It must be her.
It could be no one else. No other girl came close; none that fit this description; none with such a similar name; none close enough to him to star in this fictional whim. And, yes.
It must be him.
It could be no one else. No other boy came close; none who really wrote. Who drowned the paper with the blood of his soul, the writing bulging out on the other side, looking like the blue veins of a ghost. And the handwriting. That raw scrawl. That calligraphy. Yes.
It must be him.
But she didn't know what to do with it. She could've given it to the teacher. She could've given it to his friend. She could've even chased after him, swimming against a stream of students, and said something like "Hey! You forgot this!" She could’ve left it here. Or, she could’ve just thrown it away.
But, she wanted to read it.
Every word, every cross-out, from the first letter to the last period. Maybe it was wrong, though. It wasn't hers; it was his. And he lost it. He didn't even know he lost it, and she was sure he’d notice soon enough, like a father finding he left his child behind. Maybe she should give it back. She needed to—
"Beth!"
Beth's head jumped up toward the voice, her eyes having idly darted about the paper while she thought. A girl, wearing some gleeful glare.
"Aren't you coming to lunch?"
She said nothing. She didn’t know how to answer. After taking impulsive peeps into this lost world, the world around her seemed a stranger.
"Well?"
"Uh," she glanced at the world within her hands, folded it, and stuffed it into the cramped black hole of her purse. "Yeah." She walked away, out into the blood flow, ears flooded with that droning medley of countless voices, dodging.
The girl ran up to her side and walked with her, eyes locked on her purse with furrowed brows. "What was that?"
She didn't look at her. "What?"
"That paper."
"Oh." She shrugged. "It's nothing."
The girl's frown persisted but she said nothing. She shrugged it off in her mind, too, and looked forward as they both walked off to lunch.
He didn't know.
For now, at least, he didn't. She could tell when she watched him from her library table, in her eighth period free later that day--alone and distant, somewhere in his mind; the usual.
"You're quiet, today," said the girl she was sitting with, her head hopping back and forth between a Math textbook and her notebook.
Beth's frown grew but she stared at problem number thirteen to keep from looking up at her. To make herself look busy. Contemplative. Lost in the infinity of mathematics. Anything to avoid answering.
"Beth?"
She didn't look up. "What?"
"Something wrong?"
"No." She started copying the problem in her own notebook. "I was just thinking on this problem."
"Oh."
Beth sighed with relief at her successful dodge. But, she figured she oughta work on this dumb problem, anyway. She needed to get something done. She couldn’t think on this all day. Then again, the day was almost over and she needed to decide soon. Did she even have to decide, now, though? All she’d have to do is approach him and say “Hey. You dropped this in Math,” or something like that. But--
“You still seem quiet, though,” the girl said.
She gripped her pen and gritted her teeth. “Do I?”
“Yeah. You didn’t talk much during lunch, either.”
“Oh.”
“You sure nothing’s wrong?”
“Uh-huh,” she said, jotting unconscious calculations in her notebook.
“All right.”
Her friend left her inside of her own labyrinth of deliberation, juggling numbers and morals. Was it good that he didn’t know? Only if she was planning on reading it and giving it back under the guise of an oblivious, friendly find. But, it wasn't hers. She hadn’t been asked to read it, nor had she any permission. She wondered if she even cared about that, though. Her curiosity and her conscious clashed, and their stalemate paralyzed her. She—
“Hey!” the girl said. “Did you do Chemistry?”
“Yeah.”
“Lemme get it.”
“You know people are gonna bug you for it.”
“But I won’t be buggin’ myself for it.”
Beth could imagine a smile on her face because she smiled a bit, herself. Silly wit like that humored her, so gave her the homework. She began to feel better--she thought she was, anyway--until the bell blared like a buzzer and the simple, quiet world around her broke into anarchy, beginning the great race to return home.
And she watched the lone stallion take off.
He stood and walked away toward the door, dismissed to a dismal day which would carry him to wherever his days usually did. And here she was: sitting, watching, sweating, thinking things so fast she didn't think she thought at all, gripping her pen and gritting her teeth.
"Hey!" the girl said.
