just that there’s nothing down here like the Golden Gate.
I can’t wait to hear what you think!
Yours truly, Tammy
P.S. Happy belated birthday! I didn’t mean for this to be a birthday present, but if you want, maybe it could be.
Fall, 1977
Monday, September 5, 1977
Dear Diary,
It’s strange to be writing here again. I just looked at my last entry, and it was from way back in July—that time Peter got upset because Mom said she was voting for Dan White. I’ve been writing to Tammy more and more since then, so I haven’t needed to use this diary as much. It’s odd mailing those letters off, because I can’t read back over what I’ve written the way I always did with my diary, but I love reading the letters she writes back.
I’ve told her about all the shows I’ve gone to in the past couple of weeks. Describing them to her is almost more fun than the shows themselves.
And last week I told her something I’ve never told anyone, about the time freshman year when Rhonda and I tried smoking pot for the first time in the church bathroom, and convinced ourselves we were about to get sucked into the toilet. I’ve never had the nerve to tell Peter that story—he’d laugh at me for days. But Tammy just wrote back that she doesn’t like to smoke, either, because once her sister went to pet a neighbor’s dog while she was high. It ran away, and she tried to chase it and wound up tripping and breaking her wrist.
She tells me things she doesn’t tell other people, too. A few weeks ago she even sent me a collage she made.
When I opened the package it looked fragile, and I was so careful unwrapping all the tissue paper Tammy had wrapped around it, I spent a full five minutes to get the collage free. Then another ten minutes studying every inch of it.
I wouldn’t even have called it a collage. When I think about collages, I think about my kindergarten art projects, when the teachers would set out bottles of Elmer’s glue and piles of ripped construction paper and tell us to do whatever we wanted as long as we didn’t put glue in anyone’s hair. What Tammy made is nothing like my sticky childhood creations. This isn’t a kid’s craft project—it’s art.
I wrote back right away to tell Tammy exactly how awesome I thought it was. When she replied, she seemed almost embarrassed, and she kept saying it wasn’t a big deal that she’d sent it to me, but… I kind of think it was.
I owe her a letter tonight. We write more often now than we did at first, and there’s a lot I want to tell her.
I need to write this diary entry first, though, because I have to write about what’s going on with Peter. It hurts to keep a secret from Tammy, since I’m totally honest with her about everything else, but I don’t have a choice.
It started when Kevin came over for dinner tonight. Mom was cooking when he arrived, so I brought him up to my room to see the collage. He hadn’t been over since I got it.
“Wow, that’s amazing.” Kevin took a step back, studying it. I’d dug out an old frame that used to hold my sixth-grade softball-team photo and, after several tries, I’d managed to slide Tammy’s collage in without having to bend the cardboard backing. I’d torn down my old posters and hung her collage right in the middle of my bedroom wall. “Who made it?”
“My pen pal down in Orange County. I told you about her, remember?”
“Oh, right. She must be a good pen pal to be sending you her artwork.”
“Yeah, she’s awesome, actually.”
Kevin tilted his head, his eyes running over the lines of the collage. I shifted my weight from foot to foot as it occurred to me that Tammy might not have wanted me to show her work to anyone. She already said she couldn’t show it to any of her friends. But it was too late to do anything about that now.