CHAPTER 8: Yellow Sticky Notes
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Ella along with her three friends was hanging out in their campus coffee house. It was right after college ended which meant the coffee house was crowded and noisy.
Nora needed some caffeine, and so everyone tagged along for some milkshakes and food. They all sat around a round table talking and laughing about all sorts of stuff.
Daniel was talking about typical college guy problems and complaining about how he needed to increase his swimming speed (he was on the swim team) and basically all his teachers were being jerks and assigning way too many project reports, to which Jay joined in and complained about his own overload of psychology 101 assignments.
"And there are no cute guys in my class." Dan wailed, not entirely unexpected of him, and Jay glared at him for suddenly changing the topic to one which he could not relate.
"Yeah, you should definitely work on your swimming speed." She nodded enthusiastically and ignored his last comment since it's been repeated way too many times.
The topic however changed when Nora brought up Ella's lost diary which was still mysteriously lost. "What happened to it, is it just gone?"
Ella swallowed the breadstick she was eating and said, "I'll tell you as soon as I find out." She didn't want to worry about it while hanging out with her friends but they apparently were very much interested in this particular topic.
"What do you mean 'as soon as I find out', it's been days... I thought you might have gotten a ransom call from the kidnapper." Jay frowned at her.
"You mean blackmailer?" Nora attempted to correct him but he brushed her off.
"Tomato, tomaahto... it's all the same," he shrugged.
"Except its tomato, no one says tomaahto." Daniel interjected.
Ella sighed. "No such calls. Which makes me wonder if it's just lost, or someone took it on purpose..." She voiced her uncertainty while going along with her friend's outlandish suggestions.
"Don't worry, you'll get the call soon, maybe it's their first crime." Daniel chuckled.
"I can only imagine what the conversation would be like." Nora mused.
Jay and Daniel looked at each other and smirked, almost as if they just had a telepathic conversation. And suddenly out of nowhere they started doing impressions.
Jay spoke up in his 'Batman voice' as he held his hand to the side of his face like a telephone. "Hello, Ella? I have your personal diary as a hostage."
Ella rolled her eyes, but she had to smile, her friends were such dorks.
"What? No, you don't!" Daniel said in a voice that was much too high pitched as he held up his phone to his ear, and pushed his non-existent long hair behind his ear with his other hand.
Nora burst out laughing while Ella tried not to get too offended. "First off...I don't speak like that and I do not sound like that."
Jay shushed her and continued with his fake deep baritone. "I'm sorry to disappoint but I do in fact have it, it's right here in my hands labelled 'personal diary' and all that formality..." He pretended to flip open a book in his hand and turned pages made out of thin air.
"You have no proof, why should I believe you?" Daniel's annoyingly pitchy voice said and Ella face-palmed at this ridiculous joke, but couldn't keep from smiling.
Jay continued with "Uh maybe because I read it, your handwriting sucks by the way, and I can assure you your future self will kill you for writing this crap...it clearly says here that when you were five you fell from a swing on a beam and got a black eye and then lied to your parents about how you were defending some helpless kid from bullies."
Daniel broke character as he burst out laughing. "What the heck!"
Ella suddenly looked up and pointed out "Wait! That's way too specific... there's no way you just made that up."
"What, no-..." Jay tried to backpedal.
"Aww poor Jay, you were clumsy as a five-year-old too, weren't you?" Nora laughed.
"No that didn't-" Jay tried again but he was cut off again as Ella pretended to feel sad.
"Did someone witness it? Did they laugh, get it on camera? You must be humiliated, what a traumatic childhood you have had..." She mumbled in sympathy.
"No such thing happened to me!" He yelled.
"It's okay you don't have to deny it, we all understand." Nora fake consoled.
Daniel was still busy laughing and falling over himself. "Defending from bullies? Really Jay? Did your parents actually buy that?"
"They thought I was pretty badass..." Jay sulked in defeat.
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The weekend arrived faster than ever, only to crash and burn all of Ella's hopes. She couldn't sleep well the night before, especially when all her dreams consisted of invalidating the journal incident. As if the entire thing was a fragment of her wild imagination.
She habitually looked at her little sticky notes whenever she passed by any of the notice boards and found that her notes were littered with tiny little scrawls of good luck messages from strangers. It made her smile. But in the end, it was all for nothing.
Ella was a busy, overworked, always tired second-year college student and amidst her tremendous academics, she didn't have the time to continue with an unexplainable pursuit of mystery. Maybe this was it, this was all it was gonna be, it was never meant for anything more or to go further than this.
The feeling of being blocked at a cul-de-sac felt a little too final. More final than writing the last letter. This was just going to be one of those things that end up on the 'dumb things I did in college' list, which she'll recall and laugh about when she got older.
On a weekday this time of the day would have kept her busy with classes, but now that she didn't have a strict college schedule to follow, her mind wandered into places she didn't prefer.
Just as she was passing the last notice board her gaze fell on the yellow sticky note. It had a message beneath it, and she was about to disregard it completely when what she saw finally registered in her mind.
Under her tiny little message, there was a single word response.
"No." That's all it said, and she would have rolled her eyes and kept walking if it wasn't for the name underneath the one-worded answer.
"-Elliot"
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And the plot thickens... I hope you're interested in what happens next.
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