Passing Notes

Chapter One

2gethr 4evr

It’s not original, but I texted it anyway to Bethany while I walked up the front steps into the school. By the time I got down the main hallway, she was already sharing it with her friends Lissy and Kat. They huddled over each of Bethany’s lovely shoulders like the good and bad angels of cartoons and giggled. Bethany had her hand over her mouth, but I could tell she was smiling and probably saying something like, “I know, right?”

As I passed my gorgeous, seventeen-year-old, brunette dream girl, I nodded and winked. All three girls burst into a storm of giggles and fussed over the phone. A moment before entering homeroom my phone buzzed. Her reply:

;)

Awesome! A success! I was a great, thoughtful, romantic boyfriend. And I stayed really proud of that fact for the next thirty-five minutes. That’s when the ghost notes began to show up.

        Even though it was Monday, I was in a great mood because this was the first day of my last semester of high school. Most of my required classes were done, which meant I had a fairly easy load; only five periods instead of six and only three of those were academic. My D+ average wasn’t going to leave me working at Sonic for the rest of my life, because I’d registered to join the army right after graduation. I was excited about my future for the first time ever.

On top of all that, Bethany started dating me over Winter Break—after four years of me dreaming about it and never daring to ask her out. Nothing could get me down.

We got our new schedules in homeroom, and then I headed down to Mrs. Hollstein’s room for British Lit, my last English course—ever. Not even the idea of writing essays about Shakespeare and Dickens upset me. I knew that come June it would never again matter that my spelling sucked, my printing was unreadable, and I had no grammar skills at all. Who needed any of that in the real world anyway? All I ever wrote were emails and texts. Those were done in shorthand. Anything more than that was a waste of time.

So, when I stepped into the room and found every seat taken, I didn’t freak. A grin stayed firmly in place across my face as I leaned against the dry erase board with three other slowpokes waiting for Mrs. Hollstein to straighten it all out.

“Okay,” she sighed, exasperation fraying the ends of her red hair, “it seems the front office made a mistake and put too many students in this class. Again. Until I can sort this out, we’ll have to accommodate.” She addressed the four of us without seats. “Two of you can share my desk over here…” Apparently the two girls up front with me thought that was a good idea and lunged for the desk before the dude and I could even consider it as an option. “The other two need to find a friend to let you sit beside them at their desks.”

Clearly, this wasn’t going to work. Mrs. Hollstein had to know that. The student desks were those skinny ones attached to the seats that piss off left-handers because the elbow rest is on the right. No way can two people share that. Also, while I knew most of the people in that class, I didn’t really want to be that close to any of them for the next eighteen weeks. None of them appeared anxious to be that close to me either, because books, backpacks and binders quietly began to appear on top of desks where they hadn’t been before. No one glanced in my direction.