Marcus
Three years post-graduation, mechanic, never left town
You want to know about Ellie Chen?
Man, I haven’t talked about this in… well, ever, I guess. Not the real story. People in town, they remember the surface stuff – how I asked Katie Morrison to prom, how we dated senior year, how she went off to college and I stayed here to work at Dad’s shop. Clean story, you know? Boy meets girl, boy loses girl to bigger dreams.
But that’s not the real story.
The real story starts with me being seventeen and stupid and completely convinced that Katie Morrison was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Which she was – don’t get me wrong. Blonde hair that caught the light just right, this laugh that made you want to be funnier just to hear it again. She was headed to Northwestern for journalism, talked about writing for magazines in Chicago, maybe New York someday.
And me? I was Marcus Webb, son of Tom Webb who ran Webb’s Auto Repair, destined to spend my life under the hood of pickup trucks and mini-vans, smelling like motor oil and trying to explain to people why their transmission was shot.
Katie and I had exactly zero in common, which is probably why I thought I was in love with her.
The problem was, I couldn’t string two sentences together around her. I’d been working on cars since I was twelve – could rebuild an engine blindfolded – but ask me to write a love letter? Might as well have asked me to perform brain surgery.
That’s where Ellie came in.
Elena Chen was… how do I describe Ellie? She wasn’t the kind of pretty that stopped traffic. She was quiet pretty, you know? The kind you noticed slowly, then wondered how you’d missed it before. Dark hair she kept in this messy bun, old flannel shirts that probably belonged to her dad, always carrying books that weren’t for any class.
We’d been in school together since kindergarten, but I don’t think I really saw her until senior year English, when Mrs. Patterson paired us up for this poetry project. Most kids groaned about analyzing metaphors and symbolism, but Ellie lit up like I’d just handed her Christmas morning.
“You actually like this stuff?” I asked, watching her flip through our assigned poems with genuine excitement.
. . . . . .
Katie
Five years post-graduation, journalist in Chicago, back for her grandmother’s funeral
Elena Chen.
God, I haven’t heard anyone ask about Ellie in years. Someone else from Millfield must have mentioned her, right? Let me guess – Marcus?
Of course it was Marcus.
Okay. Ellie Chen. Where do I even start?
I suppose I should begin with the obvious: Marcus Webb wrote me the most beautiful love letters I’d ever read, and they were all lies.
Not lies, exactly. That’s not fair. But they weren’t… they weren’t from him, you know? I mean, technically they were – his handwriting, his signature, his name at the bottom. But Marcus Webb, sweet as he was, could barely string together a sentence about spark plugs, let alone write poetry about my laughter sounding like wind chimes.
I knew someone was helping him. I just didn’t know who until senior year was almost over.
[Long pause]
I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up.
Marcus and I dated for about eight months senior year. Classic small-town romance – star quarterback falls for head cheerleader, except Marcus played JV baseball and I was editor of the school paper. Close enough.
He was a good guy. Is a good guy, I’m sure. Steady, reliable, the kind of person who’d give you his jacket without thinking about it and really mean it when he asked how your day was. But we were… God, we were so wrong for each other.
I was planning my escape from Millfield before I could drive. Had college applications submitted by October, scholarship essays polished until they gleamed. I wanted to write for The Atlantic or Harper’s, maybe cover foreign policy or social justice. Big dreams, big city ambitions.
Marcus wanted to take over his dad’s auto shop and raise kids who’d play Little League in the same park where he’d played. Nothing wrong with that – it’s a good life, an honest life. But it wasn’t my life.
We both knew this, but we pretended we didn’t. Maybe because it felt nice to have someone think you were perfect, even when you knew you weren’t.
That’s what the letters did – they made me feel perfect. Seen and understood and cherished in this way that was almost too beautiful to be real.
Which should have been my first clue.
The letters started in February. Marcus asked me to prom with the first one – not just asked, but wrote this gorgeous meditation on how watching me take notes in history class was like watching someone “paint with words.” I remember reading it and thinking, When did Marcus Webb become a poet?
But I was seventeen and flattered and maybe a little naive. When someone writes you letters that make you feel like the most fascinating person in the world, you don’t question it too hard.
. . . . .