Little Brown Notebook

***Author's note:** This is Part 3 in a series. Check out Part 1 and Part 2.*

I took a long shower, letting rivulets roll off my hair until the lukewarm water ran cold.  Mathilde.  How could I have forgotten Mathilde?

Well, not forgotten, exactly.  More like I’d folded her up in my subconscious.  I remembered the little blonde autistic girl that lived across the street, but I hadn’t thought about her in fifteen years.

Mathilde had been two years younger than me.  We’d gone to the same elementary school; she was in Special Ed classes.  She never played with the other kids at recess.  She just sat, expressionless, observing.  I’m not an expert on autism, but she was definitely at the far end of the spectrum, to the point where she was completely non-verbal.  They'd managed to teach her enough sign language to communicate her most basic needs.  She’d sign with her parents, her brother, and her personal school-appointed aide; otherwise, she was locked in her own little world behind her big blue eyes.

She had, however, shown signs of being a savant.  While she didn't speak, she drew.  Her pictures were all over their house - taped to the refrigerator, framed on the wall, filling notebook after notebook.  On the few occasions my mother took me across the street to socialize, I’d been amazed and immensely jealous of her skill.

The pictures were always of the various things and people she saw throughout the day - her classroom teacher, the line at the grocery store, a teen-aged couple making out on a bench at Allister Park.  Her mom once gave my parents a small collection - pictures Mathilde drew of our house, Alicia and me in the front yard, my dad loading his truck.

Mathilde also seemed to possess an amazing memory and an uncanny eye for detail.  One of her pictures depicted my mom and I walking to the car before school.  I wore a Digimon sweater and lace-fringed jean shorts.  My dad’s truck was parked in front of the house.  There was a purple manila folder on the dash labeled CORONA.

I knew the exact shorts and sweater - every detail in Mathilde’s picture was perfect, even though she must’ve only seen us for a minute, from her bedroom window.  And that purple manila folder.  I remembered my father turning the house upside down looking for “the Corona contracts,” searching frantically for hours before he’d finally found them in the truck.

The folder was there, clear as day, in the picture.  The picture was signed MATHILDE and dated 2/17/2001.  Mathilde always signed and dated her pictures.  “She could be a courtroom artist,” my mom once told hers.

Mathilde Koperski.  Why Mathilde Koperski?

\*\*\*\*\*

I stepped out of the shower, changed, and retreated to my room.  There, I stared at the closet door.  My arms pimpled.  I was scared.  Scared, despite the fact that nothing that could fit in that closet could possibly do me any harm.

Heart racing, I slid open the door.  A cloud of dust hit me in the face.  I coughed.  Then I looked.

There was nothing.  I was looking at a dusty, hobbit-sized cubby.

Annoyed at my own immaturity, I stuck my head in the closet.  In the far corner, there were two objects: a cylindrical wooden dowel and a little brown notebook.  Dust irritating my eyes, I reached in and pulled both out.

I remembered the dowel.  When I was ten and scared of the monster in the closet, my father had cut it and showed me how to jam the door shut by placing the wooden cylinder along the track it slid on.

“Try and open it,” he’d said to me.

I had.  I’d pushed on the handle as hard as I could.  The wood didn’t budge.

My dad laughed.  “Even monsters have to obey the laws of physics.”

There are benefits to having a contractor for a father.

Of more interest to me was the brown notebook.  It had been my childhood journal, where I’d written down all of the fantastical plotlines my friends and I had imagined, all the adventures of the Four Grand Adventurers.  After Micah disappeared, I wanted nothing to do with the thing.  I guessed one of the tenants had found it, thrown it in the closet, and forgotten about it.

I sat on the bed and opened the notebook.  I flipped through a few pages of “weapons” (anything we could construct out of polymer clay and Legos) and “potions” (mixtures of flowers and leaves and whatever our parents had in the kitchen), and settled on *The First Chalenge*.

*The Bagwurms live in the sand.  They have no eyes and they don’t like the sun because they disintigreat.  There are hundreds of them.  Their ruler is The Great Bagwurm.  She lives fifty feet under the sand and is thirty feet long and five feet thick and is orange.  The little yellow worms are her slaves.  When its dark they come out of the sand and grab children to take back to The Great Bagwurm to eat.*

I stopped reading.  I flipped the page.  On the next, one of us - probably Tommy, who was the best artist - had drawn a picture of The Bagwurms.  The little yellow worms that came out of the sand in the dark.  It was an illustration of my dream.  And, if I was scared then, I became even more so after reading the rest.

