Chapter Auggie
Auggie
I’M IN THE LIbrARY STARING INTO THE CROWDED HALL AND NOT AT THE blank document I should be staring at when I realize Mayte is at school.
On Monday.
The day after Aida’s funeral.
“Mayte,” I call into the hallway, running after her. I call her name a few more times before she finally notices and stops against the wall.
“Hey,” she says. “What class are you headed to?”
“Why are you here?” I ask.
“Well, that’s rude.” She smirks at me. “I’m here because I’m seventeen years old and I have to be. Why are you here?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she says, and starts to walk down the hall again. I follow her despite being sure that some jerk is stealing my laptop as we speak. “I can’t just stop my entire life because my sister died.”
“Yeah, but, I mean, I don’t know. Don’t you need time to grieve?” I ask.
“I did grieve. At the funeral. Remember? When I went all psycho about her nail polish.” She turns toward me abruptly and grabs my shoulders. “Auggie, I’m fine. I’m a big girl. If I need you to save me, I’ll let you know.”
“Mayte,” I say again as she continues down the hall. “Mayte!” She doesn’t turn back around. “I’m not trying to—” I sigh. “Save you.”
I walk back to the library and almost collapse into my chair from relief when I see that my laptop and backpack are, in fact, still there. No jerks. Or at least, no jerks in the business of laptop thievery.
The hallway is clearing as fourth period is about to start, and it appears no one has the same free period as me or, if they do, they’re not spending it in the library. Which means I have no “people watching is just as important as getting words on the paper” excuse. I have to actually write.
I’m still not totally sure where to start telling Mayte’s story.
Her birth? The first time I saw her? Aida’s death?
I still don’t know exactly what story I’m even telling about her.
Everything seemed clear and noble and story-making at the funeral, but now that I’m in front of the blank page, my mind is… well, a blank page.
I can’t just write about her directly. I’m writing fiction, a short story, and so it can’t be Mayte exactly.
Which won’t be that hard. I change her name.
I change Aida’s name. Maybe Leo’s a best friend and not a cousin.
Plus, I have no idea how Mayte’s real story is going to end, how she’s going to cope with her grief.
But with fiction, I can create courage and hope and lift man’s heart or whatever that Emory website quote was.
Mayte starts out as that broken girl at Aida’s funeral, crying at the side of her coffin.
Mayte ends strong and brave and hopeful.
Or fictional Mayte, whatever her name ends up being.
I open an internet window and search “names with the same meaning as Mayte.”
Did you mean: names with the same meaning as matte? Google asks me.
“No, I don’t mean matte,” I say aloud to Google.
I’ll leave her name as Mayte for now and replace it later. That will keep the character centered on her so I don’t fade too far from the reason I’m writing this story.
To help Mayte be seen. To help her find out what she means. To help her be free. To help her learn the truth about herself.
And… to get me into a college Creative Writing program.
I smash my head against the keyboard. There is nothing I hate more than writing. There is nothing I love more than writing. And this is always the scariest part. Isn’t that what Stephen King says, anyway? The scariest part is before you start.
I stand up and pace behind my chair, stare at the jumble of letters on the page, which is no longer blank. That makes it less scary, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t it?
It’s strange because I don’t really know Mayte, do I?
But being with her in that moment, in her living room, with her dad’s voice in my ear telling me that Aida had been pronounced dead, being the one to break it to her.
Holding her in a way I had never held anyone before.
Watching her break into pieces in front of Aida’s dead body.
I feel like we jumped from learning each other’s names to grieving together, like a poorly written time skip stands between the moment I saw her at that party and being able to chase her down the hallway without her thinking I’m a creep.
There’s story there, character there that I’m missing, that I need if any of this is going to become something worth reading, let alone submitting to Emory.
I grab my phone and send a text to Leo.
ME: Do you know if Mayte has a new phone yet?
I open Google and type “Colombian song about Mayte” and the video pops up immediately: “Pa’ Mayte” by Carlos Vives. I click on it and skip the ad. The drums start up.
And then I pull up my email inbox, click on Mayte’s essay, and open it.