I knew that Monday was going to be horribly stereotypical at 7:15 a.m., the exact time I finally found my car keys after more than twenty minutes of searching. My morning had been spent tearing the house apart; without them, I had no ride to school. At 7:15, my fourth emergency alarm went off (I was a heavy sleeper), and in my frustration, I chucked a shoe at it. The shoe hit my clock, which pulled the cord from its socket, causing it to be swept across the top of my dresser. This in turn displaced a (thankfully) empty soda can and several papers, which had been resting on the elusive keys. That were sitting right there on top of my desk. With just a little bit of digging they would have been right in front of my face. I silently cursed my own oversight.
The alarm clock, still screaming, dangled limply, as if the cord giving it power were simultaneously choking it. I hastily unplugged it and snatched my lanyard. Serious thoughts about giving in to the silky siren’s wail of sleep once more tormented me, but were immediately quelled by my resolve to not miss today’s important physics quiz. I hadn’t studied notes for an hour for nothing.
Within seconds of stepping outside, I was confronted with yet another obstacle: my car’s door was nearly frozen shut. I lived in an area of Indiana that I liked to refer to as “Mother Nature’s sandbox”, because any weather anomaly that could happen here, probably would. For example, there had been no precipitation in weeks, yet frosty temperatures continued to seep into the landscape, scoffing at my mortal attempts to combat them. “Oh, you’re afraid of missing school? Spent all night studying for an important quiz?” the chilling air taunted. “Guess you better start walking.”
After another couple tries, the door snapped open with an icy crack. I immediately jumped in, taking refuge from the cold and turning the ignition. As the car warmed up, I kept reminding myself school was going to be fine, and I’d be there in no time. The morning’s lateness was simply an inconvenient wrench thrown into the internal workings of the preconceived machine that was my ideal day.
Desperate as I was to get to school at my normal time of 7:20, there was no way I was speeding on potentially dangerous roads. The wind was a definite concern; I had to pay extra attention to avoid drifting. This wasn’t easy, as nagging unlikely scenarios floated around in my mind, most of which involved me failing the quiz due to my tardiness. I turned the radio on to my usual station to drown out my anxiety.
If I had known the morning was only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the stress I was going to receive that day, I probably would have just stayed home.
My first clue to the impending downward spiral of the day came as I pulled into the student parking lot (17 minutes late—not only was I tardy leaving the house, but I also had to stop and put gas in the car). Parking space 42 B was empty. That parking space belonged to Cassiopeia Simmons, the most complicated human being I knew.
Cassie was even more of a school stickler than myself. In all the years I had known her, she had missed school exactly two times: once to get braces put on and once to get them taken off. It wasn’t that she had my anxiety about missing assignments, or tried to get attendance records. She didn’t even like school, even though she did pretty well. Top 20 of her class, several English class writing accolades, tons of scholarship offerings. Yet when asked she always talked about school with a tone of disdain. Never joined any academic clubs I tried interesting her in. Hated every minute of her homework.
Regardless of her paradoxical views, this development meant that A) Cassie was either as late as me, or not coming at all, in which case B) I’d probably have nobody to talk to all day, and C) something sudden must have happened to keep her from school.
Point B was debunked almost immediately. I was walking through the crowded halls with my patented demeanor of “average”, which allowed me to avoid large groups, facial recognition, and typical conversation. However, Patrick (who elected to go by neither her given name Patricia nor the feminine abbreviations Pat, Patty, or Tricia), Cassie’s best friend, called out to me: “Starr? Ben Starr?”
I was surprised at my own name; with Cassie gone, I had expected minimal social contact throughout the day. I turned to face Patrick, who was hurrying to catch up with me. “Have you heard from Cassie lately? This morning?”
“No?” I replied. I stopped at my locker.
“I was hoping you had. She just seemed so.” Patrick paused, unable to find the right words. “Cassie caught me on the way to the band room earlier, and she was acting all weird and rushed. Kept talking about you and then something she had to go do.”
“Is she okay?”
“I’m not sure.” Patrick began digging through her backpack. “She just kind of shoved this book at me, rambling about a bunch of stuff. She wanted me to give it back to you, tell you thanks for letting her borrow it, or something, and told me to make sure I found you as soon as possible—it’s in my binder here one second—told me to find you this morning and give it back right away because she didn’t need it anymore.”
