Passing Notes (2 page)

I decided to be proactive. To head things
off, I snuck my cell out of my pocket. Discreetly, under my seat,
using one thumb and not even looking at the keys, I texted
Bethany:

Thnkn of u

I knew she probably wouldn’t reply because
she was the kind of person who never texted during classes. Bethany
was a straight-A student, the kind that follows the rules.

I pushed the boxes on the desk to try to make
a little more room, but they wouldn’t budge. I was only working
with like two inches. With a shove of my shoulder, I purchased one
more inch, enough for my forearm to rest. As I lowered my hand, it
came to rest on a corner of a yellowed paper sticking out from
under the boxes. I tugged at it and freed it from its prison,
curious as to how long it had been there.

What I found was a lined paged from a 5x7
spiral notepad. A faint green line divided the page in half, and
the top was frayed from having been ripped out. Written on it was a
short note not addressed to anyone or signed, like something that
might have been passed eons ago during a class and shoved under a
box so a teacher couldn’t find it.

None of this seemed all that odd except that
the words were in the exact same cursive hand as the carved
“Eileen” on the desktop. It had to have been written by the same
person.

Hairs raised on the back of my neck. I didn’t
know why I got spooked like that. I mean, it made a certain amount
of sense that once upon a time some guy sat at this desk carving
his girlfriend’s name into the wood and writing a note to a friend.
It’s just that, after all these years, how weird was it that I
discovered them both on the same day?

I tried to read the note, but it was really
hard for me to decipher it. I pulled out a fresh piece of my
notebook paper and wrote the letters I thought I recognized with
little placeholder dashes for the letters I couldn’t figure out. In
the end, I had some horrible Wheel of Fortune game with no clues to
help me decide if I wanted to buy a consonant or a vowel.

“Jill,” I called out. She was still playing
teacher’s pet and flitting about the room. I waved my book at her
like I had a problem with it. She huffed back over to me.

“No trading. You get what you get.” I think
she was trying to sound stern, but her helium voice just made me
want to laugh at her. I stifled my smile.

“No, it’s not that.” I held up the fragile
note and winced. “Can you read this?”

“Are you stupid, Mark?” she asked.

“No, Jill,” I returned with an equal amount
of attitude. “I just can’t read cursive.”

She gave it a once over and then handed it
back without a word.

“Well?” I asked.

“It doesn’t mean anything. Just some note
someone passed in class once.”

At the edge of my patience, I asked, “What
does it say?”

“Read
, Mark. What does the note
read
? A note can’t say anything.”

“Seriously?”

Jill did her snotty face, another thing she
perfected in Kindergarten and never let go.

I tried again, rephrasing my question
correctly to appease her only because I really needed to know the
answer. “What does the note
read
?”

She sighed and took it back again and read
out loud:

What kind of note was that? Does it even
make sense? You can’t even spell, let alone romance a girl. Try
again.

Jill handed the letter back to me. “Does that
mean anything to you? It’s a little vague to me.”

I shook my head and stared at the cursive
words, watching the loops and dots magically morph into something I
could decipher.

“Hey look, Mark,” Jill said. “Mrs. Hollstein
said to start reading page 282. I don’t know if you heard her.”

“
Oh,” I said
distractedly, “thanks.” I put the note down and opened my book.
Jill went back to parading around with texts and
handouts.

Some weird story about a boring dinner party
full of dead people passed by my eyes, but I didn’t take any of it
in. The note was on my mind. It was so strange to read only a part
of a conversation. I wondered who this guy had been writing to and
what had prompted this response. Surely he wasn’t picking on lovely
Eileen’s letter writing skills. That wouldn’t have won him any
points.

To be honest, it felt a little like the
letter was written to me. I had just dashed out a poorly spelled,
pointless love message a moment before that note appeared.

No. That was ridiculous.

The note could be fifty, maybe even sixty,
years old for all I knew.

