Passing Notes

Published by

Fire and Ice

A Young Adult Imprint of Melange
Books, LLC

White Bear Lake, MN 55110

www.fireandiceya.com

Passing Notes, Copyright 2014 D. G.
Driver

ISBN:
978-1-68046-037-7

Names, characters, and incidents depicted in this
book are products of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales,
organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher. No part of
this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.

Published in the United States of America.

Cover Design by Caroline
Andrus

“
How obvious it is now—the gift you
gave him. All those letters, they were you... All those beautiful
powerful words, they were you!.. The voice from the shadows, that
was you...”

—
Edmond Rostand,
Cyrano de
Bergerac

For Kevin who expresses his love in a million
different ways.

PASSING
NOTES

by D. G. Driver

Mark has finally gotten the attention of the
girl of his dreams. Only, his lame attempts at romance through
texts and emails seem to be turning her off. When he gets put in
the back of the room in an over-full class at school, he begins to
discover old notes giving advice about how to write a great love
letter. At first he thinks he’s stumbled on some long-forgotten
notes passed in class ages ago, but every time he reads them they
seem directed specifically to him. They also appear at the perfect
moment each time he needs more advice. It’s like someone is
haunting him.

How do the notes keep appearing? Who’s
writing them? Why?

And if Mark follows the ghostly writer’s
advice, will he win Bethany’s love?

Table of
Contents

"Passing Notes"

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

About the Author

Previews

1

2gethr 4evr

It’s not original, but I texted it anyway to
Bethany while I walked up the front steps into the school. By the
time I got down the main hallway, she was already sharing it with
her friends Lissy and Kat. They huddled over each of Bethany’s
lovely shoulders like the good and bad angels of cartoons and
giggled. Bethany had her hand over her mouth, but I could tell she
was smiling and probably saying something like, “I know,
right?”

As I passed my gorgeous, seventeen-year-old,
brunette dream girl, I nodded and winked. All three girls burst
into a storm of giggles and fussed over the phone. A moment before
entering homeroom my phone buzzed. Her reply:

;)

Awesome! A success! I was a great,
thoughtful, romantic boyfriend. And I stayed really proud of that
fact for the next thirty-five minutes. That’s when the ghost notes
began to show up.

Even though it was Monday, I was in a great
mood because this was the first day of my last semester of high
school. Most of my required classes were done, which meant I had a
fairly easy load; only five periods instead of six and only three
of those were academic. My D+ average wasn’t going to leave me
working at Sonic for the rest of my life, because I’d registered to
join the army right after graduation. I was excited about my future
for the first time ever.

On top of all that, Bethany started dating me
over Winter Break—after six years of me dreaming about it and never
daring to ask her out. Nothing could get me down.

We got our new schedules in homeroom, and
then I headed down to Mrs. Hollstein’s room for British Lit, my
last English course—ever. Not even the idea of writing essays about
Shakespeare and Dickens upset me. I knew that come June it would
never again matter that my spelling sucked, my printing was
unreadable, and I had no grammar skills at all. Who needed any of
that in the real world anyway? All I ever wrote were emails and
texts. Those were done in shorthand. Anything more than that was a
waste of time.

So, when I stepped into the room and found
every seat taken, I didn’t freak. A grin stayed firmly in place
across my face as I leaned against the dry erase board with three
other slowpokes waiting for Mrs. Hollstein to straighten it all
out.

“Okay,” she sighed, exasperation fraying the
ends of her red hair, “it seems the front office made a mistake and
put too many students in this class. Again. Until I can sort this
out, we’ll have to accommodate.” She addressed the four of us
without seats. “Two of you can share my desk over here...”
Apparently the two girls up front with me thought that was a good
idea and lunged for the desk before the dude and I could even
consider it as an option. “The other two need to find a friend to
let you sit beside them at their desks.”

Clearly, this wasn’t going to work. Mrs.
Hollstein had to know that. The student desks were those skinny
ones attached to the seats that piss off left-handers because the
elbow rest is on the right. No way can two people share that. Also,
while I knew most of the people in that class, I didn’t really want
to be that close to any of them for the next eighteen weeks. None
of them appeared anxious to be that close to me either, because
books, backpacks and binders quietly began to appear on top of
desks where they hadn’t been before. No one glanced in my
direction.

“I’ll just use my lap,” the guy next to me
said. I think his name was Jaden-Jay-or-Jason-Something-or-Other.
He’d been in my classes before, but we’d never spoken to each
other. The guy whose name started with J grabbed a folding chair
from the wall and set up next to a file cabinet by the classroom
door.

That left me standing very awkwardly in front
of the class.

