Yield

Bobby Goelz

            Of the hundred people laughing and screaming and socializing and running and buzzing and whispering and every day, for at least a moment, I caught sight of the one person who wanted to be invisible. I didn’t stalk Charlotte Piers or have some crazy obsession with her. It was just that somehow, my eye would jerk around the cafeteria across the pale beige walls and catch her, a shadow sitting alone in the corner, eating an apple, and writing in that journal. Sometimes, she would see me seeing her, but she never blushed or smiled or acknowledged my existence in any way. She’d just look a moment and try to make her face clear of any clues, though I sometimes thought I saw some longing in her eyes. Maybe it was just a trick of light. After that, she’d turn back to her journal, the scribbling slower, more deliberate. The fact that this daily routine never became mundane intrigued me so much.

            If I knew anything, though, it was that I couldn’t just walk to her and strike up a witty conversation. I knew very well that, at lunch, I’d have to sit with Brad, his girlfriend, Sam, his girlfriend, Chad, Don, Sarah, and a bunch of others in red and green wrestling jackets and red and green football jackets and such. I knew that I had to talk about homecoming and why I wasn’t dating anyone and last night’s Red Sox game and such. And I knew that I couldn’t just walk over to Charlotte-The-Weird-Girl and start talking about why I stare at her all the time.

            But for all that I knew, there was still that key question that lingered. Why did I always end up watching her? And so many more flooded afterward.

            I was so used to facts, but because of one strange girl, everything became cloudy.

            Every look would pain one part of me, but satisfy another at the same time. I became consumed to the point where I’d stutter when talking to my friends or forget the funny of a funny story I’d be telling. Curiosity clashed with reality. But the difference between the two sides was that my curiosity grew, while my reality remained unchanged.

            One day, I stuck around at Chemistry for a few extra minutes, waiting for the cafeteria to fill. My eyes on the clock, I felt every tick echo in my head and travel through my body for that one second until another tick sounded. When it seemed like the right time, I willed myself to walk through the halls to the back door of the cafeteria. The motions were automatic: legs walking, hands reaching for the door handle, eyes finding that face, legs walking some more. She looked up from her journal with that same blank stare as always when I sat down across from her.

            “Can I help you?” she asked.

            “Uhmm…” I just shrugged and gave a small, warm smile. It was the right answer.

            “I’m Charlotte,” she said, returning the smile and extending a hand towards me. Her other one discreetly shut her journal. “You’re Darrel.”

            Oddly, it wasn’t a question. I answered as I’d been taught, nodding and taking her hand. Her grasp was firm, her hand a bit damp from the apple. I wiped mine off on my khakis afterward, but she didn’t seem to mind too much.

            “So why are you sitting here anyway?” asked Charlotte. I wondered if she knew the answer. If she did, though, I didn’t get any hints.

            “Well, uh…I just, I just kind of wanted a change…I guess?” If I was meeting anyone other than Charlotte Piers, I would’ve been thoroughly embarrassed by my stutters and pauses. But I wasn’t.

            “That’s…fine,” Charlotte replied, giving me a curious look. “But aren’t you happy with Genna, Gina, Brad, Sam, Lexi, Don, Chad, and Marianna?” She rattled off the names as if she’d been practicing for years. I smiled to myself, enjoying this odd tendency of hers. It along with those wide eyes of hers felt like a breath of fresh air.

            “Well, sure I’m happy with…them,” I replied. “I just…wanted a change.”

            “A change,” she repeated skeptically.

            “Yeah, a change. What’s wrong with that?” My tone had a bit more anger than I intended. She, however, looked triumphant.

            “Of course not, Darrel Savoca.” Her growing smile brought color to my face and I wanted to sink into my hands and groan. Instead, I just looked down at the patterns on the wooden table and let her continue the conversation. “What do you want to talk about, then? Politics, current events, gossip, our favorite foods…”

           “There you go again,” I murmured to myself, still looking down. I meant it to only reach my ears, but she caught wind and paused her know-it-all-ish listing.

            “I beg your pardon?”

            “Nothing, nothing, nothing,” I stammered, starting to sweat.

            “Oh, it wasn’t nothing,” she said, smiling. “It was something. And you’re going to tell me what it is.” She leaned forward and rested her head onto her left palm, eyebrows up, completely in control. It was the first real silence in the conversation, and I knew that with someone like Charlotte Piers, a silence isn’t a good thing. I felt myself sweating more and more as time passed.

