If This Were a Story Read online

  To my family

  The Note

  I measure how happy a day is with sounds. Happy days sound like a TV on low volume or birdcalls through a screen door. Sad days sound like dishes crashing into each other in the sink. Sad days sound like too-loud voices. Once a day is stained sad, it’s hard to make it happy again.

  My class copies vocabulary into our notebooks. I write the words like an astronomer discovering a new planet, as if the definitions can unlock the secrets of outer space. “Instantaneous”: when something happens without any delay. “Iridescent”: the quality of changing colors when viewed from different angles. “Intention”: an aim or a plan.

  The tip of my pencil breaks. I walk to the back of the room and shove my pencil into the sharpener. The grinding sound is a happy one. It means a new point, a shiny do-over.

  On the way back to my desk, I see a small piece of paper crunched into a ball on the floor. I pick the paper up with the intention of throwing it away, but it looks like my name is written on it. I unravel the note and read the three words on a torn sheet of lined paper. The words fill my head with the sound of flying arrows, quiet and quick and aimed in my direction. A sad-day sound.

  NOBODY LIKES HANNAH.

  Pine-Tree Hugs

  I don’t know what to do with the note. I keep it tucked in my hand and sit back at my desk with thoughts as loud as fireworks in my brain. Nobody likes me? What did I do? A new piece of paper slides across my desk. Courtney watches me, pointing her chin to the new note. I open it.

  WHAT’S WRONG?

  Before I understand what my hands are doing, I rip up Courtney’s note and stuff the pieces into my desk. I should tell my best friend about what I found, but I would rather the note just disappeared. What if she sees those words and believes them?

  “Hand it over, Hannah,” a voice demands from behind me. I turn to find my teacher, Mrs. Bloom, with an outstretched palm, tapping her rubber shoe.

  “I don’t have anything,” I answer. I’ve made a mistake. I shouldn’t have picked up the note.

  “You know the rules.” Her long dress is covered in roses, with thorns still attached to the green stems. I focus on the printed flowers by her ankles and drop the note into her hand. A little cough rises from her throat.

  “Keep copying, everyone. Hannah, come with me.”

  I try not to notice my classmates staring while Mrs. Bloom takes me into the hallway. We stop a few feet from the door, and I focus on the walls. Our introduction bulletin board from the first day of school is still hanging up. I reread my “About Me”:

  HI, I’M HANNAH. I’M A SPELLING BEE CHAMPION WHO LIKES STORIES AND SOUNDS.

  I remember completing the assignment and wondering how anyone could narrow themselves down to just one sentence, as if there weren’t a million iridescent facets of a person to look at, like a prism in the sun.

  I should’ve written: I’M HANNAH, AND NOBODY LIKES ME.

  “Hannah?” Mrs. Bloom waves her hand in front of my face.

  “Yes?”

  “Who gave this to you?”

  “I found it on the floor.”

  Mrs. Bloom taps her rubber shoe again. She has an “About Me” on the bulletin board too. It says: HI, I’M MRS. BLOOM. I’M A FIFTH-GRADE TEACHER WHO LIKES PLAYING WITH MY CATS.

  “Do you have any idea who would write this?” she asks. I stare at the floor until it turns to a soft gray blur.

  “If nobody likes me, then I guess it could be anybody.”

  She puts the note into the pocket of her dress and touches my shoulder.

  “That’s not true, Hannah. Everything is going to be fine.” We walk back into the room together, and my whole class watches me. My chair scrapes the tiles on the floor when I go to sit down, and makes a sad-day sound that echoes forever.

  My heart beats hard like a drum for the last hour of the school day, and I can’t slow it down. I worry about palpitations, the uneven rhythm of my heart’s beating. I try to spell the word “palpitation” with each new thump, but only get to p-a-l-p before I’m spelling the words from the note instead. L-i-k-e-s. The note is a palpitation, and I don’t know how to set things straight again, how to get the music in my heart back on track.

