Seven.
With her name came a pang in his chest. He lifted his beer to his lips, but stopped just in time, remembering that he’d already drained more than half of it. He placed it on the kitchen counter, pushing it away from him.
Whenever Colin thought back to that afternoon, after he’d given back the black notebook, he felt queasy. His mind constantly wandered back to that message he wrote in her diary, trying to guess if she’d read it already or not. It wasn’t every day that he poured out his deepest feelings to a girl who probably hated his guts. Maybe that’s why she wasn’t calling him.
Calm down, he told himself, she’ll call you if she wants to. If she doesn’t, it’s fine. It’s cool. It doesn’t matter.
It did.
He laughed at the joke Roman just said and fumbled inside his jean pocket for his phone. Once he realized it wasn’t there, he twisted around to look at his back pockets, but it wasn’t there either.
Colin craned his neck towards the couch in the living room, where he’d been sitting a couple of minutes ago. He could see Maria, still sitting cross-legged by the spot he was in earlier, sliding her fingers across the screen of his phone.
It wasn’t strange that he’d let Maria play with his phone. She often took it in her bony fingers, taking pictures of herself, sometimes both of them, but he always just deleted them afterwards.
But for some reason, this time, Colin felt annoyed.
He left his group without saying anything and strode towards Maria, clenching his jaw. Just thinking of the possibility that Seven had already called and he wasn’t able to answer her because Maria wanted to take more pictures of herself made him feel like punching something.
She looked up at him and smiled as he got closer. He ignored her and snatched his phone from her hands without a second thought. “What are you doing with my phone?” he demanded, a little too harshly.
Maria was shocked at his angry expression, but she expertly covered it with a grin. “What? I was just playing a game, okay? Sheesh.”
Colin stared at her, suspicious, and then asked, “Did anyone call me? Or, I don’t know, texted?”
She cocked her head to the side, her hair falling off her bare shoulder. “Nope,” she said, shaking her head, and then she gasped, an idea forming in her head. “Hey! Colin, we should take a picture together!”
He furrowed his eyebrows at her. “Why should we?”
“Well, high school’s almost ending,” she reasoned, leaning towards him, “and we should, you know, make more memories together.” She extended her arm, aiming to take his hand, but he quickly backed away, scowling.
“I don’t care,” he growled. Maria recoiled, her smile falling apart. She definitely wasn’t expecting that. And why would she? Colin never got mad at anyone. He was always smiling, always having fun. He was the boy that no problem could ever touch.
The only person who really knew the truth was Seven.
He didn’t bother waiting for Maria to respond and simply walked away, heading back to his friends. When he was far away from her, at last, Colin checked his recent call history, hoping against hope, but all it told him was that Seven never called.
And he believed it.
It seemed, in his sadness, he forgot how easily information could be altered.
Entry 21: Ignorance Is Bliss—Being Ignored Isn’t
Date: April 15, 2013
I spent the rest of my weekend moping around in my room, going on attempts to call Colin. The most I managed to do though was collapse on the bed and toss the phone away.
What made things worse was that Colin hadn’t even called or texted me back since last Friday. After crying my heart out, I’d soon realized that Maria could’ve easily lied about her and Colin being together.
At this, I tied my hopes to a big helium balloon and got ready to set it free—it didn’t take long however, for it to pop and sink back down to the earth.
Colin should’ve seen my call by now. He would’ve known that it wasn’t a missed call because Maria had answered it, and if he really did feel the things he wrote in my diary, he would’ve given me a call to at least clarify things.
Of course, there were plenty of reasons why he didn’t call—don’t think I didn’t try to give him all the excuses in the world. He could’ve gotten sick. He was at a party and didn’t notice it. He was graduating soon after all; what else to expect from a boy celebrating the end of his high school days? He could’ve done something impulsive and was grounded from every means of contact with the outside world despite his improving relationship with his father. He could’ve seen the call, shocked to see that it had been answered, but was too uncertain to talk to me about it.
If what he wrote to me was true, he was the one in fear of our terribly imbalanced relationship completely tipping over because of the secret he had kept so long.
All the plausible scenarios that I had run over in my head at least eighty times, but how could I know which one was on point? What was a girl in love to do? Naturally, she had to smother her feelings some more and wait for the boy to make the move. Because that was the way of things.
But the boy didn’t make the move, and so the girl was left with no other choice: she had to leave her room sooner or later. She walked down to the kitchen and took the whole bucket of pistachio ice cream back up to her room. She put on some romance movies on her laptop and fed her eyes and ears and heart with empty promises of a destined someone she was to meet someday.
They should’ve put another warning after the one for piracy: “This is fiction, folks. Don’t compare this love story to your nonexistent one.” That would’ve been so helpful.
Eventually, I managed to convince myself that going to school wasn’t a waste of my time, that it would actually get my mind off red-haired, green-eyed and extremely attractive things.
However, with school came the inevitability of people and noise and more secrets that I didn’t want to think about, much less keep in the black notebook that had gotten me into this mess in the first place.
