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.