“How do you even remember stuff like that? And no, I’m not still writing to her.”
I could feel my face getting hot. I hadn’t thought I was that easy to read.
“Bullshit,” he said. “I asked you last year and you pretended you didn’t know what I was talking about.” Then, in an exaggerated imitation of me, he said, “Uh … uh … who?”
“That’s not what I sounded like.”
“You’re a bad liar, Luca. I know you’re still writing to her. Is she your girlfriend or something?”
My face turned even redder. “No. She’s not my girlfriend. She just won’t stop writing letters to me. And she’s mean, too.”
“Really? Why do you still write to her?”
The truth was that I didn’t want Naomi to get the last word, but I didn’t want Ben to know that I was that petty. I shrugged. “It gives me something to do.”
We stopped walking when we reached our classroom. Ben blocked the door. “What does her letter say?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t opened it yet.”
He raised his eyebrows, prompting me to open the letter. I sighed, shrugged off my backpack, and pulled out the letter. I tore open the envelope and read it out loud to Ben.
Dear Luca,
I hope that you wake up tomorrow morning with a small hangnail, and when you pick at it, it just gets bigger and more painful. I hope that it bothers you so much that you just keep picking at it, but it doesn’t come off, and you end up pulling a really long sliver of skin off your finger. Then I hope it gets infected, and the only solution is to amputate your whole hand.
That would really make my day.
Love,
Naomi
Ben stared at me, wide-eyed. A few other students had gathered around us, waiting to go inside the classroom.
“You’re blocking the door,” I reminded him. He stepped into the room, and I followed him to our desks at the back of the class.
“Why would she say that?” he asked once we were both sitting. “That’s…” He clutched his hand as if feeling a phantom hangnail after hearing me read Naomi’s letter. “That’s disturbing.”
“She has a way with words.” I tucked the letter back into the torn envelope and slipped it into my backpack.
“Does she always write ‘Love, Naomi’ at the end?”
“Sometimes. Why?”
“It just seems a little weird to end a letter with ‘love’ after writing something like that.”
“I never really thought about it.”
Actually, I had thought about it every time I read her letters. I usually copied whatever she had used to close her last letter, but sometimes I wrote something different.
“What are you going to write back?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet.” I was too tired to come up with anything creative, and I couldn’t follow a letter like that with something boring.
“Luca. Ben.” We both looked up at our teacher, who had already started the lesson while we were distracted with the letter. “Care to join the rest of us?”
Ben mumbled an apology, and I straightened in my seat. The rest of the school day was uneventful. We were going to be spending the rest of the week taking our state tests, so most of the teachers had us reviewing what we had learned over the year.
As I rode home on my bike that evening, my mind wandered to Naomi’s letter in my backpack. I hadn’t decided what to write back yet. I felt like nothing I came up with could top what she wrote about the hangnail. I blamed my lack of imagination on my stress over the upcoming exams. I could probably come up with something better once school was out.