Still, I felt compelled to pull out my phone
again. Hiding it inside my book, and thankful Mrs. Hollstein was
preoccupied on the phone up front arguing to someone in the front
office about her class being over-full, I typed a new text. This
time I used full words, which is something I’d never done before.
It took a couple minutes.

You look sexy in those jeans today. Cant
wait to see more of you at lunch.

Okay, so I didn’t put in an apostrophe on
“can’t”. Otherwise, I thought I spelled everything right. That was
an effort too. I didn’t have one of those fancy smart phones with
an automatic spelling corrector. I had an older phone, a
hand-me-down from my mom that couldn’t even get on the Internet. It
was a little my fault. I accidentally drove over one phone and
dropped another in a toilet. My parents said they weren’t ever
going to get me a good phone. If I wanted one, I’d have to buy it
myself. Up until now, the cheap phone and my texting shorthand had
been all I needed. I read my text again and nodded, proud of
myself, feeling confident that my compliment of her awesome body
would win me a kiss in public at noon.

I hit send.

When I was done, I pulled out the note and
filled in the blanks on my cheat sheet with the correct letters.
Now I felt like I had a key to the cursive code. If I found another
note (which I knew was unlikely), maybe I could decipher it without
Jill’s busy-body help.

The bell rang, and I scooped up my bag from
the floor and stuffed my new, heavy English textbook into it. The
note and my folded up practice page went in my back pocket. I
walked to my next class, waiting for the familiar buzz of my phone
as Bethany texted me back with some appreciative reply.

It never came.

2

I scanned the hallway for Bethany. I didn’t
know her new schedule for the semester, but I remembered her
telling me she was going to have a pretty full load of AP classes.
If she was headed for Physics or Calculus, she’d be on the other
side of campus. I didn’t have any math or science classes left that
I had to take to graduate and had no intention of entering those
halls again. Too many bad memories, and those teachers were not my
friends.

I took heavy steps through the hallway to
American Government class, the silence from her weighing me down.
Why was she ignoring me? Had I done something wrong?

I sat down at an empty desk for second period
and plopped my backpack at my feet. Five minutes later I had a new
textbook to cram in there with the other one. When I unzipped my
bag, I caught a glimpse of a piece of yellowed note paper before it
slipped down into the depths of my pack. Certain I’d put the note
in my pocket, I gave it a pat to hear the familiar crunch of folded
paper. So, what was that in my bag? Had there been a second page,
and I missed it?

I yanked out the Government book and my
English textbook, plopping them both on my desk. Then I dug around
at the bottom of my backpack for the note. I regretted now not
taking the time over Winter Break to clean the bag out like my mom
had told me to. So many candy wrappers, crumpled up worksheets,
broken pencils and inkless pens lined the bottom of my black
backpack that it would be amazing if I found it at all. I thought
that because the note was yellow, it might stand out, but a lot of
Starburst wrappers are yellow too, and I have a thing for that
candy. I picked through the mess as best as possible, but I never
saw the elusive paper. I opened my English textbook on my desk and
rifled through the pages, and that forced the yellow note to puff
out at me from the pages where it had lodged itself.

“Mr. Dowd,” my government teacher, Mr.
Antenore, barked at me. “This is not English class, nor is it time
to organize your belongings. Kindly put your things away and open
your book to the pages written on the board.”

“Yes sir,” I said, quickly palming the note
and shoving everything else in the basket under my seat. Before I
got called out again, I opened my text book. We were supposed to be
looking at the Table of Contents page as a class, but personally I
was studying another letter written on the same yellow paper in the
same pretty cursive as the first one. I pinned the note to my book
page with my right thumb and pinned the code key I’d created to the
book with my left thumb. Glancing back and forth, I slowly made
sense of it.

Choose your compliments carefully. Some
words aren’t for love letters. They come across crude and terse.
Some words are only for private moments when you are together. A
love letter needs lovely words.