Patrick handed me a velvety book with a clasp. It was untitled and old-looking, tinged with earthy shades of brown that reminded me of an antique journal. The confusion in my face must have matched the confusion in her voice, because she continued: “Right? I was totally confused too. She said it was for a research project, but I’m in most of her classes like that and I didn’t remember any projects. Plus, it’s empty on the inside. It doesn’t make any sense.”
I unhooked the clip and flipped through the pages. Sure enough, the pages were full of empty lines, questions, quizzes, and fill-in-the-blanks, exactly like a kid’s journal activity book would be. However, this was a book that I had never let Cassie borrow because I didn’t own it myself.
Patrick continued: “She was so serious about you getting it, I was a bit scared. She was acting so weird about it, too, like she couldn’t give it to you herself. After I promised to give it to you she made some excuse about forgetting something in her car.”
“All of this happened today? This morning?” I asked.
Patrick nodded. “Yeah, ten or fifteen minutes ago. I’d only just gotten here.”
The day’s strangeness continued to escalate. For lack of a better plan, I decided to play off the whole thing as best I could: “Okay. Well, thanks for the book back. I’ll message Cassie and see what’s going on.”
Patrick nodded, but her eyes told me her mind was elsewhere. She paused for a minute, checked her phone, looked around. I edged closer to my locker. As the situation reached peak awkwardness, she said: “Well, let me know if you hear from her, okay? She has me all freaked out with how she was acting.” With that, she left. Just as I was about to call out that I didn’t have her number, and consequently had no way to contact her in the event of a Cassie update, the five minute bell rang. I quickly shed my coat, slammed my locker, and hurried to class, determined to get a few precious seconds of studying time in before the quiz.
All thoughts of Cassie and the book were, perhaps selfishly, pushed from my mind until the end of physics class. After enduring the quiz (who am I kidding—I probably got at least a B—I was content), I dug the expensive-looking journal out of my bag and flipped through it. Most of the book was comprised of empty, lined paper, but every so often a fact sheet page appeared. The journal included space for everything, from class description boxes and and calendar pages to “favorites” lists and drawing space. But the entire book was blank—why had Cassie wanted me to have an empty journal? A present I could understand; but if that’s what it was, she would have given it to me herself, without the layers of secrecy. It had to be something more than a simple “this-made-me-think-of-you” gift.
Perhaps she was trying to help with my anxiety. By disappearing for the day and then giving me a book to fill out (Cassie knew I liked organization and tracking things), was she trying to help me stay occupied while she was gone? For some reason, that explanation felt hollow. She would have texted me or left a note inside the journal. What else could it be, though?
I also had to consider Patrick’s impression of the situation. Though I only knew her through Cassie, I saw her as incredibly level-headed and laid back. I’d never seen her so worked up. Most worrisome to me was the fact that Cassie had just left school with no explanation. Lying to and avoiding friends were not phrases one associated with Cassiopeia Simmons.
Perhaps there was a message in the journal for me; after all, I had only skimmed through it briefly. However, just as I began to perform a page-by-page analysis, the physics teacher walked by, tapping my desk with his pen. “A little light reading?” Mr. Smith scowled, startling me.
“Huh?” I snapped the cover shut. “Oh this. This. Yeah it’s a friend’s—” I sputtered, grasping at words. “Research thing.” But he had already moved on, shaking his head.
“If everyone is now ready, please turn your attention to the center column of the worksheet I’m handing out. When you think about standing still, there’s really no such thing—all matter is in a constant state of motion. Let’s add it up: the rotation of the Earth around its axis, combined with Earth’s orbital velocity around the Sun, combined with the Sun’s orbit around the supposed black hole at the center of the galaxy, combined with the Milky Way’s inevitable movement towards the Andromeda galaxy, and so on and so fourth.” He now arrived at his desk, finally turning to address the class directly. “We are, all of us, moving at potentially millions of miles an hour. How to all of these pieces fit together in the universe? What forces drive all this movement? There are thousands of them, working all at once, propelling the movements of all celestial bodies. By looking at the large-body motion equations at the bottom of the page, it is clear…” Mr. Smith continued elaborating on the science part of the lesson. I stared at Cassie’s empty desk. All I could think was that if everything is always moving so fast, then why did it seem as if the world had slowed to a halt?
