john marsden

letters from the inside
(Set sometime near the end of the Albertane Tour.)

It was a Tuesday, around 2 a.m. and Isaac Hanson couldn't sleep for what he was worth. He sighed and rolled over, listening to Zac's peaceful slumber. Taylor's was somewhat fitful, but at least he'd managed to sleep. It was pretty hot and stuffy, although it was the middle of September already. But that wasn't what kept Isaac awake. He could handle bad weather pretty well.

What kept Isaac awake was not the movement of the bus, nor the hum of the wheels on the pavement, nor the traffic around the bus. In fact, Isaac found all of those to be comforting and familiar. Isaac was not awake because of anything in his surroundings, whether it be sight or sound or feeling.

Isaac was unable to sleep because of the activity in his brain. He'd tried to clear it earlier, but had found it to be useless attempts. Isaac could not get something out of his mind. A book that he'd read, just for fun because he was out of school now and no longer had to do the assignments. But he had liked the book, very much even. It was beautifully written in his opinion.

But it was disturbing in a way. The ending bothered him. That was how the author had meant for it to be, of course. It was supposed to haunt your for hours after you set it down. But not to this extent—not to the point where you can't sleep at night for worrying over a fictional character in a book that you had read—especially one that's meant for people who are a few years younger than yourself to begin with.

Taylor groaned in his sleep and sat up quickly in his bed, which caused him to hit his head on the ceiling of his bunk. "OW! Oh crap."

"Taylor, be quiet!" Isaac hissed quickly. Taylor grunted something that Isaac guessed he probably wouldn't have wanted to hear anyway. The blankets stirred for a few minutes and then Taylor quieted again. Isaac thought he had gone back to sleep, until he heard his brother whispering to him.

"Ike? I had a really strange dream." Taylor whispered.

"Good for you." Isaac sighed. All he wanted was to go to sleep, and he knew that it wasn't going to happen tonight and was in a bad mood because of that.

"Ike, just listen." Taylor begged. Isaac rolled his eyes and sighed a little.

"Fine." He gave in.

Just then Zac took his opportunity to interrupt by waking up just enough to go into a severe coughing fit. Taylor's eyes shot open and he smacked his head on the top of his bunk again. Isaac had already scrambled out of bed by then and crouched down by Zac's bunk. He heard Taylor moan from above them and would have smirked if he wasn't so concerned about Zac, who was now starting to wheeze and pant, trying to catch his breath between huge racking coughs.

"Taylor, get some water!" Isaac ordered quickly.

Taylor nodded slightly and dashed out of the room. Isaac heard him trip over something in the kitchen and curse to himself, then the tap water came on and a few seconds later Taylor reappeared with a glass of water.

Isaac gave it to Zac who at first shook his head and then accepted it. Taylor and Isaac both patted Zac's shoulders and rubbed his back and tried to soothe him.

"I need air. Help! LET ME OUT!" Zac panicked and pushed past them both and staggered over to the windows. He opened one up and stuck his face out, taking deep gulping breaths of air. Taylor and Isaac only managed to stare. Out in the "kitchen" the boys heard Walker trip over very likely the same thing that Taylor had tripped over only minutes ago. A minute later he was in the doorway and had flipped on the lights. He looked blearily at them.

"Wassagnon?" he asked. Taylor bit his lip to hide a grin.

"Nothing dad, Zac just had some trouble breathing again. I think it has to do with the c-l-a-u-s-t-r-a-p-h-o-b-i-a." Isaac answered.

"I think that's wrong, Ike." Taylor said thoughtfully.

Isaac rolled his eyes, as did Walker who was now over at the window rubbing Zac's back and asking him questions.

"Boys, why don't you all sleep on the floor with the windows open tonight." Walker suggested in as cheerful a voice he could muster at the time. But Taylor and Isaac heard the undertones in his voice and both quickly agreed. Zac gave them a look that told them all that he wasn't that stupid. Still, Isaac had to admit that when they'd all spread out on the floor with the windows open after all of the excitement, he could sleep. Finally. He was really glad right then that his mother and younger siblings weren't along on this segment of the tour because they would have all been awake for sure if that were the case.

