All the Right Notes

“Anthony, I fucking swear to God, you have to drop what you’re doing now and look at this!”

I left my bedroom door open most of the time because I knew Andy wanted to come in a lot, and this time he didn’t even pause at the doorway. He just swaggered right in, a dusty backpack thrown over his shoulder and an all-too-familiar dumb smirk on his stupid face.

Standing at the foot of my bed, he dropped the backpack and I realized that it was open. A shit ton of folded-up pieces of paper cascaded out of the main pocket, spilling next to my feet – I immediately closed my laptop and threw it aside because somehow, I knew what it meant.

“Holy shit,” I gasped, scooting forward. The Internet could wait; this was far more important. “Are those…?”

He let loose a big laugh and turned the bag upside-down to dump out the rest of its contents. “It’s every single note we passed to each other in high school.”

The very first thought that shot through my head was, “Aww, he actually kept those?” and then immediately afterwards, my actual brain kicked in and I said, “Well, where the hell were you keeping this backpack if you’re only finding them now?”

A look of hurt flashed across his face for a moment. “What, you don’t wanna read ‘em? It’s basically a time capsule, dude.”

“Of course I wanna read ‘em,” I sighed, rolling my eyes. “I’m just saying, I mean…high school was like a decade ago, and you obviously didn’t lose them since we’ve moved around, so why are you just now bringing them out?”

Andy fidgeted with one of the zippers on the bag, staring at the ground. He started to say something, but then he paused and eventually just sat down next to the mess of paper, dipping the bed with his weight. “Well…it’s only been about a month since we got together, so, like…I hope I’m not being corny or anything, but I’ve been waiting to look through these with you and I didn’t wanna wait any longer.”

Since the night I spilled the beans about my dumb ten-year-long crush on him (okay, maybe more than just a crush), things just haven’t been the same. And when I say that, I mean that they’ve been fucking incredible. There’s something distinct about the way we smile at each other and the way we sing now.

“God, you’re so cheesy and I love it,” I teased, reaching over to punch him in the arm. I didn’t even bother trying to be a dick to him anymore. A decade of nitpicking just wasn’t worth it if it meant finally being true to ourselves.

“And I love you,” he smiled right at me. When the words rolled off his tongue, he instantly turned bright red and stared at the floor, covering his face. “God damn it, I’m sorry, that was so dumb.”

I wasn’t having any of that crap and scooted forward even more, yanking him by the hand to pull him closer and make him face me. Before he could even question what I was doing, I was kissing him so hard that I even forgot my name for a second. It never failed – even though the first few days after our “confessions” were full of backstage makeout sessions whenever we got a split second to ourselves, the feeling never got old. I didn’t care if we were just honeymooners. It was fantastic and we were going to ride that wave for as long as we could.

But I had to pull away, knowing that I’d get distracted from the matter at hand if we kept on locking lips. He still snuck in another smooch on my cheek, though, which caused me to forget how to speak momentarily.

I squeezed his hand and just said, “I love you too, Andy,” as gently as I could.

“You fuckin’ nerd. Can we look through the notes now or do you just wanna make out for the rest of the night?” he joked.

“I’m dying to look back on our high school days, but we can save the kissing for later.”

He just laughed again, and that was that.

In a heap mere inches from us, there were pieces of paper that went all the way back to 2001. We were content to stay in 2013 with our successes and failures since then, but it was hard to shake the fact that those papers were once held in our grubby teenage hands, the same ones that took our SATs and applied to colleges. There was history on those lines.

While he took a random one from the top, I grabbed the one right underneath it, which was folded to look like a paper football. The creases had been set in stone over the years, graphite smudged against its edges, and as I carefully unfolded it, I immediately saw a sign of Andy – a date in the upper right-hand corner. “10/23/2004,” it said. I always remembered him being anal about the dates. It was like he knew we would be there in a few years to look back on it all.

But before I read mine, Andy groaned long and loud and threw me off-track.

“I just remembered how much of a weeb I was…” he grimaced, squinting at the note. He shoved the paper into my hands, and then the first of many blasts from the past was in my lap.

It was a drawing of Naruto, dated April 3rd, 2003.

I’m not kidding. Andy and I were such colossal weeaboos back then that he had actually passed me a fucking drawing he did of Naruto in the middle of English class – and this was before the English anime even came out! And since I didn’t have an artistic bone in my body, I just scribbled a pile of poop coming out of his butt and wrote, “cool drawing dude!”

“I have seen Hell,” I muttered, suddenly regretting ever getting excited over this adventure.

“I try to block out that dark time of my life,” he groaned. “Here’s hoping we don’t find any other horrible drawings of mine.”

I took that as a cue to look at the note I was still holding, the one shaped like a football. Unlike the one before it, this one didn’t have any drawings – just lines of text, my chicken-scratch next to his loose scribbles. I glanced over all of it before reading it out to him.

“Hey dude you’re coming over Friday right?
Yeah man
Ok good
You don’t even have to ask, I was just gonna crash there anyways whether you like it or not
Well I gotta let my dad know. He’s been kinda moody this week.
Hey don’t worry, I got you buddy. I might even be able to get my parents to let me stay Saturday too if you need me to.”

There was a little bit of a code within those words, and both of us seemed to remember it as I went through it. Andy pressed his lips together and had his hands bunched up into fists.

I placed a hand on his arm, feeling the tense muscle relax a bit. “You okay?” I asked. I knew the answer, but I still wanted to let him know everything around him was real and we were in 2013.

