At the seventh line, your head explodes. Then you start over.

Dear Dad,

My school is kind of lame sometimes.

So after all that crap about cutting kids from the team, Mr. Schick said that he has decided not to cut anyone. Everyone who tried out made the team. 15 kids in all. I’m not sure if this makes me feel good or not. It’s like being on a team where every kid gets a trophy, even the kids who suck.

Even so, I don’t mind not getting cut. I get a jersey with a number on it and the shorts are long and pretty cool looking. I can see why hip-hop guys wear so much basketball gear. It does look pretty tight.

Mr. Schick said I’ll be playing guard, so I need to work on my dribbling, defense and outside shooting. I think I’m a pretty good shot from outside. And if that means I don’t have to do layups, I’m all for it.  I still have to do them in practice, though. That stinks. I stress out every time I run toward the basket.

Nothing in basketball comes naturally for me. “Keep your head up when you dribble, Trevor!” shouts Mr. Schick. “Keep your eye on the ball, Trevor!” shouts Mr. Schick. How am I supposed to do both? And whenever you don’t do both, you have to run these things called “lines.” Did you ever have to run lines? I bet if you ever figure out where hell is up there, you will find Satan making the really evil people run lines. I suppose it’s good for me. That’s what Mom says. But it doesn’t feel good for me. It feels like I’m going to die.

You start at one end of the court, which, by the way, is covered in painted lines. Then you run as fast as you can to the first line, bend down and touch it, and run back to the end. Then you run as fast as you can to the next line, bend down and touch it, and run back to the end. You keep doing this until you get to about the fifth line. At the fifth line, you also start cursing Mr. Schick under your breath. You can only do it under your breath, because it’s impossible to actually talk. At the sixth line, you start grabbing your side, because it feels like weasels have crawled down your throat into your stomach and are trying to eat their way out. At the seventh line, your head explodes. Then you start over.

Anyway, Mom says we can get a dog tomorrow, to celebrate. I’m pretty sure that if I hadn’t made the team, she would have said we could get a dog tomorrow to help ease the pain. Mom’s kind of a genius sometimes.

I hope you get this letter. I hope you’re not lost in the woods. But I’m glad you’re going for it. Funny. You wanted me to go out for this stupid  basketball game. I wanted you to try to go somewhere. We’re both doing it, for better or worse. Hopefully for better.

Your son,

Trevor

I’m starting to think Mrs. Henry is a nut.

Dear Dad,

I talked to Mrs. Henry again today, but I’m starting to think she is kind of a nut. Here’s a drawing of her I did in class when I should have been reading. I like it. I worked on it some more when I got home. Can you tell what I mean about her kind of ex-hippie style?

Mrs. Henry really believes this stuff about The Other and all her other kooky crap. I think she’s one of those people who probably thinks ghosts and angels and all that sort of thing are real.

Then again, who am I to talk? I’m writing letters to my dead dad.

I asked her if she’d tell me more about this idea of what she meant by a bargain. What kind of bargain could I make with a dead person that, like she said, God would honor?

“You’re a writer, aren’t you, Trevor?”

“Sort of.”

“You are. You’re someone who values words. Few people do, you know. We say, “God bless you” when someone sneezes without thinking what the words mean. Talk about taking the Lord’s name in vain. We pray at dinner. We say, “Bless this food to our bodies,” but if someone asked us what we meant, we wouldn’t know how to answer them. Our words might as well be grunts. But what if you made a real agreement—a verbal contract? What if you made an oath before God, say, to keep your room clean for a month? Would you do it?”

“I guess I would.”

“Would you or wouldn’t you?”

“I would.”

“Why?”

“Well, because I made a promise in front of God.”

“And God would hold you to it. God takes such oaths seriously. It is an oath of The Other. Such oaths transcend time and space. And such bargains are never to be entered into lightly.”

Mrs. Henry stared at me for a minute. I think she was wishing I would fall down in amazement at the brilliance of her words. I think teachers wish that a lot. I guess I was kind of amazed, though.

“But what do you mean by a bargain?”

“Oh, that part is simple. A bargain is simply an exchange of goods or services at a price. You get something in exchange for payment.

I still don’t really know what she meant, and Mrs. Henry wasn’t going to spell everything out for me. But there was something there. I could tell.