*The Bagwurms are servents of The Daemon.  They capture children and take them into The Forest to The Daemons lair.  It is said that if a Grand Adventurer can get past the little yellow Bagwurms, The Great Bagwurm will come out to protect The Forest.  To kill The Daemon, we must defeat The Great Bagwurm.  Their weakness is Starshine Juice.*

Starshine juice.  In my dream, Tommy had sprayed the yellow worms with something.  I flipped back to the “potions” section and found Starshine Juice.  Diet Coke mixed with three jasmine flowers picked under a full moon.

I closed the journal.  That was enough memories for the day.  We’d been trying to kill the evil thing that lived in The Forest with flowers and sugar water.  And, apparently, my subconscious was regurgitating all this information now that I was back in the old house.

What had I done last night?

I looked at the number written on my arm.  My shower had dimmed the bright red digits, but they were still readable.  I pulled my iPhone off the charger and dialed.

“Hi.”  A male voice.  “Who is this?”

“Who is this?”  I blurted out.  “This is Ansley.  I have your number written on my arm.”

“Ans?  This is Luke Andersen.”

\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*

I hadn’t been assaulted by sand-dwelling yellow worms.  I hadn’t seen Tommy, or Mathilde, or Micah.  If something had been knocking on my closet door, it managed to circumvent the laws of physics so my sister couldn’t hear a thing.

But Luke was real.

We met at Starbucks.  I sat at a little back table and watched him walk through the door, tall, lean, and square-jawed.  His looks were the ideal combination of his parents’, young and smiling in the photographs on his grandmother’s mantle - Midwest-Norwegian father, crushed to death under his dashboard in a ditch alongside the 110 before Luke was potty-trained; Chinese-American mother, now an empty-eyed quadriplegic on a ventilator in a dirty post-acute in Sylmar.

I was going to have to try really, really hard to not have a crush on him.  He looked good.

He smiled suavely as he sat in the chair across from me.  “Ansley fucking Vasquez.”

I laughed.  “Luke fucking Andersen.”

“I’m surprised you recognized me,” he said.  “I thought Jack Daniels completely destroyed your ability to create short-term memories last night.

“It did.  But I might have Facebook-stalked you a few times.”

He raised his eyebrows.  “Why didn’t you get in touch with me?”

“I just… Micah.”  Our childhood friend’s name served as a one-word explanation for the dearth of communication between us in the social media age.

Luke’s smile dimmed.  “Yeah.  I get it.”

“While we’re on the topic, how did you recognize me last night?”

He grinned again.  “I might have Facebook-stalked you a few times.”

I giggled.  He kept looking at me as though he were trying to look through me.

“So… Travis,” I said.

“I met him at UCLA; I did some research there.  I didn’t know he lived across the street from you.”

“So, UCLA, huh?” I asked playfully.  “You know, I expected more out of you.  When we were kids, everyone kept on saying Harvard.  Did you slack off in high school?”

I doubted he’d actually slacked off in high school, but the Harvard part was true.  Luke was only nine months older than me but two grades ahead in school.  He’d skipped third grade, and might have skipped even more if our elementary school had been inclined to do that sort of thing.  At twelve, his resume included pre-calculus, perfect standardized test scores, and summers at Johns Hopkins camp.

“Oh, Harvard accepted me,” he said.  “But UCLA gave me a free ride.  So I thought, lemme make the Ivies wait until I’m ready for med school.”

“You’re in med school?” I asked.

“About to start my last year at Georgetown.”

I smiled.  “Congrats, man!”

“How about you?”  he asked.  “What’s Ansley Fucking Vasquez been up to?”

“Nothing that impressive.  Florida State.  English degree.  Two years teaching preschool.”

Luke nodded enthusiastically.  “Are you pursuing writing?  You should.  You were so talented.”

“Well, teaching for now.  I’m a TA at a Montessori in Santa Monica this fall.  Then, maybe my Master’s.  I’m thinking Loyola Marymount.”

“Loyola Marymount, huh?” Luke smirked.  “They’re the school out here that wants to be Georgetown.  They’ve kinda got a Single White Female thing going on with us.”

“Cute.  Wait, Georgetown?  Like in *The Exorcist*?”

“That’s what Travis keeps on saying.”  He laughed.  “Notoriety, baby.”

“Ok, if we’re done talking shit about each other’s schools, I actually wanted to ask you about last night.”

His face straightened.  “You were wasted.  We sat on Travis’s porch and talked.  Your phone was dead, so you told me to write my number on your arm.  Then you said you were tired, so I walked you to your door.”

“That was all?” I asked.  “Nothing bad happened?  We didn’t go anywhere?”

“No.  Just your house.”

“And you saw me go inside?  I didn’t wander off somewhere?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”  He laughed.  “I waited outside for a couple minutes to make sure you didn’t stumble out and get hit by a car or something.  Why?  Did you wake up with any hickeys you didn’t remember?”

“No, definitely not.  What did we talk about?”