Beth looked at her friend’s seat, but, in the hubbub of the bell, she had moved, so she looked up and saw her, wearing the fretful, downward glower of a mother. "What were you looking at?"
She looked back at the door but he had vanished, too, having departed into the depths of yet another hallway rush, so she looked back at her. "Nothing."
The girl kept her face for a few seconds before snorting. "You're gonna tell me later what's up." She started walking away, still facing her. "I gotta go to practice."
"All right. See you."
"See you," she said, walking off.
When she left, Beth stared at her purse, a bag of mysterious magic. A bag with a portal to another world she never knew anything about. Or a bag with a bomb in it.
She groaned, glanced out the window into the sunny, spring day, glanced to door, buried her mind in math again, and made a mental note to keep her cell phone off for the rest of the day.
It was a story.
It was a story of a boy named Ron, narrated by him, too, with in-the-moment, stream of consciousness, present-tense stress. As he sat in the library, eighth period free, heart pounding, palms sweating, it was happening. She was walking--a girl named Bethany, walking in the library, from where he could see her in a way and in a light better than perfect. He could see her: hair flailing beautifully behind her like a cape in the breeze, those long, nylon legs flowing in front of each other, floating towards a table far from him. She was about to sit, he saw. And he wanted to sit with her. He almost couldn’t believe he’d even dared to imagine that but, once he did, the thought possessed him to move. She's going nowhere. She's doing nothing. It's the library, eighth period, a free period. She could do her homework some other time. This would only take a minute or two in the span of the period and in their lives. Yes.
Do it.
That jolt of encouragement ejected him from his seat, and, as he sat up, she sat down. He walked, one step after another, walking until he nearly bumped into the table because his eyes had been so immovably fixed on her. She looked up at him and she said "Hey". Her voice nearly knocked his stiff stick of a body over like a sapling in the breath of the wind. And she smiled. That smile. Oh God.
"Ron?"
"Uh--" he expelled like a breath held, surfacing from the sea of his thoughts, "c-can--can I--talk to you about something?"
"I WILL NEVER FINISH THIS STORY" was scratched onto the remaining space of paper, scarring the paper like you scar a tree with a knife. The sentence stabbed at and popped the bubble that this world had carried her away in, as if God had said “SCREW YOU” to the world on the final day of creation, pissing in the world’s water, turning all the earth’s soil into fecal matter, and altogether leaving the world incomplete.
Beth looked up from the incomplete world in her hands, feeling the mundane sensations of the mortal world once more: the beat of her heart, the sweat on her skin, the weight of gravity suppressing her.
* * *
She thought the next day.
She thought about the both of them. What she meant to him and how she felt. How she wasn't even supposed to have ever read this. Nobody was. He had intended to lock this away inside of himself forever. And yet, he still didn’t know. She saw him sitting peacefully, drifting away in his own thoughts in Math, still oblivious to the loss of his infant story.
Nonetheless, she tried to focus on the school day. She failed, however: her struggle between attention and reflection made her sway in a pendulum of pensiveness, from which either she or someone else always eventually pulled her out of. Overall, she was silent for most of the day. Not even the badgering of her friend could rescue her this time.
Now, only a whole day later, she once again sat in the library, in her eighth period free. And she once again saw him come in and sit at his table. And, as she had yesterday, she could only stare at him again, infinitely more indecisive, still clueless as to what to do. She concluded she would have to give it back. It was inevitable.
She stood up as he sat down and she willed herself to walk without thinking until she nearly bumped into his table. He looked up at her with his blank face as readable as a billboard.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hi,” Don said, glancing at her eyes and looking away.
“Uh--” she said, “can I—talk to you about something?”
His eyes had been looking downward at his binder but they looked upward in a frown which groped in the dark for something it knew was there.
When he found it, he looked at her and died.
He got the last words out a little before the bell blared like a buzzer, ending Math. But, no, he said. This can’t be.
It won’t be.
These were no longer the last words. When the bell blared, breaking the simple, quiet world around him into anarchy, he scratched onto the remaining space of paper:
"I WILL NEVER FINISH THIS STORY".
He stood up, collected his crap, crumpled the paper, threw it in the garbage, and went in the stream.