“Hey, Seven!” I turned around to see a boy named Kevin jogging towards me, an excited smile stamped on his face. “I’ve got something to tell you!”
“Sorry, Kev,” I said, placing my hand between us so he wouldn’t run straight into me. “I don’t feel well today. Let’s just talk next time, okay?”
“Oh. Yeah sure, just get well soon, Seven.” Kevin gave me a smile that was meant to apologize to and reassure me at the same time. When he walked away from me, though, his shoulders were slumped in disappointment.
Kevin wasn’t the first person I’d turned down that day and he surely wasn’t going to be the last.
I felt bad for the people who came to me, knowing that they could depend on me based on past experience, only to find me incapable and unwilling to help them. Then again, I’d think about how unfair it was that they had someone to guide them, to hold them up when they couldn’t even do it themselves, while I had no one.
My thoughts kept me rooted to my place, occupying the center of my attention. Kevin was long gone, but I was still staring blankly at the spot where he’d stood—until a certain name pierced through all the other sounds in the hall and drifted to my ear, like a dandelion that had been tossed away by the strong breeze.
“…oh, Colin, you’re hilarious!”
I snapped out of it, the spell that kept me in place broken merely by that name. I spun around, trying to find the owner of that name, the reason for all the sleepless nights and heartaches.
He was closer than I’d anticipated, slouched against a locker with a couple of girls enveloping him. It was a wonder he could still breathe from how near they were to him. Roman, who was standing beside him, was the only male to be seen in sight.
Colin laughed at one of the girls’ comments and threw a joke their way. The girls lunged at it, a bunch of hyenas with a piece of deliciously raw meat.
Basing it on my call history
with Colin from the weekend—or lack thereof—no one would be assuming that Colin would trap me against my locker, demanding that I be his. Well, one wouldn’t imagine it if one weren’t me.
But I didn’t think he’d be back to his normal self this quickly. I didn’t think he’d be laughing and kidding around while I was walking around with only a small, miserable piece of myself left.
I guess it just goes to show how far apart our worlds really were—so far apart that while one was on the verge of self-destruction, the other went on turning.
Above us, the school bell wailed, alarming us to the start of our next classes. Mine was just down the hall and I could reach it in no time. Sadly, I was given no other choice but to pass by Colin’s posse.
I sucked in a deep breath, preparing myself. Just keep walking, I told myself, don’t look at him and he won’t look at you. Keep your face straight. You don’t care about him. You don’t care about him. I smoothed down my shirt with one hand and adjusted my books with the other before stepping forward.
I actually thought it was going pretty well; I was walking with a bounce to my step, chin up with confidence, and basically, I didn’t look as weak as I really felt inside.
It started going unsuccessfully when the girls had dispersed with fluttering hands and flirty smiles, and Roman patted his best friend on the shoulder and left for his class. Colin raised his hand half-heartedly in a wave at them and whirled around—toward my direction.
In that same instant, I made the mistake of looking up, and our eyes met.
Faster than a fire sparking from the strike of a match, I was stuck. I was captured, mesmerized, and compelled to keep looking, but I knew I had to tear my eyes away before those green, green eyes of his could swallow me up. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop staring at him. And apparently, he wasn’t planning on breaking our eye contact any time soon, either.
And then, I just couldn’t take it. Colin had read all of my secrets, my feelings for him, and he could confirm any of my assumptions—he could be mad, he could be disgusted or he could possibly, possibly be feeling the same way too—but that last one was just a foggy speculation I couldn’t depend on. What was I supposed to think? What was anybody supposed to think if they were in my situation?
So I was the first to look away.
If he really does like me, he’ll say hi, I thought, my limbs as stiff as a pair of new jeans that you weren’t comfortable with yet. Colin was well within my line of vision, but I fixated on something—anything else. If he really does care about me like he said he did, he’ll call my attention and talk to me about the black notebook. He’ll—
I felt Colin’s arm brush against mine as he walked past—and then he was gone.
I lurched to a stop, shocked. Colin had never ignored me like that. Not since he stole the black notebook.
While everybody else scurried to their classes, I slowly pivoted in my place to look back at Colin, but he was already getting farther and farther away—until he disappeared from my sight entirely. I could almost hear my heart breaking again.
***
Date: April 22, 2013
For the past week Colin and I had settled into a sort of routine. In the halls, we’d somehow find each other, glance briefly for a millisecond, and then look the other way, as if we didn’t see anything.
There were times when I wanted to break the routine and just come up at him, spill my heart out for him to take and stomp on if he felt like it, but I always ended up turning my head, my eyes gravitating away from him as if pulled on by some mystical force.
If that was hard, sitting behind him in Calculus for an entire period was harder. Especially since Colin loved to talk and joke around with his friends so he’d be squirming in his seat, unable to sit still, and my eyes would incontrovertibly flicker toward him.
And every single time, I had to close my eyes for a few seconds, reminding myself that whatever relationship Colin and I were able to build, it was already burned down to ashes.
***
Date: May 3, 2013
The lunch line was a little long but I was in no hurry to eat. I didn’t have the appetite for that many things nowadays. I usually occupied myself with a book, which was exactly what I took out of my bag then and opened.
