I hope that felt good. I hope you are enjoying at least some part of these little notes, because I have enjoyed writing them, and I’m sad there are only a few left, because we have to stop somewhere and because twenty-four is the age I was when I first started writing the Alvin books, so that seems as good a place to stop as any.
I left you my journals, and the time has come to read them. If I know you, you might feel more than a little strange at the idea of snooping through my life, but please, I implore you: snoop away. There are things in there that I want you to know, things I never told a single soul and things I’ve saved for you. Because you’re me, really. If I could be your age again we would be best, best friends, the sisters we both never had. We are so similar, and that is why I always knew you’d be the one I told.
Start with the red one.
I think you’ll find it the most interesting.
—H.
I’d read the letter twice more, once standing at the bathroom sink brushing my teeth and once digging in my closet for the sandals I wanted to wear.
I had to hand it to Aunt Helen; it was pretty suspenseful. Wondering what I’d find in the red journal erased all my curiosity at where Em had gone. (Had she left in the middle of the night? Early in the morning? Into thin air?) I was so flustered by the time I got to school that I tried to open the wrong locker for three minutes.
Everything looked different. Everything had a ticking clock over it, counting down the minutes left of high school, of this long and important stretch of time that every single adult in the world assured me was the absolute best years of your life. It didn’t feel like that to me. Maybe it felt that way to a select group of people, the kids who roamed the halls acting like they owned a part of this, the kids who stuck together in packs and wore glossy lip stuff that looked like it would glue their mouths shut.
“Is this really the best it will ever be?” I’d asked Aunt Helen once.
“What, high school? Oh God, no. High school is shit, Lottie. You’ll like college a little bit more. You’ll like your twenties a little bit more. And then you’ll settle in to thelife you want, and you’ll like that even more. Hell, if you’re lucky, you might even love it.”
I was late to first period, English with Mrs. Nguyen, a classroom with two doors. I tried to sneak in the back, hoping her back was toward me (she really liked writing on the whiteboard), but I didn’t have any such luck. She was front and center, reading aloud from a paperback copy ofTo the Lighthouse, a book I still hadn’t read and, let’s be honest, probably would never actually pick up.
Mrs. Nguyen paused just a moment, and I slipped into my seat and slid down, trying to make myself as small as possible.
She kept reading:
“‘What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.’”
She closed the book and held it against her chest, and I wondered how many times she had read that exact copy, because its covers were worn soft and its pages were dog-eared and smudged and she held it not like an ordinary book but like something that had saved her once from drowning, a floating ring thrown into a sea she couldn’t navigate.
“Well?” she said. “You’re about to start your lives, leavehigh school behind. Some of you will leave town, make new friends, see new places. Certainly you’ll do things now that you’ve never done before. So: what is the meaning of life?”
According to Alvin and Margo’s mother, the meaning of life was simple but one that evaded the large majority of people, because they were looking for something complicated and deep and heavy. But the meaning of life wasn’t any of those things, she had told her children, right at the very end ofAlvin Hatter and the Overcoat Man, right before she and her husband disappeared. The meaning of life was something simple:keep going, be nice, make friends.
Sometimes I thought that was too neat a package, too simplistic, something easy for people to understand but lacking true meaning. Then other times it made perfect sense and it came into the utmost clarity: sharp and focused and so, so obvious.
Near the front, Evan Andrews raised his hand. I had forgotten we were supposed to be answering a question.
“Yes, Evan?” Mrs. Nguyen said.
“I think the meaning of life is to try to be happy,” he said. A few kids nodded; one kid snorted.
Mrs. Nguyen pointed at the snorter. “Do you disagree, Lilah?”
“The meaning of life is family,” she said, but you could tell she didn’t really believe it. Lilah was an aforementionedlip-gloss girl. I’d never seen her have a kind word for anyone.
“Family is important,” Mrs. Nguyen agreed. “And so is happiness, Evan.”
“So is money,” someone shouted from behind me. I didn’t turn around to see who.
“Money is certainly a factor,” Mrs. Nguyen agreed. “Anyone else?”
She looked at me for a fraction of a second, just long enough for me to know what she wanted from me. She wanted Alvin’s mother’s answer, the six-word phrase printed and reprinted a million times on everything from T-shirts to tote bags to coffee mugs, the neat package, the bow tied into a ribbon on top of perfect wrapping paper. More than anything she wanted that answer to be the right answer, like I could confirm that for her, like I could possibly tell her what was the right answer and what was the wrong answer, like I had any say over that. In reality there were a hundred meanings to life, and they were all true for different people, they were all valid for their own confusing reasons.
Next to me, Mae Bryant raised her hand. I hoped she would say it so I didn’t have to, because I knew everyone in the class would swivel to look at me, to see if I agreed or started to cry or ran screaming out of the room, I don’t know.
“Yes, Mae?” Mrs. Nguyen said.
“‘Keep going, be nice, make friends,’” Mae said, in a voice that sung and twisted her words into the air, spilling each like little gems.
