October 13, 4:27 p.m.

Hello, Notebook. Slept through classes today. Weird dreams. Weird dreams brought on by a weirder person that I now accept I have fallen madly in love with.

Sarah called me Sunday night. And we talked for hours and hours. About books and movies and things we liked. It kept getting closer to home. After an hour she said she ought to go to bed, but I wouldn’t let her. I’d start saying goodnight and change the subject. And anyone who’s talked to anyone else on the telephone for a long period of time knows that things start to break down a little after three a.m. You get sleepy and honest. No, I didn’t tell her I loved her. It was worse, in a way, though. I asked her what had happened that my poem had reminded her of. And I told her how she’d looked at me, and how I’d felt about it.

She hung up on me.

Jules located me in the Union the next day. "What did you do to that girl?" she demanded. "She was always a little out of it before; she’s a total space cadet today. She damn near sanded my fingers while we were working on the set."

"I didn’t do anything," I said, and I think that was sort of a lie, but while I knew I had done something, I didn’t know just what. "We just talked."

"Just talk doesn’t do that to a woman," she said wisely. Now she was Jules the Sage, and I didn’t want to hear it. I got up and started walking away.

I had my head bent down and my hands shoved into my pockets and started out the door, but there was someone standing in the way, just standing there. I looked up. It was Sarah.

"Sorry," she said. "I’m sorry, Chris. I’m really, really…"

She stopped. We just looked at each other for a minute. And then she kissed me again.

"I have to go to class," I said when she stepped back. I was asking myself what sort of thing that was to say and what was wrong with me, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

"Okay. Come over tonight. I’m in apartment three in the first building in Cherry Blossom. I want to make you dinner."

I nodded, mute. She looked so serious and somber, but so beautiful.

"Is seven okay?"

I just nodded again.

"I want to tell you everything, Chris," she said, and her hand touched my face.

And at seven, I was there. I mean it was straight up seven and getting dark and I was standing outside her apartment. Mostly because I knew by that time that I really was in love with her. I would have crawled over hot coals to see her face again, and that’s the truth. I still would…even after…well, look, let’s just tell it in order…

She let me in and we had dinner and it was perfect. I don’t remember what I was eating, except that there was some kind of pasta involved because I remember watching her put her fork to her mouth and there were noodles on it. For the first time in my life I was watching a girl’s mouth and thinking about just how pretty and perfect her lips were and her smile and even her frown. She wore this long, blue dress and her feet were bare and she padded around the apartment, getting wine and lighting candles and playing with her cd’s. And we laughed and talked and she apologized again and she kissed me again. And again after dinner. And then it happened.

Sarah leaned against me and sighed. "Chris, what happens at the end of all the fairy tales?"

I kissed the top of her head, smelling that rain smell again. "They live happily ever after, right?"

She stepped back and looked up at me, and I was scared. I don’t mean I was worried, I mean I was scared. Everything had happened so fast for me, and I didn’t want to lose her, couldn’t lose her. But she was someplace in her head where I couldn’t follow her.

"That means forever, doesn’t it?"

"Yeah, I guess so," I said.

"Someone told me that forever wasn’t long at all. He was right."

And then Sarah told me a story.

It was a story about a bad wish. About monsters. About a man who did magic. It was a long story. She talked and talked. At the beginning she cried.

"I wished him away…I was so bad to Toby. I wished him away and he hadn’t done anything to me at all. I had to go after him, of course…"

And at the end of it, Sarah completed the circle of the tale. "I remembered then. I said he had no power over me. And then the clock struck. I won. Toby was back. And I was part of the real world."

I stared at her. I had stared at her for most of the story. I thought she was trying to entertain maybe. Just showing me that she could be a storyteller too. I didn’t understand. Because I didn’t want to. Because I loved her.

Then she looked at me. "Please say you believe me. Or at least that you believe that I believe. Even if it makes me crazy, Chris. Just understand…"

"I do."

And she knew that I didn’t. She cried again. "Get out, get out…"

And I left. I left her crying there on the couch.

That long drive home I kept thinking of Jules, hearing her voice in my head.

"Well, Chris, you certainly know how to pick them. Brilliant and sensitive and beautiful…and crazy."

I stayed up all last night. Paced. Tried to read. Read my poem over again. Understood what she’d seen in it. And I tore it into little pieces.

Gotta talk to Tony Maxx…the real sage. I’m going to tell him everything. Please god, let him make some sense out of what she told me.

Sarah, Sarah, why did you turn those eyes on me? It’s not fair. It’s just not fair.

--Chris

 

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