Page 89 of Everything All at Once

And yes, every single person in the class turned around to look at me, and I looked only at the top of my desk, pretending to be fascinated by what I found there, pretending that my folded hands were a very recent discovery, not wanting to give them the satisfaction of seeing my face and its current state of pinkness.

“Very good,” Mrs. Nguyen said, her own voice shaky and uncertain now, because sometimes when we get what we thought we wanted, we realize that it’s actually so different than how we imagined it would be. “Can anyone tell me what Mae is quoting from?”

“Duh,” Lilah said, because she was the exactly the type of person you might imagine sayingduh, and not ironically.

“I’d prefer a title,” Mrs. Nguyen said, losing her patience.

“Alvin Hatter,” Evan said. “The second one.”

“And do you think that quotation has a point?” Mrs. Nguyen asked the class.

He muttered his assent, and I tried not to feel annoyed: of course Mrs. Hatter had a point. If she didn’t have a point, one of the only things she said in the entire series (before she and her husband were spirited away by the Overcoat Man) wouldn’t have resonated with as many people as it did. People with tattoos. People with permanent ink needled into their skin.

Keep going.

Be nice.

Make friends.

Really, what else was there?

I somehow got through the week. The last week.

The red journal sat open on the bed, and I sat on the bed in front of it, my legs tucked under me and the last day of school behind me and just the weekend left before the graduation ceremony on Monday night.

I hadn’t read it yet.

I’d picked it up a dozen times, and every time I’d been too scared of what I would find in its pages.

It felt like—

Here it was.

Here were all the answers to all the questions I’d been asking myself.

But I could only put it off for so long.

I opened to the first page and saw the date; she would have been almost my age, just a teenager. It was written in the summer, and the very first line was this:

Finally school’s out, and I can relax. Every year seems to be longer, is this normal? I hate math and I hate history and I hate chemistry, so basically there’s nothing I like. I like eating. Maybe I’ll be a professional eater.

It made me laugh, trying to picture Aunt Helen strapped to a table, a hundred hot dogs in front of her, tucking a napkin into the collar of her shirt.

It made me laugh and then it made me stop laughing, because I kept reading and the next part of the entry said this:

I’ve been spending a lot of time with that new kid, the one who moved here not too long ago. He’s okay. He also hates math and loves eating. He has a pet turtle too. Sam says if he goes away on vacation, I can watch him.

I stared at the journal, still open, its pages worn and wrinkled and yellowed and I was too scared to move or get off the bed because almost twenty-five years ago, when my aunt was a teenager, she had written in her journal about a boy named Sam.

Sam.

Sam.

Sam.

And then, just for good measure, just so I couldn’t try to explain it away, just so my brain couldn’t hatch any sort of explanation for how the hell a boy I knew now, a boy I’d met and hung out with and knew now was mentioned in my aunt’s twenty-five-year-old journal, there was a picture.

She’d taped a picture into the journal.