The Shaper

“This is wrong and I’m gonna destroy it.”

That was what I should have said when Stella and I found The Shaper’s notebook.

It was no bigger than a card you would receive on Christmas. The leather was so soft I thought it was velvet when I swiped it. It could get lost in any bookshelf.

Really, the notebook doesn’t look special. All the pages are blank, so it doesn’t even have any fun secrets.

At least that was how it looked to Stella. And to her mom. And to the dude next door to her. And everyone else she tested it on.

Except me. If you’re me, the notebook is filled with so many words that if I’m far enough away, all I see are pages with black blobs on it. No white space left for the amount of fucked up stuff in it.

This is how we know it’s The Shaper’s notebook.

“Ave, we just got access to so much goddamn power. Are you saying we’re not gonna do anything with it?”

Stella had that look on her face that always scared the shit out of me. I’ve known her all my life and not once have I seen her cry.

But I have seen her eyes get glossy countless times. It was like there was a thin layer of glass on her eyeballs. It was there when she was vying for first place in a club boxing match. It was there when we were stupid high schoolers left alone in a rundown liquor store and the cashier went to the back for a minute. It was there when the ex-boyfriend she was sick of asked her to move to a different city and she finally had a reason to leave without a fight.

It was the terrifying look of opportunity.

---

Let me back up 500 steps.

I’ve always thought The Shaper was bullshit. Someone less crass would call it an urban legend. A mystery. A nighttime story told by an older brother to mess with a younger sibling. A story made up because our small town is so damn boring.

Overall, bullshit.

I never thought about The Shaper much, but a lot of people around here held the tale close, especially the ones who weren’t exactly realists.

Stella and I overheard a lot of speculations all our lives. When Chrissy Meere’s parents got divorced out of nowhere, her response was, “fuck The Shaper.” When some guy I went to community college with lost his job of 11 years, he said, “motherfucking Shaper.”

And then there were the darker times.

Like when our valedictorian’s dad shot himself in the head. Blamed The Shaper.

When someone broke into the town’s main dive bar and stabbed 30-year-old Ravi Nemani to death. Blamed The Shaper.

The hit and run that paralyzed a child? Blamed The Shaper.

Seeing a pattern here?

Somehow, somewhere in the history of this tiny town, some twisted fuck convinced a bunch of people in different generations that something called The Shaper is responsible for all the unexpected, fucked up things that go wrong.

---

Stella decided to advertise that we had The Shaper’s notebook.

“This isn’t cool, Stella,” I said while reading the many tweets she posted about The Shaper’s notebook. “We don’t even know if this thing works.”

She had a theory that whatever that got written in the notebook would happen.

Everything was in there: Chrissy’s divorce, Ravi’s death, the hit-and-run, the valedictorian’s dad.

All these events and more were written down so matter-of-factly it was like reading an instruction manual.

“Maybe it’s just a diary. Maybe someone was just writing down what already happened. We should take these posts down,” I was getting frantic now. Her tweets actually had replies.

“Avery, we’ve already got someone who’s willing to pay a shit ton of money for us to write something in the notebook. He’s on his way now,” Stella said with her glossy eyes never leaving her phone.

It felt like someone shoved a brick inside my stomach.

“Who is it?”

“Derek Downing.”

We knew the Downing family well, but everyone did. They were the richest family in town because they inherited money from their great, great, great grandfather who started a bunch of investment services firms. His sister played soccer with me and our moms always made small talk for an annoyingly long time while she and I waited in the parking lot. Derek was a year older than us. He was intense and good looking in an intimidating way.

All of the Downing kids left this town except for him.

“Dude, tell him not to come,” I pleaded not because I was afraid it wouldn’t work, but because I was afraid it would.

“For all we know the guy will just tell us to write about giving some chick gonorrhea. Just hear him out, Ave,” Stella reached over and squeezed my wrist. She always knew how to comfort me even when she was the one who stressed me out in the first place.

Still. We decided I would stay in the background. Let people think Stella had the power of The Shaper. She could handle it more than I could.

When Derek arrived, I had to admit that I felt more at ease. I hadn’t seen him since high school and the years seemed to have softened him a bit. When Stella opened the door for him, he smiled, took his leather gloves off, asked us how we were in a way that made it seem like he actually gave a shit, took a seat on the couch, and told us about the past few years.

And then he asked Stella to kill his father.

You would think Stella sold murder on a regular basis with the way she unflinchingly asked for ten thousand dollars.

