The Slightly Bruised Glory of Cedar B. Hartley by Martine Murray Page B

knew who it was from. I could tell. I took it and ran outside to be private. I sure didn’t feel like anyone watching me read.
    â€˜Well, well. There’re a lot of letters coming in this week,’ said Aunt Squeezy as I left.

Chapter 12
    Hi Cedar,
    Remember me? Or has some other acrobat swung out of a tree?
    I’ve been thinking of you, but I never know what to write and say, but now there’s going to be an audition up here in two months (December 5) and since I reckon you should come up for it, that seems like something to write about.
    Anyway, you’d like it here. Maybe not Albury, but the circus, it’s great. You should see the equipment. Dad ’s doing a good job.
    I don’t know what to tell you.
    Days wear on.
    It’s getting warmer.
    I’ve got blisters (doing some flying trapeze).
    You’d like the trees here. So would Stinky.
    How’re Oscar and Caramella?
    Are you attracting any attention with your bat pole positions?
    Be good and come up.
    Love Kite.
    I read it through about seven times before I stopped to think about it. I wondered why he set it out like that. So it would take up more room and look longer, probably. I have to admit, I wasn’t happy with how short it was. Not a lot of thought had gone into it…no endless hours lying in bed, pencil in mouth, thinking about how to put this and how to express that. Plus there was no kiss at the end, no I miss you. There was a lot that wasn’t in it, let’s face it. But then again, there are things you have to take into account, like for instance, he’s a boy, and boys don’t give too much away and, as I once said before, it becomes a girl’s job to learn how to read things that aren’t said. The problem with this is that if you happen to be a girl with an overactive imagination you can read a whole lot of extra stuff into everything, because you tend to read things with a certain imaginative vigour and a kind of leap-happy attention that jumps off and runs further and further until you are making quite faraway assumptions and thinking of desperate implications…
    Like for instance, just say Marnie is your friend ( God help you ), and if one day she just happens to not say hello to you ( because actually she’s busy focusing her attention on getting Angus Bennett’s attention ), you might just decide that means suddenly she hates you ( wrong ) and you get to wondering what on earth you did to make her hate you (nothing ). Was it because you were absolutely committing a glaring and embarrassing fashion blunder by wearing your brother’s hand-me-down King Gees? Because Marnie for sure wouldn’t abide that. ( True, but this was not noticed because she was too busy flirting with Angus Bennett. ) So then you begin to believe that really you must be a worthless person because you make fashion blunders. (If you’d been thinking, instead of imagining, you’d have known that fashion victims are the ones to be pitied, not us fashion crime-committers. ) So you decide the only thing that will redeem you is the purchase of a brand new pink zip-up parka. ( What a big waste of money, and lucky for me I don’t even like pink parkas, anyway. )
    Fortunately, I’m already disliked by Marnie, and my best friend Caramella is an artist and not a snob, so I haven’t had to go out and buy a pink parka, but still, I do tend to run away with my interpretation of events.
    Here’s how I read the letter:
    Hi Cedar,
    Hopefully he wanted to say, My dear Cedar, but that sounds too much like an old gent from last century, so he opted for a more casual version of greeting.
    Remember me?
    As if I’d have forgotten him. He knows very well I’ll never forget him even if I don’t hear from him ever again. Obviously he’s sarcastically overcompensating for extreme guilt he feels from not having written sooner.
    Or has some other acrobat swung out of a tree?
    Hmmm. Can I