Hello?

I've always loved filling notebooks, whether with scribbles or stories or just to vent. Notebooks come and go. They're easily replaced. You can find them anywhere, and get them cheap. But over the summer when I was 8, I found one that was special. It was a plain looking wide-ruled notebook with a purple cover, and it had been hiding underneath my dresser. I already had all of my school notebooks assigned by color to different classes, and purple hadn't been one of them. I assumed I'd just gotten an extra one for home and forgotten about it. I dusted it off and set the notebook on the little desk where I did my homework.

I flipped through the notebook to confirm that it was unused. Next, I fished through my giant pencil case for a gel pen, and selected black one. Black seemed like the right color to start a new notebook. I began writing the alphabet on the first page. It always felt good to warm up my writing hand with an alphabet and "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." As I wrote, a question mark in blue ink appeared in the upper right quadrant of the page.

My pen dropped out of my hand after the letter P. A few seconds later, blue ink continued on to Z.

"Hello?" I wrote in black.

"Who is this?" appeared in blue.

We agreed for the blue pen to write their name inside the front cover and my black pen to write my name inside the back cover, to prevent cheating.

When I flipped to the other cover, and I suppose when she did the same, the names were a perfect match.

For several months we snuck the notebook around with us to school and spent nights under the covers with flashlights getting to know each other. Or was it getting to know ourselves? Even now I have a hard time wrapping my mind around it. We liked a lot of the same things, of course, like favorite foods, books and movies. We had some differences baked in: she was better at math, and I had better grades in English. But we had the same families and friends. It was comforting to have someone to share secrets with, or to vent about parents, without getting in trouble.

For a while we even had a crush on the same boy. One day she, the blue-ink me, declared she didn't like him anymore. I think she just wanted to prove she could make her own choices. That was a comfort, too.

October came around. We had always loved Halloween. Putting together our own costumes (or at least helping Mom put them together) was a highlight of the year. The candy was great, too. Everyone in our small town was pretty generous with the candy. The blue-ink me was going to be trick-or-treating as an angel, and I was going as the kind of devil you see in cartoons, with the red horns and the pitchfork. No one in the world knew that we had a costume-buddy.

That Halloween night, I hit every house on my block. The last stop of the night was a block over, and there was a haunted house set up in someone's garage. It was a pretty good haunted house; really dark, some older boys jumping out in scary masks, and fog machines galore. But at toward the end of the experience, there was something... off.

A life-sized zombie dummy was posed in a big chair with a tray in its lap. On the tray were huge, full-sized candy bars. The idea was that you had to be brave enough to go up to him and take your reward. As I crept closer, I watched. It was breathing. I paused. The smell of the fog machines clouded my head. One of the boys who had been helping with the haunted house tried to encourage me forward, but I just couldn't do it. I shook my head apologetically, turned, and ran back home.

By the time I got to my room, I was feeling a little silly. In all likelihood, it was just the owner of the house waiting to grab my arm as I reached for the candy. Feeling a little sheepish, I sat down with my notebook to confide in the blue-ink version of myself. Maybe she hadn't gone out yet and I could save her a scare. Or maybe she would come back with a story that ended in screams and laughter, along with a giant Hershey bar. Then, at least, she could put my mind at ease about the weird vibes in that garage.

She never wrote back.

Over the years since then, I've looked back at the pages now and again. Once in a great while, I'll even write a short journal entry or a life update just in case someone is still reading them. And the reason I'm telling you about it now is that I pulled it out of storage this morning and flipped to, what I expected to be, the first blank page.

Scrawled across the paper in blue ink was a new entry: "Hello?"