“I know. This will help.”
I closed my eyes and did what he said.
I was acutely aware of every part of my body, from my heart that beat a little too heavily to my breathing, which caught in my chest and stuck there like a hard candy.
This was not quite a panic attack, but I knew one was building, biding its time, getting ready to explode.
All you have to do is get through this class....
I let my breath out slowly, so slowly that my lungs ached. I did it three times, and then I opened my eyes and looked at him.
“Wow,” I said.
“Did that help?”
“It really did.”
“Breathing is important. We don’t give it enough credit.”
“I don’t think I giveyouenough credit.”
He laughed and said, “Come on. Room 404. Let’s do this.”
The elevator was out of service, so we walked from the basement to the fourth floor. I was panting again by the time we got there, but it was a good kind of panting. The panic was still there, still buzzing around inside me, but I wasn’t as nervous now. I knew there was no backing out. I had to do this, for Aunt Helen and for myself. So I might as well try to enjoy it.
It was five minutes to four, and the classroom was already full. I guess word had gotten around that they’d be having a special guest today, and when I put my bags down on what used to be Aunt Helen’s desk, I felt every pair of eyes in the room turn to look at me. Sam took a seat in the front row. He gave me a thumbs-up and smiled widely and goofily. I took Aunt Helen’s laptop out of my bag and heard a gasp from somewhere as one of the students recognized it. That didn’t surprise me—the Apple logo on the front had been painted in rainbow colors (by Em, of course, in nail polish), making the computer easily distinguishable. Aunt Helen had loved it.
“A trueartiste!” she’d said when Em had shown her. “Avisionaire!”
“Are those real French words?” Em had asked.
“More or less, I think.”
A few more students shuffled into the class as I set up, opening the document I needed and spreading one of Aunt Helen’s notes on the keyboard. Number ten. An important one, so I’d been keeping it with me.
At four on the dot, I walked around to the front of the desk and leaned back against it. All I wanted in that moment was for my voice to be steady.Please let my voice be steady.
“My name is Lottie Reaves. Helen was my aunt. She asked me to teach your last class in the event she couldn’t be here herself.” Somebody in the back was already crying: low, quiet sobs that floated down through the lecture hall ceiling and threatened to put me over the edge too. “I don’t know what all of you want to do with your lives, but I’m guessing at least a few of you want to be writers. I think that’s great. But just like anything we want in life, it’s going to be really, really hard. Even for someone as established as my aunt, there were times when it was difficult, when the rejection letters piled up and her resolve started wearing down.
“My aunt spoke often of the idea of immortality. This shouldn’t be surprising, given the subject matter she chose to write about. The idea of time comes up a lot in our lives. Time—it seems like there’s never enough of it, right? I know there wasn’t enough of it for my aunt, but I still thinkabout all she was able to accomplish, and it makes me think that it is possible to do the things we want to do.
“Along those lines, I’d like everyone to take a few minutes to write down the answer to this question: What would you attempt to do if you had all the time in the world in which to do it? Just a sentence or two, and when you’re done, you can exchange your paper with a neighbor, somebody random, releasing the idea into the world. That’s often the first step of doing anything: admitting it to someone else.”
I risked a glance at Sam; for some reason he was unmoving, looking not happy for me but... a little worried? But then he saw me watching him and a huge smile spread across his face. He leaned over to his neighbor, who tore a strip of paper out of a notebook and gave it to him. He gave me the smallest thumbs-up again and started writing.
But why that initial hesitation?
Was this a stupid idea?
I was completely prepared to show up and read the first chapter of the new Alvin book, which I was sure would make everybody lose their minds, but then I remembered that Aunt Helen had wanted me to figure this out. If she had wanted somebody to simply show up and read a few words she’d written, she could have asked anyone else to do it. No, this was supposed to be my thing. And now that the entire class was writing diligently, I had to stand behind it.
A few minutes passed, and then I saw the first people begin to exchange their papers. I felt a weird sense of pride that they had written this thing, this short assignment, because I had told them to. Then more and more people started passing papers, and passing papers with people who had already passed, until finally everyone’s writing was fully jumbled up and with somebody completely new.
“All set?” I said. “Okay. Now your words are out in the world. It may seem like a tiny step, but tiny steps are just as important as big ones, because they still lead you forward. Can I have a volunteer to read?”
A few hands shot into the air, and I pointed to a girl in denim overalls. She cleared her throat and read, “I would figure out how to build colonies on the bottom of the ocean. Overpopulation is real!” A few chuckles from the room, and I laughed appreciatively too.
“Anyone else?” I pointed to a boy wearing a highlighter-yellow sweatshirt.