The noise of the cafeteria minimized to a dull buzzing in the background as I poured myself into the book, letting the words swallow up my consciousness and take me to another dimension where I didn’t have to think about anything or feel anything besides what the character was thinking or feeling.
“…you naughty, naughty boy,” a voice said, penetrating through the cloud of indifference I’d surrounded myself with, and I could picture a certain familiar grin. I would’ve recognized him anywhere—Colin. “I heard you left two dozen roses inside Rica’s locker. No wonder the girl didn’t turn you down.”
“Hey, watch it, bucko,” another voice said. “She would’ve said yes to me anyway—flowers or no.”
“Right.” Colin snickered.
“Oh, shut up, Col,” I heard the other person say. “At least I already asked. Just three weeks and it’s already prom—aren’t you going to take anyone?”
I was barely focusing on my book now, my hands trembling slightly. He must’ve been at least a person away from me in the line, maybe two, and I strained my ears to hear his reply, but there was only silence—silence that seemed louder to me than any of the hubbub inside the cafeteria.
It was only when I took a step forward in the line did Colin answer with a laugh. “No rush, my friend. I’m still thinking about it.”
I didn’t know if I should’ve been relieved or disappointed.
***
His friend Jason was waiting for a reply. Colin was entirely aware of Seven standing just a few feet away from him in the line, bent over another book. He wondered if she could hear him from where she was, if she missed him like he missed her. He wondered if someone had already asked her to prom.
He laughed. He was getting pretty good at balancing it out, making sure it didn’t sound forced, and it implied that he was actually enjoying his time and that he was happy. “No rush, my friend. I’m still thinking about it,” he said, his answer safe.
Jason accepted his response with a nod and then went on to talk about some online game he’d recently discovered. Colin kept up the conversation with the right amount of smiles and questions and going “Woah”, but all he wanted to do was to go up to Seven and ask her how her day was going.
***
Date: May 5, 2013
“Mom, can I not go to school today?” I asked when my mom came to wake me up fifteen minutes after my alarm clock failed to do so.
My mom retraced her steps and looked at me, a wrinkle in between her eyebrows. “Why?” she asked, walking back inside my room to put a hand to my forehead. “Are you sick?”
Does heartsick count? I shrugged. “I don’t feel up to it.”
She stared at me for a long time, scrutinizing my sleepy face. Without a doubt, she could see the dark circles under my eyes, which were puffy from all the tears I’d shed when the night was quiet and I was alone with my masochistic speculations.
I glanced briefly down at her stomach and noticed the tiny bump under her shirt. It was already two months since I first met Candice, and, coincidentally, she’d turned out to be Colin’s older sister.
“Seven,” she said softly, moving to sit down beside me on the bed, “if there’s something wrong, you know you can tell me.”
I pulled myself in, hugging my blanket around my shoulders. “I know,” I said quietly.
Mom waited for me to continue, her hand on my back, comforting.
I’d wanted to tell somebody about what I was going through for months already, to vomit out all the negative and positive feelings that were mixing together inside me when they weren’t supposed to be mixed at all.
And here was my mother, offering to help carry the burden on my shoulder
.
The problem with our society today is communication. Most teenagers never really realize how easy it actually is to just tell their parents everything, and likewise parents never really realize that teenagers want not just to be heard, but also to be listened to and understood.
That doesn’t exclude the friends or siblings that have always been there for you, those who are willing to be the wooden beams to your collapsing roof. Of course, you can try to forget about the fact that you’re torn apart with all the fun and laughter you want, but in the end, it’s only when you’ve confronted your broken parts that you can gradually piece them back together.
And at that point, I was quite ready to get some parts reassembled. I just didn’t know where to begin to tell my mom. So I simply said, “Colin and I broke up.” It was the truth and it was a start.
“Oh, baby, that’s terrible,” she said, genuinely flabbergasted. “Are you okay? I mean, of course you’re not okay, but you know—are you?”
“I’m holding up.” Barely.
My mom wrapped an arm around my shoulders and brought me towards her in an embrace. “Who ended it?” she asked.
Just thinking back to that moment, that mistake I could never take back, made me want to weep—again. “I did,” I choked out, squeezing my eyes shut before the tears could pour out in one big flood.
“Why?” she asked, aghast. “The two of you were doing so well and I could see he really cared for you. Don’t you care for him too?”
“I do. I do care for him—gosh, I’m pretty sure I’m in love with him, Mom,” I said exasperatedly, waving my hands around in wild gestures. “It’s just…it’s a long story.”
A smile yanked at the edge of her mouth. “Summarize it for me.”
I sighed, shaking my head. “I…let’s just say that…Colin and I knew the mess we were in, and yet we delved even deeper into it. There were always opportunities to back out or choose another direction, but we were both—or I—was too scared to let go because I thought something so fantastical wouldn’t—couldn’t—happen twice to someone like me.” I covered my face with both hands. “But now…now the rug’s been pulled out from me and it’s too late…it’s all over.”
The Black Notebook Page 33
