Passing Notes (5 page)

“Are you there?”

Fading. Not much time left.

6

I had every intention of following the
ghost’s advice. I folded up my letter and stuck it in the side
pocket of my backpack. I gathered up my belongings and headed out
of the locker room. I was parked on the other side of campus, so I
weaved my way through the hallway to get to the exit doors. A
friend of mine, Stephan, bumped into me and asked where I’d been at
lunch. I was surprised he’d looked up long enough from his game to
notice I was missing.

“Were you with Bethany?”

“How did you know about Bethany?” I asked
him. Stephan was hardly in the middle of the school gossip.
Sometimes I was surprised he even knew the names of his teachers or
had the vaguest idea who was in his classes with him.

Stephan wiggled his shaggy eyebrows at me.
“Everyone knows. You’re the talk of the school today. About fifty
people came up to our table to ask about you at lunch.”

Ah, that’s why he noticed I wasn’t there.

“Fifty?”

“That might be an exaggeration, but it was a
lot.”

I didn’t know what to say to him, so I just
nodded and took a step to leave. He grabbed my elbow.

“So? Were you with her? Don’t leave me
hanging.”

“I haven’t seen her all day,” I said. “I
don’t know where she is.”

“She’s right there,” Stephan told me,
pointing down the hallway at the entrance to the auditorium. Sure
enough, Bethany was standing there, holding the door open while she
laughed at something with Lissy and Kat. Stephan ceased to exist as
I moved away from him, pulled down the hall toward her like she was
a beacon. Before I could get to the auditorium, she ducked inside
and closed the door behind her. Lissy and Kat pivoted and started
walking toward me. We nearly collided.

“Well, if it isn’t Mark Dowd!” Lissy said
with unnecessary volume that drew the attention of several people
in the hallway. I heard snickering and some whispers like “that’s
the guy I told you about”.

“Were you looking for Bethany?” Kat asked,
also too annoyingly loud.

“Um...”

Kat wriggled her nose like I was kind of
smelly and pathetic to her and she felt sorry for me. “She’s
busy.”

“Oh...”

“Debate team,” Lissy informed me. “Where she
is the team captain because she’s really good with words.”

“Yes, she’s very smart and well spoken,” Kat
added.

“I know...”

She continued, “Unlike some other people we
know.”

Both girls dropped their foreheads a touch
and stared at me through their eyebrows like they were challenging
me to stand up for myself. I wanted to, but what could I say? I
knew I wasn’t as smart as Bethany. I wasn’t in her circle and
probably didn’t belong there even one little bit.

I wasn’t sure how much, if anything, Bethany
had told her best friends about me, but I was certain these snobby
girls didn’t know what it was like that night after the Christmas
party when Bethany and I talked and talked about all kinds of
things. I’d put money on it that they didn’t know about our long
phone calls over vacation. Clearly, Bethany hadn’t told them
anything (or enough) about me and how I made her smile and feel
happy. If she had, wouldn’t they be on my side?

I knew right then that I didn’t have time to
go snail mail with this letter. Bethany needed to be reminded of my
feelings for her right away. She needed to be reminded of
her
feelings for me, too. Somehow being in this building
where we were separated by our positions on the popularity ladder,
everything I meant to her over break had been erased. I needed to
fix whatever had gone wrong with us before it got worse. Maybe this
note, even as messy as it was, could help her remember that we had
started a good thing. Then, maybe instead of being embarrassed
about me in front of her girlfriends, she could defend me and tell
them that I was worth something to her.

Having nothing to say to Lissy and Kat, I
spun around and ran down the hallway away from them. I could hear
them laughing at me, but I didn’t care. At this time tomorrow
they’d be telling me how sorry they were that they teased me, and
could I ever forgive them? I rounded the corner and found Bethany’s
locker. Some seniors didn’t use their lockers much or at all, but
she always had so many textbooks that I’d often seen her standing
at this spot switching them out for different classes. I was pretty
sure which one belonged to her.

