I shrug. “No. She always gave us the envelopes unopened. I think as long as none of us complained, she just assumed all of our pen pals were behaving. It worked out in my favor, too, because I got pretty mean after that.”
“Were you actually mad, or did you just do it for his reaction?”
I pause to think about it. “I was mad at first. I think as time went on, though, I started looking forward to his letters. I wanted to see how mean he could get. I made it my personal goal to be worse than him.”
Anne looks down at the letter on the table between us. “Seems like the ball is in your court now.”
I pick up the letter and look at it, my eyes skimming over his familiar handwriting. “No return address,” I remind her. “How am I supposed to write back?”
“Try his address from two years ago,” she suggests.
“I did. I tried it a year and a half ago. It came back undeliverable. Usually when one of us moved, we’d send the next letter with the new return address. This time, he moved without sending a new letter.”
Anne purses her lips, thinking. “He’s challenging you,” she says after a minute.
“Challenging me?”
“To find him,” she clarifies. “If you don’t send a reply, then he gets the last word, ending a decades-old snail-mail battle. Are you ready to let him win?”
I shake my head. “Hell no. I’m tracking him down.”
ChapterTwo
BROTHERS AND SISTERS
Luca
Ihad thought the idea of writing to a pen pal was stupid. I had nothing to say to some kid in some other state. I was probably the only kid in my class who wasn’t excited about it. While the rest of the class was reading their letters to each other, and talking about what they planned to write back, I sat in the back of the classroom, wishing I could be home playing video games.
It’s not like this was a graded assignment. Mrs. Martin probably wouldn’t even read our letters.
“Luca,” she said, grabbing my attention. “Would you like to share your letter?”
I shook my head. “Not really.”
She gave me a sympathetic smile. “Maybe just read it to Ben.”
My friend Ben sat at the desk next to mine. He looked about as excited as I felt. I slid the letter across the desk to him. He read it, and then pushed it back to me.
“She talks about the ocean a lot,” he said.
“I know,” I agreed.
“What are you going to say?”
“I don’t know. This is stupid.”
“You think everything is stupid.”
“Everythingisstupid.”
“You need to write back to her,” Ben said.
“Why?”
“Because if you don’t, she’ll be the only kid in her class who doesn’t get a letter.”
I rolled my eyes, and with a sigh, I flipped my notebook to a blank page. I looked at Naomi’s letter one more time, and then scribbled my own letter. When I was finished, I smirked. I ripped the sheet of paper out of my notebook and handed it to Ben.