            “It really was…well I mean…you just started rattling off some list like before and it was just…amusing, I guess.” I gave her a nervous smile.

            Right answer again. This time, I was awarded with a chuckle. “I should put that down,” she said, opening her notebook on her lap and picking up that ballpoint pen of hers. I arched my back a bit in attempt to see the writing, but she caught me and slammed it shut. I opened my mouth to apologize, but she raised her hand to pause me.

            “Do you want to know what I’m writing?” she asked as if I were a small child.

            “Yes,” I muttered, blushing, my eyes shifting towards the floor.

            “Then ask me.”

            I raised my head and really looked into her eyes, something I wasn’t quite used to doing. They were green, clashing with her bright red frames and brighter red hair. They seemed ready, always ready.

            “What do you write in your journal, Charlotte Piers?” I slowly curled my mouth into a smile. She matched me.

            “Everything,” she said enthusiastically, as if she’d been waiting to answer that question her whole life. I waited for her to expand, but she seemed to be waiting for me to ask. The urge to catch her off guard rose from deep inside of me.

            “Oh, okay,” I said slyly. “So you just scribble down a little record every time Aaron Moskowitz picks his nose and every time Keisha Parmalee starts making out with Ken Johnson and—”

            “Every time you look over here,” she added conversationally. My confidence slipped from my fist and shattered on the tiled floor. The sounds of the cafeteria buzzed around me, but she remained silent before I finally looked up and saw her face, so open, so calm.

            “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

            “Mmm,” she replied forgivingly, picking up her apple again and taking a bite.

            It was quiet for awhile. There was a question itching my lips, but I couldn’t find a way to phrase it. She just kept taking bites out of her apple and looking around, sometimes at me and sometimes at the fluorescent lights and sometimes at other people and sometimes at the trash can and sometimes back at me again. I was just watching the table. However, I did see her open the journal and scratch the paper with her pen as fluidly as ever. Then something happened that I hadn’t seen. She crossed out what she’d written. I was sure that it was just a minor grammar mistake or something trivial like that for a few seconds as she kept writing, but then I saw her cross out the writing again. Chancing a look at her face, I saw her chewing her lip, at a loss for words for the first time ever. Her eyes seemed scared of the lined paper, and her right hand was shaking, the bright blue pen beginning to drip ink on the page. She tried a few more times before something made me interrupt.

            “Why do you sit alone?” I blurted out. Something made me look over her shoulder at where I usually sit. I saw a few of them looking at me, confused, and then turned back to her.

Her eyes wide for a moment with the deer-in-the-headlights look, but they soon changed as if seeing me for the very first time in her life. Her pen scribbled a short sentence. Her other hand closed the journal in a fluid motion. She stood up.

            “I’m going to go get a thing of milk. I will be back in three minutes. Go back to Genna, Gina, Brad, Sam, Lexi, Don, Chad, and Marianna.”

            I was expecting a straightforward answer, but no such luck. Her monotone and that listing threw me even more. “Should I come back?” I asked.

“No. Don’t. Come back only when you’re ready to sit with me every day at lunch.” I nearly laughed at her melodramatic response before I realized that she was right. She wanted me to find out why I’d watched her every day. She wanted me to find out why I’d been so intent on finding her and sitting with her. She wanted to be sure that my sitting here was real, that this actually meant something.

            She left as she’d promised to, but made a critical mistake. Her journal was sitting there on the table, unguarded and alone for maybe the first time ever. As soon as I touched it, though, I was sure that it was no mistake. I started flipping through, past colorful sentences and sketched doodles, searching for that one page where there were sentences crossed out. Skipping those, I found the only one that remained intact.

Met Darrel Savoca today. He’s nice. I like him.

            I was shocked for a moment before I started to laugh. The people around me must have thought I was crazy, laughing at two tiny sentences from Charlotte-The-Weird-Girl’s journal. But at that moment, the people around me didn’t matter quite so much.

            I stood smiling, ready to comply with her demand. That question I couldn’t create still remained along with many others, but the itch to learn the answer wasn’t as painful this time as before it was before I’d met her. It really wasn’t painful at all.