Gilman is a doofus, but man, is he ever big.
Dear Dad,
An eighth grader called me “wussy boy” today. Will Mudgett has successfully branded me as a wussy.
David Gilman, this big kid with spiky red hair bumped into me in the hallway when I was opening my locker. “Oops. Sorry, wussy boy,” he said, winking like a dork at his friend, Jordan Sackett. Gilman is a doofus, but man, is he ever big. He must weigh 250 pounds. He looks like a grown man, except for the doofus grin that’s always on his face. If you told Gilman that his whole family died in a plane crash, he’d just stand there looking at you, grinning. This time he was grinning at me.
Gilman is a jerk. He’s a defender on my soccer team, like me. He’s always trying to give the seventh graders titty twisters on the way to games. When Gilman called me a wussy boy, I should have one-two punched him right in his stupid grin.
I talked to Mrs. Henry after her class today. “So what do you know for sure?” I said.
“What?”
“What do you know for sure? You said there were only a few things you know for sure. What are they?”
Mrs. Henry looked really serious all of a sudden, by which I mean her smile lines went completely horizontal. But only for a second or two. Then they curved back into place.
“Humm. I know—I know for sure that Fisherman’s Friends throat lozenges are the best throat lozenges. I know for sure that the best meal I ever had was a loaf of crusty bread, a wedge of ripe brie and a bowl of Washington strawberries. And I know God for sure.”
I knew she’d sneak God in there somehow.
“There are different kinds of truths, Trevor. There’s the Fisherman’s-Friends truths and strawberries-are-good truths and two-plus-two-equals-four truths. The factual kind. That kind of truth is valuable and there’s less of it around than you may think. It reassures us. Gives us that pause, when we can exhale and get our feet back under ourselves.
“Then there’s the kind of truth you can know. The rarest of all truths. I mean that you can know it the same way you know me and I know you. You can relate to it. You can relationship with it. You can have it over for coffee, so to speak. That truth is called God. God is truth and you can know him. It’s not always a reassuring kind of truth. Sometimes it’s damn unsettling. But it’s truth. He’s truth.”
I just stared at her.
“You had another question for me the last time we talked,” Mrs. Henry said, “about whether people who are dead can help you.”
“Yeah?”
“Death, it seems to me, is a change in the physical state. The physical state does not have much to do with the state of The Other. God’s laws—the laws of The Other—don’t pay much attention to death, time or space.
“Let me pose a theory to you,” Mrs. Henry said, as she doodled on a scrap of paper with her well-chewed pencil. “First of all, let’s agree that God lives outside of what we think of as time and space. Let’s agree that God lives—or perhaps lives isn’t the right word. Let’s say he exists—on another plane where time and space are irrelevant. OK? If you made a bargain of The Other—an agreement that God would honor—then it wouldn’t matter to God if the bargain were made between two people standing together in the same room or if they were two people on opposite sides of the earth, right? Is it also possible that it wouldn’t matter if they lived 100 years apart? Is it possible that it wouldn’t matter if one was alive and one was dead?”
“What kind of bargain are you talking about?” I asked. But the bell rang. Mrs. Henry smiled and told me we’d have to talk another time.
Your son,
Trevor