The Most Wanted by Jacquelyn Mitchard Page B

then I didn’t have anything else to say. That was plenty for a first letter, especially to someone you didn’t even care whether they wrote back.
    But it just didn’t feel like enough.
    So I told him about my dream.
    What would have happened if I hadn’t? If I’d just stopped there and left it with the problems I had with my hamstring stretches, what would have happened? Would it have been better, all the way around, if it had all stopped right there, without my ever knowing a thing about him, all that happened between us sucked right back into time like water into dry ground? Could I say that and still be true to Desi? To myself?
    It doesn’t matter now. I told him about the wagon dream, which I had pretty often, starting years and years ago, from when I was little. I kept having it too, until after Desi was born. The first time, I was in second grade and the teacher was telling us about the westward expansion, about how Texas had become an independent republic and a state. I wrote to Dillon: “She told us how deprived these families were, coming out across all those miles of prairie in covered wagons, how some of the babies starved to death because their mothers didn’t have enough food to make their milk.” The funny thing about the way I heard those stories, I thought it was “colored wagons.” I could just picture them, all these bright colors, like sidewalk chalk—lime and pink and watery blue. I pictured them in my head, and I drew them for school, just strung out across fields of grass like soap beads. And when I dreamed about it, they would go up at the end, right up into the sky. “Sometimes,” I wrote in that first letter to Dillon, “I think that dream was kind of a message, that I’m waiting for a train of colored wagons, waiting so I can get on and get on out of here.” Then I was done. There just wasn’t anything at all left of my life to tell. Anyhow, it was already three pages, both sides.
    Three days later, I got a letter back. It was only a page, but it came express. The postman brought it right up to the door; thank God Mama wasn’t home.
    It said that my name was filled with “music” and my dream with “prophecy.” And it finished up with these lines: “I can’t abide cheap trading on real feelings. So if you think it would be a big laugh to tell your girlfriends you’re writing to a man behind bars, find a different man. I’m sure there’s plenty wouldn’t mind. Now, myself, I’m hungrier than I can rightly explain for the pleasures of real life, and they’ve been denied me for two more long years. So if you want to write, I will answer you. If you honestly want to share thoughts with me, I will respond truthfully. It was that dream about rising up and out, out of this dusty redneck hell, that made me have enough trust to do it this first time. But if you’re not that woman of energy and heart, don’t write me back. I won’t bear you ill will.”
    It was signed: “Yr. obedient servant, Dillon Thomas LeGrande.”
    I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to cry, I felt so ashamed.
    It was like he saw right through me. Saw me sitting there thinking maybe I could use him for some kind of status symbol at school, for proof that I wasn’t little Goody Two-shoes. It was just what he feared.
    The saddest thing, though, what really grabbed my heart, was that in spite of what he suspected, he still turned to me. He was so lonely, he had to take the risk of getting betrayed. And I was the one he turned to.
    I couldn’t foresee, from that first letter, what would happen with us. But I knew how it felt to be that lonely, to feel as though there wasn’t one other person in the whole world who truly cared about your feelings or your thoughts. To feel you would never be free of everything that tied your hands. And so the pull from him to me was like the pull of the earth, all that loneliness a void to be filled.
     
    Of course it’s easy for me to say now, because I know what came