SLICE OF WRY by Anna Breslaw
Editor’s Note: The name of Hannah is a pseudonym for the actual student.
Dear Hannah,
I don’t know if you remember me, but I remember you.
In the sixth grade, you were in a few of my classes. You hardly ever said anything except when books came up. You would never participate, but your mouth would always be half-open, like you wished you could muster up the courage to say something.
I had a feeling that if you ever said it, it would blow us all away.
Around that time, I went to the same sleepover you did. I remember you were sitting on the bed reading, listening to the big clunky headphones we had back then earbuds weren’t cool yet a CD spinning in the player. Nelly Furtado’s self-title, I think.
Actually, I brushed your hair, Hannah; it was always really long and tangled. I recommended a place for you to have it cut, but you just smiled a little and shook your head like it wasn’t for you.
I remember when we talked about writing. I always knew you wrote, just like I did, but you kept to yourself so much that I didn’t really know more than that. We made a promise to write a book together, actually, and I spent some time with you back then, coming up with character sketches and concepts for story lines.
You did that AOL role-playing thing I was always torn as to whether it was cool or geeky, but I had a feeling not everyone was as good at it as you were. It incorporated writing and kept you safe behind a computer monitor, drew a distinct line between you and other people. I think that’s why you liked it so much.
You didn’t have many friends, did you, Hannah?
I remember hearing kids make fun of your frizzy hair, big glasses and oversized T-shirts even the way you spoke, which you rarely did. I never joined the taunting, but I never said anything to make it stop.
I mean, I wasn’t exactly the most popular kid either, Hannah. It’s not like my reputation could’ve survived if I had defended you. It would’ve put a barrier of fire between me and you, and everyone else.
Every kid needs friends. Just because you had something special doesn’t mean that concept didn’t apply to you.
I couldn’t understand your indifference to material culture how you could be so ignorant of who’s going out with who at school? How could you let yourself go the way you did?
Was writing just an excuse to shut yourself off from the world? To make yourself different? What gives you the right to be yourself, Hannah, and not me?
I never realized it, but I was a little angry at you then. Sometimes I think I still am.
So I started to avoid you. I stopped going out of my way to talk to you in class or in the halls. As middle school ended I went to the movies and out to dinner with kids in school who didn’t write books or make up fantasy worlds and toward the end of the eighth grade, Hannah, you just disappeared.
Now I’m 18 years old. I talk over crowds and pop my collar. I wear American Eagle. I hang out with popular people the same people who made fun of you, maybe even me, once.
I write, but my writing is fused with the social circles that I know, the friendships I’ve made, the experiences I’ve had in a world beyond computer chat rooms. It isn’t bad, but it’s different from the undiluted way you probably write.
I haven’t thought of you much these past four years. To be honest, the active social life I am still sometimes mildly surprised to claim as mine has really kept me from thinking of you at all until recently.
The other day, outside Rita’s Water Ice, kids were talking about some girl who dropped out in the ninth grade for home-schooling and got into NYU’s prestigious dramatic writing major.
It was you, of course. We had both unknowingly applied to I had been rejected from the exact same major. At the exact same school.
"But you’d rather be you than her, Anna," my friend dismissed.
I shrugged.
"Oh, come on," my friend pressed. "She had no friends. Then again, that probably made her a pretty good writer."
Ouch.
My mom called NYU despite my protests to ask why I had been rejected. They told her that my math SAT score was too low, although my writing was well-received.
"At least they liked your stories," she told me as she hung up the phone.
I wonder.
Nobody even knew I wrote until recently. Unlike you, it was not the predominant thing that came to mind when someone thought of me, which was my goal. Specifically, to avoid being weird and unpopular.
Sometimes I wonder if it was karma that manifested itself in my failure to stick up for you, sifted my papers into the rejection pile and yours into the acceptance pile. Other times I realize how stupid and metaphorical that is and accept the fact that you’re just a better writer that the best man won.
In this case, "winning" is relative. I didn’t let writing put an invisible wall between me and the world, but you’re going to the very school the specific program I would castrate, maim and slaughter to attend.
So, Hannah, if you remember me, are you as surprised at how everything worked out as I am? I wish I could have one more conversation with you, ask who you think got the better deal.
How can there be a best man if I can’t figure out which side is the winning one?
Anna Breslaw, waking up on the right side of the bed since 1987.

