Passing Notes

by D. G. Driver

  “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.

  My parents didn’t shout after me to come back, but they did continue to babble to each other about stupid stuff I’d done that I didn’t find as funny or charming as they did. I slipped into Grandma’s room to kiss her goodnight. She was still awake. I sat down on the edge of her bed and held her hands so that she could see the heart with her name again.

  Grandma patted it and smiled at me. “Do you know where my letters are?”

  “What letters?”

  “From your grandfather.”

  My eyes began to water. She knew who I was. I wished so much that I could help her right then while she was lucid. Through trembling lips I told her, “I don’t know, Grandma.”

  “I kept all of them. Each one lovelier than the last.”

  “When was the last time you saw them?”

  Only she was already fading. I saw the fog come across her face as the world of confusion crept in again. “Will you write me one more? It’s been so long, Joe. Just one more to let me know that you’re all right.”

  “Grandma?”

  She fell asleep in that world where nothing made sense. Yet for just the briefest moment she shared something with me. The letters. They mattered to her after all these years. My ghost friend was right. I had to do this perfectly.

  In my room I stayed up late going through websites full of love poems and Shakespeare sonnets. I thought about the words like I’d never done before and why they were written the way they were. I did my vocabulary homework in cursive and really focused on making each letter perfect. When I was all done, I went to my dad’s office and took out a piece of the linen paper he used for his business letters.

  Slowly, I created a letter. Each sentence was carefully thought out. I typed it onto my computer and used the spellchecker to make sure I got everything right. Then I practiced writing it on scratch paper twice before I copied over onto the nice paper. I put a sheet of lined paper under the stationery to keep my sentences straight. At the top I put Bethany’s beautiful name in a heart, and at the bottom I wrote simply: Sincerely, Mark. I wanted to write “love” but I thought we weren’t to that point yet. I was really, truly “sincere” about the words I’d chosen. I hoped it would be enough.

  I folded the letter carefully in thirds, using a ruler to make sure they were even, and placed it in an envelope, addressed it and found a stamp in the kitchen near where Dad kept the bills.

  In the morning I stuck it in the mailbox before I left for school. I’d never sent a letter through the mail, and a silly thrill went through me as I closed the front of the box and popped up the red, metal flag on the side. The flag was only four inches tall, and I wished it was as tall as a tower so I’d be certain the postmaster wouldn’t miss it. I almost wanted to stay home from school and watch out my front window all day. Or better yet, park myself on a lawn chair right next to the mailbox. If the post office wasn’t in the opposite direction of my school, I’d drive over there and drop the letter off. Surely, if you took the letter straight to the post office, they got delivered faster. Was that right? I considered being late to school and following that urge. Just as I was about to open the mailbox door again, the garage door opened and my dad came out to get in his car for work.

  “Whatcha doin’?” he called out to me. “You expecting something? I brought in the mail yesterday. Just junk mail.”

  “I’m uh...” I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell my dad what I was doing. He’d tease me about it, and I was already too self-conscious. “I thought I saw a spider. A big one. I wanted to shoo it away so it didn’t scare Mom.”

  “That was thoughtful.” Dad put his hands on his hips and looked up at the sky, took a deep breath of fresh air, and then dropped his head again. “Guess I’ll call the exterminator to swing by again.”

  “Nah, Dad. It’s okay. There wasn’t anything there. Just my imagination.” I lowered the red flag and lifted my hands to show him that it was clear. Dad seemed satisfied with that, told me to have a nice day, and got in his car. I lingered in my car on the curb
for a second, acting like I was looking in my backpack for something until my dad backed out and drove down the street. Then I jumped back out of my car, popped the flag up again, and kissed the top of it for luck before heading off to school.

  This was Wednesday. Maybe Bethany would get my letter before the weekend. I hoped so.

  8

  The next two days were painfully slow. Bethany continued to avoid me while her friends snickered and talked behind their hands in the hallways. My ghost friend didn’t write to me, which was upsetting, but I figured that meant he approved of what I’d done with the letter. Each time I washed my hands or took a shower the heart on my hand faded a little bit more until Eileen was missing some loops of her name and the heart was incomplete.

  School ended on Friday, and I couldn’t shake how disappointed I was that my letter hadn’t been received yet. I had hoped to take Bethany out on Saturday night. Now it looked like that wasn’t even a remote possibility. I went to work and had to force a smile with all the happy teenage couples eating hamburgers in their cars before going to Friday night dates at the movies together. I even told Miguel I didn’t feel well and asked if I could go home early. He didn’t let me, though, because we were short-staffed. I had to stick it out all the way until 12:00.

  Just as we were closing up the registers, one final car pulled into a space. A blue Prius just like Bethany’s. I blinked and looked again. No, it couldn’t be.

  “I got it,” I told everyone. I flung off my skates and loaded up a large size chocolate shake to take out to her. I got to her window and tapped. She hadn’t lowered it to order or anything. At the sound of my tapping she turned her head, and I saw that her face was wet with tears. She put down her window, and then I could see my letter, open, in the passenger seat.