He jerked his head up with wide eyes and said, “Yeah, yeah. I’m good. It’s just…weird.”

I cracked a little smile. “That’s understandable. At least nothing nowadays is nearly as shitty as it was back then, right?”

“God, you got that right.”

There were a few more lines left on the note, but I didn’t read them out loud. It was already hard enough to watch him remember Satan himself (his dad, who Andy cut out of his life as soon as we left for college), and I didn’t want to trigger him.

He was already unfolding another note while I silently read the rest of the one I had.

Thanks Anthony. It means a lot
No problem, I owe you my life anyway & don’t you forget it.
What I did was nothing compared to what you do every week.
Well I’m not going anywhere so just plan on it happening during college and when we’re old farts.

I caught myself smiling at the words, just as he abruptly snorted and started laughing so hard I was scared he was going to fall off the bed.

“What’s so funny?” I grinned, yanking the crumpled paper from his hands. He squeaked out something that I couldn’t understand, so I just looked for myself.

The date said, “12/9/2002,” and underneath the date, there was a doodle of Gir from Invader Zim, obviously Andy’s doing. But more importantly, there were lines and scribbles and notes scrawled all along the page, underneath a title that said, “Chickenfuckers.”

Just…“Chickenfuckers.”

In our sophomore year, we entered the talent show as a singing duo. We chose to write a song ourselves instead of covering somebody else’s masterpiece, and after mindlessly brainstorming horrible ideas that were far too advanced for our simple minds at the time, we settled on writing about the horrible chicken nuggets served in the cafeteria.

Obviously, we changed the name of the song to something cleaner (“Ode to Nuggets”), but reading over the relic was a trip down memory lane. I was in stitches right next to Andy, doubled over so hard I could barely bring my eyes to the page. It was terrible in all the right ways.

I had a flashback to the day we wrote it in math class, stifling snickers to keep our teacher from looking in our direction. And of course we didn’t win, but I always looked back fondly on it, since it was the first song we’d ever written together.

It took a good seven minutes for us to calm down, though, and at that point I was laying on my back from laughing to the point of exhaustion. When I wiped the tears from my eyes and hacked up a lung to finish off the pure nostalgic giddiness, Andy patted my thigh and said, “Here’s a good one, I think you should read it out loud.”

I sat up and he tossed a squarely-folded note into my hands. It was tucked into itself so tightly that I could barely even open it without ripping, and when I realized what it was, my heart skipped a beat and I broke into a cold sweat.

The outside said, “To: Andy, From: Anthony.”

There wasn’t a date in the corner this time, but I already knew that it was from September of 2003, shortly after the worst day of my life.

With shaking hands, I pulled the note apart and took a deep breath. I didn’t know what kind of face I was making, but it must not have been a very inviting one, because Andy took one of my hands and said, “I – I was kidding, you don’t have to read that if you -”

“No, I’m gonna read it,” I interrupted. “I’ve been wondering what happened to this note most of all of them, actually.”

At the top of the page, I had doodled Andy’s name in block letters before I wrote the actual letter, a cornerstone of the most vulnerable point in my life.

“Thanks for everything,” I read aloud. “Seriously, honestly, and truly, thank you. The past week has been a total mess but you’re the only reason why I haven’t gone completely nuts yet. Since Catalina died, you’ve been there for me whenever I needed a friend, and I hope you know how important that is. I hope you know how important you are to me and I know this is super gay, which is why I just left this in your locker for you to read on your own time. But yeah. You were there when it happened, you were there that first night, you even came to the funeral and today you didn’t even bat an eyelash when I broke down at lunch today. I always considered you my best friend but this just goes even further than that. I never realized how much shit you put up with when you put up with me. And I’m not good at expressing my emotions and stuff like that, so I’m really sorry if this is weird, I totally understand if you end up avoiding me tomorrow. But I just really needed to say it, cuz it’s all true. I make fun of you and we bust each others’ balls every day, but I can’t put into words how much I appreciate your existence and our friendship. And I want you to know that I will always be here for you when you need me, just like how you’re still here with me. I’ve got your back for life, buddy. Thank you.”

I was definitely not crying by the time I got to the end. Nope, not at all. And if I was, it had nothing to do with the fact that Andy was holding my hand just the way he did when I lost my sister to a car accident, looking up at me like nothing had changed.

“You didn’t have to read that out loud if it hurt that much,” he said quietly.

“N-no, I…I wanted to. I needed to.” I traced patterns on the back of his hand with my bony thumb.

With his free hand, he brushed the hair back from his face, jet-black waves hanging to one side. His eyebrows furrowed over worried eyes, he said, “The last thing I wanted these notes to do was make you cry.”

“No, I’m just…it’s raining. This is rain. …On my face.”

Andy narrowed his eyes. In a low yet spiteful whisper, he said, “You fucking dork, was that a Fullmetal Alchemist reference?”

I coughed out a sob that turned into another laugh, and then any sadness in the air had completely vanished. In a flash, we were teenagers again, free from adult responsibilities and bills to pay, just laughing at crap that was only funny to us. The tears brought on by re-reading the letter were replaced with happy ones, and after a few more good minutes, both of us were still reeling and laying down on the bed with the notes strewn all around us.

Andy leaned over and kissed me slowly when all the commotion had gone away. It was my natural reaction to melt into it and pull him closer, despite the pressing urge to read more of our past, but that could wait.

We were living in the present, after all. Time comes and goes on its own terms and we had learned to roll with it a long time ago.