Chapter Two, Part 2

The Myth of You and Me
by Leah Stewart

(Page 2 of 2)

"What?" I turned to see him holding an envelope up toward the light, squinting in an attempt to make out what was inside.

"This is addressed to you," he said. "In your handwriting." He raised his eyebrows. "You seem to have written yourself a letter."

"That's odd." I crossed to the table and reached for the envelope, which he handed over with some reluctance. He was right — there were my name and his address, on the front in my own script. I thought I must have misaddressed a reply to one of his acolytes, switching the to and the from. But the return address had no name, just a street and an apartment number in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"Why would you write yourself a letter?" Oliver asked.

"I don't think I did."

"This is delightful," he said. "You have a secret identity. Hidden even from yourself. Maybe you're another person."

I rolled my eyes at this, but it did give me a strange feeling, to see my own name in my own handwriting like that, as though somewhere out there was indeed another me. Oliver pushed out a chair. "Sit down," he said. "For God's sake, open it."

I sat down. I opened it. Of course I hadn't written the letter, but I felt no less strange when I saw who had. The letter was from Sonia Gray. In high school we practiced until our handwriting was so similar even we couldn't tell it apart. This made it easy for me to do her math homework for her, and for us to sometimes leave our names off our math tests, so that I could claim hers, and she mine, because my math grade could survive the occasional fifty, while hers could not. We called this "falling on the fifty," and every time I did it I felt flushed with an exhilarated beneficence. Because I couldn't imagine why Sonia was writing to me now, nearly eight years after we'd parted, it did seem to me that all times existed at once, that she'd mailed the letter from someplace years ago. That was why our handwriting was still identical, neither of us having altered at all the elaborate girlish loops in our Ls and Ys.

"Well?" Oliver asked.

I ignored him, holding the letter away from his curious gaze.

Dear Cameron,

I had a dream about you tonight, and now I can't sleep. I can't even remember exactly what the dream was about — there was something about snow cones, though you and I never ate snow cones together, that I can recall. We did eat a lot of those Oreo shakes from the Taco Box. And remember how we used to stir syrup into milk and make those vanilla wafer sandwiches with peanut butter? It all sounds ridiculously disgusting now.

I've been thinking about you ever since I got engaged. My first impulse afterward was to call you with the news. Isn't that odd? It was like I was a kid again, and we were planning our imaginary weddings, back when I was certain you'd be my maid of honor and I'd be yours. It took me a moment to remember we weren't friends anymore. Ever since, I keep having this feeling I'm forgetting to do something. I look at my list — I've called the caterer and talked to the florist — and it takes me a while to realize, because it's not on the list, that the only thing I haven't done is talk to you.

I have that middle-of-the-night strangeness, when it feels like you've fallen out of your normal life, and maybe that's why I'm writing to you now, as if we were friends like we used to be. Somewhere somebody's playing Madonna, her first album, I think it is. Why do they have that on at three in the morning? Isn't this traditionally a more melancholy time? Maybe they're trying to counteract melancholy. Maybe "Borderline" is the only thing between them and suicide.

You and I used to make up dance routines to Madonna songs. Remember the playroom at my house? All those boxes along the wall, full of childhood discards — an old dollhouse, the Ewok village, a box of stuffed animals loved into ruin. You and I dancing in the middle, doing what we thought were sexy moves. Don't you think that's symbolic? Loved into ruin. I just invented that phrase. I like it. On occasion I've felt like that's what's happened to me. Remember the sock monkey with no mouth? I hated that thing. The bottom half of its face was just a blank. I think my mother still has it in the house, probably to spite me. Remember when we were walking across campus to take a final exam and a bird fell dead at our feet? It wasn't some small brown finch, either, but a cardinal. A red splash. You poked it with a stick. It was truly dead. We were juniors in college but we held hands the rest of the way, we were that unnerved. Remember when we drove up to Sewanee to see that boy I was dating, I can't even remember his name now, and the three of us went skinny-dipping in the reservoir? It was so black, and the stars were everywhere, and the boy was stupid and kept splashing around, but you and I floated away on our backs, and you said that floating there and looking up at the sky was like not existing in the best possible way. I said we should make up a myth about two maidens and the water, but we never did. I guess it's a myth now anyway.

Maybe that's the point of this letter. Is it a myth? Is all of this a myth, what it was like when we were best friends? What I'm wondering now, in the middle of the night, is did those things actually happen? Sometimes without you to confirm these memories I feel like I've invented them. It's a little like being orphaned. That sounds really dramatic, I know, but since I'm a half-orphan I think it's okay for me to say it. There are things about my life that no one else has ever understood.

I wonder about your life now. Do you think about any of this, the myth of you and me? Do you wonder why we were friends, why we aren't anymore, why we made the choices we did? Do you wonder how things might be different if we hadn't? You were never as enamored of this kind of thinking as I was, but even you must admit that parting was a turning point in both our lives. For a while we were practically the same person, you and I.

I don't know what I want from you. I can imagine you dismissing this letter — I think that would be your first impulse, to consider it ridiculous of me to contact you after all this time, no matter what the reason, especially if the reason is this strange feeling I have that you should still be my maid of honor, that if you're not, some part of my past is erased, something left unfinished. I think this even though I know if you were it would be terribly upsetting to Suzette. So I don't know if I'll even send this, though I did track down your address.

I don't know how to sign this, so I'll just put my name.

Sonia

Copyright © 2005 by Leah Stewart. Excerpted by permission of Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

leahstewart.com
Leah Stewart is the author of Body of a Girl. She has taught at Vanderbilt University and Sewanee, the University of the South. She lives outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with her husband, writer Matt O'Keefe, and their daughter.