  • • •

  I’m still shaky when I walk home from school. I like my walks home, because I learn how months feel. October is like sinking into cool water, but the good kind of cool water that makes you feel awake. The best sounds are hidden inside October air, inside the smell of chimney smoke and cold. A song from a chorus of shivering leaves. The whisper of a secret-keeping wind.

  If I listen hard enough, the world speaks to me. I hear magic the same way I hear happy and sad day sounds, but the mysterious voices are always just beyond my reach, not focused enough for me to really understand. There’s something the sounds want to tell me, I just know it, but they’re still too quiet. I hope someday my dormant powers will wake up and make everything better.

  My house is so close to school that I can practically see the school from my front porch, so the walk doesn’t take too long. Dad’s truck is in the driveway. He’s usually not home till dark. I instantaneously feel like a girl made of quicksand.

  I open the front door and see Dad on the couch. His hands are covered in white paint and balled up in his lap. The TV is on, loud. A knife slaps the cutting board too hard in the kitchen. Sad-day sounds.

  “Hi, Dad.” I stay close to the door, where I can escape to the front yard and suck down October air if the yelling picks up where it left off last night.

  Not even the rain against the roof drowned out the fight. Not even my pillow.

  “How was your day?” Dad asks but doesn’t look away from the TV.

  “It was okay. Why are you home?”

  He takes a sip from his Coke. I flinch when he drops the can back down onto the table.

  “When you build houses for people, they can change their minds. And you lose hundreds of dollars and weeks of your time.”

  I’m not made of quicksand anymore. I’m a chemical reaction. Motion sickness mixes with panic and adds in a few drops of melancholy, but I don’t let Dad see.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  Mom comes into the room with a towel in her hands and hair piled high in a bun. I can tell how Mom is feeling by how tightly her bun is tied. Today it’s a mess of black frizz and flyaways.

  “Hannah, is there something you want to tell us?” she asks.

  I heard you fight last night. It sounded like thunder.

  “I’m sick of being responsible for making all the money here,” Dad yelled.

  “I stay home to take care of Hannah,” Mom yelled back.

  “She can start taking care of herself.”

  I blink hard, my way of escaping when I get too stuck in yesterdays.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “I just got an email from your teacher. Are you being bullied?”

  Dad looks at me with eyes like concerned spotlights. All the anger in them disappears. The science experiment inside me settles down a little.

  “I found a note. It was . . . mean,” I tell them.

  “What did the note say?” Dad asks.

  “It said that nobody likes me.”

  There’s no yelling or cutting board slapping or door slamming. The only sound is the ticking clock on the mantel. A sound more happy than sad, because it’s quiet.

  Dad crosses the room to wrap me in his arms. His hug smells like cut wood, like a pine tree. I breathe it in. The chalky white paint on his shirt brushes my cheek.

  “No one says that to my girl. No one bullies you,” Dad says urgently.

  Bullies. I have the basic definition in my brain dictionary. I add more.

  Bu
llying hurts as much as a punch in the face, even if it doesn’t touch you. Bullying makes you forget about everything except being whole and safe and happy again.

  Maybe Dad wants me to be safe more than he wants to be angry. I close my eyes; I would want to find another hundred notes if it meant Dad would hold me in his pine-tree hug where no storm could touch us again. I’d do anything to make the sad sounds go quiet forever.

  Ambrose the Stuffed Elephant

  That night I slip into bed and pull Ambrose my stuffed elephant toward me. I hold him tight and compose wishes that might make him speak, like I have every night since Dad gave him to me. That was two years ago. There was something about his black bead eyes that generated light. The moon through my window hit the top of his head like a lopsided halo and made me believe in guardian angels (well, guardian elephants). I haven’t gotten Ambrose to talk to me yet, but something tells me not to quit.