He shrugged.  “Things.  You said you’re hanging around for the summer.  Alicia finished law school, kicked her fiancee to the curb, and moved back into your old place.  Your dad’s finally going to flatten the shack.”

“Just that?” I insisted.

“Ansley, what are you getting at?”

“I… I had a really weird dream,” I said.  “About Micah.  And Tommy.”

At the mention of Tommy’s name, Luke’s calm expression broke.  His eyes narrowed for a second before he rearranged his poker face.

“You did ask me about Tommy last night.”

“I might’ve Facebook-stalked him, too.  He was studying architecture, right?  Screw that, he’d be an architect by now.”

Luke frowned.  He looked at his lap.  “Did you Facebook-stalk Tommy lately?”

“No.  I did once, like four years back.  Why?”

Luke closed his eyes, then opened them.  “Tommy’s dead, Ansley.  He slit his wrists six months ago.”

\*\*\*\*\*\*

I drove in circles for an hour after parting ways with Luke.

Sure, it had been tough coming back to the place where I’d spent countless afternoons playing make-believe with Micah.  But I’d been mentally prepared for the painful memories.  I knew Micah had been savagely violated, and I knew he was dead.  I’d gotten used to it.

Tommy, though.  I thought about the pictures I’d seen on his Facebook page when, procrastinating, I’d searched him out years before.  He’d been tall and beanpole-thin, with a baby face and the half-buzzed haircut of a Korean pop star, laughing over red cups in a San Luis Obispo dorm room.  Out of the four of us, he’d been the most fun.

I tried to imagine Tommy - lanky, goofy, prankster Tommy - locking himself in a bathroom and taking a razor blade to his arteries.  I couldn’t do it.

Luke tried to make me feel better.  It was best I’d heard it from him - from empathetic, halcyon psychiatrist-in-training Luke.  He’d been a calming presence to when I was a scared kid, an effect he’d reprised at the Starbucks that afternoon.

“Tommy was clinically depressed,” Luke explained.  “He was the young hot-shot whiz kid at a firm in Phoenix.  One day he just broke down, quit, left his whole life and came back here.  I think he worked a couple crappy minimum-wage jobs, then he met a heroin dealer.  So that was messing with his head, plus his prescription meds, and apparently he was drinking.  I guess he couldn’t take it anymore.”

“He was always so happy,” I said, paying homage to the cliche.  “Did you talk to him at all, before he…”

Luke shook his head. “I was still in DC.  And honestly, he and I weren’t friends.  Hadn’t been for awhile.  The whole ‘and then there were two’ thing was too tough to deal with.  His parents transferred him to Catholic school, so it wasn’t even like we saw each other by the lockers.  We’d wave from across the street.  That was about it.”

I’m sure I looked like a bomb had gone off in front of me.  Luke smiled comfortingly.

“I do miss him, though.  Remember those pictures he drew of Mrs. Schmidt?  That shit was hilarious.”

I did.  The middle school guidance counselor - a short, overweight middle-aged woman with frizzy hair and a perennially constipated face - elicited the ire of the entire student body with her condescending assemblies on bullying and eating disorders, always held right after lunch, robbing them of their treasured playtime.  Tommy would sketch unflattering cartoons of her in the margins of his notebooks.

“He was so fucking talented,” I said.  “I was always so jealous of him.”

“Yeah, well, I missed you too, Ansley fucking Vasquez.”  Luke smiled genuinely at me.  “And I’m glad we’re talking again.  I just… I don’t want this to be the place where Micah died, you know.  Or where Tommy died.  I want it to be the place where we made awesome memories together.”

In that moment, it was what I wanted, too.  But as I canvassed the city in my car, it was hard to feel anything but loss.  Loss, and guilt.  I should have messaged Tommy on Facebook, called him, something.  He was suffering, and I had no idea.  Whenever I thought about him - which was pitifully rare - I’d imagined him designing skyscrapers and telling jokes and being happy.

Micah and Tommy.  Two dead boys, two friends to wallow over.  Tommy, dead in a bathtub, the furthest thing from my mind.  Micah, dead at the hands of a monster, newly friendless because of a stupid fight.

It seemed so petty now - he’d told our fifth-grade teacher that Luke let me copy his old report, and we were giving him the silent treatment for tattling.  Dumb kid stuff.  It had been a Life Science paper I’d plagiarized, about animals that used echolocation.

\*\*\*\*\*

The sun was low in the sky by the time I turned onto Fifth Avenue.  In the burned-gold light, Allister Park looked particularly inviting.  A group of small children chased each other up and down the play structure.  Two teen-aged boys shot hoops on the cracked-asphalt basketball court.  Like an epiphany, I knew where I wanted to be.

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Read the next chapter here.

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*Written by NickyXX

Content is available under CC BY-SA*