Dear Kurt,

In the second sentence of your suicide note you said it would be pretty easy to understand. It is and it isn’t. I mean, I get how it goes, what the story is and how it ends. Becoming a star didn’t make you happy. It didn’t make you invincible. You were still vulnerable, furious at everything and in love with it at once. The world was too much for you. People were too close to you. You said it in one sentence I can’t get out of my head: I simply love people … so much that it makes me feel too fucking sad. Yes, I understand.

I feel it, too, when I see Aunt Amy rewinding the answering machine, playing a Jesus-man message from months ago as if it were new. When I see Hannah running over in her new dress to meet Kasey, all the while looking over her shoulder at Natalie. When I see Tristan, playing air guitar to one of your songs, when what he wants is to write his own. When I see Dad, coming over to kiss my head before bed, too tired to worry about where I go at night. When I see the boy in Bio who fills the always-empty seat beside him with a stack of books. Everything gets in. I can’t stop them.

So yes, in a way, it’s easy to understand. But on the other hand, it makes no fucking sense, as you would say. To kill yourself. No fucking sense at all. You didn’t think about the rest of us. You didn’t care about what would happen to us after you were gone.

It’s been three days since Sky broke up with me. I couldn’t bear to see him at school the next day, or the day after that, so I told Dad I wasn’t feeling well and stayed in bed, burying myself under the blankets. When Natalie and Hannah called to check on me, I texted them back that I had the flu. I wasn’t actually sick, but I drank some NyQuil from the medicine cabinet and slept away the days. Dad cooked me Lipton chicken noodle soup every night when he got back from work, which is what Mom used to make me when I was home sick. It was so sweet, him trying like that, but it only made me feel worse. Tonight, when I was still loopy from the cold medicine that I didn’t really need, I asked him for a lullaby. He sang “This Land Is Your Land.” I closed my eyes and tried to travel in my mind to the feeling that I’d had as a kid when he sang it.

But I couldn’t go anywhere, except back to the night that May died. And to the nights before that—what it was like waiting for her to come back. There’s something wrong with me. I can’t say what it is.

I was frozen still when May fell. The policeman found me there the next day, just looking down at the water—that’s what they say. I don’t remember. When they asked, “What happened to your sister?” I didn’t answer. They found her body in the river.

Dad never pushed me, but Mom asked all the time, wanting to know what we’d been doing at the bridge, why we had gone there, why weren’t we at the movies like we were supposed to be. I think Mom was mad at me for not being able to explain. I think that could be why she moved to California and stopped being my mother. I think she thought it was my fault. And I think she’s right. If she knew the truth, she’d never come back.

One day just before she left, I remember Mom was wiping off the counter after breakfast. She looked up and said, “Laurel, did she jump?”

“No,” I said. “The wind blew her off.”

Mom just nodded back at me, her eyes teary, before she turned away.

After Dad went to bed tonight, I lay awake. I tiptoed down the hall and started to turn the handle of the door to May’s room. But then I turned it back. I was afraid, suddenly, of how I knew she wouldn’t be there. Of how quiet all of her things would seem, staring at me just as she’d left them.

Nirvana means freedom. Freedom from suffering. I guess some people would say that death is just that. So, congratulations on being free, I guess. The rest of us are still here, grappling with all that’s been torn up.

Yours,

Laurel

Dear Amelia Earhart,

I keep thinking of you, having flashes of what it would have been like in your plane that morning before you disappeared. You’d already flown twenty-two thousand miles of your journey across the world, with only seven thousand to go over the nearly empty stretch of the Pacific. You’d meant to make it to a tiny island called Howland. From the air, its shape would be hard to tell apart from the clouds.

Your plane didn’t have quite enough fuel, and your maps were off by a little bit. Radio communication was bad. When you sent a message to the Coast Guard on Howland—We must be on you, but we cannot see you. Fuel is running low—were you in a panic? They answered back twenty minutes later, but didn’t know if you’d heard them. And then they got your last message, full of static, an hour after that. They sent up smoke signals to you, but we’ll never know if you were close enough to see them. They sent out search parties, and we’ve been searching ever since. It’s a testament to how much we loved you that we are still looking seventy-five years after your death. But sometimes I can’t help wonder what would be different if we finally had an answer.

Today is Monday, my first day back at school after the breakup with Sky. Dad finally said that he thought that he should make an appointment with the doctor, and I knew I couldn’t go on playing sick forever. So when it was time to switch to Aunt Amy’s yesterday, I said I was feeling better. This morning I put on a sweatshirt that I hadn’t worn since eighth grade and pulled my hair back. At lunch, I didn’t feel like eating my kaiser roll or even a Nutter Butter. I went over to our table and sat down with Natalie and Hannah. Before they could start asking questions, I blurted it out. “He broke up with me.”

They went into a chorus of Oh my god, are you okay, how come? After something really bad happens, the next worse thing is people feeling sorry for you about it. It’s like confirmation that something is terribly wrong. I tried to hold back the tears that were burning behind my eyes, but they came out anyway. Natalie and Hannah rushed to put their arms around me, and Hannah pulled my head against her shoulder and started to stroke it. “He has no idea what he lost. You are the best, most beautiful girl ever. What a complete idiot asshole, Laurel.”

“No,” I said, my voice muffled by her shirt. “I think it’s me.”

“What? No it’s not. It’s not.”

“I can’t go to chorus today,” I told Hannah. “I can’t see him.”

“Okay, it’s all right,” she said. “You don’t have to go. We’ll ditch.”

So in eighth period we snuck off campus, walking through the little flecks of swirling snow that were melting against the blacktop, and went to the sketchy Safeway to get some liquor that we would drink at Natalie’s house before her mom got back from work. We climbed up onto Natalie’s roof, bundled up with blankets, and passed the bottle of cinnamon After Shock between us. Hannah was trying to make me laugh and trying to think of a new boyfriend for me, suggesting friends of Kasey’s that made Natalie wince, and then Evan Friedman—“He and Britt are on the outs again, and I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”

But I could hardly pay attention to what they were saying. There was only one thought that I could hear, that kept repeating itself in my head, over and over. She’s dead. And then it happened. Maybe because I was grateful for Natalie and Hannah, or maybe because I was too tired and too sad to try to be like her anymore—I just said it out loud.

“My sister’s dead.”

It was silent for a moment. Finally, Hannah nodded. “I know,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

It didn’t make sense. “What do you mean you know?”

She hesitated, and then she said, “Tristan told us. He and Kristen used to hang out with some kids from Sandia, and they said that a girl from there died. It wasn’t that hard to figure out that she was your sister.”