  Ambrose is named after a character in a story called “Lost in the Funhouse.” Ms. Meghan, the school counselor I used to see, told me she knew I liked big vocabulary and gave me the story to read. She told me that she’d taken out the parts I was too young for and that I might not understand it all, but I should give it a try. I didn’t really understand it then, but I thought about it all the time. In the story the narrator keeps reminding you that it’s a story. It’s like the story knows itself too well, and I think that was the problem with the character Ambrose. He knew too much and thought too much, so his head was all full and he got lost. I told this to Ms. Meghan when we met again. She nodded and scribbled in her notebook and asked if that reminded me of anyone. I said no.

  If this were a story like “Lost in the Funhouse,” then the note I found on the floor would be the inciting incident that sets everything into motion, like the discovery of a body in a murder mystery. I would be the lead detective in a trench coat and brown hat, propelling the narrative forward by uncovering clues on my way toward finding the truth.

  But this is not a story.

  I sink my head into the pillow.

  “Wake up, Ambrose,” I whisper to his trunk, lifting him up into the air. “Wake up, wake up.” I find the place inside where I think my magic hides and send it all to him.

  And I swear, I swear, I swear, I see him blink.

  “Whoa, put me down, sister,” Ambrose says. Ambrose, my stuffed elephant, says.

  I toss him across the room. He bounces against the dresser and lands facedown on the floor.

  “Ouch,” he cries, but he doesn’t move. I’m stunned, ready to hide under my sheets. Ambrose’s voice should be the happiest sound of them all, but instead I wonder why he chose tonight to speak up.

  I crawl out of bed and lean Ambrose against the dresser, then sit cross-legged in front of him.

  “I can hear you,” I say.

  “I’m happy to be heard.” His mouth doesn’t move when he speaks. He sounds like an elephant if an elephant could speak English, a rough and shouty sort of sound.

  “Why did you wake up now?” I ask.

  “You had a hard day,” Ambrose replies.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know you, Hannah.”

  I listen for noises on the other side of the door, but there’s only the creaking of the house. I move closer to Ambrose.

  “What should I do about the note?” I ask.

  “I can’t tell you that,” he replies.

  I guess magic doesn’t mean getting all the answers. If a character in a story solves the puzzle on page one, why would you even keep reading?

  “Do you think it’s true that nobody likes me?”

  “I like you.”

  I pull my legs in close and lean my face onto my knees. When I close my eyes, I see torn pieces of paper.

  “They didn’t fight tonight, you know,” I say very matter-of-factly.

  “I can’t remember the last time that happened. And I’m an elephant. Our memories are exceptional,” Ambrose says.

  “I hope it’s not because I was bullied. I don’t want to be bullied anymore.”

  “Maybe your parents are just as tired of the sad sounds as you are.”

  “You know about the happy and sad sounds?” I ask. I don’t think I’ve told Ambrose about the special way I hear the world.

  “I told you, Hannah. I know you.”

  My eyelids start to lower against my will and I yawn. I pretend that this is a story where if I fall asleep, the world will end. I resist the tiredness with all my strength.

  “Don’t fight it. You should get some rest,” Ambrose says.

  “But you’ve just come to life.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  I lift Ambrose toward me and squeeze his soft gray body.

  “Hannah. Too tight,” Ambrose wheezes. I laugh and tuck us into bed.

  “Ambrose, why did you get lost in the funhouse?” I ask him before closing my eyes.

  “I’m an elephant, silly. I’ve never been in a funhouse.”

  He hums a lullaby until I fall asleep.

  Acts of Kindness

  When I walk into class the next morning, all the desks have a piece of lined paper on top of them. Mrs. Bloom stands in front of the room. The word “BULLYING” is written in red marker on the whiteboard behind her. I stop short, and Courtney runs into me.

  “Watch out, Hannah,” she says in the voice she uses when something annoys her.

  “Sorry,” I say in the voice I use to act like nothing’s wrong.

  Everyone sits down, pulls out a pencil, and writes their name on top of the paper, like we’ve been trained to do since kindergarten.

  “Mrs. Bloom, is this a pop quiz?” Rebecca Snow asks hopefully. Rebecca loves quizzes of all kinds.

