And then I read his letter several times over.

I loved the way he wrote: While I understood all the words, they still seemed foreign. Every letter began with Hallo!, a greeting I’d never seen written before. I imagined his voice to be singsongy and upbeat. In his letters, he used lots of exclamation points, except instead of a dot at the bottom, he drew tiny bubbles. They reminded me of smiley faces, and I imagined him to be as happy as his handwriting. His language was so formal—he sounded so smart!

I wanted to send him something special in my next letter, so I went to the mall that weekend with Lauren to find the right gift. Claire’s was our first stop. It was a jewelry store where you could get a pair of hoop earrings for five dollars. We also went to Spencer’s, which sold gag gifts. Back then, key chains were super-popular, especially these rectangular metal plates with funny references like Heartbreaker, Lucky, or Diva. I had about two dozen, which I had clipped onto a huge key ring that was attached to the outside zipper pocket of my backpack. Lots of kids did this, which meant everyone clanged when they walked through the hallways at school, like a jingle orchestra.

I chose one for Martin that had a glittery swirl pattern on it without any words. I also bought one for Lauren that said Best Friend. She got me the same one. We already had Best Friend necklaces. Mine said Best and hers said Friend.

Back home, I wrote Martin another letter thanking him for the photo, and sent him the key chain and a picture from my winter dance. In it, I’m wearing a headband that looks like a tiara, and a burgundy dress. I asked him to please send me another photo. I hoped it would be more current.

A month or so later, I received a four-page letter from Martin. No one had ever sent me such long letter! This time, instead of writing Hallo!, he addressed me as “the queen,” which was so funny! It didn’t feel like it did when Richie said it. My mom and dad called me Queen Caitlin as well, but in a much nicer way than my brother did. I had no idea where Martin got the idea, but it made me feel that much closer to him, like he was part of our family.

He wrote:

3 March 1998

Dear Caitlin the “queen”

Well! It’s me again. I don’t know how to thank you. Thank you very very much for sending the nicest letter in my life. Thank you for the glittering and attractive charm. What a friend Caitlin. Thank you for the nice picture of yours. You look extremely beautiful, like a queen. (Queen Caitlin.)

I thought it was funny he called the key chain a charm, and was so glad he liked it. Then I noticed at the very top of the letter, he wrote a PS, which said: I am making you very nice African-type earrings. I will send them in my next letter.

How could he possibly know that I collected earrings? I had more than one hundred pairs—a collection of big hoops and long dangly beads and small studs shaped either like hearts or daisies or baby animals. I kept my most valuable ones in a jewelry box my parents gave me for Christmas the previous year. It was blue velvet and had my initials, CBS, in gold letters. I also had a pink plastic Caboodles box that looked like a small suitcase, which I had covered in stickers. That’s where I kept all the plastic jewelry I got at Claire’s. In all my searching for new earrings, I had never seen a pair from Africa.

Martin went on to list all the holidays he celebrated and I was relieved to learn that many were the same as ours—another thing we had in common. But then he wrote that Zimbabwe was still “developing.” I didn’t quite understand what he meant. I knew I was developing—I had grown two inches since September and had just gotten my first training bra with my mom. But I wasn’t quite sure how a country developed. Martin said that there were few schools and hospitals, and wrote that some students learned under trees due to the shortage of classrooms. But then at the end of that sentence he wrote, “Fun!” It certainly sounded nicer than being stuck in a classroom all day—as long as it was not pig-cooking day. When he wrote, Patients have to stay about ten per bed. Just imagine. Fun, I couldn’t imagine that, no matter how hard I tried. So I skipped to the next line, which made me smile: Our friendship will always last forever. Sometime we will meet one another.

I really hoped this would come true.

On the next page, he described life in his country. Lines like Many workers in Zimbabwe receive a small pay which can’t even feed the families and Two families have to share a room in some parts of Zimbabwe stuck out. We had poverty in the United States, though I had never really seen it up close. I figured Zimbabwe was similar.

I also thought that Martin came from a wealthy family because he was wearing a school uniform in the photo he sent. I assumed he went to a private school, which is expensive in America. There was a Catholic school in neighboring Lansdale where the girls wore dark green skirts and the boys wore slacks. Everyone had to wear a yellow shirt. It was supposed to be an excellent education, but I thought I would die from the boredom of wearing the same thing every day. Still, those kids gave me context for Martin and his life. I imagined he lived in a home like mine. But then he wrote that Sakubva, the town where I was sending his letters, was a high-density suburb and filled with poor people and crime, like LA. I had never been to LA, but knew that movie stars lived there as well as poor people. Maybe that was what Martin meant.

I didn’t dwell on it long because the very next paragraph talked about clothes, my favorite subject. We also have Nike, Reebok, Adidas, and many others, Martin wrote. My best is Reebok. All of these brands were popular in school—the boys especially liked to wear oversize shirts with Reebok or Nike logos on them. I wanted to get one for Martin on my next trip to the mall.

On the last page, he drew a man wearing a grass skirt and a crown of feathers and wrote, Our traditional suit but many people wear real clothes. He also sketched a hut with a grass roof and wrote, Some Zimbabwean house. I had seen photos of grass huts in National Geographic magazines, but in the photo Martin sent me, there was a brick building in the background that had to be his school. It looked a lot like mine.

The next line really cracked me up: Have you heard the one from Spicy Girls, which says friendship never ends?

I laughed out loud that he called them “Spicy,” and hoped that the line would become our motto.

At the end of the letter, he wrote, Send me a US dollar and I will send you ours in my next letter. I had actually thought about sending him a dollar, to show him our currency. It was like we were on the same wavelength. There was so much else I wanted to tell him about the United States, and to learn about Zimbabwe.

I took out my multicolor pen to write him back. It was the size of a fat cigar and had little levers in different colors circling its top, like a crown. I clicked the green button to describe our seasons, and then the pale blue one to explain that our president was Bill Clinton and our vice president was Al Gore. I chose a dark blue to write, I have also sent a dollar bill.

After I finished writing, I opened my desk drawer where I kept all my babysitting money. I found the crispest dollar bill and folded it into my letter. As I addressed the envelope, I felt another kind of fluttering in my stomach. It was a different feeling from my boy crushes—it felt more like an awakening. The world was gigantic, and I had a friend who lived halfway across it.