*Next Day*

They'd arrived at the hotel around 9am. Isaac and his father would be in one room, and Taylor and Zac in another. The rooms were connected by a door. Isaac sat on his bed and stared at the wall. It wasn't that he found the blank cream wall very interesting, it was more that he loathed to move. Things had been hectic lately, and he'd lost a lot of sleep. Isaac's ears perked up a bit when he heard his brothers in the next room over start discussing the very book that had been keeping him awake before Zac had his coughing attack the night before. Taylor had started the discussion by casually mentioning that Tracey shouldn't have lied to Mandy in the beginning of the book. Isaac heard Zac snort and he stifled the urge to laugh, knowing that Zac would have a sarcastic remark or two all pent up for Taylor and his virtuous opinions of everything.

"Oh puh-lease Tay! What if Tracey had told the truth? No one would have written to her if she admitted to being in juvie!" Zac argued. Isaac grinned, thinking that Taylor would not give up so easily. He was right.

"I would have! I prefer bad truths to good lies, or something like that." Taylor said defensively. Isaac shook his head. Taylor could exaggerate quite a bit when given a chance. Isaac would have given Tracey a chance probably, but he wouldn't have actually been ok with her situation.

"No way! You would have been like 'yeah, well sadly I'm leaving for a LONG time.'" Zac began, but Taylor interrupted him.

"That's NOT true Zac!" Taylor scoffed. Isaac was still waiting for Jessie to interrupt. He couldn't help but wonder what was taking his little firecracker so long in responding. In secret, he almost always pulled for Jessie in the spats over books, because she was so strong and sure of herself. And very opinionated.

"It reminds me of email friends. You know each other, but you don't." Zac put in thoughtfully. Isaac could almost hear Taylor's brain rattle with that one, knowing that Taylor wouldn't have thought of that himself. Because some of his closest friends were online, and Zac liked to try and keep most of his relationships "real" instead. It was one of their favorite arguments.

"Well, what about the ending?" Taylor changed the subject to one that was possibly worse.

"Oh. That freaks me out a little bit." Zac admitted. Isaac nodded. Suddenly he realized that was his ticket into their conversation and pounded on the wall with a grin on his face. For a moment things were silent on the other side. Then two sets of quiet tapping were heard from the other side. Isaac could hear his brothers snickering and rolled his eyes.

"Hello, is that you Isaac?" Taylor whispered in an English accent.

"Y'all don't gotta knock, door's open." Zac added in a thick, Southern American accent. Ike smirked, thinking to himself that his brothers must have had sugar for breakfast. He decided to give them a taste of their own medicine by answering them in a French accent. And the French language.

"Au fait, oui. En cars. Je volonte' pourvoir vous en une minute. Rester voila'!" Isaac replied with a snicker. There was a shuffling and a small cough beyond the wall.

"What's he talking about?" Zac wondered aloud.

"How should I know? I took Italian," replied Taylor with a shrug.

"Yeah and I'm not even bilingual except a few phrases." Zac said dejectedly. Isaac chuckled to himself, from the doorway to Tay and Zac's room.

"How'd you do that?" Taylor asked with a baffled look on his face. Isaac smirked again.

"Vous ne comprenez?" he teased. Zac knew that meant 'don't you understand?' in French, and he shot a glare at Isaac.

"In ENGLISH, please." Taylor groaned. Isaac knew when he had pushed his brothers far enough.

"Sorry guys, just kidding," he apologized. Then he remembered the reason that he'd wanted to come and talk to them in the first place.

"Would you guys be willing to cooperate with a crazy idea I had?" he asked hopefully.

"Sure, if Mom agrees." Taylor grinned. Zac wasn't quite so trusting.

"What exactly IS your idea, first, Ike?" he queried. Isaac laughed.

"Let me go talk to Mom and I'll be right back," he dismissed the question. Isaac caught a glimpse of Zac's worried gaze as he left, and Taylor's optimistic and trusting one.

*5 minutes later*

"Mom thinks it's a great idea." Isaac said smugly when he returned. Usually it was Taylor who came up with the serious alternate lesson plans. Isaac and Zac usually were rejected because they worked harder on finding ways that they could goof off then ways that they could learn better.

Isaac began to explain to his brothers what he had suggested. Taylor smiled and agreed right off, Zac seemed to roll it over in his brain a bit before finally agreeing as well. The boys giggled to themselves in anticipation. They both wanted to do the project right, and Isaac's idea seemed like it would be fun.

All of a sudden it occurred to Isaac that something was missing.

"Where's Jessie?" he asked.

"She's doing The Great Gatsby instead." Taylor and Zac answered simultaneously. They looked at each other and smiled. Isaac took an exaggerated step backward from them.

"Oooooh k, well let's get to work on the projects then, shall we? Pick up your pencils and start the 5 minute essays guys."