  “No, it’s an activity. An important one. There’s been some bullying in this class, and it’s not acceptable.”

  I stare so hard at the piece of paper that the blue lines on it disappear.

  “What kind of bullying?” Courtney asks from the desk next to me.

  “One of your classmates found a note with a hurtful comment, the kind of comment that could really damage someone’s self-esteem.”

  She might as well say my name. Anyone who saw me walk into the hall with her yesterday is staring at me anyway. Like Courtney.

  “Today we are going to do the opposite,” Mrs. Bloom says. “Everyone rip your piece of paper in half.” Mrs. Bloom rips her own piece as an example.

  The room fills with tearing sounds that cut straight to my core.

  “I’m going to have you pull one of your classmate’s names out of a shoe box. On one of your pieces of paper, you’re going to write something kind about the person you pick. When you’re done, bring it to me.”

  Everyone looks sort of confused when they pull a name from the shoe box and start to write. Mrs. Bloom gives me a small smile when I pick out mine. I unfold the piece of paper and see KIMMY DOBSON written on it.

  I try to think of something nice about Kimmy, but it feels like coming up with a story, a piece of make-believe. Kimmy is big and mean and draws circles in the dirt around the best swing at recess so that no one except her can use it. She’s also my only real competition in the annual school spelling bee, because she’s so good at spelling big words. Maybe she’d like to hear that. I write KIMMY IS A STUPENDOUS S-P-E-L-L-E-R on my paper and bring it up to Mrs. Bloom at the whiteboard.

  When all the notes are handed in, Mrs. Bloom tapes them to the board and erases the word “BULLYING.”

  “Come up and see the great things your classmates have to say. This is how we wipe bullying away, one act of kindness at a time.”

  We all clump together to look at the board.

  COURTNEY WEARS CUTE CLOTHES.

  REBECCA IS REALLY SMART.

  THEO PLAYS BASKETBALL LIKE HE’S IN THE NBA.

  I find my note toward the edge of the board.

  I THINK HANNAH IS A GOOD PERSON.

  The words make me feel a little brighter inside. So
metimes I think it’s harder to be a good person than any other good thing. It’s nice to know someone sees that I try, even if I don’t know who they are.

  “I hope you’ll all keep choosing to be kind like you were on this board.” Mrs. Bloom directs us back to our seats.

  “What is the other piece of paper for?” Rebecca asks, probably still hoping for a quiz.

  “The second half is for you to tell me what you know about any bullying notes. You don’t have to write your name, but if you’ve seen something or heard something or know anything at all about who wrote the note, this is the time to speak up.”

  The room fills with shifting sounds. I look around and see some people glancing at Kimmy, because whenever there’s bullying going on, she’s usually the one behind it.

  When Kimmy’s mom died last year, Kimmy didn’t come to school for two weeks. On the day of her return, we gave her a card with all our names signed inside. I saw her at recess that afternoon, digging a hole in the dirt when she thought no one was looking. She dropped torn-up pieces of the card inside her hole and then covered it back up. I wanted to tell Kimmy that I understood why she would bury the card, and that I knew what it was like to hide memories down deep—if only I could get within five feet of her without being hit by hate-rays. I never said anything.

  I don’t know if Kimmy wrote the note I found yesterday. All I know for sure is that it made me want to change everything unlikable about myself, even though I can’t be anything but Hannah Geller. If I write that on my piece of paper, Mrs. Bloom will know it came from me. Instead I write I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING and drop the paper into Mrs. Bloom’s shoe box.

  When we grab our things from the shelves before lunch, Courtney punches my arm.

  “The note was about you, wasn’t it? That’s what you talked to Mrs. Bloom in the hall about yesterday?” she asks in a low voice.

  “Yeah,” I whisper into my backpack.

  “What did it say?”

  “That nobody likes me.”

  Courtney sort of laughs. “That’s not true, Hannah.”

  “Really?” I ask.

  “I mean, you’re not the most popular, but I still love you.”