What on Earth? What did it mean? And what the
heck did “crude” and “terse” mean? Who used words like that?

“Choose
your
words better, man,” I
muttered, “so I can understand you.”

“What was that, Mr. Dowd?”

“Nothing, sir,” I said, turning the page with
the letter inside and hiding my secret.

“I should hope not.”

I tried really hard to concentrate on class.
It felt like the note was trying to burn through the pages of the
textbook and get in front of my eyes again. I’m sure it was my
imagination, but when I put my hand on the left side of the book,
it felt hot instead of the way cool, glossy textbook pages are
supposed to feel.

Mostly I found myself wondering what the
notes were about. The guy was trying to give romantic advice to
someone, but who? I kind of wished I could see the other half of
this conversation. Or maybe, since I found them in English class,
they were just jotted notes about something they were reading. Was
that possible? I didn’t know much about literature. Was there a
book about someone learning to write romantic notes? I needed to
stop obsessing about it and focus on school. When class was over, I
flipped back to the Table of Contents page to look at the note one
more time. My cursive cheat sheet was there, but the note was gone.
I reached into my back pocket. The other note was gone too.

I scrambled through my backpack again while
all my classmates got up and left the room. The notes had
completely disappeared. Mr. Antenore finally came up to me and
tapped me on the shoulder. “You’ll be late for 3
^rd
period if you don’t get a move on.”

I apologized, tucked my textbook against my
chest, threw my backpack over my shoulder, and got out of there
before I did anything else to get on my teacher’s nerves. I
practically ran down the hall to Advanced Spanish class. I didn’t
find another note in this class, and I thought that was funny. I
half expected to find one telling me that French was a more
romantic language than Spanish, since all the other notes had a
weird way of correlating to my actions. Pleased to not have a
scribbled note implying that I was doing something wrong, I was
able to relax a little bit. I had fun going over all the words and
phrases we learned in Beginning Spanish to see what we remembered.
I’m actually pretty good at Spanish, compared to my other
academics, and soon I was able to get the notes off my mind.

Bethany, however, stayed ever present in my
thoughts. The day dwindled on with no word from her. Finally,
fourth period, one of my R.O.T.C. electives, let out for lunch. I
went right to the spot where I’d seen Bethany eating lunch for
three and half years, hoping I’d get to officially join her friends
as her boyfriend. Only, she wasn’t there. Kat and Lissy shrugged at
me and said they didn’t know where she was, but I had a feeling
they were lying. They also neglected to invite me to sit down and
wait for her.

I headed over to my old table with the guys
who had been my buddies since grade school, almost tripping three
times because I was looking around for her and not at where I was
going. Finally, I saw her on the stairwell, leaving the cafeteria.
For some reason she’d tied a sweatshirt around her waist,
completely obscuring that delicious swish of her behind in those
skinny jeans.

I stood up and called her name. Bethany
turned and raised a finger at me as if to say, “Just a minute!” I
texted her:

???

I watched her pull out her phone. Without
looking back at me, she continued up the stairs and out of sight.
Her reply:

Busy now. See you later.

She had a quality phone and didn’t use text
shorthand.

But what was going on with that reply? See me
when
? I thought we’d planned on lunches together. We didn’t
share any classes. She had debate team after school, and I had my
job. Lunch was going to be our only time together. Without that,
our relationship wasn’t going to be much more than texts and phone
calls. That wasn’t what I wanted at all.

I sent her a half-hearted:
Cant w8

After I hit send, I read back the texts of
the day between her and me. What I’d texted to her did seem really
lame now that I looked at it. I was as romantic as a stale fortune
cookie. Maybe I shouldn’t have texted the thing about her being
sexy in the jeans. It was true. She looks freakin’ amazing in those
jeans. But maybe she took it the wrong way. Maybe I’d been too
forward or insulted her.

I thought about that odd note I’d found
during American Government. My text to Bethany had been “crude” and
“terse”. The note had been telling me that.