"Did you guys know that Salvador Dali thought he was his dead brother's reincarnation?"
"What?"
"Bang, why do we want to know this?"
Bang put her pen down in the crease of the art history textbook. "It's interesting!"
Mayette rolled her eyes, "Not to an engineering major."
"Or an undetermined major," Ange piped up.
Bang sighed. "Fine. Don't appreciate my passions. Some best friends you are."
Ange picked up Bang's light black sticky notes and scribbled a sentence down. She pulled the piece of paper off the top of the stack and tapped Bang on the arm. When Bang looked up, Ange bopped her on the forehead, effectively sticking the piece of paper to her. Mayette and Ange snickered.
"Really, Ange?" Bang ripped the sticky note off of her forehead to read it. It said: ask me about boring ass art history shit!!! Bang rolled her eyes, crumpled the note up, and threw it at Ange. Bang smirked when it hit her nose.
"Hey! Rude!"
Over the PA system, Bang's name was called.
Bang rose from her seat, "Babalik ako."
Once Bang was around the corner of another shelf in the library, Ange pulled another sticky note from the top of the stack and placed it in the front cover of the textbook. She wrote another short sentence on the black paper before flipping through to the page Bang had been on.
Bang returned moments later with the same book in her hands.
Ange grinned conspiratorially, "Finally got your own?"
Bang groaned as she sat back down, "Finally. A month in and they couldn't order enough textbooks? So annoying. Now I don't have to share it with every other student who got screwed over by the bookstore." Bang closed the borrowed book and slid it to the other side of the table. She opened up her brand new textbook and got back to work.
The light black sticky note on the inside cover rested between the thick cover and thin page it was pressed on, waiting to be seen.
---
Ara strolled into the library. It was early on a Saturday morning. Most students were still sleeping off the hangovers they had acquired the night before. Ara, though, was eager to start her day of studying.
She walked over to the desk she normally claimed and set up her laptop. The wall on her right held an outlet for her laptop charger and a window that was small enough as to not distract Ara from her studying, but big enough that she would get some sunlight through it. The natural light always perked her up when she was reading, as if she was a solar panel being recharged. Once her laptop and books were arranged nicely, she realized that she was missing that one book for that art history class that she needed to fulfill a requirement. Napabuntong hininga nalang siya. The damn bookstore hadn't had the correct edition of the book when she went to go buy it, so like the rest of the class, she was forced to share the one in the library as they all sat on the waiting list.
One of the benefits of being up early on a Saturday morning to study was that she didn't need to fight for the book.
Ara drifted between the shelves until she found the book she was looking for. She pulled it from the stack and walked back over to her seat. As she sat back down, she had a thought. Maybe the edition was online somewhere. An e-book or PDF would be tedious to go through, but at least then if someone else had the textbook, she wouldn't have to share.
Ara was not one to share when it came to her books.
She opened the front cover of the book to get all of the authors' information down. She was met with a black sticky note instead. It read: text xxx-xxx-xxxx for cool art history facts. Ara peeled the sticky note off of the book and stared at it. It was likely a prank. Who would put their own phone number into a textbook like this? It was just asking for spam calls. She shook her head and stuck it to the top of the desk. She would throw it out later.