Following J.J.’s example, I scanned the
perimeter of the room for a better option. Way in the back of the
room was this big piece of furniture covered with a stack of boxes,
a globe, and an upside-down wooden office chair. The chair was the
old-fashioned kind, really wide and heavy with castor wheels under
the legs. I dragged a folding chair back there and sat beside the
monstrosity. Up close, I could tell the base of the tower was some
kind of old cabinet or desk made of dark wood. It was turned
backward to the room, so all the drawers were inaccessible. The
thing was badly scratched and worn out, like it had been at the
school since the place was built and was just too heavy for anyone
to ever bother moving it. Considering that Central High had been
around long enough that my grandparents had been students there at
one time, the concept of that desk being from the fifties wasn’t
farfetched.

So much stuff cluttered the top of the desk
that there wasn’t enough room to lay a piece of paper flat on the
surface. I really hoped Mrs. Hollstein wouldn’t hold that against
me when grading my penmanship. Not really wanting to use my lap all
semester, I seriously hoped that some junior would get bumped out
of the class and free up a real desk for me. I stuck my backpack
down by my feet against the wall and corner of the desk and pulled
out a pencil.

Mrs. Hollstein finally started up class after
taking roll, making a seating chart and handing out her syllabus.
As she droned on about how many points everything was worth, I
started poking around the desktop with my pencil, allowing the tip
to find old scratches in the wood and then imagining what had
caused them. My pencil bumped into a groove along the very back
corner of the desktop, almost hidden by the window ledge that
jutted out over it by an inch or so, and stuck. Carved into the
wood was something written in cursive with a heart around it.

I couldn’t make out the word. I learned
cursive in third grade and forgot it in fourth. I’ve never written
or read a word of it since.

I pressed my pencil tip into the carving and
traced the heart and cursive letters. Some dust came up when I
pulled my pencil out. Whoever had done this had carved it pretty
deep, probably with a knife not a pencil. I wondered how long ago
that could have been because kids got expelled these days for
having plastic butter knives in their lunch boxes. We’re supposed
to spread mayonnaise with our fingers, I guess. Anyway, I decided
the kid with the pocketknife had to have carved this valentine at
least a decade ago, if not two.

The name was really elegant the way it was
written, too, like something you’d see on a Hallmark card. I
imagined this girl with a high pony tail and wearing a poodle skirt
working hard to carve it just right one day when she was really
bored in class. Maybe Mrs. Hollstein was her teacher, too. She
certainly looked old enough, and she sure was boring enough.

Mrs. Hollstein rambled on about something I’d
probably need to know later and got a couple volunteers to help
pass out textbooks. While that happened, I pulled out a piece of
notebook paper and put one corner of it over the heart. Using the
side of my lead, I colored the paper until an etching of the heart
showed up. I could see the name more clearly now, but it was still
this mess of loops. Below the etching I tried to copy it on my
own.

My first few tries were hideous looking,
jerky and full of stops and starts. I would never be a professional
forger—that was sure.

On my sixth try, my penmanship improved. By
my eighth try it was a passable copy. I’d run out of room on the
paper, though, so I pulled a black permanent marker out of my
backpack and tried one more time on the back of my left hand. This
time, I got it just right. It was so perfect in my eyes that it
seemed to actually glow and sparkle for a second.

“That looks pretty,” said Jill Pietenpol over
my shoulder. She was passing out textbooks and handed one to me.
Actually, she dropped it in my lap because she was staring at the
heart on my paper. “What kind of marker are you using to make it
glow like that? I’d like to get one for my art project...” She
stopped herself and cocked her head. “Oh, never mind. I thought for
a second that it was... It was probably light coming in from the
window.” She looked up at the window to find the shades drawn. She
shook her head. “So, who’s Eileen?”

“Eileen?”

Jill giggled in this high-pitched nasally way
that had never changed since we were in Kindergarten together. Her
voice never deepened to a normal register like all the other girls
in school. She was seventeen and still sounded five. My spine
stiffened at the sound of it. “You’ve got her name all over your
paper and on your hand.”

“If it’s Eileen, that would mean a guy made
the heart,” I kept explaining, mostly to myself. “No
guy
is
going to write all flowery like that.”

“You’re not making a lot of sense.”

“Eileen doesn’t make sense to
me
,” I
told her. I directed Jill’s attention to the heart carved in the
desk. “See that? It’s old, right? You think that was done by a guy?
I don’t.”

Jill just raised an eyebrow, or at least the
part of her face where an eyebrow would be if she hadn’t plucked
them to near oblivion. “Whatever, Mark. Just make sure Bethany
doesn’t see this. If she finds out you’re crushing on some Eileen
chick, whoever that is, it’ll be over.”

That caught my attention. “I’m not...”

But Jill was gone—bouncing off to deliver
more books and stick her nose into other people’s business.

Great, I thought. Now some rumor was going to
start about me having a thing for some chick named Eileen. I didn’t
even know an Eileen. Was there even a girl that went to our school
named Eileen? That was an old-fashioned kind of name.

And by the way, how did Jill know Bethany and
I were dating? I didn’t think she and Bethany were good friends. It
was only the first day of school. How did everyone find out so
fast? I wasn’t even sure myself if Bethany was officially my
girlfriend. I just kind of assumed it was going that way.