The LBB

The LBB

By Tim Gesner

Needra was a writer. Yes, she was a lot of things, but she thought of herself as a writer more than anything. When Needra was young her mother read to her the most amazing stories. Needra loved it when her mother read to her. She loved the pictures, she loved the voices her mother made when she read. But the words! Words were mysterious. They were magical. Needra tried making up her own words by carefully copying some letters onto a scrap of paper and taking them to her mother to read them to her. “What’s this word, Momma?” “Oh. I don’t know…” Her mother said, a smile playing on her lips. “Let’s see if I can pronounce this. Hmmm, I think it says ‘Needra’. What’s it supposed to be?” “It’s my name Momma!” Needra almost shouted. “Oh, I see it now! You spelled ‘Needra’. You spelled it very nicely too.” And even though Needra’s name was actually Leeandra, Needra was the only name she would answer to from that point on. That week, her father came home a little later than usual and he presented Needra with a book for her to write in! “Now not every book is made to write in, Needra,” her father had said very solemnly, but still smiling gently, “but this one is.” They showed her how each page of the book had a letter of the alphabet on it. Needra knew the alphabet song but didn’t know what each letter looked like. Momma showed her how, if she sang the song, it would show her what each letter was as she turned the pages. There were also dotted lines, where if you connected the dots, you could make your own letters! Daddy said her letters were very nice when she copied the word “FROG” out of the book. Needra often saw her mother writing in a little book. It looked old, and shiny, a deep dark brown. “Are you writing your alphabet too?” asked Needra. “No Baby, I’m just writing. This is my writing book. It’s kind of like yours, but there’s no pictures and I already know how to make all the letters into words. Momma writes down important things that have happened, things she is thinking about, even little stories sometimes.” “Stories?!” Needra’s whole world turns upside down for a moment. “YOU can write stories?” “Of course I can Baby, anyone can, and that means YOU too!” Momma poked Needra softly right over her heart. Little Needra didn’t realize it at the time, but from that moment on she was a writer.

When Needra started school, things changed for her a bit. Needra was in such a big world now – new friends, new ideas and new things to write about. She treasured her time in the classroom and it just fueled her writing. She wrote about countries she learned about and how to make a paper airplane and about animals that she saw on a field trip to the zoo. One Christmas she had a bicycle waiting for her by the Christmas tree! Once she had learned to ride it, she was on it as much as possible. Bicycles were fun and fast and it took her places where she could write, under a tree, or in the ice cream shop. She would watch an old man walking down the street and then she would write about him and his cat Max, and how they led a secret life, going out at night and planting vegetables in people’s yards. Needra was a writer.

As Needra grew up and slowly became a young woman, her writing blossomed. Then one day they moved away from that little town and moved to a new, bigger city. Her first day as a freshman at the new High School her father gave her a most excellent gift, a new notebook, just like her mother’s, but with a perfect black leather cover, embossed with the initials LBB. She took her notebook with her everywhere, taking notes and writing about everything she saw. She wrote about the way the light slanted through the double doors at the front of the school, or the turn of a red-haired girl’s head as she talked to an older, taller boy in the hallway, and she wrote about the kids she saw who didn’t fit in that well. Those people were so much more interesting to her than the Senior football player who never raised his hand in class, and always hung out with the same five other guys. She wrote about the girl who brought her own lunch to school every day, yet sat with her friends, obviously wanting to eat what they were eating from the cafeteria. She wrote about the two boys who always sat together talking about Star Wars and Legos and Anime, who both looked like they were ten years old, yet in a class she shared with them, they proved that they were smarter than most of the other kids. Needra decided to write a book, bringing all her writing subjects from the school together, knitting them into one narrative. She really didn’t want to mess new book, starting the story in the middle of it, and she didn’t want to carry another notebook for the new story either, so Needra would flip her notebook upside down, and started writing the new story from the back of the book. As the days went on, and Needra wrote, a curious thing happened. She began to attract a certain following. It would begin with one of her subjects noticing she was studying them, and then writing in her notebook. They might look happy, or concerned, or even angry and they would all eventually walk up to her and ask what she was doing. She told them she was writing a story and that it had them in it. Reactions were swift: either they became happier, more concerned, somewhat embarrassed or even more angry. They would all ask, sometimes even demand, to know what she was writing about them. Needra never let anyone touch her LBB (she called it her “Little Black Book”) so instead she would read to them what she had written. Needra read to them in the smooth mellow tones she had inherited from her mother. By the time she was done reading to them, they were all hooked, even the angry ones. Every single one of them couldn’t believe this unassuming, quiet girl could really “see” them so well and they were hooked. And when Needra hooked someone with her wise and kind words, they became her friends. Soon Needra had quite a following at the school, her table was always full to overflowing when she went to lunch. Her story started fleshing out and the crowd grew bigger when she read aloud to her friends, and she gained more friends. The new friends started writing too. Notebooks of all shapes and sizes and colors started appearing among her friends – one with a unicorn on the cover, another with a green kaleidoscope cover, an orange one, a blue one and a plethora of LBB’s like Needra’s. People started treating each other differently, they were all reading to each other what they had written at lunch – notebooks swapped and talked over. People started taking their English classes seriously and the world changed around Needra by the simple fact that people started to understand each other, to see the world through each other’s eyes.

