Free You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt Page A

Twain character. Jesus, they’re turning her into an American archetype.”
    “The Soviet people,”
wrote Mr. Andropov,
“are for friendship and peace. The Soviet Union will never use nuclear weapons first. We would never start a war. We are occupied with exploring space and reading poetry and growing wheat. I invite you and your family to come to our peaceful country and see for yourself.”
    The next morning four news vans jockeyed for position outside Jenny’s house. The cameras aimed at us as we set out for school. “Jennifer, did you think Mr. Andropov would write back?” a reporter shouted.
    Jenny parried with a humble smile. “I didn’t know what to expect,” she said. “I just wanted him to know that regular kids like me are worried about nuclear war. I’m just a girl from Ohio who wants peace.”
    “You didn’t tell them about my letter,” I said when we reached school.
    “Sorry, I was nervous,” she said.
    But she didn’t seem nervous. She was remarkably poised. Her sound bite made it onto all three networks that night.
I’m just a girl from Ohio who wants peace.
(“That’s savvy,” my mother said. “Playing the heartland card.”) Jenny was a natural. If my letter were published, I knew I’d freeze up in interviews. My mother was right. Jenny was good for the cause.
    Letters began arriving for Jenny from all over the world.
“Dear Jennifer,”
they wrote.
“You were brave to write to Andropov.”
Sometimes I’d see the postman carry an overstuffed sack up the steps of her house, as if he were delivering mail to Santa Claus. The envelopes made unruly heaps on the Joneses’ front porch. Jenny invited me over to help open them. I sat on the porch swing and watched her. “Listen to this one,” she’d say, trying on different accents as she read them aloud. Then her mother whisked them away, filed them in labeled boxes. Mrs. Jones loved her label maker.
    Jenny said Andropov would write to me. Every day for weeks, I checked the mail as soon as I got home from school. Pip always ripped the mail out of the slot with his teeth the minute the postman shoved it through, so the edges of our letters and magazines were often torn. I wondered if a letter from Andropov had arrived only to be eaten by the dog, but that was wishful thinking. Pip was not in the habit of consuming paper. While I waited for a letter, Jenny flew to New York to appear on
Nightline
and then to Los Angeles to be on
The Tonight Show.
My mother let me stay up late to watch her chat with Johnny Carson. “God, the camera loves her,” my mom said. She rang the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange; she made a guest appearance on
Sesame Street
(Oscar the Grouch to Jenny: “What are you so happy about?”). She was on the cover of so many magazines that I lost count. My mother saved them all. She missed a lot of school, but Mrs. Gibson didn’t care. “This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to one of my pupils,” she told the
Washington Post.
“I’m so proud of Jennifer. She’s such a thoughtful girl.”
    And in the midst of all the television appearances and ribbon-cutting ceremonies, the Joneses, with the help of the Russian embassy in Washington and the American embassy in Moscow, were planning their trip to the USSR that summer. They would go for two weeks in July. They had an official invitation from Yuri Andropov, and their itinerary would be carefully controlled by the Kremlin: six days in Moscow, six days in Leningrad, and three days at Artek, the Pioneer camp on the Crimea. Meanwhile my mother was busy prepping for the International Day of Disarmament on June 20. There were protests scheduled at fifty sites around the world.
    I helped Jenny pack before her big trip. “I wish you could come,” she said. I wished I could go, too. I figured I’d earned it, since the letters were my idea. But I didn’t tell her that. It wasn’t her fault that her letter was picked. It wasn’t her fault that