Paper Flowers

The Last Day of Eigth Grade

  Michelle glanced down the row of lockers to her right. Then turned her gaze back to the empty locker in front of her. Her backpack was full and it was time to go back to class, yet for some reason she couldn't pull herself away from the locker.
  It was strange, she thought, how such a simple thing that you didn't even own could hold so many memories. Secret notes slipping through the cracks, magnets pinning photo booth pictures to the inside, engravings and things written in sharpie on the door. Michelle wondered if Josh Klippang who apparently "was here" went through the same feelings, leaving the locker, as she did. She reached her hand up to the little latch preparing to close the locker door, but was greatly startled when another hand met hers there.
    Michelle looked up to see her best friend Tara, who was preparing to slam the locker door shut.

"Hey, check out 'you know who' over my shoulder," she whispered.
"Tara, don't say that so loud!" Michelle hushed her, yet looked pass her friend anyways.
  
    Chris stood at his locker, slowly taking out binders and notebooks and putting them in his book bag on the ground. She noticed some pieces of paper peaking out from a pocket on the book bag. Her stomach fluttered with the hope that they were a few surviving notes that she had left in his locker throughout the year. Since mid-October she had been occasionally sneaking origami flowers with poems or sweet little notes folded inside into his locker. She liked to think that they made him smile when he read them, that they were something he enjoyed finding rather than dreading that he was being stalked by a lovesick drama queen.

"You should go talk to him," whispered Tara in a singsong voice.
"Are you crazy?" Michelle whispered. "I don't think he knows I exist. "
"Our class has twenty five people in it, basically everyone knew everyone else's name by the end of the first week of school. And if he doesn't know you from that, then then he should know you from graduation for getting that Spanish award." Tara insists.
"Well yeah. But I don't really talk to him, what do I say? " Michelle asks.
" 'What do I say?' 'What do I say?'" Tara raves. "Honey, you tell him you wrote the notes in those paper flowers. You tell him that you have loved him desperately since you first layer eyes in him. If you've never spoken to him you can say anything because he doesn't know anything about you!"
"I don't love him DESPERATELY." Michelle grumbles. "And how do you know about the notes?"
"Michelle, I'm your best friend." Tara says, "If I didn't know about them there'd be a problem. Now GO!" She gave Michelle a slight nudge toward the boy slowly cleaning the locker and looking at its hollow insides.

To Be Continued.....