Super Scary Forest! 💖

“Ahhhhhhh, the woods. Breathe that in, Fence. Breathe it deep. It feels great.” I inhaled deeply, taking in not only the sight of the towering pines and lush underbrush before me, but also the sheer scent of it all. The scent of nature. Of old, coniferous growth. Of untamed, rugged wilderness. Of the interstate 20 yards to our right past a paved ditch and a steel guardrail. “Eugghgh. On second though, hold your breath actually.”

“One ztep ahead ov you, dude,” Fence said, his nose pinched.

Why were we at the local woods, you ask? Because if everything went my way for once — and I was hoping against the odds that this time, things finally might — that was where we’d find Snowball.

The journal… err Super Secret Love Diary 💖 had told all.

“Ready to head in?”

“Sure,” Fence said, already having given up the performative nose-holding. “But aren’t you a little scared? I know I am.”

“What is there to be scared of? It’s just the local woods. This isn’t even real nature. There's, like, trails and benches and garbage cans in there and stuff.”

Fence cracked open Snowball’s Super Secret Love Diary 💖. "Dear Diary,” he started reading out loud, “today was an awesome day. I went for a walk in the woods and guess what I found? The remains of that guy who was eaten alive by a wildcat here just a few weeks ago! Isn’t that cool? They were piled up right next to a super scary web with a lot of black widows in it!  When I looked around, I noticed they were crawling all over the place! Anyway, I looked all over for that cannibalistic death cult confirmed to be active in the middle of the forest, but the only traces I could find of them were a few bloody scraps of clothing and a fractured human sku—”

“Ok, ok, enough. I really don’t need to hear this.” Jesus, Fence. Have some tact. This was like explaining the last dump you took to someone in excruciating detail while they were eating or something. Which, come to think of it, he also did pretty often.

“Well,” he said, continuing in spite of me, or maybe to spite me, “she goes on to write about how romantic this place is and how she wants to bring you here on a date one day. Also the entry ends with her saying she was just kidding about the wildcats, deadly spiders, and cannibals.”

“More nonsense she wrote into her diary hoping I’d sneak a peek one day and get frightened?” I guessed it was obvious enough that none of that stuff was true. But as much as I hate to admit it, it doesn’t take much to scare me. And Snowball knew it.

“Seems like it, dude.”

Well that was depressing. I guess Snowball had it in for me even in written form.

“I never took Snowball for the hiking type though,” I commented for no real reason. I mean that, ok? For. No. Real. Reason. None at all. I didn’t care what type she was, hiking or otherwise. Not one bit.

“Appearances can be deceiving, dude. You can’t judge a book by its cover.”

“This one I think we can though.” I snatched the Super Secret Love Diary 💖 from Fence and flipped ahead to a more recent entry. The one he’d been reading was written a couple of weeks ago. “I’ll skip ahead to the relevant parts.”

“Good thinking, dude. That’ll give us an idea of where we're headed.”

#

The Super Secret Love Diary 💖 was a small pink notebook like you could find just about anywhere. Only it had been outfitted with some high-tech accessories courtesy of Snowball. Like a geiger counter, a portable egg poacher, automatic glasses cleaner complete with a robot hand that sprayed and wiped, and one of those mini solar panel strips like the kind you see on old calculators, to name a few of them. And also, apparently, a biometric lock. At first, right after we got our hands on the book and ran as fast as we could out of the girls’ bathroom backed by a chorus of shrieks, me and Fence couldn’t even open the damn thing. The cover wouldn’t budge, no matter how much Fence pulled or pried.

But the second I tried, pressed my fingers to the cover in attempt to open it, the journ— Super Secret Love Diary 💖 finally gave. Turned out the contraption on the front was some sort of fingerprint reader. A fingerprint reader calibrated, of course, to respond only to Snowball’s fingers and mine. All it took was reading a couple of the diary entries inside to learn that Snowball had written this thing with the intention of me one day finding it and not being able to resist looking inside. Hence all the entries inside were written half as typical diary entries, and half as letters — the old fashioned kind — to me.