“I’ll give you twenty thousand,” Derek said while taking a pen and checkbook out of the inside pocket of his jacket. It was like he was revealing a loaded weapon he was overeager to use. The brick inside my stomach grew.

I would have thought he was a monster if he didn’t look so damn depressed. There was a certain sorrow in the way his brows furrowed while Stella explained how everything she wrote would happen. His voice shook as he handed her a check and told her to make it painless. His jaw hardened while he played it cool and said even if it didn’t work, it was fine because we would be stealing his asshole father’s money.

I was so sad for him, knowing he had it in him to fuck with fate and kill his father.

I’ll always remember this as one of the last emotions I ever felt.

---

That night, Stella went straight to the bank, wired me ten thousand dollars, and headed to the bar to get drunk.

Going out with her was never my favorite because usually it was for the sake of her ego instead of us hanging out.

I’ll start by saying that Stella wasn’t traditionally beautiful, but she was certainly noticeable. She was almost six feet tall, had cerulean eyes, and if mahogany and honey had a baby, that would be the color of her hair.

Meanwhile my eyes are a dull brown and my hair is the color of an empty toilet paper roll.

Stella had the type of presence that pushed her way into any crowd.

I went home early and left Stella at the bar, which was normal. She kept telling people she found a way to control The Shaper. Honestly, I was mostly worried that someone would try to kill her.

Who could have that much power and get away with it?

We decided I would write about Derek’s dad the next day. It would be a test run and we were going to figure out how to make it painless. I made sure to take the notebook with me before leaving her.

When I got to my apartment, I was thinking maybe I could write about Derek’s dad becoming a better person instead (a naive idea, really, but Stella and I were apparently twenty thousand dollars richer no matter what).

Somewhere between thoughts of Derek’s dad and trying to be happy about getting a fuck ton of money, I saw her at my door.

She couldn’t have been over fifty. She had blonde hair, blue eyes, and an unremarkable face. It was almost like looking into a mirror and seeing myself in different colors.

“I’m Jane,” she said in a voice so calm that I forgot about trying to change Stella’s mind about Derek’s dad. “I’m The Shaper.”

I felt the brick inside me grow all the way up to my throat.

“At least I used to be The Shaper. That’s you now. I won’t lie, your time came sooner than expected. You must really need this.”

The brick in my esophagus stopped me from saying anything.

“I know what you’re thinking. I know everything and so will you,” Jane explained with a shine in eyes.

The shine was almost identical to Stella’s look of opportunity, but more terrifying. It was like we were playing Poker and she knew she had all the right cards from the beginning.

I couldn’t speak, but I didn’t need to. Jane continued, “You’re not gonna kill Mr. Downing. But If you were going to, you would know that he’s about to get on an international flight and you could make the entire plane crash, if that’s what you chose to write down. You’ll also know that your neighbor across the street just adopted a new kitten and you could make her son hug it a little too tightly because he’s got that killer gene in him. If you wanted to, you could give your friend’s grandmother a heart attack at the age of 60 instead of 82.”

My face felt numb, but then again it seemed like I couldn’t get myself to feel anything. Not surprise, and not fear.

“All this new information in your head, it’ll be a lot at first, but you won’t even have to learn to live with it. The Shaper is always someone unnoticeable. It’s ironic, really. We’re so unremarkable, but we control so much. You just have to write it down. This is how we stay relevant,” Jane explained. “But you have something different, something the other Shapers never had.”

And just like that, I knew.

Stella.

Jane’s eyes locked into mine like magnets.

“Avery, go inside and turn the last page of the notebook,” she said slowly before walking away.

I opened the door, stepped inside, and the whirlwind in my head started.

I knew that if I wanted to kill Derek’s dad, I would have three perfect opportunities this week. I knew that my cousin was cheating on her husband and I could make him find out tomorrow, if I made it so. I knew that the guy I went on a date with last month was going to lose his brother on Thursday, but I could stop it if I wrote about him missing the bus that would take him to his long-distance girlfriend.

But Jane was right. I had an anomaly. One thing that made me less subtle. A bold exclamation point amidst my dull story.

I opened the last page of the notebook and immediately a new, blank page appeared and before I knew it, there were bricks in my entire body and I felt nothing.

What I did feel was that in about six minutes, someone would be texting and driving way too fast, and Stella was already walking home drunk.

And all I wanted to do was write about it.