Hey Kid! with Elana Arnold (THE QUESTION OF MIRACLES)

hey kid

Hey, Kid!

EKA at 11Eleven, huh? It seemed like eleven was going to feel older than this. Like it would be a bigger deal, more of a transition, maybe even magical. Double digits plus one, the symmetry of how it looks, “11,” two tall proud straight-backed lines.

You don’t feel like that, though. Not tall. Not proud. Not straight-backed. Rather, you hunch forward, shoulders rolled, eyes down, thick glasses slipping down the bridge of your nose. Hoping no one notices you, but at the exact same time wishing desperately that someone might notice after all.

Not a boyfriend. That’s not what you want. What you want—what you need—is a friend. A bosom friend, as Anne of Green Gables would say, a best friend. A second half, the answer to your echo.

At the mall, you gaze wistfully at the display of BEST FRIENDS necklaces, one heart divided into jagged halves, made whole when pressed together. At school, the necklaces seem to follow you, to mock you, swinging from the necks of so many girls—half of them reading BE FRIE, the other halves declaring ST NDS.

You contemplate buying a pair for yourself and the girl Laura around the corner. You imagine presenting it to her—it would be almost like proposing. What if she refused to accept it? What if she said she liked you, but not that much, not enough to declare to you and everyone else that you were a matched pair, linked even when separated by the promise of that necklace set?BEST FRIENDS necklace

There’s another girl, Carly Carson, with whom you would love to share a necklace set. Not because you’re such close friends—actually, you don’t know Carly all that well—but rather because Carly is popular, and if she shared a necklace with you—if she agreed to be the ST NDS to your BE FRIE—then you would be popular, too.

You know this is not the spirit behind the BEST FRIENDS necklaces. They are not supposed to be currency that buys admission into popularity. But the more you think about it, the better it sounds: Why wouldn’t this work? Couldn’t you perhaps give Carly Carson your birthday money in exchange for her agreeing to wear a BEST FRIENDS necklace with you? And what if, after wearing the fake pronouncement for a week or two, Carly discovered what a great, fun, special person you were and decided that she really did want to be your best friend, and she insisted you take back the money, and you used it to buy milkshakes and fries for the two of you, and your fake best friendship became the real thing?

A couple of years later, when the movie CAN’T BUY ME LOVE comes out—about a nerdy teen boy who pays a popular cheerleader to act like his girlfriend, thus paving the way to his own popularity—you wonder if they stole the idea straight from your brain, oblivious to the more obvious truth… your fantasy of buying your way into love, of using someone to bridge the social gap, is not unique. It may actually be ubiquitous.

For now, Kid, try not to resent the girls who have successfully paired up. Don’t hate them because of what you do not have. If I could, dear eleven-year-old me, I would time travel back to the eighties and buy one of those necklace sets. I would smile at you and offer you half, whichever half you wanted. I would fasten the clasp for you. Then I would string the other necklace around my own throat, and I would wear it proudly.

~Elana

Question of Miraclesfacebook

Find The Question of Miracles on Indiebound, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, B&N, and Amazon, or ask for it in your local bookstore or library.

Sixth-grader Iris Abernathy hates life in Corvallis, Oregon, where her family just moved. It’s always raining, and everything is so wet. Besides, nothing has felt right since Iris’s best friend, Sarah, died.
When Iris meets Boris, an awkward mouth-breather with a know-it-all personality, she’s not looking to make a new friend, but it beats eating lunch alone. Then she learns that Boris’s very existence is a medical mystery, maybe even a miracle, and Iris starts to wonder why some people get miracles and others don’t. And if one miracle is possible, can another one be too? Can she possibly communicate with Sarah again?

Find more Hey Kid! letters here.

Elana K. Arnold, the author of several young adult novels, earned her master’s in creative writing at the University of California, Davis. She lives in Huntington Beach, CA, with her husband, two kids, and more than a few pets. THE QUESTION OF MIRACLES is her debut for younger readers.
Connect with Elana on Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads.
Photo credit: Melissa Hockenberger

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