Then the unthinkable happened. One day after lunch, Needra had to go to the bathroom and stuffed her backpack in her locker, along with her precious journal. When she got back to her locker, she found her backpack strap sticking out of the locker door. She hadn’t left the locker like that, so she hurriedly opened the locker and her heart sank. Hanging from its hook, zipper opened, she could clearly see that her journal was gone! All those words, all her notes and stories and the Book she had started writing about her new friends! Gone! Yes, she had written all those words, probably six chapters worth so far, and yes, she could write it all again, but the magic of those specific words would be gone. The story would subtly change, and it was lost! The grief was profound and obvious on her face – each and every one of her friends saw it instantly when they saw her – the ever-present journal wasn’t in her hand and her loss sucked them in to her, crowding around her and loving her, patting her on the shoulder, saying all the words they could think of to reassure her. She was offered a dozen different journals as a replacement, but she wouldn’t take any of them. She wanted only one: her journal. It meant more to her than anything. Needra was a writer and the words in that journal were her soul.

By the time the school week was over, Needra had been to a birthday party for one of her friends, gone to see two different movies, with two other friends (and their friends too), and been invited to a girl’s night sleepover at a fourth friend’s house. She was glad of the distraction. She was so devastated, and it hurt to do it, but she started writing again, in a brand new LBB, (Initials and all) that her mother was saving for her for her birthday, but had given it to her early. As the weeks went by, she let go of the pain and Needra wrote about her grief and loss and her friendships and their love and support and her heart lifted itself, word by word, out of the darkness. One bright spring Monday morning Needra walked into the school –and her friends were nowhere to be seen. Usually before she even walked in the door, at least one or two of them had said hi, or walked inside with her, but today, nothing. She turned the corner to her locker and there they were. All of them. All clustered together, all with huge smiles on their faces, all looking at her expectantly. She stopped in her tracks. This was something she had never experienced before, and it disconcerted her. Her hands automatically opened her new LBB to write down the scene as fresh as she could and her friends all yelled, “Needra!” and laughed. She stopped and looked up, they were all beckoning to her and calling her over to her locker. She walked slowly towards them, smiling because she couldn’t help herself, and as the circle of friends opened up to engulf her, there stood Heather, one of her earliest friends, with an LBB of her own, hugged against her chest. She wasn’t smiling and looked worried. “Needra,” she began in a small voice. “It was me, I took your Journal.” She slowly held out the book she was holding and Needra saw the stamped LBB on the front cover. “But why? Why did you… Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you keep it so long and not give it back until now?” Her friend swallowed but didn’t let go of the book when Needra reached for it. “I took it because your writing was so beautiful and I, I took it to show to my dad. He’s an editor and his company publishes books. He thought it was really good too! I was going to bring it back the next day, but he took it to work, and then didn’t bring it home until yesterday. Here. Take it and look inside.” Needra opened her book and a big fat check sat inside the front cover. The check was for $20,000, made out to Leeandra B. Bunsen. “He bought it Needra, if you’re willing to sell it. He wants to buy your book!” Needra gasped when she realized, she was a writer, but she was going to be an Author!

Tim Gesner