They don’t know that’s why Kyle and I—
That’s not—
Because at first it was fine, until it wasn’t. Until he was self-satisfied in his expectation that he didn’t need to try anymore while I had to try harder. It’s the kind of thing I don’t let myself think about. The kind of thing I don’t let anyone know.
I’ve never told another living person.
Andsomeonewrote it down.
Hand-delivered it to my apartment with freakish accuracy, and then left at a speed no human being can physically achieve.
…I don’t love how that sounded.
Let me try it again with less of that.
I walk to my desk and open the box.
The little wooden one that’s been sitting here empty since my mom brought it back from some crystals-and-incense place in Scotland, the kind of shop that sells you a rock and a feeling. It’s beautiful, I’ll give it that. A dragon carved into the lid, wings spread wide down the sides, worn smooth like somebody’s thumbed it for a hundred years.
It reminded me of your tattoo, sweetheart.That’s what Mom said when she gave it to me.
That silly little tattoo I got on my side the day I turned eighteen. Easy to hide. Easy to forget. I forget it’s there more often than not.
Sometimes it throbs.
Which is probably normal. Bodies do weird things. Old injuries ache when it rains. Knees predict weather. Maybe tattoos have moods. I don’t know.
That’s the explanation I’m choosing.
The wood is a color I’ve never been able to name — too warm to be brown, too dark to be red, and Mom swears up and down it’s a normal wood from a normal tree, even though I have stood in a great many forests in my life and never once seen one that shade. She gave it to me “for pens.” I have never put a pen in it. Pens felt wrong in it, somehow, the first time I tried, and I never tried again.
The other two notes are already inside.
I don’t remember putting them there. I don’t remember deciding to keep them at all. But there they are, folded, tucked into a dragon box made of a wood that supposedly exists, and I drop the third one in on top of them and close the lid.
There.
Done.
Handled.
I sit back down. I find my last sentence about oolong. I read it. It’s terrible. I delete it.
Then I open the box, take the note back out, read it one more time, put it back, and shut the lid harder than a lid needs to be shut, which accomplishes nothing except telling the lid I mean business.
Okay. No. Nope. I am not doing this. I am not a grown woman getting slowly taken apart, in a locked apartment, by a piece of paper the size of a gum wrapper.
“You know what? No,” I tell Gerald.
He doesn’t argue. He never does. Best roommate I’ve ever had.
I grab my coat. My purse. The laptop, because being haunted is not a recognized extension and the deadline does not care about my personal life.
And then — everybody look away, this is between me and Gerald and I’ll deal with the consequences from him — I open the box, take the note back out, and put it in my coat pocket.
Because I can’t sit in a room with it.
So I’m leaving the room.