Lunch provided its own set of issues. I always sat with Cassie and her friends. I had a couple of acquaintances (mostly because of classes), and even some people I enjoyed talking to outside of school, but I was pretty sure none of them shared my lunch. After going through the line, I hovered uncertainly. I weighed the scenario of sitting with people I knew regularly to be less stressful than trying to find a new table. At least Patrick didn’t have this lunch either, so I didn’t expect to get grilled about Cassie.
I walked past the popular tables, which had been claimed by the popular kids who wanted to sit closest to the lunch line because they were popular and often got the things that they wanted; past the jocks, athletes, and preppy girls, who filled various tables in overlapping bubbles that made up the rest of the student body Venn diagram; past the band tables, which existed in their own primary section of said diagram, separate from all of the other circles but rivaling them equally in size; and finally, sandwiched in between the outermost choir table and the table full of people that never got off of their computers, I arrived at Cassie’s table, home to her ramshackle group of friends that lived at the edge of the Venn diagram.
A few quiet moments went by, as Cassie’s friends trickled to the table from the lunch line. Soon, however, Susan addressed the table: “Anybody seen Cassie today? Supposed to work on our bio stuff next hour.”
Heads were shaken, as apparently nobody had seen her. Patrick and I were the only ones who knew about this morning.
Susan frowned. “Ugh. She avoided my messages all weekend. Talking all weird on messenger like she was distracted or buys all the time.”
Claire nodded. “Yeah, it felt like that with me too. I’ve been talking with her for weeks about this show she got me into watching, but out of nowhere it’s like she lost interest in talking about it.” Now Claire looked upset. “I probably got too annoying about it with her…”
Susan dove to her rescue, reassuring her that no, she hadn’t been annoying, it was Cassie being the weird one, and what was her show about? As they spoke in between mouthfuls of salad, I sat, pondering the journal. Within five minutes, table conversation had already moved away from the missing best friend, under the assumption that she was sick. Claire and Susan talked about some apocalyptic TV show. Jackie, Cassie’s music friend, talked to Rachel, Cassie’s lesbian friend, about some girl band. Emily, Lily, and Tracie, who normally had only Cassie to talk to, were filling that void by striking up various conversation topics with each other. And I sat alone, realizing that the only reason this entire table of misfits were sitting together was because of Cassie, and I was the only one that cared she was missing.
Suddenly I needed to get out of there. I left lunch early, hastily dumping my tray and retreating to my favorite class half an hour early.
My last hour of the day was photography. Our school had an old-fashioned photo lab, the kind that required real film and chemicals and a dark room. Most people preferred working in the digital lab; I, too, sometimes enjoyed the speed and ease of working with pictures on a computer. But more often than not the cool assurance of the metal film-winding rings and the calm red glow of the darkroom called to me. Film developing was a process, a routine. It was predictable and orderly.
Today, however, I was doing digital. My assignment for the day was to get a bunch of pictures of the school and surrounding areas: the bus barn, tennis courts, football bleachers. I got the school’s camera, which I seemed to have checked out in a permanent state of borrowing, out of the school’s camera bag, which I always had on me as I was also permanently borrowing it. The teacher wrote me a pass to be out of class and I began sightseeing.
The rest of my day passed calmly. The afternoon sun had warmed the air, so I wasn’t totally uncomfortable outside. I went first to the science labs’ garden area, followed by the basketball court and picnic bench lunch area. After this, I circumnavigated the building, capturing its different facets (although there were only so many ways I could make brick seem appealing in pictures). I was able to spend the period thinking about the journal and Cassie without really thinking about them. Thoughts and fragments faded in and out of focus as I completed the now-automatic actions of adjusting the camera. Eventually, my battery ran low, so I was forced to return to the classroom and upload the pictures.
There were about 5 minutes left in class: just enough time to get the pictures from the camera card to my flash drive. As they downloaded, I thought I saw a glimpse of something strange—pictures I hadn’t noticed before—but before I had gotten a good look, they disappeared, to be replaced by another thumbnail. Curious, when the transfer was done, I plugged the flash drive into the school’s computer.
At the beginning of the photo set were two pictures I had never seen in my life. The time stamp said they had been taken yesterday, on my camera, even though I didn’t remember it leaving my sight all day. They were both black-and-white, an in-camera setting I never used. One of the pictures was a closeup of a “Help Wanted” sign. with the focus of the picture clearly on the first word. The following was a picture of the brown velvety journal given to me by Patrick, from Cassie.
The bell rang.