A little help here would be great, Dad. Any ideas?

Your son,

Tom

What you’re talking about, Trevor, is The Other.

Dear Dad,

Dang it, this whole advice-by-mail thing totally sucks. I come home from school after trying to hide my black eye all day, after trying not to talk about it, after getting called a wussy-boy by Mudgett. Then I open a letter from you that says, “Don’t hide your black eye. Tell everyone how you got it.”

Our timing stinks.

I talked to my English teacher, Mrs. Henry, today. I’m not sure she believed me when I told her I got the black eye boxing with my brother. I think half the school figures that Mudgett creamed me in a fight. Heck, he hasn’t even fought me yet and most people already figure I’ve lost.

Mrs. Henry tried not to stare at my eye when we talked, but she failed on that one. She was having a conversation only with that corner of my face. My black eye has its own gravitational pull.

“If you were trying to learn about life aboard a ship, I’d have you read Melville or Jack London,” she said. “If you were trying to learn about, oh, I don’t know, bullfighting, then I suppose Hemingway would be your man. But what you’re talking about, Trevor, is The Other. It’s Heaven and Hell and God territory. There’s only one kind of writer for that—a theologian—which is literally someone who studies God. Unfortunately, very few theologians died, came back from the dead and wrote about it. Lucky for us, some of them were smart enough to speculate. To try to fill in the gaps with both logic and intuition.”

The Other—that’s what Mrs. Henry calls everything religious. She talks about it like it’s science fiction. In The Other, there are laws that control how things happen. And, according to Mrs. Henry, these laws are on a higher level than our regular laws.

“I know space and time don’t matter to God,” said Mrs. Henry. “if they do, he’s not much of a god, is he? When we pray for others, we pray that God will intervene in their lives the next day, or in a different place. We pray to a single God, asking him to insert himself into our lives, knowing that a few other million people around the globe are asking the same of him. God could only answer these requests if space and time do not matter to him. If he lives outside of it. In The Other. And if he does, then past, present, future, are all the same to him. So are heaven, hell and earth.

“Death? Well, that shouldn’t matter either, because God conquered death a few thousand years ago.”

I was going along with Mrs. Henry. And all she said sounded pretty encouraging to me, until she sucked all the air out of my tires with just a couple of sentences.

“Before we go farther down this road, Trevor, we need to be completely clear on something. This is speculation on my part. This is conjecture. I don’t begin to pretend to know what happens when we die. Those who do claim to know are almost certainly wrong.”

I protested. She just got done talking about how clear everything looked. How logically laws operated in The Other. She said that she’d be getting input from the smartest guys who’d ever lived. Then she says that even they don’t know. So what’s the point?

“There are only a few tiny things I know for sure,” Mrs. Henry said. “I can tell you those with utmost certainty. Those are the things that matter. These other things—how was the world made? What happens after we die?—we can only make educated guesses. And that’s OK, Trevor. We don’t have to know everything.”

“I’m not asking to know everything,” I said. “I just want to know about my dad. Can he help me or not?”

“Ahh,” she said.

I hated that “ahh.” Even Mrs. Henry could be annoying sometimes. That “ahh” meant, “I have just figured you out.”

But she hadn’t. Not a chance. I walked out.

By the way, tomorrow is thanksgiving.

Your son,

Trevor

You’re a million miles away or floating in some other dimension.

Dear Dad,

You can’t do anything. You’re a million miles away or floating in some other dimension.

I went to school today. Kind of. It was actually after school. Mr. Anders, my homeroom teacher, called Mom and asked her if the three of us could meet. Mom got off work early and drove me up there in our Nissan wagon. She asked me if I knew what the meeting was about. I said I didn’t know, because I didn’t.

When Mom sat next to Mr. Anders, he looked about 16 years old. I’m not saying Mom looks old or anything. It’s just that she looks like a regular grown-up and Mr. Anders looks like a kid. He has rosy cheeks. I bet he couldn’t grow a beard if he tried.

Anyway, Mr. Anders avoided the subject for a while. He asked how I felt. He asked Mom about work and where we lived. He seemed kind of interested and surprised when Mom told him we lived on the water, because usually only rich people live on the water and we are definitely not rich.

