فصل 10

November 8, 1991

Dear friend,

Bill gave me my first Bin advanced English class for my paper on Peter Pan! To tell you the truth, I don’t know what I did differently from the other papers. He told me that my sense of language is improving along with my sentence structure. I think it’s great that I could be improving on these things without noticing. By the way, Bill gives me A’s on my report cards and letters to my parents. The grades on these papers are just between us.

I have decided that maybe I want to write when I grow up. I just don’t know what I would write.

I thought about maybe writing for magazines just so I could see an article that didn’t say things like I mentioned before. “As ______ wiped the honey mustard off of her lips, she spoke to me about her third husband and the healing power of crystals.” But honestly, I think I would be a very bad reporter because I can’t imagine sitting across the table from a politician or a movie star and asking them questions. I think I would probably just ask for their autograph for my mom or something. I would probably get fired for doing this. So, I thought about maybe writing for a newspaper instead because I could ask regular people questions, but my sister says that newspapers always lie. I do not know if this is true, so I’ll just have to see when I get older.

I did start working for a fanzine called Punk Rocky. It’s this xerox magazine about punk rock and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I don’t write for it, but I help out.

Mary Elizabeth is in charge of it, just like she is in charge of the local Rocky Horror Picture Show showings. Mary Elizabeth is a very interesting person because she has a tattoo that symbolizes Buddhism and a belly button ring and wears her hair to make somebody mad, but when she’s in charge of something, she acts like my dad when he comes home from a “long day.” She is a senior, and she says that my sister is a tease and a snob. I told her not to say anything like that about my sister again.

Of all the things I’ve done this year so far, I think I like The Rocky Horror Picture Show the best. Patrick and Sam took me to the theater to see it on Halloween night. It’s really fun because all these kids dress up like the people in the movie, and they act out the movie in front of the screen. Also, people shout at the movie on cue. I guess you probably know this already, but I thought I’d say it anyway in case you didn’t.

Patrick plays “Frank ’N Furter.” Sam plays “Janet.” It is very hard to watch the movie because Sam walks around in her underwear when she plays Janet. I am really trying not to think of her that way, which is becoming increasingly difficult.

To tell you the truth, I love Sam. It’s not a movie kind of love either. I just look at her sometimes, and I think she is the prettiest and nicest person in the whole world. She is also very smart and fun. I wrote her a poem after I saw her in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but I didn’t show it to her because I was embarrassed. I would write it out for you, but I think that would be disrespectful to Sam.

The thing is that Sam is now going out with a boy named Craig.

Craig is older than my brother. I think he may even be twenty-one because he drinks red wine. Craig plays “Rocky” in the show. Patrick says that Craig is “cut and hunky.” I do not know where Patrick finds his expressions.

But I guess that he’s right, Craig is cut and hunky. He is also a very creative person. He’s putting himself through the Art Institute here by being a male model for JCPenney catalogs and things like that. He likes to take photographs, and I’ve seen a few of them, and they are very good. There is this one photograph of Sam that is just beautiful. It would be impossible to describe how beautiful it is, but I’ll try.

If you listen to the song “Asleep,” and you think about those pretty weather days that make you remember things, and you think about the prettiest eyes you’ve known, and you cry, and the person holds you back, then I think you will see the photograph.

I want Sam to stop liking Craig.

Now, I guess maybe you think that’s because I am jealous of him. I’m not. Honest. It’s just that Craig doesn’t really listen to her when she talks. I don’t mean that he’s a bad guy because he’s not. It’s just that he always looks distracted.

It’s like he would take a photograph of Sam, and the photograph would be beautiful. And he would think that the reason the photograph was beautiful was because of how he took it. If I took it, I would know that the only reason it’s beautiful is because of Sam.

I just think it’s bad when a boy looks at a girl and thinks that the way he sees the girl is better than the girl actually is. And I think it’s bad when the most honest way a boy can look at a girl is through a camera. It’s very hard for me to see Sam feel better about herself just because an older boy sees her that way.

I asked my sister about this, and she said that Sam has low self-esteem. My sister also said that Sam had a reputation when she was a sophomore. According to my sister, Sam used to be a “blow queen.” I hope you know what that means because I really can’t think about Sam and describe it to you.

I am really in love with Sam, and it hurts very much.

I did ask my sister about the boy at the dance. She wouldn’t talk about it until I promised that I wouldn’t tell anybody, not even Bill. So, I promised. She said that she has been seeing this boy secretly since Dad said she couldn’t. She says she thinks about him when he’s not there. She says they’re going to get married after they both finish college, and he finishes law school.

She told me not to worry because he hasn’t hit her since that night. And she said not to worry because he won’t hit her again. She really didn’t say any more other than that, although she kept talking.

It was nice sitting with my sister that night because she almost never likes to talk to me. I was surprised that she told me as much as she did, but I guess that since she’s keeping things secret, she can’t tell anybody. And I guess she was just dying to tell somebody.

But as much as she told me not to, I do worry a lot about her. She is my sister, after all.

Love always, Charlie