Chapter Text
Lara Jean's |
Only after eleven o'clock at night, when Daddy has turned off the news he wasn't really watching, when Kitty has finally stopped telling stories about her video game under her breath through the wall, and when the entire house settles into itself like an old dog lying down, does our home experience a particular kind of quiet. I love that silence. It was just Margot and me doing our evening routines at the bathroom sink, two toothbrushes going at once, and I've enjoyed it since I was a little child. It's the type of silence that creates space.
It created room for the hatbox tonight.
I rarely take it out. When I was younger and it felt like the end of the world every other Tuesday, I used to begin with Josh, then Kenny from camp, and then, embarrassingly, a boy in my chemistry class whose name I've since made myself forget on principle. However, it had been months since I had opened it. Perhaps longer. The most of my emotional crises had been overshadowed by college applications, Model UN, and helping Daddy with the new dishwasher. I suppose this is a form of maturing, even tho it doesn't feel like it on the inside.
I took it out from under my bed and placed it on my lap. The hydrangeas on the lid, which have since faded to nearly nothing, made my chest feel both full and soft.
I opened the lid. They were all there. Several years of them. Some were in envelopes that were so old that the glue had cracked at the flap due to brittleness. I carefully and somewhat carefully ran my fingertips along the edges of each one, but I never opened any of them since that's not the point; the writing was always the important thing, never the reading back.
Keeping a box of letters to boys I never sent and no longer even like is creepy, according to Kitty. She just wrinkles her nose as if I've told her something horrible about digestion, despite my repeated attempts to explain it to her. It's not morbid, tho. Actually, it's the opposite of morbid. I let things go in this way. I write down every fragment of emotion until nothing sharp left in my chest, at which point I bundle it up, mail it somewhere, and call it a day. Over. Every time I have a little funeral, I always feel better afterward.
I wasn't planning to write one tonight. I had come upstairs to do nothing at all, I had a chem lab write up that was due and a load of laundry that I was ignoring, but then I opened my window because the night smelt like the first real night of summer, with cut grass and someone's charcoal grill three yards away, and it completely made me feel miserable.
Because he smells like that. It's summer, just regular Virginia summer, and it somehow belongs to him in the same way that a music belongs to a memory. It's not fragrance or anything he wore.
Peter.
It had been so long since I'd let myself to intentionally think about him that I actually laughed a little in my room by myself. When he moved, he would have been, what, seven? Perhaps eight. No matter how much sunscreen his mother used, he was always gap-toothed and had sunburns all over his nose in June. Even tho his mother warned him not to cross Larkspur without an adult, he used to ride his bike to our house. He would sit on our porch steps with a red popsicle colouring his mouth and tell me, with complete, unwavering seven-year-old conviction, exactly what he was going to be when he grew up. Every week, it changed. An astronaut. A firefighter. It was an actual job for a man who trains dolphins for the Navy, and he was very thorough.
He did the cannonball off the deep end at the community pool after the lifeguard yelled at him twice, and I would sit at the edge with my feet in the water, yelling at him to be careful, secretly thrilled every time. This is why I used to think he was the funniest, bravest person I knew.
Then, one August, he disappeared. Margot once mentioned that his family had moved to New York due to his dad's job, but I'm not sure if that's genuine or simply something I chose to believe since it made him feel like he was still out there someplace rather than just gone. For a week, I sobbed over it. The kind of tears Margot suffered as I spoke into great detail about how terrible it was to lose your best friend at the age of seven. After that, I mostly forgot how things work when you're seven. Life continued to unfold. Other boys showed up to break my heart in more minor ways.
I pulled out my stationery, which is the cream-coloured type with a small scalloped edge that I save for occasions like this. I uncapped my favourite pen and, rather than pressing it down, let myself to feel it all the way thru.