The boys did as they were told while Isaac went back to his room and began to rummage around for his old cassette player/ audio recorder. As he did this, he thought to himself about the book and how it had affected him. It had made him think, though it wasn't intended for his age group he still found it to be fair reading. If not, wonderful.

The book began with a couple of girls who wrote to each other, and it began on a cheerful note. The girls got along, and soon became close. That part had its purpose, but it had bored him just a bit.

Further into the story, things changed a bit. The letters now held secrets. Things were less happy on both sides than they had originally seemed. That was when Mandy first caught Tracey in a lie.

From there on, things began to pick up the pace. Tracey admitted to having lied about her life. While she had originally claimed to be wealthy, have a boyfriend and a horse and a loving family, she now had to admit that she was in a women's juvenile delinquent center. And that she would not be out from there anytime soon. In fact, once she was a legal adult, she would be sent to the women's prison across the street.

The book was set in Australia. Originally, Isaac had thought that Australia was extremely gender ruled. He figured that country had many public schools that were single sex, and prisons and such. It just seemed odd to him. It had also shook him up a bit to think about how well people could hide things. Pain especially. It had, strangely enough, made him worry for his brothers. Did they have secrets from him too? It wasn't that he thought they were secretly axe murderers or something. He just wondered if they were telling him the whole story. Recently when he asked what was wrong, it seemed that they were so uncertain, but usually they said they were tired. Isaac thought that had to be an understatement to say the least. He was completely beaten himself.

Isaac sighed as he picked up the cassette recorder. It had been in Taylor's suitcase, for some unknown reason. Probably Taylor had wanted to record song ideas or something of the sort. Isaac popped the cassette that was in it out, and carefully laid it on Taylor's bed. He then grabbed a new one. He was about to walk out of the room with those items, when he noticed what was written on the cassette he'd put on Taylor's bed.

It read "May 5 through June 10" in Taylor's sloppy, scrawly handwriting. And Isaac knew it was one of his little audio journal/letters to friends back home. The thought provoked a smile. Too much Felicity for that boy, it was. For just a moment, Isaac wanted nothing more then to snatch the tape up and have a listen. There were all of Taylor's thoughts and feelings that he had been holding back from Isaac all this time. That was assuming there were any...but still. Isaac shook his head to clear his mind.

No, he decided as he walked from the room. Tracey had eventually come clean, and so would his brothers if they were hiding anything. Isaac walked back out the door and into the next room again. He found Taylor leaning back in his chair, looking up at the ceiling. Isaac raised his eyebrows in mock surprise.

"Taylor, you do know that a 5 minute essay isn't necessarily written in 5 minutes time, don't you?" he teased. Taylor grinned and shook his head. He was tracing the patterns on the faux wooden desktop.

"I'm done." Zac breathed and put down his own pencil. Isaac nodded his approval at his brothers' speed in writing. He began to unwrap the cassette tape, drifting off into his own thoughts again.

Isaac’s thoughts returned momentarily to the plot of the book. Tracey had tried to push Mandy aside for awhile after being caught in the lie. But slowly, Mandy convinced her that they should keep writing, and that there was no way for her to be convinced otherwise. She wanted to get to know the real Tracey, and tough cookies for her if she didn't want to keep in touch because Mandy wouldn't ever give up until she got her reply. Isaac admired that. He wasn't very sure that he could have handled that situation as well as Mandy did. In fact, he was pretty certain that he couldn't have.

"Ike?" Taylor's voice cut into Isaac's thoughts.

"Oh! Sorry. I'm ready for you." Isaac replied as he clumsily pressed the record button. Taylor gave him an puzzled look and cleared his throat.

"I see this book as a very amazing piece of teenage reader directed literature. It's taking two separate worlds and merging them. They don't make one world, though, they remain as two but with a shaky link between them. But the link grows stronger as the girls learn acceptance of each other, and the truth. One day, at almost its strongest point, the link is broken, not by the girls, but by the gravitational pull of the real world around them," he finished.

Isaac considered that for a moment. Taylor's essay was poetic, and had its own marked qualities no doubt. But it left something to be desired, a sense of having escaped unknown danger, as if you had been sheltered from a blow. It was an excellent piece of writing, but it didn't at all capture Isaac's feelings on the book. He took the paper wordlessly from Taylor, and handed him the recorder.

"On three, Zac." Taylor said, as he put his finger on the record button. Zac nervously dog-eared his paper. This report meant a lot to his grade, and the book had meant something to him. He only hoped it would be good enough for his mother.