“Wow, dude.” Fence whistled, slow and long. After retrieving the diary, we had sat out in front of the school reading it and trying to figure out what to do next. What’s that, you say? We shouldn’t have been snooping in a girl’s personal journ— uh, Super Secret Love Diary 💖? Believe me, I didn’t want to. Especially since the thing was basically a PTSD time capsule for yours truly, filled cover to cover with stories of my most embarrassing moments. But it was also our only clue. So we had to do it. When he was finally done whistling, Fence finished: “I’d hate to be the subject of these Super Secret Love Diary 💖 entries. These are ridiculously embarrassing. Like, some never-going-to-live-this-down tier stuff. The kind of thing that makes you wince on your deathbed, your unlimited high school cringe still haunting your every waking moment even as you fade into the light.”

“Ok, ok. Don’t rub it in. Just keep reading.”

We were going through the most recent entries in the jour— dammit, Super Secret Love Diary 💖, because there was something suspicious about them. Something off. Offer than a power strip during a blackout. Something even more sketchy than the weird gadgets attached to the notebook itself. I’m talking about the handwriting.

Most of the Super Secret Love Diary 💖 was written in your typical girl handwriting, big, round letters loopier than a shoelace. I recognized the writing right away. It was definitely Snowball’s hand. But towards the middle, the handwriting changed. The letters grew smaller, more jagged. And the content of the entries changed along with them.

At my urging, Fence kept reading. “A-he-he-he-he-he-he-he-” — I slapped him on the back and a green glob of phlegm rocketed out of his mouth and hit the concrete with a splat — “-HEM! Thanks, dude. Where was I? Oh yeah, here we go. Huh, this entry doesn’t start with dear diary either. And it’s in that weird jagged handwriting.”

It couldn’t have been more clear. This wasn’t Snowball writing anymore. Towards the center of the Super Secret Love Diary 💖, someone else had taken over. But why? More importantly, how? The notebook was designed so that nobody could even get in besides Snowball and me.

“I’ve had it about up to here with that little nuisance,” Fence read from the book. “What gives her the right to monopolize all of our time at school… rrrrhgghghrhrrhrh! Just thinking about it is making me mad. But I don’t have to worry. It’s finally time to enact the foolproof plan I came up with! All I have to do is lure Snowball into the bathroom, and she’s mine. Then we can take her to the super secret hideout I set up in the woods and take care of her and that massive ego of hers once and for all! Hahaha! Hahahahaha! Hahaha! Hahahahaha! Haha—!”

“Alright, alright. You don’t have to read all the laughter.”

The gist was clear, in any case. Whoever had hijacked the Super Secret Love Diary 💖 had also kidnapped Snowball, and had taken her to some sort of holeup out in the woods.

Lucky for us, they had even written directions there.

#

“Awright,” I said, stretching both arms. I was ready to head into the woods. “Ready when you are, Fence. Fold that map out, and let’s get to following it.”

The directions to the secret hideout came in two forms. One was a series of diary entries inconveniently recounting Snowball’s “dearest memories” — a.k.a. some of the most cringeworthy moments of my entire life. The idea was that these entries used my sad, unenviable past as a sort of mnemonic device that would spell out directions to the villains’ evil lair.

But that was both way too complicated and guaranteed to drive me even more insane than Snowball would once we found her.

That was why we were instead using the map. That was the other set of directions contained in the Super Secret Love Diary 💖: an easy-to-follow, suspiciously convenient map through the woods, straight to where we needed to be, a big, red X even marking the spot. Personally, I had to wonder why an apparent kidnapper would leave obvious incriminating evidence and clues to their whereabouts just lying around like that. Part of me wondered whether we weren’t playing right into some dastardly criminal’s hands and walking right into a trap. I mean, you know what they say about things that seem too good to be true, right? Yeah, me neither.

To be continued!