His only companion now was his backpack, sitting on the floor beside him with a gaping open mouth, ready for the piling in of eight months of stratified books and papers. He did so without looking at what he was pulling out, or bothering to sort the trash from the stuff he meant to keep. He was in a hurry; a bunch of his friends were going to head to the local Mexican restaurant to push too many tables together and make too much noise.
He almost didn't notice the tight little packet of paper that fell out and bounced off the toe of his shoe. It was clear right away that it wasn't his. The paper was purple, for one thing; he'd never owned anything other than standard ruled white in his whole life. Not only that, but it had been folded over a few times and tucked in on itself at one end, much more effort than he would have put into anything.
He stared at it for a second, puzzled, then bent down and picked it up. It even felt different than all the other paper he had been pulling out his locker. This was softer, and Josh thought maybe it was so old it had stared to disintegrate, but then realized it was just made that way. Inspecting it, he saw that he could see faintly dark, curving lines through the paper.
Handwritten lines. A note. Someone had written him a note on purple paper and stuck it in his locker.
He unfolded it as quickly as he could, the tight origami folds taking more than a little effort to get undone. The packet apparently had to be thin enough to be shoved through the tiny vent slats at the top of the locker. As he spread it out into one layer, he could see that it was a complete page, a few inches on a side, clearly ripped out of some girl's mini-journal. The words were written in distinctly feminine swirls and loops, in purple gel pen.
Its message was short, consisting only of the words "I wish you had."
Josh stood there, staring at them, as if more of the thought might magically appear after a few seconds. But none came, and the period at the end of the sentence seemed to make it clear that no more were coming. He looked up and around, instinctively searching the far ends of a hallway he already knew was empty. What did he expect to see? Half a face peeking at him around a corner? He heard Mr. Ridlack in his head again, a quote from an old poem read aloud in class, that stuck in his head for some reason: "Darkness there, and nothing more."
Just to be absolutely sure, Josh flipped the note over in his hands. The back was blank. His brow furrowed, and then he tossed the note aside. After all, there wasn't anything else he could learn from it. The creased curves of the paper caused it to tumble end over end in the still air, gliding right back into Josh's locker. It landed on the remaining layers of detritus, as if reminding him where it had come from. He sighed, exasperated.
He saw messages like this all the time online, half-formed thoughts that weren't really intended for anyone specific, just words that people threw out into the world to get them out of their own heads.
That's why it should have been so easy for him to ignore it. He was actually reaching for the note again, ready to ball it up this time before throwing it as far down the hall as he could, when something else his English teacher had said came to him. "Every word is put there for a reason, and an author makes the conscious decision to use each one that way. If you really want to understand the written words, you have to think about why those particular words were used, in that particular order."
It was funny. On any other day, after taking any other test, Mr. Ridlack's disposable wisdom wouldn't have been so clear in Josh's head. He knew that as soon as he was done cleaning out his locker, he could go meet his regular friends, order his usual food, and see what kind of typically stupid stuff they were all going to do that evening. But once that purple paper was in his hand again, he lost his hurry. He found himself going over it again, searching it for more clues.
"I wish you had." This wasn't someone fishing for attention. This was a note, written in actual handwriting, and put specifically into his locker, so only he would see it. It was anonymous, too... either the person assumed he would know who wrote it, or they didn't want him to know. He didn't recognize the handwriting at all, although to be honest he probably had never seen anything physically written down by over half of his friends. So he had no way of figuring this out.
Or did he? One of the upper layers of excavation in his locker had contained his yearbook, which had been in there ever since they had become available. There had been a mad scramble that day to get everyone's signature, which monopolized almost an entire school day. But he now had handwriting samples from everyone in his circle. He dug it out of his backpack and now started flipping through it.
Most of the signatures were on the inside front and back covers, since it was the place that had the most blank space, and in Josh's both areas were filled with handwriting of all sizes and orientations. Some were heartfelt (he noted the nice things Tanya had said about him, even though she had been seeming to avoid him lately), and other friends went out of their way to write the most comically offensive things they could, notably the classic epithet from Brandon that began "I love you dearly..."