Dear Peter,
Your last name is no longer even familiar to me. That is unusual, isn't it? You were never anything but Peter to me, not a whole person with a last name and a life somewhere, just Peter, my Peter, the boy with the gap tooth and the dreadful cannonballs and the great dreams to teach dolphins for a job.
One of the six hundred things you promised to accomplish in one day on our porch is what I hope you're doing. I hope your nose's sunburn has finally learned to behave. I hope that wherever you are, there's still a porch, a popsicle, and someone who believes you're unforgettable, something I seem to have never been able to do, even after all this time, even tho I couldn't tell you a single detail about who you ended up being.
I'm not entirely sure why I'm writing this tonight of all nights. Perhaps it's just that summertime smells the same everywhere, no matter how far away or how many years have passed. In any case. I hope all is okay with you. Even if it was just a seven-year-old girl on a porch a long time ago who thought you were amazing, I hope you know that you were once adored.
Love, Lara Jean.
I folded it into thirds as usual after reading it back once, my eyes aching in that nice, clear-out way.
The problem, though, is that every time I write a letter like this, without a last name, current address, or anything other than a name and an emotion, I run into a tiny, stupid, sentimental snag: I never want to leave it unfinished. despite the fact that it will never truly go anywhere. even tho it doesn't go anywhere, which is the entire idea. A fanatical part of me maintains that it cannot be considered a legitimate farewell until it appears complete and is a genuine letter to a real person, complete with envelope.
I went hunting as a result. Before Peter moved and before we moved twice ourselves, my mother kept an old address book from when we lived closer to the old neighbourhood. It is filled with names in her looping handwriting, half of whom are people we haven't spoken to in ten years. The mail was waiting for me at my desk, so I flipped through it and discovered it at the back.
1428 Birchwood Lane, Kavinsky. She must have added the words "moved" years later in fainter ink next to it.
Nevertheless, I copied the address onto the envelope. I have no idea why. With an address on it, even if it was incorrect or pointless, it felt more genuine. Like a message in a bottle that is at least thrown toward a real shore rather than just the ocean in general.
Peter, I scribbled the old address underneath in my best handwriting, licked the flap, sealed it, and placed it, as usual, in the hatbox with all the rest. There, it was meant to remain unsent and unfindable, its solitary task completed the moment I finished writing it.
I never gave it another thought. After all, I had a chem lab due.
What I didn't know (and couldn't have known) was that earlier that evening, I had left a small pile of actual, real, going-somewhere mail on the kitchen counter, including envelopes for Daddy's medical association dues and the electric bill. In my rush to get upstairs before the feeling faded away, I had placed the letter to Peter directly on top of that pile rather than carrying it upstairs.
Three days later, when I was at school, Kitty, who is thirteen years old, bored, and incredibly helpful, discovered that stack on the counter, decided to "help out," and threw every single packet into the mailbox on the corner without giving any of them a second glance.
Peter Parker's |
To be clear, I wasn't expecting to get a letter on Saturday that would completely change my inner being. Mostly because I wasn't planning on doing much on Saturday other than assisting Ned with whatever unfinished robotics project he had brought into his grandmother's garage. If Mrs. Leeds was feeling particularly giving, which she always was, I may also get free lunch.
In reality, Mrs. Leeds is not my grandma. I also want to make clear because people make assumptions, and I never address them quickly enough. Technically, she is Ned's grandmother, but sometime during my freshman year of high school, she quietly adopted me in the same way that she adopts stray cats and overwatered houseplants. This was mostly because she found out that I was eating dinner by myself more often than not that year, back when things with May were... complicated. She began arranging a another platter. She never gave it any thought. We both knew it wasn't really about the meal, so I never stopped to thank her for it either.
By then, she had been living on Birchwood Lane for almost four years, having moved out of the large home Ned had grown up in. She had very strong, very vocal ideas about the bushes the previous owners had planted, which she considered a personal humiliation, and she enjoyed gardening in this big straw hat that made her appear like she was going to compete in the Kentucky Derby.
