Remember Me (On Hold)

iv

iv.

 It’s the weekend again, and even though I know I should be building something with the wood that’s been waiting in the backyard all week, all I want to do is lie on my bed and listen to music. I keep getting these songs in my head that I want to put on, but I have to get up to change tracks because I can’t find the remote of my stereo. After I’ve done this twenty times, I finally decide to just look for it. It isn’t buried under the covers. It isn’t under all the clothes piled on top of my chest of drawers, or sitting on top of my CDs or my desk. I get down on the carpet to look under my bed. I stick my arm under and feel around, find a couple of mismatched socks, and something I don't recognize − hard and flat and dusty. I pull it out, thinking maybe it's my yearbook from elementary school, and then I see it my heart stops.

Harry’s journal.

For some reason, I feel afraid. It’s like I’m spilt down the middle and one half of me wants to open it more than I’ve ever wanted to do anything. The other half is so scared. I can’t stop shaking.

Did it get kicked under the bed one night by accident?

Did he hide it?

I stare at it in my hands forever, just feeling its weight, looking at the place where one Wite-Out wing is starting to flake off. Then, once my hands are steadied, I open to the first page. It’s a drawing of his face – luscious chestnut locks, radiant emerald eyes, a dimpled smile. His left eye closed and the other one was a little open, like his about to take a photo. Holding, that seems to be a Polaroid Impulse, a present of mine. He drew a beaming light, to show a snapshot, and across the top he wrote, Me on a Sunday Morning.

I turn the page.

As I read, I can hear Harry’s voice, husky and slow, like he’s telling me secrets.

DEAR HALL MONITOR,

go ahead. call my parents, send me to detention, make me clean up trash at lunch. i didn’t go to bio today. it couldn’t be helped. i was already feeling so nervous, heart pounding a billion times a minute for no reason except that just thinking about sitting next to nigel made me want to puke. even though it’s the only thing i ever look forward to. crushes are supposed to be fun, aren’t they? they definitely aren’t supposed to be so torturous. i passed him at his locker in the english hall on my way to meet bella and he smiled at me and my stomach cramped up. i told bella ‘we have to leave’ even though i knew that here fifth period class is the only one she likes because mr. harris is the coolest teacher i’ve never had. she could tell that i meant it, though, because she got her serious face on and just left with me. that’s why i love her so much. that’s why i wish i was a better person. maybe you’ll spare me this once. you have a nice face and a shit job. maybe your life is hard and maybe you’ve just waiting for a kid to listen to you complain about it. if you don’t call my parents i promise i won’t call you ‘nails’ like the other kids do because i’ll know that you aren’t hard like them at all, and i’ll slow down when i pass you in the hallways just in case you decide that then’s the time to talk.

                                                                                                                            love,

                                                                                                                             harry

I shut the book.

My room is so quit and empty it hurts.

I know I should want to keep reading but I can’t. It’s too much. I put his journal in my chest of drawers, not in the top drawer where everyone put thing they want to hide, but buried in the clothes all the way back of a drawer near the bottom. But after a few minutes I move it. That place doesn’t seem right. So I put it on a shelf in the walk-in closet I painted purple a couple summers ago. I slide a shoe box full if photo negatives on front of it. I stand in the doorway of my closet and look at the shelf. I almost expect to see the shoebox rising and falling with the journal’s breath. But it’s just a journal. It isn’t alive. Something is wrong with me.

An hour later I reach up and touch it to make sure it’s still there.

After lunch I move it again. This time, I put it back under my bed, because that’s where it’s been for the past three months. I try to do homework. I try to watch TV. But all I can think about is Harry’s journal, in my room, and if it’s still there, and what id someone finds it, and why I don’t want to read it, and how I know I need to.

͌

The next morning, already dressed, shoes tied, hair pulled back in my perpetual ponytail, I stand in front of the closet again. I want to walk out the door but I can’t. I don’t mean I can’t like I don’t want to. I mean. I can’t, like something is physically making it impossible for me to leave my room without it. So I crouch over my backpack and find a zipper pocket. The pocket’s pretty small, so don’t know if it will work, but I take Harry’s journal from the shelf and try to fit it in, and it turns out to be perfect. It rests there, hidden.

I close my backpack and heave it over one shoulder, then the other. The journal makes it so much heavier, but the weight feels good.

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Note:

I had just had the greatest idea today to update, even though it’s kinda short but hope it’ll do.

 ‘til next time.

-s.m. .x