The Notebook We Passed Between Classes
Half homework, half confession, entirely the best thing about school.
The most important literature of my life was disguised as chemistry homework.
It was a green spiral notebook, seventy pages, the cover softened at the corners from living in two different backpacks. On the front, in June Okafor's handwriting, it said CHEM II, NOTES, DO NOT TOUCH. The first eleven pages were actual chemistry notes, copied neatly, a decoy layer in case a teacher ever flipped it open. Page twelve began with a sentence I can still quote from memory, twenty two years later: "Okay, but if you had to be a weather, which weather would you be?"
I wrote back that I would be the specific ten minutes before a thunderstorm, when the light goes green and everyone pretends they are not excited. She wrote back, "Correct answer. You may continue."
I continued for two years.
The rules were never spoken but everyone with a notebook like ours knows them. Rule one: you never talk about the notebook out loud. Rule two: you hand it off between third and fourth period at the water fountain by the gym, no eye contact, like spies. Rule three: in person, in daylight, you are almost strangers. June and I shared exactly one class and sat six seats apart, and if you had watched us for a semester you would have concluded we barely knew each other existed.
Meanwhile, in the notebook, I knew her father had a laugh he only used at church. I knew she practiced signing her future famous author autograph on the back page of her math book. I knew she was afraid of exactly two things, dogs and being ordinary, and that she considered the second one much more dangerous.
She knew I cried at a car commercial in 1999 and had told no living person. She knew I wanted to write, actually write... before I had ever admitted it in daylight.
Half of it was nothing. Rankings of the vending machine snacks. A four page argument about whether a hot dog is a sandwich that got so heated we did not pass the notebook for a week. Doodles of our history teacher as various sea creatures.
The other half was everything.
Somewhere around page fifty, without either of us announcing it, the notebook turned into the place where we kept our real selves, the ones too soft to wear in the hallway. She wrote her first poems in there. I wrote mine. We were brutal with each other's lines and gentle with each other's secrets, which I have since learned is the exact recipe for making a writer.
The Question on the Last Page
In March of junior year, June's father got transferred. She found out on a Tuesday and moved before the end of the month, the way it happens when you are sixteen and your life is a thing adults decide around you.
The notebook was in my backpack when she left. Wrong half of the handoff. I told myself I would mail it... and then I did not, because mailing it felt like ending it. And then it was summer, and then it was college, and then it was a box in my parents' attic for twenty years.
You know how this goes. Everyone has a box like this.
Two winters ago, my parents sold the house, and clearing the attic was assigned to me because I am the child who "likes old things." I found the notebook under a track trophy at nine at night, sat down on the attic floor in my coat, and read all seventy pages by the light of a bare bulb.
Here is what I had forgotten. On the last used page, in her handwriting, dated four days before she moved, June had written a question. Just one line, and then blank paper for the rest of the book.
"Do you like me, or do you like the notebook?"
I never answered it.
I had twenty two years of never answering it... folded into a green spiral notebook, under a trophy for coming third.
Sitting on that attic floor at thirty eight, married, mortgaged, allegedly a grown man, I felt the question land the way it was meant to land in 1999. And I finally understood why sixteen year old me went silent. He did not know the answer. It seemed like a trick, like she was asking him to choose between her and the version of themselves that only existed on paper.
It is not a trick. It took me two decades and a lot of writing about memory to see that it was the single most honest question anyone had ever asked me.
The Answer, Late
I found her the way you find anyone now, in about nine minutes. June is a pediatric nurse in another state, married to a man who restores canoes, two kids, still writes. Of course she still writes. I sat with my thumb over the message button for a full day, composing and deleting... feeling seventeen in the worst way.
What I finally sent was a photo of the last page and one line: "Answering your question with a twenty two year delay. Both. It was always both. The notebook was just you, folded flat enough to fit in a backpack."
She replied in four minutes. "RULE ONE. We do not talk about the notebook." Then, a minute later: "I cried at work. Thank you. Also a hot dog is still not a sandwich."
We are not a love story, in case you are bracing for that. We were barely a love story then, if love means what the movies mean. She is happy. I am happy. Nobody's marriage was harmed in the making of this essay.
What we were was something I do not have a clean word for: the first person who ever read me.
Not my handwriting. Me.
We were not in love with each other, not exactly. We were in love with being read.
Everyone asks about school romance memories like they are asking about a museum, something roped off and finished. Mine is not finished. June and I have a shared document now, the modern kind, and the first line of it says CHEM II, NOTES, DO NOT TOUCH. We drop poems in it a few times a year and insult each other's line breaks with enormous tenderness. Last spring she talked me into posting one of mine on a community wall for poets, actual strangers, actual daylight, and when the first comment arrived I felt the water fountain by the gym, the no eye contact handoff, the whole green notebook of it, come flooding back through my wrists.
The notebook itself lives in my desk drawer now, not the attic. Sometimes when the page in front of me is too white and too quiet, I open it to a random page and let sixteen year old June ask me something ridiculous, and I am unstuck. People pay money for prompts that do that. I got mine at a water fountain, between third and fourth period, for free.
If you had a notebook like this, you already know the ending. And if you still have the notebook... answer the last page. It is not too late. It is never as late as the box in the attic wants you to believe.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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