September 22, 1970

It was sitting in the mailbox beside a bill from the electric company. It looked harmless, wrapped up in brown paper and twine, and I didn’t think twice about reaching into the box and pulling it out. Even when I saw that it was addressed to me, I was more curious than worried. There was no return address, and I wondered who would send me a package. I brought it into the house to open.

When I saw what it was and who it was from, my first thought was to put it right back in the mail box. But where would they take it with no return address? Throwing it in the trash didn’t seem as effective, given it would have to sit in the bin nearly a week until I hauled the bags to the end of the driveway for the collectors. I brought it upstairs instead and set it on my desk, where, slowly, it was covered up by books. So even though my dad is the last person I want to accept a gift from, somehow I still have the journal three months later.

He meant it as a birthday present, or so said the note he wrote on the first page. Don’t bother looking – I ripped it out and burned it the first day I read it. It was full of crap – how he wished he had been around while I was growing up, and how proud he is of me, fifteen years old now and almost a man. I wonder how he can be proud of someone he hasn’t seen in ten years.

His note launched into a lecture about the merits of memory. Does he remember that Christmas Eve, I wonder, all those years ago? I was five, but I remember it perfectly. He’d gone out for eggnog. He was supposed to be right back, and Mom let me sit in front of the Christmas tree and wait for him. It got later and later, and finally Mom put me to bed, so Santa Claus wouldn’t skip our house, she said. I woke up excited the next morning, but Dad never came back.

I wish, he wrote, that I had a record of the days I spent with you and your mother, when we were happy. I wish I had a way to relive the smiles and the laughter. Of course, those are the times he remembers. This was why he had sent me the journal, so that I would have a way to remember the times, as inconsequential as I might think them now.

Well, I do think the “times” are inconsequential. I live in the smallest, quaintest country town you ever saw, in which our last great event was the Fourth of July BBQ at the Fire Hall. I am fifteen, but having no great adventures in life. My days are patterned – school from eight in the morning to three in the afternoon, followed by a retreat straight home to my bedroom, where I play music records as loudly as Mom will let me and read novels, go down to dinner, go back up to sleep, and then rise and do the whole thing over.

So what should I record? Everything, I guess.

I’m sitting in the school cafeteria now, with the smell of steamed green beans making me sick, and everyone around me shouting to each other. Is this moment a great event that I should record for all time? And how should I record it? In the style of the great authors, London and Dickens and Bronte, telling a story to some invisible reader, or in the scrawled notes common in journals? It would be easier to tell a story if I knew the plot. But my life has no plot and no theme. It’s only a road that wanders without end.

The bell is ringing, signaling the end of lunch. All around me, teenagers stand to throw out their lunch trash and file back into the hallways.

All, I should say, but two: Myself and Benjamin Cross. I sit with my eyes still on this page, my pen still writing, wondering if he sees the glances I dart at him. It seems impossible that he not see – He is staring right at me. He has been all through lunch, sometimes fleeting glances, sometimes long stares such as now.

I know Ben Cross only by reputation. He sells marijuana to the older teens, and is known as an antihero because of it, and because he plays in a rock band, and is taking the twelfth grade over after flunking it last year. He’s nineteen – the oldest student at East Hanover High – and fascinating. He’s one of the best-looking guys at school, but rarely dates, and has never had a steady girlfriend that anyone can remember.

But we are both being motioned to by a teacher trying to clear out the room. Maybe I’ll write again, and maybe I’ll throw this journal in the trash can with the leftover green beans where it belongs.