Mom answered every question he asked, super politely. I think she secretly hoped Mr. Anders had just wanted to have a little chit-chat. She hoped he just wanted to talk about the weather for a while and then he’d send us on our way.

“Hello, Mrs. Griffiths. Lovely day we’re having, isn’t it?”

“Why yes, Mr. Anders, it is lovely. Such a warm fall. Unusual, don’t you think.”

“Indeed I do, Mrs. Griffiths. Well, nice to talk to you. Have a good day. Hope to see you at a basketball game this winter.”

That didn’t happen.

Mr. Anders finally pulled a folder out from under a history book. It had my name on it. He opened it up and showed Mom my midterm progress report. All my classes—even English—had i’s next to them.

“Is Trevor getting bad grades?” Mom asked.

“That’s the thing, Mrs. Griffiths. It’s hard for us to tell. None of Trevor’s teachers was able to assign him a grade, because he’s missed so much school.”

“What do the i’s stand for?”

“Incomplete.”

“Ah.” Mom just sort of looked at Mr. Anders then, waiting to see what he recommended.

“Trevor’s a bright kid…”

Mom nodded enthusiastically at that one.

“…but if he doesn’t start showing up for school every day, he’s going to get in some real trouble, academic-wise. Have you taken him to a doctor?”

“No. I don’t think it’s anything that serious.” Mom has some sort of natural aversion to doctors.

“I think you might want to take him,” Mr. Anders closed the folder, “because the farther behind he falls, the harder it’s going to be to catch up. OK? Are we good here?”

That last sentence really got on my nerves. It was like Mr. Anders figured he’d done his little bit and everything would somehow take care of itself. No one asked me what was wrong. No one asked me why I might be staying home from school. All we had to do was go to the doctor and everything would magically turn out right. Little Trevor would go back to school and Mr. Anders wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore.

Mom and me piled back into the Nissan. Mom called Dr. Bruell on her cell phone and made an appointment for the next morning. Thank the lord she listened to the radio on the way home so we didn’t have to talk about it.

Your son,

Trevor

I should have known that Mrs. Henry would even know about stuff like soccer.

Dear Dad,

Thanks for all the great advice and everything, but I don’t think it’s helping much. I went back to school today, mostly to avoid getting bugged by Rhonda for staying home. But I went to the nurse’s office to avoid going to social studies. Will Mudgett. He’s in there. If I go in the class, he’ll turn those dark eyes on me.

I tried to speak to Mrs. Henry today. I asked her if I could talk after class. She said sure. Then, when I walked up to her desk, I just stood there. She said, “What’s up?” All casual and friendly-like, because she’s really good at making kids feel comfortable. Like how she shows us stuff she wrote when she was a kid even though she knows it was bad, just so we feel more comfortable writing our own stuff. She read us this one story she wrote about these birds. The birds had dorky names like Hawkwing and Windrider. They talked to each other in this kind of pseudo-Lord-of-the-Rings-language. “Hail, Hawkwing. Thou art mighty of feather, with beak of stone.” We all laughed and she laughed along with us, which is so different than Mrs. Fletcher or Mr. Schick, who I bet would never admit to doing anything stupid in a million years, even though they do stupid things every single time they come to class.

So I stood there in front of Mrs. Henry’s desk, feeling like a total dork. What was I going to say? “Mrs. Henry, I wanted to tell you I’m pretty sure that total nerd, Will Mudgett, is going to stab me. My dead dad thought it would be a good idea if I talked to you.”

She said, “What can I do for you, Trevor?” I still just stood there. It was like when Eugene Tinkham gets up in front of class and then freezes. The whole class gets embarrassed, not just Eugene, because it’s so weird watching someone be that uncomfortable. Except Mrs. Henry didn’t seem embarrassed. I could tell her brain was working, behind all those smiley wrinkles. She was trying to figure out how to get me to say something. She was gearing up for her next technique.

“How’s the soccer season going?” she asked.

“Fine.”

“What position do you play?”

“Defender.”

“Ah, the most important position on the team.”

“How do you figure that?” I asked.

“Well, of course, it depends on your strategy. Did you watch the Italians in the 2006 World Cup? If your defense is strong enough, you only need one goal to win.”

I should have known that Mrs. Henry would even know about stuff like soccer.

“Of course,” she continued, smiling, “I’m not sure our Mr. Schick is quite up to the same level as the Italian coach.”

