“Seven…” he began to say, but I shook my head at him and turned away. I didn’t want to hear any more petty excuses. I walked away, parting the crowd that had engulfed us, and left Colin, the school, and everything else behind.
I didn’t look back.
***
I pushed the door to The Book Station open with a sigh and welcomed the familiar smell of books, the warmth of the lamp hanging right above the door and the peaceful sound of pages slowly being turned.
Most of the walk back home from school was a blur. My feet had taken me through streets and across roads by muscle memory, while my thoughts and heart roared with anger, frustration, and hurt at Colin.
The image of him standing before me with confused eyes and his pink lips in a frown, his hand pressed to his cheek, was still quite fresh in my mind, and now that I’d had some time to think, my stand against him was starting to crumble.
He deserved it, I told myself, hoping I could somehow convince that small shard of regret embedded in me to disappear. He deserved it. Don’t fall for his tricks again. Don’t fall for him.
As I shrugged off my jacket, I felt my phone vibrate long enough for me to know it was an incoming call. I pulled it out of my pocket, but didn’t look at the screen. I already knew who was calling. He’d been calling since I left school.
I held my phone in my hand, waiting, until it just stopped buzzing. I sighed and slipped it back in my pocket before heading over to the counter, where Francesca was standing.
“Hi there, Seven,” she said, sending a smile my way. Her wavy brown hair was tied up today in a bun, a few strands hanging elegantly by the side of her face. “Here to borrow another book?”
“No,” I croaked, my voice sounding raspy. I cleared my throat. “Just going to hang out for a while…” I trailed off, looking around the place. There were fewer customers today. I found Danny messing around with Alfred by the stairs. “Where’s Patrick?” I asked.
Francesca’s smile faltered and she hesitated, glancing towards the shelves. “He’s…not really doing well.”
“Why?” I asked, alarmed. “Is he okay?”
She pursed her lips, unsure of what to say. “I think,” she said, “it’ll be better if you ask him yourself.” She gestured towards a section of The Book Station that held the religion books. Rarely anyone went there.
I nodded my thanks and went over to those particular shelves, craning my neck to peek through the small spaces between books.
Patrick was sitting on the cold floor, his glasses in one hand while the other covered almost half of his face. He must’ve heard my boots clicking against the floorboards, but he didn’t show it.
“Patrick?” I slowly drew closer towards him, reluctant to make any sudden movements.
He jumped a little in surprise. “Seven,” he said, removing his hand from his face. He didn’t look at me, but a lamp behind me made his glassy eyes shine. “Sorry, I was just thinking.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.” He didn’t sound okay at all. “It’s just…they didn’t come.”
“Who?” I asked, crouching down in front of him.
“My parents,” he said, his eyes averted. “Remember I told you and your mother that they wanted to meet up with me? I even invited them to see this place that I’ve built.” He raised his hand to indicate The Book Station, only to drop back down to his lap, limp. “Well, they cancelled.”
I thought back to three days ago when he’d told us about it. He’d been so excited. Now he looked like those broken, useless things we hide in boxes at the back of our closets, just waiting for dust to pile up.
I felt my heart breaking for the second time that day from seeing Patrick like that. He was always so optimistic, so cheerful; he was my inspiration. But now he was brought down so low that I didn’t know what to do to pull him back up on his feet.
“Maybe they’re just busy,” I reasoned half-heartedly.
He snorted, shaking his head. “That’s exactly what they said. They also said maybe they could come next time, but I know there won’t be a next time.” He sighed, shifting uncomfortably in his place. “Now that I think about it, I don’t understand why I even bothered in the first place,” he said quietly. “It would take a miracle for them to want to see me again.”
I wanted to tell him not to think that way, to think positively, but I couldn’t, because then I would be lying to myself. Even I couldn’t come up with a single silver lining for my own disappointments, much less his.
“What did I expect?” I heard him whisper to himself, forgetting for a moment that I was there.
You expected them to come through, I thought to myself, just like I expected Colin to come through and be any different than he was before. But your parents didn’t and he didn’t, and now we’re both drowning in regret and heartache.
“I’m sorry you have to see me like this, Seven,” Patrick said, and I looked back up at him. He was covering his face again. “Just go home.”
I should’ve argued to stay, to comfort him while he was going through a tough time. A good friend would’ve done that. The Seven Warrilow who kept everyone’s secrets safe would’ve done that.
But this Seven Warrilow had had enough.
So I ended up saying, “Okay,” and made a hasty exit out of the building.
***
Date: April 12, 2013
At the age of five or six, I dreamed of becoming an actress. I spent most of my hours running a marathon of movies on the TV, admiring how the actresses could shift from one emotion to another like they were merely shuffling a deck of cards.
Although, as the years passed, I gave up on that dream. One of the reasons was that it wasn’t as easy as it had seemed. You have to memorize tons of lines, you have to go to interviews and say words you don’t really mean, and sometimes, when your contract forces you to, you have do things you aren’t comfortable with.
The other was the paparazzi—the endless stalking, questions, cameras flashing at every move—there wasn’t any privacy for your personal life. Everybody knew everything about you. I just couldn’t take that.
