Free Passing Notes by D. G. Driver Page B

She
stopped herself and cocked her head. “Oh, never mind. I thought for
a second that it was... It was probably light coming in from the
window.” She looked up at the window to find the shades drawn. She
shook her head. “So, who’s Eileen?”
    “Eileen?”
    Jill giggled in this high-pitched nasally way
that had never changed since we were in Kindergarten together. Her
voice never deepened to a normal register like all the other girls
in school. She was seventeen and still sounded five. My spine
stiffened at the sound of it. “You’ve got her name all over your
paper and on your hand.”
    “If it’s Eileen, that would mean a guy made
the heart,” I kept explaining, mostly to myself. “No guy is
going to write all flowery like that.”
    “You’re not making a lot of sense.”
    “Eileen doesn’t make sense to me ,” I
told her. I directed Jill’s attention to the heart carved in the
desk. “See that? It’s old, right? You think that was done by a guy?
I don’t.”
    Jill just raised an eyebrow, or at least the
part of her face where an eyebrow would be if she hadn’t plucked
them to near oblivion. “Whatever, Mark. Just make sure Bethany
doesn’t see this. If she finds out you’re crushing on some Eileen
chick, whoever that is, it’ll be over.”
    That caught my attention. “I’m not...”
    But Jill was gone—bouncing off to deliver
more books and stick her nose into other people’s business.
    Great, I thought. Now some rumor was going to
start about me having a thing for some chick named Eileen. I didn’t
even know an Eileen. Was there even a girl that went to our school
named Eileen? That was an old-fashioned kind of name.
    And by the way, how did Jill know Bethany and
I were dating? I didn’t think she and Bethany were good friends. It
was only the first day of school. How did everyone find out so
fast? I wasn’t even sure myself if Bethany was officially my
girlfriend. I just kind of assumed it was going that way.
    I decided to be proactive. To head things
off, I snuck my cell out of my pocket. Discreetly, under my seat,
using one thumb and not even looking at the keys, I texted
Bethany:
    Thnkn of u
    I knew she probably wouldn’t reply because
she was the kind of person who never texted during classes. Bethany
was a straight-A student, the kind that follows the rules.
    I pushed the boxes on the desk to try to make
a little more room, but they wouldn’t budge. I was only working
with like two inches. With a shove of my shoulder, I purchased one
more inch, enough for my forearm to rest. As I lowered my hand, it
came to rest on a corner of a yellowed paper sticking out from
under the boxes. I tugged at it and freed it from its prison,
curious as to how long it had been there.
    What I found was a lined paged from a 5x7
spiral notepad. A faint green line divided the page in half, and
the top was frayed from having been ripped out. Written on it was a
short note not addressed to anyone or signed, like something that
might have been passed eons ago during a class and shoved under a
box so a teacher couldn’t find it.
    None of this seemed all that odd except that
the words were in the exact same cursive hand as the carved
“Eileen” on the desktop. It had to have been written by the same
person.
    Hairs raised on the back of my neck. I didn’t
know why I got spooked like that. I mean, it made a certain amount
of sense that once upon a time some guy sat at this desk carving
his girlfriend’s name into the wood and writing a note to a friend.
It’s just that, after all these years, how weird was it that I
discovered them both on the same day?
    I tried to read the note, but it was really
hard for me to decipher it. I pulled out a fresh piece of my
notebook paper and wrote the letters I thought I recognized with
little placeholder dashes for the letters I couldn’t figure out. In
the end, I had some horrible Wheel of Fortune game with no clues to
help me decide if I wanted to buy a consonant or a