Penpal by Dathan Auerbach Read Free Book Online

all … just another picture.
    This one was more distinguishable, but not fully comprehensible. The camera was sharply angled toward the sky. The photograph caught the top corner of a building in the bottom left of the frame, but the rest of the image was distorted by a lens-flare from the sun. I turned the Polaroid over, but again there was nothing written on the back. My teacher put her hand on my shoulder and said, “A picture’s worth a thousand words, right?” before walking away toward her desk.
    “A picture’s worth a thousand words …” I had never heard that said before, and I sat there for a while trying to decide if I believed it.
    Because the balloons didn’t travel very far, and because they were all launched on the same day, the board became a bit cluttered fairly quickly. If a letter came in with a picture of a place that wasn’t already overrepresented on the map, it would be displayed, but otherwise the correspondences were distributed to their recipients, so we could take them home as keepsakes of the project. A week or two before the school year ended, the remaining pictures were taken off the map and handed out to their owners. My best friend Josh took home the second highest number of pictures at the end of the year – his penpal was very cooperative and sent him photographs from all around the neighboring city; Josh took home, I think, four Polaroids.
    I took home nearly fifty.
    The envelopes had all been opened by the teacher, but after a while I had stopped even looking at the pictures. However, the photographs were, if nothing else, a collection, and so I saved them in one of my dresser drawers that housed my other collections. The problem with collections, I had found, was that either there was simply no way to gather all the things in a series because there was no end to it, or there would always be that last item that made your collection incomplete. In my mind, I suppose, the things in the collection weren’t as valuable as the completeness of the collection itself.
    My drawer was a mausoleum of my incomplete collections of rocks, baseball cards, comic book cards, and little miniature baseball batting helmets that my mother and I would ceremoniously buy from a vending machine at Winn-Dixie after T-Ball games. I put the photos in a box and slid it next to my baseball cards. With the school year over and summer break just beginning, I turned my attention to other things.
    For Christmas, midway through my year of kindergarten, my mom had gotten me a small snow cone machine. It didn’t make very good snow cones, but the fact that I could make them at home now delighted both Josh and me. He came to covet the machine so much that his parents bought him a slightly nicer one for his birthday, toward the end of the school year. The snow cones produced by Josh’s machine were much bigger and were made much faster than when we would use my machine.
    Several weeks into the summer break, we decided to take a break from exploring the woods; we would pool our resources and set up a snow cone stand to make money. We thought we would make a fortune selling snow cones at one dollar.
    Josh and I lived in different neighborhoods, so we had a conversation about where we would set up shop. As one might have expected, we both wanted to locate the business at our respective houses, so before we even had the cups for the shaved ice, we had our first disagreement.
    His neighborhood was a bit nicer than mine, but many of the older houses in my neighborhood had slightly larger yards, and as such, the people who actually cared for them had to be outside for longer amounts of time in order to do so. There were also simply more people in my neighborhood, since there were many houses that stood on fairly small plots of land, and the ongoing construction around where I lived meant that there were always people outside on the weekends.
    Josh rebutted by claiming that his neighborhood was nicer than mine was, and this