"One, two, three." Taylor counted off, and then pointed to Zac when he pressed down the record button. It was a small gesture that showed his experience with recording voices. He may have even done it subconsciously.

Zac heaved a large sigh and began his own report.

"The book is about two girls. One is Tracey, who put an ad in the paper for a pen pal. The other one, Mandy, answered. They started writing and Tracey told Mandy about how perfect her life was, but one day Mandy caught on that Tracey was lying. Tracey admitted she was in juvie, and she was in there for something real bad and would probably never get out. She wanted to stop writing then, but Mandy didn't. So they kept writing and Tracey found out Mandy's brother was violent and beat her up sometimes. The book ends not long after Mandy tells Tracey that her brother is going to get a gun as a gift. Tracey continues to write, asking Mandy where she is at, but she never receives a reply." Zac finished.

Isaac was chilled by this version of the story. It was blunt, and captured the essence of the book much better than Taylor's had. It may not have been so well worded, but Isaac thought it was good.

"That's fine, guys. You can go." Isaac told them.

His mind began to drift again. When Mandy had first admitted that her brother was a problem, she had been hesitant about it. But once she really opened up and began to discuss it, it had been awful. Isaac had put himself in Mandy's place. He tried to imagine that he was small and young and scared of his own brother. But it was just unfathomable. He was thankful to no end that his brothers and sisters had no reason to fear him. It was just sick that anyone should ever have to be afraid of their own family.

And the end was so sad. Tracey had opened up around Mandy, the girls had become real friends. Best friends. So why did that have to be taken away from them? Had Mandy been shot by her brother? The thought made him feel physically ill. How could you not? It was just wrong, wrong, wrong. And yet it happened every day. Not a month ago, Taylor had attended three funerals, one for his friend who was shot, one for her boyfriend who had shot first her and then himself, and one for an unrelated shooting. It was awful.

Isaac started when Silverchair's "Anthem for the Year 2000" blasted, and gave Zac a look. Zac ignored it and hummed along with the CD. Zac knew he was the only Silverchair fan in the family, so Isaac took that as his cue to leave the room. He went back to his own room and found Taylor on the laptop computer, he'd raced there to check his email as soon as Isaac had dismissed them. Isaac suddenly remembered something.

"Hey Tay?"

"Yeah?" Taylor looked up from the computer screen. His expression was a bit concerned when he saw the odd look on his brother's face.

"Taylor, what was that strange dream you had last night on the bus?" Isaac questioned.

Taylor seemed baffled for a minute, and then he remembered. "Oh,right. It was about the book. I dreamed that I was Mandy and you were Tracey. Erm, sorry. Well anyway when the book ends, you know how there's no real ending and I hate that sort of book because I want closure for everything?"

Isaac nodded. It was one of Taylor's more annoying traits, in his opinion. But maybe it was understandable for the kid to want stability in such a chaos filled life. "Go on." Isaac encouraged.

Taylor shrugged. "Well I guess my subconscious came up with its own ending to the story. In my dream I got shot, but I went and visited you as a ghost. I told you what had happened and you wanted to avenge my death, but instead I made you promise to live your life to the fullest even if it wasn't going to be an easy one. You agreed..." Taylor trailed off at the ending, now seeming to be caught up in his own thoughts.

Isaac realized that he'd been brushing Taylor off a lot lately when he wanted to talk. He realized a bit unhappily that it wasn't Taylor who was distancing them, it was himself. And possibly Zac, who was going through that "I want to be independent by myself thankyouverymuch" stage.

Isaac knew he would have to make more time for Taylor in the future. But at the moment, he'd suddenly found himself inspired. Perhaps there was more than one way to look at the story. Perhaps what it needed most was an ending. Or maybe he just wanted to tell it in his own words. Whatever the case, Isaac got out a pencil and paper and began to write.

Letters from the Inside: Marsden

"Yeah, my brother's a creep. I mean, he's creepy." Mandy once wrote in a letter to Tracey...

Note from the author: This book touched me in a special way, and I would like to thank my best friend *you know who you are* for loaning it to me. Thank you. I'd also like to dedicate this little chat to my own brother. He'll never read it, but I think it fits. And once again Jackie, you're wonderful. Thank you so much for everything, especially your endless patience with me. And thank you everyone who reads this, just because. I would love to hear your reaction to this book chat!! *grin* -Liz*

Copyright ©1999. All rights reserved.