The Framing

The notebook

November 28th 2015 9:00am
"You're on time again." I said to Jeremy as he walked in through the cafeteria. "Yeah well I have nothing better to do so why not?" He asked and sat at our usual cafeteria table.

"So what did you want to work on today?" I asked mentally preparing myself for teaching him. "I have no idea, anything is fine I guess."

"Well what did you bring with you today?" I looked around, the only thing I saw was his notebook with a bunch of songs and artwork in it. "Well all I brought was this." He placed it in front of me.

"Go ahead, open it. I don't care." He insisted. I looked at the very first page which was full of his favorite song lyrics, some were very deep and meaningful, while others either didn't make sense or were just funny.

The first four pages were filled bottom to top with song lyrics, and the next few pages after that being empty so he could have more room to write more.

"So I'm guessing you spend most of your time with this journal open?" I asked because the next two pages were filled with drawings. Doodles of anything that came to his mind, a ton of creativity was used. A lot of which, I didn't think he had.

"Yeah, I've gotten it confiscated twice this year. I'm not much of a note taker."

"Jeremy I saw your science notes, believe me I know that you take terrible notes." I said, flipping through more pages. Coming across a lot of things that were personal and if I were him, I wouldn't be sharing this with someone like me.

"I'm gonna go pee." He said getting up and leaving the cafeteria, he left me with the notebook so I knew he was coming back. I took this time to go through most of what I could while he wasn't breathing down my neck.

I opened up to a familiar page, one I had seen last Saturday. The one that said "Dad come back home" and "Mom I have been doing just fine without you." I was dying to know what he meant by all this, yes it was easy to infer he had a lot of home problems, and I couldn't just ask him what they were.

I heard the cafeteria doors open and saw him walk in, I quickly turned to any other page. I saw one with a drawing of an album cover he must have been working on.

"Did you find anything interesting?" He asked me sitting down, I decided not to talk about the "Dad come back home" page and just shook my head. "It's all pretty interesting, I like what I have seen so far."

"Do you really? Or are you just being nice to me?" He asked.

"Yeah I really do mean it, nothing in here comes across as scary or anything. And at least you can draw pretty well, all I can do is draw poorly looking stick figures."

"Allison I know you saw the page, you know exactly which one I'm talking about, it's okay that's the whole reason I trusted you with the notebook."

"I have no idea what you're talking about." I lied. My stupid mouth should just stay quiet because I really want to know more about him. "Yes I know you saw it." He shoved the notebook which was now open to the page at me.

"Okay fine yeah I saw it, I just didn't want to be rude and ask you a bunch of personal questions when I only met you like a week ago."

"Ally it's fine, after all we do have to spend an hour every Saturday with each other. Eventually we're gonna find out more, so it's best to just put it all in the open as soon as possible, and besides I trust you."

"I trust you too." I lied once again, I had a hard time trusting people who basically lie for a living and who I just met a week ago. "Alright Jeremy, tell me your life story."

"Well when I was a kid, my dad was stationed in Bahrain being a military employee, when the station he worked at was bombed. He survived for the next few weeks, but during a surgery there was some complications with the medicine they knocked him out with, and it killed him on the table. And as for my mom, well she went absolutely crazy after that. She started abusing me and never let me leave the house. Eventually, there was a complaint filed by a neighbor and she was taken away, now my dad's sister watches me. She's pretty badass and I love her, I just wish I had my real parents again."

Yeah and then there was me, the girl who thought her life was over when her car and phone were taken away. "So what about you, what's your life story?" He asked.

I had to think about it for a moment, "Well there isn't much to it I guess. My mom is a kindergarten teacher and my dad works at some office cubical job, lately they've purposely been staying at their jobs to avoid seeing me."

"Why?" He asked.

"Did no one ever tell you what happened to me, the entire reason as to why I am tutoring you?"

"No."

"Well a little over a week ago I was in study hall, and got called to go to the office, where I was informed that they found a knife in my locker, which wasn't mine by the way, and that my punishment would be to have detention for like two months, and I had to tutor you."

"Wow I can't believe they would make you do that."

"Yeah it really does suck." I said looking at the clock, it was now 10:05 and we were still here. "Dude we could have left like five minutes ago." I said pointing at the clock.

"Oh shit, Tom is gonna kill me if I'm late. So I'm assuming that we'll give you a ride home then?" He asked, I if course said yes because I already had to walk here.

We walked out of the school and saw his van parked off of school property, since he was expelled he wasn't allowed on it so that meant we had to walk forever.

"Hey Ally." He said to me as I crawled to the back seat. I said hello and tried not to die back here, even the slight turn was pushing me out of my seat and I had to sit here listening to death metal which really didn't calm my nerves.

The van came to a stop finally and I looked out the window to see my house, I thought I wasn't going to make it back here alive. "Well thanks for the drive again, I'll see you on Monday." I told Jeremy and got out of the car.