“Yeah, my brother Keith thinks he’s a dork.”

“Remind me again how many brothers and sisters you have,” she said.

“Three brothers and one sister,”

“And you’re the…”

“Youngest.”

“Ah. How old were you when your dad died?”

“Five.” See, this is the thing about Mrs. Henry. She doesn’t get all uncomfortable when she talks about tricky stuff like dead dads. She doesn’t start saying how sorry she is. She just jumps right in and talks about it.

“Do you remember much about him?” she asked.

“Kind of. Well, it’s sort of confusing, because I think I remember things about him or things we did. You know, like camping trips or going out in the boat. But then Rhonda or Rhett will tell me that I wasn’t even born then. So I think that sometimes when I think I’m remembering him, what I’m really doing is remembering stories about him.”

“That makes complete sense,” Mrs. Henry said. “William Wordsworth—he was a writer, like you—has a famous poem about how memory and imagination are the same thing. Trevor, you’re going to be late for class if you don’t go now. And my next class is going to start in one minute. But we could talk after class again tomorrow, if you like.”

That was it. It’s funny with people like Mrs. Henry, because we didn’t talk about anything, really, but I still felt better afterwards.

Your son,

Trevor

He spoke as if I’d just shot up heroin. All I did was chew a piece of Hubba Bubba.

Dear Dad,

I don’t think you should get on that boat, if that’s what going onward means. It seems like that boat must be going to hell.

I would like to hear more about the woods. You make them sound scary, which is weird to me, because of all the stories Mom tells me about hiking trips you took my brothers on, I can’t ever imagine you being scared to go into the woods. What are you afraid of?

We had our fifth soccer game yesterday, so the season is half over. We’ve won four games and lost one. I’m still playing on defense, which I like, because I get to see the ball coming before it gets to me, so I have time to think about what I should do. I don’t think I’m the greatest player or anything. I don’t start. But I think I’m OK. I’m pretty fast. Keith thinks Mr. Schick should play me as a midfielder and says Mr. Schick doesn’t know how to make use of my speed.

Mr. Schick calls me Rhino. I’m not sure if that’s good or not. Do you think it’s good? Is that some kind of soccer term I don’t understand? Mr. Schick is also my Bible teacher. Today in class I was chewing gum. He was talking about the prophet Samuel choosing David to be the king of Israel, then he stopped all of a sudden and looked at me.

“Trevor, are you chewing gum?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. I could feel my face getting hot.

Mr. Schick just stood there and stared at me without saying anything for about 15 seconds. The whole class got really quiet. Then he said, in kind of a whisper, “I’m very disappointed in you, Trevor.”

Geez! What a total dork! “I’m very disappointed in you, Trevor.” For chewing gum? He spoke as if I’d just shot up heroin or murdered his wife. All I did was chew a piece of Hubba Bubba.

I bet his wife is a hag. And not a sea hag. Just a regular, unhappy hag who never gets to chew gum.

But the thing that bugs me most of all is that I can’t stop thinking about it. I mean, Mr. Schick really is a dork. His hair is always greasy and he’s mostly bald anyway and he wears these glasses that ride way up on his nose. But if all it takes to be disappointed in me is for me to chew a piece of gum, what hope do I have?

I included a drawing of Mr. Schick. Ick. I’ve got to stop writing now. More tomorrow.

Your son,

Trevor

I actually like my English class.

Dear Dad,

I guess I should tell you why I’m writing you these letters. I kind of have to do it. I mean, I don’t have to write letters, but I have to write in a journal every day for my English class homework. No one gets to read what I write, not even my English teacher, Mrs. Henry. I asked her if, instead of writing in a journal, I could write letters to you. She knows you’re gone, so at first she gave me a funny look. Then she nodded and said that it actually seemed like a really good idea. I don’t think she knows I’m mailing them, but if she did, she probably wouldn’t care.

I actually like my English class. Mrs. Henry is pretty cool. She’s kind of an old hippie. Not in a good-looking way or anything. I don’t think she’s all that old, but she’s kind of wrinkly. I think she may have spent a lot of time outside or something. She calls her wrinkles smile lines and says that she tries to smile a lot to keep them growing in the right direction. Yesterday she played a record by Simon and Garfunkel, which was dorky, but at least she made an effort, you know? While it was playing, we were supposed to just write however the music made us feel. The only rule was to keep the pencil moving the entire time. I wrote a couple of pages of complete nonsense. Parsley, sage and Rosemary’s baby. That was my best line. Simon and Garfunkel. Lame.