I pulled the note out of my backpack and
started feeding it through one of the vent slots up toward the top.
The note slid easily at first and then suddenly stopped as though
something was blocking it. I guessed a book or maybe one of those
locker mirrors was in the way. I pulled the note out and tried a
slot a little bit higher up. Again, the letter stopped about
three-quarters of the way into the locker. I tried wiggling the
note to make it go further. No luck. I pulled it back out and
unfolded it. This time I slid it through the vent hoping that being
thinner it would slip by the barrier. That didn’t work either. I
reached up to the top of the locker and tried to slip the letter
above the locker door. When it went all the way though I jumped
back and did a subtle fist cheer for my success.

My joy only lasted a second before the locker
rejected my letter and sent it flying back out from the locker
where it hit me in the forehead, leaving a stinging paper cut.

“Are you serious?”

I stuck the letter though that same space
again.

It spit back out at me again.

Two more times, same result.

“Come on,” I begged to my ghost friend. I
knew he had to be doing this. “Just let me put this in there.”

One more time I fit the letter into her
locker. One more time it zipped back out again. This time, the
letter flew down the corridor almost as if my ghostly friend were
running with it over his head. I took a step after it, but stopped
when it smacked against the chest of Lance Whittaker. He had been
walking down the hallway in my direction, a quartet of his hockey
friends flanking him. Like Lance, I’d known those guys all my life,
too. Craig, Adam, Hudson and Aaron had all been on the roller
hockey team with Lance and me. I remember when we used to have
pizza parties after games and big sleepovers at Adam’s house,
playing in his backyard pool so late into the night that the
neighbors had to call his parents to kick us out. Good times long
gone.

“What’s this?” Lance took the letter from his
chest and began to read it. My hand involuntarily reached for the
letter, but I knew it was pointless and I convinced my arm to drop
mid-motion. My pulse throbbed in my temples, and I was certain I
was shrinking. I’d grown up with these five guys. I didn’t remember
being shorter than all of them. Or was the corridor slanting like
the deck of the Titanic, and I was about to slide off to my death?
I’m not sure which of us had the redder cheeks by the time he was
done. The coloring in Lance’s face wasn’t from embarrassment,
though.

I thought he’d pass the note to his friends
so they could read it too. He didn’t. He wadded it up in a ball
and, while still in his fisted hand, he punched me in the jaw.
Right there inside the school. I slammed against the locker and
thought I heard his friends, my old friends from childhood,
laughing and cheering him on. Lance stuck a finger hard against my
forehead like he was attempting to pin me to the lockers with
it.

“So, you have a thing for my girlfriend.”

“She’s not your girlfriend anymore,” I dared
to say.

“Oh yeah? Well, I don’t remember breaking up
with her.”

“The night you spilled wine all over her
Christmas dress was the night she broke up with you. She told
me.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,
buzz head.” He rubbed my head harshly and then used his whole palm
to bang my head against the lockers. “I was out with her last
night.”

“No you weren’t.”

He couldn’t have been. She said she was doing
homework. She wouldn’t have lied to me.

“He was, Mark,” Hudson said. “Lance saw your
stupid post on her wall and went over to her house to talk to her.
They were out half the night.”

“Making up,” Lance said with a horrible smile
that insinuated things I didn’t want to believe about Bethany.

Adam stepped behind me and said, “It’s true.
He was with us when we heard about your declaration of love for
Bethany, and he shot out of my house like a bullet.”

“You’re lucky he didn’t go to your house
first,” Hudson said. “You wouldn’t be walking today.”

“Any more of this,” Lance held up the wadded
note, “and you won’t be walking again. Ever.” He opened up the
letter again and then ripped it to shreds, letting the pieces fall
like confetti to the ground around us. The guys laughed. “Leave her
alone. You got it?”

The five of them started down the corridor
away from me, banging on a couple lockers and laughing as they
went. Lance pivoted around one last time to shout, “You’re not good
enough for her anyway!”

Right at that moment he tripped, literally
over nothing, and stumbled backward into a large, gray trashcan
that dumped over on him as he fell to the ground. His friends, my
old friends, laughed at
him
for a change of pace. A brief
moment of remembering the good times we’d all had back in grade
school together passed over me, but I knew these guys weren’t my
friends anymore so I let it pass on by. I bit back the laughter
that I wanted to spill so badly.

