Passing Notes by D. G. Driver

 
    1
     
    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 six 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.
    “I’ll just use my lap,” the guy next to me
said. I think his name was Jaden-Jay-or-Jason-Something-or-Other.
He’d been in my classes before, but we’d never spoken to each
other. The guy whose name started with J grabbed a folding chair
from the wall and set up next to a file cabinet by the classroom
door.
    That left me standing very awkwardly in front
of the class.
    Following J.J.’s example, I scanned the
perimeter of the room for a better option. Way in the back of the
room was this big piece of furniture covered with a stack of boxes,
a globe, and an upside-down wooden