Mr. Anders, my homeroom teacher and P.E. teacher, slapped a kid in the face today. Mr. Anders is really young for a grownup. I think this is his first job—after college, I mean. Gabe McAllister was standing toe-to-toe with Mr. Anders and totally mouthing off. Mr. Anders’s face turned bright red and then he smacked him. It totally freaked us all out. I think it freaked out Mr. Anders, too. Right afterward, Mr. Anders grabbed Gabe McAllister by the collar and hauled him out of the gym. The rest of us just stood there. Donnie Joad said if that happened to him, he’d sue.

I bet you wouldn’t sue. You would have sided with Mr. Anders, because Gabe McAllister was being a complete jerk. He deserved to be slapped.

Your son,

Trevor

Mrs. Fletcher, Math Troll

Dear Dad,

I officially do not love Junior High School.

Big surprise there, I know. I didn’t expect it to be like Disneyland or anything, but you know, I thought it would be cool to hang out with only teenagers. Now all I do is school. School has taken over my life. I don’t think school should be that much of a priority. It seems to me that the whole school system is a bad way to learn. I mean, personally, I am much more excited about summer vacation than I am about school. And so is every other kid. So doesn’t it make sense to make school more like vacation and do away with all this annoying crap like teachers and classrooms and stupid posters on the wall about dental hygiene like the one in our homeroom with the worm coming out of the apple?

Now that vacation is over, I get up, get ready for school, get driven to school, then go from homeroom to P.E. to social studies to Bible to English to lunch to math to science and then to soccer practice (the school team!) and then home to do homework (from school!) and then to bed. Tell me one person who thinks that is a good way to live? No kids, for sure. And you know all the teachers would rather be on vacation, too. So why do we do it?

My math teacher’s name is Mrs. Fletcher and she looks like a troll. She’s about five feet tall with short, red hair cut like a boy, a red nose and tons of wrinkles and she talks like a troll, too, like she’s smoked too much or got punched in the throat. It wouldn’t really surprise me if she did get punched in the throat, because she is an evil woman and there are probably 10,000 kids who wouldn’t mind taking a swing at that saggy, wrinkly throat of hers.

Mrs. Fletcher doesn’t look interesting enough to be a smoker. When I think of smokers, I think of people like Aunty Iola, who holds the cigarette in one hand and the whiskey glass in the other. Aunty Iola is still around, by the way, meaning that she hasn’t died. She’s still really cool and actually really smart, too. I like how you can smell the smoke and whiskey on her breath when she kisses you. Man, she’s got an awful cough, though.

I can’t imagine Mrs. Fletcher drinking whiskey. I guess I can imagine her drinking something else, though. Something really awful. Milk that’s gone bad. Or maybe just plain old human blood. She so clearly doesn’t like kids. She said that anyone who got less than a C on the take-home test last night was what she likes to call a “math idiot.” A C? I swear, Mrs. Rommel didn’t teach us half that stuff last year, so I’ll probably be in that group, but at least I’m not a troll. She’s a math troll.

Why do people who don’t like kids become teachers? It makes no sense. Mrs. Fletcher should have got a job in a laboratory or the city morgue or some place where she wouldn’t have to talk to people. She’d get along great with dead bodies. Or she should be a guard in a woman’s prison. Then she could get punched in the throat every day.

You probably don’t know this, but there was this guy in grade school named Brian Haase. We used to fight all the time. His best friend from last year, Max Baxter, left to go to another school. Brian and Max were the biggest bullies of grade school. He is in almost all my classes and comes up and talks to me all the time. He actually seems pretty cool. Since Donnie is now always having lunch with his “girlfriend,” I’ve been eating my lunch with Brian. We talk about all the fights we were in over the years. I won most of them, by the way, even if he says he won his share. I don’t blame him for lying. I’d lie too if I lost fights. I don’t think I lost any. Maybe a couple. Anyway, Brian is a lot nicer this year.

I guess that’s another thing that’s different about junior high school. Everyone changes.

Your son,

Trevor