Lance stood up and brushed the trash off of
his clothes. All he did was point a strong finger at me, as if that
was supposed to mean something, and then he and the guys stomped
back down the corridor toward the locker room. They left the
trashcan turned over and its mess everywhere. Mr. Lopez, our
janitor came around the corner with his cart and sighed when he saw
the mess. I nodded toward Lance and his crew, and he shook his head
slowly as if this wasn’t the first time he’d cleaned up after those
guys.

“Here, I’ll help you,” I told Mr. Lopez, and
I lunged forward to straighten up the can. When I bent over to pick
up some of the wads of paper that had fallen out, I saw one yellow
page, the same color as my ghost notes. I dropped all the other
papers in the can and then took a second to open that one piece. It
was from him.

He deserved it.

“Yes, he did. Thanks.”

Mr. Lopez glanced up from where he was
scooping some spilled fruit cup and yogurt into his dust pan and
said, “No, thank you.” I smiled politely at the misunderstanding
and let him think I had been talking to him. I put the note in my
pocket and finished helping him clean up. I had to hurry now,
because I was expected at work. I’d probably be late, and the rush
after school was usually pretty intense. Miguel would be ticked off
at me.

I grabbed all my stuff from where I’d dropped
it by Bethany’s locker and saw the tiny pieces of my old note all
over the floor. I bent over to scoop them up in my hands. When I
stood up and opened my hands again, the tiny scraps had changed
into one solid piece of yellow notebook paper.

“That was a cool trick,” I said low enough so
neither Mr. Lopez nor anyone else in the hall could hear me. “You
haven’t done that before.”

Are you going to follow my advice now, kid?
Or do you need your head bashed into a locker again?

“Okay. I got your point.”

I hope so.

“I’ll write a better love letter and stick it
in the regular mail tomorrow morning.”

Good.

“But didn’t you hear the part about him going
to her house last night? I don’t think she’s over him.”

She is.

“Are you sure? It didn’t sound like it.”

Your letter will make certain of it, but
only if you do it right. Do you trust me?

That was a good question. Did I trust a
ghost? One who clearly hadn’t died recently enough to understand
about text messages, emails and social media and that those mediums
were how people communicated nowadays. One who thought a boy should
know how to write in cursive and with fancy words. Who was this
ghost? And why did he care about me?

But I trusted him. In my gut, I knew he was
right about all this love letter stuff.

“I’ll do it right. I promise.”

You’ll thank me.

Mr. Lopez, done with cleaning up that mess
around the trashcan and replacing the bag with a new one, pushed
his cart past me. He stopped next to me and gestured for me to drop
my note in the trash. I shook my head.

“No, I’ll keep this.”

He scrunched up his face, confused. I looked
down at my hands and found a bundle of ripped up pieces from my
note to Bethany. I snorted a laugh and then let the pieces fall
into Mr. Lopez’s trash bag.

7

That night, when I got home from work,
Grandma was already in bed. My parents were relaxing in front of
the TV in the living room. “Your grandma has been asking for you,”
my mom said. She took my hand and showed it to my dad. “This is
what she’s been talking about all day.” She rubbed the heart with
her thumb. “It’s not as dark as it was last night, but you can
still see it.”

“
I hate it when you write on yourself,”
my dad said. “Remember that time when you drew a mustache on your
face in Kindergarten?”

“It didn’t come off for a month,” my mom
laughed.

“Oh, and that time he drew all over his arms,
pretending they were tattoos.”

My mom took a sharp breath at that, “Oh, you
don’t think kids who draw on themselves all the time are just
preparing themselves to get tattoos later, do you? Mark, are you
planning on getting a tattoo?”

I didn’t answer her. I’d already wandered
down the hall away from them, not really in the mood to reminisce
about the dumb crap I did when I was little or get into a debate
over tattoos. I was going into the army in June, getting a tattoo
was like a rite of passage. Did she seriously think I wasn’t going
to get one? I’d been collecting ideas for the one I wanted for
months.