So take that fun little fact you now know about me and imagine what I felt the next morning when almost everyone I knew confronted me with a sympathizing look and a question: “Hey, what happened between you and Colin Stillman yesterday?”
Suffocating.
That much attention was a foreign object—overwhelming—to me, but I survived half a day of it. I managed to dodge them in the halls with a shake of my head or simply pretending I couldn’t hear them. During classes, I would turn a blind eye to their paper conversations, and if I had to, I fed them false assurances like, “It was nothing”.
Lunch was an entirely different subject, however.
“It obviously wasn’t ‘nothing’, Seven!” Nicole attempted to whisper, but emotion filled her voice to the point of bursting and I could tell that the other table could hear us very clearly. “You freaking slapped the guy. And for you that’s huge.”
I was tempted to say she didn’t know me well enough—none of them did—to say that with such confidence, but I bit back the insult.
I was hanging out with her and Amy again, mostly out of guilt for unintentionally contributing to her heartbreak. She’d stopped crying already, like I’d asked her to promise, but there was still some noticeable redness around her eyes, as if it had been rubbed roughly several times.
She remained quiet, absently poking her food as Nicole went on, “He must’ve done something horrible…” She tapped her chin with a finger, thinking, and then her eyes widened. “Oh my gosh, did he cheat on you?”
“He didn’t cheat on me,” I said calmly, slowly, “because we’re not together, like I’ve told you a million times already. He doesn’t like me that way.”
“Puh-lease,” she scoffed, “of course he does. Trust me, I know it when a guy’s into a girl.”
I looked up at her, f
eeling my anger sputter and sizzle like acid, ready to burn anyone who dared come close. Unfortunately, Nicole was the closest one I could find. “Yeah, you seem to know a lot about those kinds of things, don’t you?”
Nicole flushed, immediately shutting up.
I suppose using her secret against her was a move way below the belt. Nicole used to sleep around with a lot of guys—and I mean, a lot—but when she met this one guy who seemed so perfect, he was probably “the one”, and they got together, Mr. Perfect found out she wasn’t a virgin. And he wasn’t happy with it.
Later on, she’d told me she wanted to change, to stop herself before things got even more out of hand. She was trying—I’d seen it so many times in the way she kept conversation with some attractive boys short, making sure she didn’t let a flirty comeback slip.
It was blatantly a touchy topic for her, and now that I’d dropped the bomb, she went back to her food, shoving some salad into her mouth. I turned away, ashamed for reacting like that, but I’d had it.
I was determined to focus on my food for the rest of lunch period, but something else attracted my attention.
Colin was standing up from his table, carrying his tray towards the trash bin. I’d been ignoring him the entire morning, refusing to even acknowledge his presence, but right then my eyes followed after him as he dumped his leftover food and placed the tray on the dirty pile. He spun around, about to walk back to his friends, glancing briefly towards me.
I tore my gaze away, but it was too late; he caught me looking. Without needing to lift my head, I could sense him giving me a second glance, one that was much longer this time. I wished and wished and wished he would just walk away, leave me to my misery, but he just had to make everything worse.
I raised my head to see if he was gone, but Colin was right there, taking long strides towards me.
My arm jerked, the instinct of fight or flight taking over my body, and some of the carrots on my fork flew across the table. The other parts of me remained completely petrified.
Amy finally broke free from her daze, noticing Colin, and looked over at me with alarmed eyes. She knew I didn’t want to see him.
Nicole noticed him too. She opened her mouth to tell me the obvious, but Colin beat her to it.
“Seven,” he said, standing merely two feet away from me. My fingers itched to reach over and shorten that distance. I closed them in a fist. “I need to talk to you.” He paused. “Alone.”
I didn’t look at him, hoping he’d just disappear if I pretend he wasn’t there, but he said, “Please.”
Some of the people in the cafeteria glanced over at our table, gesturing not so subtly at Colin and me. From the corner of my eye, I could feel Amy’s stare, heavy with meaning and unspoken words. She was watching me very closely, I knew, and I thought about all the questions I’d have to answer later if I just kept avoiding Colin like this.
Then again, I’d still have a lot of questions to answer if I did go with him.
I sighed and finally looked up at Colin. Despite what he had done, his eyes still looked like home to me. “Alright,” I said.
His face lit up at my response and he nodded at me, starting to back away towards the doors of the cafeteria.
We walked side by side, and it would’ve almost been like how it was before, except for the fact that I’d kept an arm’s distance away from him. I could feel this distance between us like an ache.
Colin led us outside the cafeteria, taking a route near a bathroom where a couple of girls were hanging out taking selfies. Maria was one of them.
She gave Colin a warm, bright smile and a wave, but when her eyes shifted to me, all I saw in them was wariness and more than a little bit of dislike.
Colin had turned around a corner and walked a bit farther, ripping Maria from my sight, until we were only surrounded by lockers and empty classrooms.
“Okay, you have me alone,” I said, a little too coldly, “now what do you want to talk about?”
