Kevin Henkes

For Susan

1 A Beginning

"Are you Martha Boyle?"

Martha nodded.

"You don't know me," said the woman at the door. "Olive Barstow was my daughter. I was her mother."

Martha heard herself gasp. A small, barely audible gasp.

I don't know how well you knew Olive," said the woman. "She was so shy." The woman reached into the pocket of the odd smock she was wearing and retrieved a folded piece of paper. "But I found this in her journal, and I think she'd want you to have it."

The rusted screen that separated them gave the woman a gauzy appearance. Martha cracked open the door to receive the pink rectangle.

"That's all," the woman said, already stepping off the stoop. "And thank you. Thank you, Martha Boyle."

The woman mounted a very old bicycle and pedaled away, her long, sleek braid hanging behind her like a tail.

Breathing deeply to quiet her heart, Martha remained by the door thinking about Olive Barstow, unable for the moment to unfold the paper and read it.

2 An End

Olive Barstow was dead. She'd been hit by a car on Monroe Street while riding her bicycle. Weeks ago. That was about all Martha knew.

A sad image of Olive rose in Martha's mind: a quiet, unremarkable girl, a loner with averted eyes, clinging to the lockers when walking down the hallways at school.

The image that flashed next was imagined and worse: Olive flying through the air, after impact, like a bird, then scraping along the pavement and lying in a heap at the curbside, never to move again.

3 Hopes

Slowly, Martha unfolded the piece of paper. Olive's handwriting was perfectly formed?small, dense, controlled?like rows and rows of pearls. Martha read, hearing the words in Olive's thin, hesitant voice.

June 7: My Hopes

I hope that I can write a book someday. Not like the kind we did in writing lab. A real one, like in a library or bookstore. And not a mystery or adventure one, but an emotional one. Maybe I can make kids change their opinions on emotion books like some authors did to me. Most kids at school call the kind of book I want to do a chapter book, but I call them novels. Maybe I could be the youngest person ever to write a novel. Maybe I can develop a unique style of writing that no other authors have. I already know the first sentence of my novel. "The orphan's secret wish was that her bones were hollow like a bird's and that she could just takeoff and fly away."

I also hope that one day I can go to a real ocean such as the Atlantic or Pacific. I like Madison with all the lakes (especially Lake Wingra), but I think it is not the same. When I'm eighteen I want to live in a cottage on a cliff that looks over the sea.

What else do I hope?

I hope that I get to know Martha Boyle next year (or this summer). I hope that we can be friends. That is my biggest hope. She is the nicest person in my whole entire class.

An eerie feeling invaded Martha's body. She was holding a piece of paper that had come from the journal of someone her own age, someone now dead. But there was more. Martha would be leaving with her family the next morning to visit her grandmother at her grandmother's house on the Atlantic Ocean (Martha's favorite place in the world). Also, she had recently decided that she was going to be a writer-and this was still such a private thought that she hadn't even told her best friend, or her brother, or her parents. And, what, she wondered, had she ever done or said to Olive Barstow that would compel her to write that Martha was "the nicest person in my whole entire class"? Most eerie?she would never know the answer.

Minutes earlier, she had been packing her bags for vacation, feeling completely happy, and now she felt different?altered. The longer Martha mulled over the coincidences, the more startling they became.

4 Martha's Father

"Who was at the door?" asked Dennis Boyle, Martha's father. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

"Oh, no one," Martha replied, shrugging. "Just someone for me. Nothing really." She folded the paper and hid it in her palm. "Really. Nothing. No one."

"Well, that surely clears things up," said her father. He tipped his head and half smiled. His expression was hard for Martha to interpret; she read it as: I love you, but I don't understand you.

"Listen," her father continued, "I need your help. Lucy's still napping, and I have to go to the store to get a few new things?toys, books, whatever?to keep her occupied on the airplane tomorrow. I need you to watch her when she wakes up."

"Sure," said Martha.

"Your mother should be home soon. And Vince is at Robbie's house. If anyone asks about dinner, tell them I said it's a carryout night. Too much to do before we leave for Godbee's." He was holding a laundry basket heaped high with all sorts of things: clothes, newspapers, a rubber ball, dirty dishes, CDs, bottles of sunscreen, Lucy's plastic sandals. "This basket represents my life," he said in a slightly numbed tone, placing the basket solidly on the coffee table. "I'll be back."

And he was gone.

The summer seemed to be taking its toll on Martha's father. Whenever possible, he found an excuse to escape from the house by himself. He admitted that he was looking forward to the end of summer and the beginning of school; Martha and her older brother, Vince, would be away most of the day, of course, and Lucy would be going to nursery school three mornings a week.

It was the middle of August. After Martha and her family returned from their vacation, there would be just one week for her father to get through before he'd have more time alone.

Dennis Boyle had quit his job as a lawyer when Lucy was born and had been taking care of her full-time for the past two and a half years. He also had been trying to write a novel during this time, although no one in the family had read a word. Periodically, and with growing frequency, his face was darkened by thought. "The novel," he'd say. "I'm thinking about my novel."

Martha hadn't told anyone about her decision to be a writer yet, mostly because she didn't want her father to think she was copying him. But she had given herself a deadline?she would tell him before they came back home from Godbee's.