That Saturday, she shouted from the porch, "Peter, baby, you've got mail," and held up an envelope as if she had just caught a fish.
Halfway through giving Ned a wrench that he most clearly didn't need yet, I looked up from where I was crouching beside the garage. "I don't live here, Mrs. Leeds."
"My dear, I am aware of that. However, your name is right on it." She turned it over and glanced at it, as if the back would clarify something the front hadn't. "No return address, no last name. Odd little thing. However, according to Postmark, it's local, so it didn't just appear out of nowhere.
I wiped my hands on my pants and approached to pick it up, somewhat out of curiosity and half expecting it to be a mistake, some other Peter who had lived at this house, some piece of mail that, like mail often does, had been following an elderly inhabitant about the neighbourhood for years.
My name. Only Peter. The handwriting was purposeful and circular, as if the person who wrote it had carefully considered each letter before committing to it.
I almost gave it back to her. I told her it wasn't mine and let her throw it among the takeaway menus and coupon flyers that no one had requested. However, Ned chose that exact moment to shout something about the robot arm catching fire, it was okay, it does that, it's almost a feature at this point, and I simply tucked the envelope into my jacket pocket during the chaos, completely forgetting about it until that evening.
My hand found the envelope under my jacket, which I had flung over my desk chair, when I was laying on my bed, avoiding a problem set the way I ignore most problem sets until eleven p.m. the night before they are due. I nearly didn't open it. For whatever reason, I also want that to be documented. I almost simply left it there.
I ripped it open.
I didn't think I would read it twice. I wasn't expecting reading it a third time while sitting up slowly, as if the words might rearrange themselves if I gave them enough room.
I don't even know your last name anymore. Isn't that strange?
I'm not familiar with Lara Jean. A Lara Jean might come to mind. To the best of my knowledge, I have never cannonballed into a public pool while someone by the name of Lara Jean screamed at me from the water's edge. I was raised two states away from Queens, before May and Ben, and before everything that has shaped who I am today. I most definitely never lived on Birchwood Lane. I was not the intended recipient of this message. It was not possible. It belonged to another Peter, a child who lived here before Mrs. Leeds, her hat, and her views on hedges moved in. This child had a sunburnt nose, a gap tooth, and presumably aspirations of training Navy dolphins.
And yet I could not stop reading it.
I hope you know someone loved you, even if it was just a seven-year-old girl on a porch a long time ago.
Since it's not quite the kind of information you start with, here is something about me that not many people are aware of: Someone has shot at me. Three different persons have thrown me from three different buildings, all of whom, for some reason, believed it was the approach that would ultimately succeed. A man with what I can only describe as tentacles sprouting straight out of his spine almost drowned me once; incidentally, this is just as terrifying as it sounds. My chest never felt like it did when I read that letter, not even for a split second. Tight, warm, and weird, like if a complete stranger had just silently and unintentionally returned something I didn't even realise I was missing.
I should to have thrown it. I want to be honest about that as well. The sensible and responsible thing to do would have been to walk it back to Mrs. Leeds in the morning and tell her to throw it with the recycling because it was obviously not mine and Lara Jean, whoever she was, deserved for her private letter to end up somewhere private rather than in the hands of a guy who spends his weekends fighting crime in a onesie.
Instead, I read it like four times. I then carefully folded it back along its own creases, the way you fold something you're not ready to part with just yet, and placed it in my desk's bottom drawer, which is where I store the things that really matter, like the picture of Uncle Ben wearing his work jacket, my dad's broken watch that no longer tells the time but that I can't bring myself to throw away, and the ticket counterfoil from the first movie MJ and I ever saw together before either of us would admit what it was.
It was curiosity, I told myself. That eventually, all I wanted to know was who this Lara Jean was and if the actual Peter, whatever he had become and wherever he had ended up, had ever discovered what he had meant to a girl on a porch long ago.