Colin turned around to face me, his hands in his pockets. “Before I say anything else,” he started slowly, “thanks for agreeing to talk with me. You pretty much diminished my presence into non-existence, so I didn’t think you’d even look my way again.” A tiny smirk couldn’t help making an appearance, but I stayed stoic, leaning back against a locker with my arms crossed, waiting for him to continue.
Soon that smirk was wiped off as easily as a smudge of dirt. He cleared his throat. “Anyway, the reason why I wanted to talk to you,” he said, sighing and reaching back to his back pocket, “is because I’m returning this.” He retrieved a small notebook, its cover made of black leather and its pages slightly bulky form all the writing in it. The black notebook.
He stared at it for a moment before handing it to me. I accepted it with a small tremble to my hands, my eyes wide with surprise. I couldn’t believe it. I’d actually got it back.
It’s too late now, a bitter part of me thought, he knows all the secrets in there and he can spread more of them if he wants to.
“I can never say sorry enough,” he said, shaking his head, “I should’ve given it back to you that day but I…” He trailed away, bowing his head as he did.
“Colin…” I said, looking up at him. “Colin, I—”
“No, Seven,” he said, interrupting my sentence with a raised hand, “it’s okay.” He smiled sadly and it split my heart into two. “I just hope you can somehow forgive me.”
Without waiting for me to reply, Colin turned on his heel and walked back the way we came, leaving me standing there, the black notebook clutched tightly within the cage of my fingers.
This was supposed to be my victory, right? I spent weeks plotting and giving all my efforts to get the black notebook back; I should have been rejoicing or at least felt relieved.
So why did I feel like something was terribly, terribly wrong?
Entry 20: The Black Notebook
Date: April 12, 2013
I didn’t catch another glimpse of Colin for the rest of the day. Part of the reason was because I didn’t have any classes with him, but it was mostly because I’d dedicated myself to spending less time out in the halls in between classes. Once the bell rang for the end of another school day, I said goodbye to the last group of friends I was with, looked away when I thought I saw a tuft of red hair, and went straight home.
“Wow, Seven, you’re back early,” my mom said when I’d closed the front door to our house behind me. She was sitting on the couch with her feet up on the coffee table, a book in hand and a small timer set before her. She was probably waiting for something to bake in the oven.
I glanced at the clock in our living room and raised an eyebrow at her. “But I always come home at this time.”
“Well, you were out with Colin a little later than usual yesterday, so I assumed it would be the same today,” she said, not knowing the impact of his name on me.
It was a good thing her eyes were trained on the book she was reading, and not on me, because I had no idea what I looked like as I thought back to Colin and the sad smile he gave me. I certainly didn’t feel good about it, so I figured I probably wouldn’t look good, either.
“I’ll be in my room,” I announced curtly and went ahead upstairs.
“Seven,” my mom’s voice suddenly pulled me back. I stopped, my hand practically engraving itself on the railing by how hard I was gripping it. I asked, “Yeah?”
“Honey, are you okay?” she asked. I couldn’t see her face, but her worried tone told me all I needed to know.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I just have tons of homework to do.”
She didn’t reply to that, and I took it as permission to leave. I hurried up to my room, slamming the door shut with my leg. I dropped down to the chair in front of my desk, carried my backpack to my lap, and pawed inside for my textbooks. I hesitated when I saw the black notebook, just waiting for me to take it and write, but I ignored it and pulled my bio book out.
After going through weeks without the black notebook, I had a lot of new secrets I needed to keep and input. That, however, didn’t mean I was all that eager to reminisce on the things that had happened prior to its recent return, which I would surely do if I looked at it long enough.
So I did what I would’ve done before all of this had happened: I tuned out the whole world and studied. I concentrated on the formulas I knew would come up in the test this coming Monday, and once I was certain I wouldn’t easily forget them throughout the weekend, I went ahead and finished a project that was due next week.
By the time I was done, the sun was starting to sink in the sky. I wanted to waste more time, but I knew I couldn’t escape it forever. Eventually, I grabbed my phone and scrolled down my inbox, purposely skipping over Colin’s name.
After answering the new messages I’d just received, I dragged a hand over my face and sighed, bending over to pick up my backpack again. I shoved my textbooks back inside and found the black notebook at the very bottom.
I checked my phone again. The first secret was another problem between friends. One of them felt like the other didn’t trust him enough and admitted that there was a bit of hatred on his part of the friendship.
It made me think about how fragile relationships were. Dishonesty and the reluctance to share their true feelings could easily break one into pieces. You wouldn’t even know something’s wrong until it’s already dying.
I chose a pen from my collection and shifted in my seat, preparing myself for the task I was about to do.
When I flipped the black notebook open, I was surprised to see something else written inside.
Knitting my eyebrows in confusion, I blinked at the words, unsure if I was hallucinating. I rubbed my eyes and stared at it again.
It was all in my handwriting, so it couldn’t have been Colin or anyone else who wrote it, but instead of seeing a list of secrets like I was expecting to, I saw a diary entry.
The Black Notebook Page 31
