The First Note

The first note showed up on a Tuesday and it almost didn't get to me at all. It was third-period history. Mr. Vance was talking about some treaty, and I was doing what I always do in third period, which is being mostly invisible. That's kind of my whole thing. I'm not popular and I'm not unpopular, I'm just sort of background. There's a name for kids like me. The name is "Eli? Oh yeah, I think we have bio together." That's the name. It's a whole sentence and people say it about me a lot. So I'm sitting there being background, and this folded-up piece of paper lands on my desk. It just appeared. Like it fell from the ceiling, except paper doesn't do that, so somebody passed it, but when I looked around nobody was looking at me. Everybody was either looking at Mr. Vance or looking at nothing. Which, when you think about it, is impressive. To pass a note and then act so normal that the person it lands on can't even tell which direction it came from. That takes practice. That takes a person who has thought about it. I almost didn't open it. I figured it wasn't for me. Notes are not for me, I'm background, you don't pass notes to the scenery. I figured it was meant for the desk next to mine and just slid wrong. But it said ELI on the outside. In small careful letters. My name. So I opened it under the desk where Mr. Vance couldn't see, and this is what it said: "You did the thing again where you laughed at something in your own head and then looked around to check if it was okay that you laughed. It was okay. It's always okay. You should do it louder. — a friend" I read it about six times. Here's the thing. The thing it described? I do do that. I didn't even know I did that until I read the note, and then I knew it instantly, the way you know your own face in a photo you didn't know was being taken. I laugh at stuff in my head, little stuff, and then I get nervous about having laughed, and I check around to see if anyone caught me being weird. I have done that my entire life. I have never told anyone I do that. I'm not sure I ever even said it to myself in actual words. And somebody had watched me do it. Watched me close enough, and long enough, and kind enough, to write it down and turn it into something nice. I want to be honest about how that felt, because the whole point of writing this is to be honest. It felt scary. That was the first feeling. Somebody knows something about me, somebody's been looking. When you spend your whole life being careful background, the idea that someone's been watching the background closely enough to see you is genuinely scary. But then, like one second later, there was a second feeling, and the second feeling was bigger than the first one. The second feeling was that somebody had watched me, and what they'd noticed wasn't something to make fun of. They could have. The thing in the note is embarrassing. A meaner person could have used it to wreck my whole week. But this person took the most secret small embarrassing thing about me and they handed it back to me wrapped up like it was a good thing. You should do it louder. Nobody had ever done that. Nobody had ever made me feel like the secret parts were the good parts. I spent the rest of third period not hearing one single word about the treaty. I just held the note under my desk and looked, very slowly, very carefully, at every single person in that room, trying to catch one of them looking back. Not one of them did. Whoever it was, they were good at this. The bell rang. I folded the note up small and put it in the inside pocket of my backpack, the zip pocket, the one I never use, the one for things that matter. I told myself I'd figure out who it was by Friday. I want it on the record that I was extremely wrong about Friday, and that figuring it out was going to take me almost the whole rest of the year, and that — this is the part I didn't know yet, standing in the third-period doorway with a note in my zip pocket and my heart going too fast — I wasn't actually sure, deep down, that I wanted the notes to ever stop.