Chapter 35 2006
Sometimes the smallest thing—the merest breath of circumstance—changes the direction of our lives, as was the case when I walked into my assigned room at the International Institute of Figure Skating, IIFS, to discover a thin girl with two auburn braids to her waist and skinny arms crossed impatiently over her chest.
The room was small and bright with a large rectangular window that looked out on a sprawling green lawn and a lush forest in the distance. There were two beds, two dressers, and two desks.
“About time,” she said. “I’ve been waiting foreeever.” She tilted her head. “Wow, look at your face.” Then as quickly as she noticed my nevus, she dismissed it, and her dark eyes snapped back to mine. “I’m Esma.”
She was pretty but not in a Heddy sort of way.
She had enormous dark eyes set wide over a button nose and a small and pointy chin.
She reminded me of a portrait I’d seen once with Profe in a museum by a woman famous for painting bizarrely large-eyed children.
But the girl I’d seen in the painting looked sad, while Esma was anything but.
Like a firefly, she was light, bright, and buzzing.
I was about to introduce myself, but she didn’t give me time.
“Now that you’re here, we can finnnnally open the boxes,” she said in a dramatic, exaggerated way I’d quickly come to get used to.
Not waiting for a response, she stepped to the larger of the two boxes. “I’ll take this one. You open that one.”
She was very bossy, which reminded me of Astur and made me happy.
She ripped open the top of her box as I carefully peeled the tape from mine.
“Bedding,” she said, clearly disappointed as she pulled out the Madagascar comforter Profe and I had chosen at Macy’s the week before.
I opened the flaps to my box and pulled out an assortment of winter clothes—my parka and several sweaters, snowpants, boots, hats, and mittens.
Beneath the clothing were the two pairs of white Riedell skates we’d ordered.
My pulse quickened as I lifted them out, wishing I could tie them on right then and skate around the room.
It had been nearly a month since I’d last skated.
Esma rolled her great big eyes and moved to my box, clearly impatient that I was taking so long. She reached in and pulled out the latest Harry Potter: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
“Ooh, can I borrow this when you’re done? I love Harry. Actually I love Hermione. Harry’d be dead like three hundred times if not for her.”
“You can borrow it now,” I said, eager for her to like me and happy she wasn’t asking for me to be moved somewhere else.
“Awesome!” she said, then set it down and dug back into the box.
She pulled out a white letter-size envelope and looked at it curiously.
“Patch?” She looked up, a question on her face. “I thought your name was Vivien?”
“It’s my nickname,” I said and pointed to my nevus.
Her face screwed up in a way that meant she didn’t get it.
“Patch,” I said. “Spot, blotch, smudge.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’ve never heard that word before. Patch.”
That’s when I noticed her accent. Her words were clipped at the end and soft in the middle.
I would soon discover that the students at the institute came from all over.
It was the premier figure skating training center in the world.
Esma was from Albania, but she’d been at the institute for two years, since she was eight, so her English was better than most.
“Fine. Patch it is,” she said and held the letter toward me.
When I saw the return address, my heart skipped several beats. I stared at Dylan’s name as I carried it to my unmade bed, the boxes and skates forgotten.
“Is Dylan your boyfriend?” Esma teased.
I wasn’t paying attention. The letter was from Atherton, Georgia.
It was where he and Ivy had come from when they moved to Minnesota.
I thought of the thin white scar on Ivy’s temple, and a lump formed hard in my throat.
Though Dylan never talked about his dad, I knew enough to know he was the reason Dylan and Ivy had left.
“Whoa! No way!”
I looked up to see Esma holding a pink iPod.
“I can’t believe you have an iPod!”
In America, everyone had an iPod. Some of the kids at Gaines even had more than one.
“Apple stuff isn’t sold in Czechia yet,” she said. “You’re so lucky.”
“You can use it anytime you want,” I said a bit too eagerly.
“Cool,” she said. “You can borrow anything of mine also, though I don’t have much.”
I glanced around the room. Her dresser and desk were practically bare. Her bed had a simple striped blanket, worn pillow, and threadbare stuffed yellow Pikachu.
Esma found the earbuds, plugged them into the iPod, and started punching the buttons.
I returned to Dylan’s letter.
I opened it carefully, doing my best not to tear the flap.
I pulled out a single sheet of yellow-lined paper.
When I unfolded it, a downy white feather with specks of black fell out.
I lifted it to the light. It was a beautiful wing feather the length of my pinky, with a pale white quill that faded to black over the length of the shaft.
Setting it on the mattress, I returned to Dylan’s words:
Hi Patch,
I’ve started this letter and balled it up so many times I’m running out of paper.
I’ve never written a letter before and it’s turning out to be harder than I thought.
Mostly because I feel so bad for what happened.
My ma says you can’t reach for anything new if your hands are still full of yesterday’s junk so I needed to write to you so I don’t keep carrying around all the junk I’m holding because of what happened.
I never ever would have done anything on purpose to put Nick in danger.
I hope you know that. Not that it makes any difference.
What happened was still my fault. I should have known how dangerous it was to write about you and the pond in my journal.
I’m so sorry and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t forgive me.
I probably wouldn’t forgive me either. I found the feather beside a marsh near our house.
I never used to go to the marsh when we lived here before.
Now I go there all the time. I figured you might like it and might even know the kind of bird it came from.
I know it don’t make up for what happened but even with how bad I messed up I hope you still know I’m your friend.
Of all the things I miss from Minnesota you’re at the top of the list.
Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!
Dylan
P.S. Bart also knows about your orange bracelet. I wrote about how it was what led you to Nick. Make sure you hide it from him.
His sign-off was a reference to Harry Potter. It’s what Dumbledore said in his four-word speech to the four houses after the sorting in the first Harry Potter book. While the phrase has no actual meaning, it’s generally regarded as a way of saying idiots in four different ways.
The letter made sense of the question I’d had since I found Nick dead at the pond, wondering how Bart knew which rabbit I loved.
When Dylan attacked Bart in the cafeteria, I thought he’d done it out of chivalry for Heddy.
It was no secret Heddy had broken up with Bart because she had a crush on Dylan, and everyone was sure Dylan was going to ask Heddy to be his girlfriend soon.
But that wasn’t it at all. Dylan attacked Bart for me.
He saw the rabbit’s foot and realized the role he’d unintentionally played in Nick’s death.
The letter was postmarked from three weeks earlier, and it was clear, based on the last line, that he had no idea I was no longer at Gaines.
I read the letter twice more, then neatly folded it around the feather, put it back in the envelope, then put the envelope in my keepsake box, which Profe had also sent along.
As soon as I had the chance, I would find a computer so I could figure out the kind of bird the feather came from.
If I could figure it out, it would give me a reason to write back.
Dylan was what I missed most from school as well.
Boyfriend. He wasn’t, but it didn’t stop my nine-year-old heart from dreaming of him that way.