The Presence of Someone Else

It was another boring day of sitting in desks and not paying attention at Mountain Center High.

I sat in the back during first period History and read some pages of the novel I had snuck in. Second period Math had me right in the front of the classroom, and that’s one of the rooms on the basement level so it was too loud and noticeable to do anything except take notes. Third period I had lunch, which counts as 0, and I work as a TA for fourth period, so that’s 0 too. Lastly was Computer Programming, in which I opened the code window on my screen but tabbed out to a pdf version of the book I was reading whenever the teacher wasn’t looking.

So overall, I got +1 point from first period, -1 in second, and then another +1 in fifth.

Total Freedom from School Score for the day: +1. Not bad for a Monday.

It’s not like the points really mattered much anyway. I didn’t bother keeping track of the total cumulative from day to day, because that’d be just like doing even more schoolwork.

I used to be a model student for the first 2 years of high school, but then some things happened to make me lose any motivation I might have had, and I realized getting good grades didn’t do me any good, so I came up with this silly “points” game to pass the time and decided to spend my junior and senior years slacking off whenever possible.

My parents didn’t seem to notice, because even when I wasn’t bothering to pay attention to lectures, I still did well enough on tests to get A’s in every class. I’d always been a good test-taker after all, and if anything this just further proved to myself that actually bothering to try was a waste of my time all along.

As I sat on the school bus on the way home, I had the novel I was reading open, but I wasn’t really looking at it or turning any pages. It was an interesting work of fiction, translated to English but originating from a foreign author. It was an urban fantasy setting, with gods, vampires, ghosts, and animated corpses existing beneath the mundane everyday routines of otherwise average high school students. I liked the setting, but what I cared most captured me most was the prose. Despite being translated, so much wordplay and clever narrative devices had been preserved that I was in awe.

That awe, along with my tendency to get carsick, were the reasons I was not actually reading on the bus and instead simply staring at the open book. I was thinking about how I could write something like this myself.

Writing has always been a hobby of mine, even more so than reading, and I think I’ve been getting pretty good at it lately. I might have been good at at it already from an outsider’s point of view — after all, I finished earning every single English credit I’d need to graduate before my sophomore year of high school had even ended — but lately, I was feeling like I was finally able to write things that I truly would have loved to read.

It all started when I got that journal. My mom had dragged my sister and I along to a neighborhood garage sale and said we could each pick out one thing under $15 as a gift. Without much enthusiasm, I had searched haphazardly through a few stacked boxes on a shelf that were full of books, trying to find one that looked interesting that I hadn’t read already. Most of them were just heavily-used cookbooks and the type of self-help guides that exclusively appeal to suburban dads, and of the few novels I did find, all of them were paperbacks of classics I had already read. Staples you’d find on any bookshelf, like Of Mice and Men or The Lord of the Rings.

But buried under those piles of uninteresting books with yellowed pages, I found something that caught my attention. At the bottom of one of the boxes, covered in dust, sat a leather-bound book, with no title on its spine and with a clasp to keep it shut.

As soon as I picked it up, it felt as if this was what I had been searching for.

A quick skim of the inside revealed that all of the pretty parchment pages were entirely empty.

It wasn’t the kind of book you read; it was one waiting to be written in.

That is how I first got my journal. Since then I have written over a dozen short stories on its pages in ink, building entire worlds within its bindings. I was done with trying hard in school. The journal was, at the moment, the only important thing in the world to me.

So I spent the bus ride with a book, not reading it but simply soaking in the words, as if to be inspired, and thought about my beloved journal all the way. Mine was the last stop, and no one else got off there except me, which meant for the last five minutes or so of the ride, I had some peace and quiet. During that time, I put the book away and just stared out the window as we rolled along.

When I got home, I threw my backpack and shoes down at the cupboard by the entryway and raced up the stairs as if possessed. I really was possessed, in a manner of speaking, by the spirit of creation, with so many ideas swirling through my mind. It was such a powerful rush that I didn’t even hear (or couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to) the calls of my younger sister to “slow down on the stairs!” and “stop being so loud!”

Once I got into my room, I practically dove toward the shelf. I kept the journal on top of the bookshelf rather than in it, because it was not yet done, but someday I would make space to display it proudly on the middle shelf, sandwiched between the other short story collections, along with the works of Poe and Bradbury and Fitzgerald.

That was my ultimate goal.

And yet, when I grabbed the closest pen from my desk and plopped down on my bed to start writing, an uneasy feeling overtook me. I noticed something: the clasp that bound the book together was undone. I had never forgotten to close it up before…had someone been reading my writing?

I wrote it off as no big deal. Maybe it was my meddling sister, trying to find a diary to blackmail me with, or one of my disorganized parents, thinking it was something they had misplaced. Whoever had been the one to read it, I thought smugly, I’m sure they would have been impressed. So I opened it up to a fresh page, or at least, to what should have been a fresh page.

Awaiting me was a story I was sure I hadn’t written, in an unfamiliar handwriting that was surely not my own.

“A Look Through the Window” it was titled, in blue ink, even though I always used black. “By Ethel.”