But Josh wasn't looking for content, he was looking for form. He held the note next to the pages so that he could compare the swirly loops. He even noted that the "i" in "wish" was an incomplete circle. But he couldn't find any sampled handwriting that even came close. No purple gel pen, either. So unless one of his friends had an unusual talent for disguising their handwriting, it wasn't any of them.
And then there were the words themselves. "I wish you had"... had what? He had just been thinking, as he had started cleaning out his locker, about how great the last few months had been. Everything about high school had been reaching its high point and ending at the same time, which gave everything an extra layer of importance. He felt like he had been on an adrenaline high for two months. But here was someone who was pointing out that he had somehow forgotten something.
If he knew who had written it, he'd have some idea of what that thing was. He knew he should just ignore it and carry on. So, what, some girl he didn't even know put a random note in his locker, and he was supposed to devote time to solving the puzzle? But he couldn't put it down, either to throw it into his backpack for later contemplation, or to chuck it into a corner where the school's summer janitorial crew would take it away forever.
Until this moment, Josh had pretty much known what was going to happen, tonight, tomorrow, this summer, next fall, next year. He was going to go hang out with his friends when he wasn't working his crappy part-time job, then go to college in the fall, make new friends, and then just keep going. The path was clear, and not only was he fine with that, he hadn't even stopped to consider if it was really what he wanted. But here he was, staring at this maddeningly vague piece of paper. He couldn't shake the feeling that the message was explicitly designed to trigger something in *him*, and once it did he would know what this mystery girl was talking about.
What was it he hadn't he thought to do? He could almost picture this young woman he had clearly overlooked, watching him all year from somewhere nearby but infinitely removed, looking on in silent pain as Josh missed some opportunity, fretfully chewing her lip but unable to speak... until now, when she felt she couldn't stand by any more. What was it she knew that he didn't?
Now that he was being forced to think about it, Josh realized he had never consciously decided whether the path he was following was the one he should be on, or if it were even really the one he wanted. There was someone out there who didn't think so, so why did he? The books he had studied in Mr. Ridlack's class had been full of characters making choices about the path of their life. "The Raven", The Great Gatsby, Things Fall Apart, Crime and Punishment... Josh realized it had secretly been the theme of the whole semester. Mr. Ridlack said it point-blank one time: "Do you take hold of your life, and control it yourself? Or do you let others make the choice for you?"
It suddenly struck Josh that, in the guise of a few purple words on a scrap of purple paper, he was being asked the question again. And this time it wasn't in a book, where some old person who had never really existed in the first place was having an existential crisis, this was about *him* and his life. The whole rest of his life.
He suddenly thought about tonight, the Mexican restaurant, and the whole stretch of thousands upon thousands upon tens of thousands of days that would follow. When had he given up on trying to change the course of it all? Did he even really want to go to college at all? It was his parents that did. It was even their alma mater he was enrolled in.
He didn't even want a summer full of hours at a shitty, minimum-wage job he only had so he could make enough money to spend in the evenings, hanging out with the same people in the same places over and over again.
Was it too late to change it? Any of it? To bend his future into anything other than what he was supposed to do next, the things hat everyone expected him to do? All of a sudden, it seemed vitally important that he find out. He dragged the rest of his stuff out of his locker, crammed it into his backpack, and left the school at a dead run.
---
Maria was sprawled across her bed, adding another entry to her little purple journal. She gave a sigh, then wrote a few more lines, loving how easily the purple gel slid out in exaggerated swirls and loops under her fingers:
"I didn't hear from her today either. Oh well, who cares really? When she doesn't see me this summer, she'll know how disappointed I was. Funny thing... For just a second after I slipped the note into the vent, I thought I accidentally put it in the locker next to hers. But then I realized I got it right. At least, I'm pretty sure I did."
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