Notes in the Margins

Noor Haidari had a rule about the school library: never take a book out that someone else might want.

It was not a generous rule. It was a practical one. Noor had a talent for liking things that turned out to be popular, and the instant she began loving a band, a show, or a series, half of Year Ten followed her into it and ruined everything. So she had learned to hunt where nobody looked. The bottom shelf of the dusty fiction annexe. The back of Section 3B, behind the broken radiator, where the covers were soft with age and the card in the front still said Date Due in a stamp-inked font nobody had used since before her mum was born.

Which was how she found The Lighthouse Year.

It was a fat blue paperback with a cracked spine, a ring where a mug had once sat on its cover, and a pencil mark on the first page that said, This book is better than its cover. So is everyone. She read that line twice. Then she looked around the empty annexe to see who’d heard her thinking it, and, finding no one, took it to the desk and signed it out.

“Honestly, that one?” said Mrs Abara, the librarian, stamping the card. “Nobody’s had that one out in years.”

“That’s why I want it.”

“Oh, I know.” Mrs Abara smiled at her over her half-moons. “I’ve been watching you pick them for two years. It’s a very specific kind of loneliness, wanting to be the only person who loves something.”

“I’m not lonely,” Noor said, a bit too fast.

“Of course not, pet.”

She read it that night in bed with a torch, because her little brother had the bedside lamp and she didn’t trust him not to be in the room. It was about a girl called Wren who goes to live with a lighthouse keeper after her parents leave on a ship that doesn’t come back. It was slow. It was stormy. It had long lovely sentences, and a dog, and the kind of quiet ache that goes right through the middle of you if you aren’t careful.

By page forty, Noor found the first note.

It was in the margin, in soft grey pencil, small and slanting. Beside a paragraph in which the lighthouse keeper, a gruff old man called Mr Penhale, refused to answer a straight question, someone had written:

Honestly, Mr Penhale. Say something. ANYTHING. You are a man who has been silent for forty pages and I am running out of patience.

Noor laughed out loud into the dark.

She turned the page. Another note, three paragraphs on, beside a description of Wren staring out at the sea:

She’s not looking at the sea. She’s looking at the place where the ship isn’t.

And that one stopped her cold. Because it was exactly right. It was precisely the thing she’d felt and not been able to say. She read it again, and again, and then she did something she had never done in her life, which was to take a pencil from her bedside drawer and write, very small, underneath it:

Yes.

She felt ridiculous. She felt, strangely, like she’d knocked on a door.

She hadn’t expected an answer.

Books didn’t answer. That was half of why she liked them. But when she returned The Lighthouse Year on Thursday, intending only to take it out again, she found, tucked under the front flap, a sliver of paper on which someone had written in blocky, careful capitals: YOU CAN’T JUST SAY “YES” AND LEAVE. THAT IS NOT HOW A CONVERSATION WORKS. — P.S. I’LL CHECK THE BOOK ON MONDAYS.

“Oh my gosh,” Noor whispered, and a first-year at the next table shushed her.

She did not tell anyone. This was the entire joy of it. She’d always been the sort of girl who told her best friend Priya everything within the hour; but this felt different, too fragile to hold up to the light. For a week she carried the book in her bag like an egg. She read slowly, to make it last. And in every spare moment she wrote, tiny, in the margins, in the dim corner of the annexe where the radiator clanked and nobody came.

Penhale does talk in chapter nine. It’s two words. Do you think two words counts?

Counts as a speech, for him.

I disagree with you about Wren and the dog. Wren is not “too nice to the dog.” The dog is the only one who never asks her to explain herself.

...fine. That’s fair. I withdraw my objection. But I will never forgive the dog for chewing the letter.

It was the nicest argument she’d ever had. The writer was sharp and a little shy, funny in the way that sneaks up sideways. They never wrote their name. They never said anything personal, nothing about school or home. Only the book, and the lines between the lines. But sometimes, in the corner of a page, there was a tiny drawing: a lopsided lighthouse, a dog with too many legs, a teacup with a crack in it. And once, in the margin beside a particularly sad paragraph, three words in the careful capitals:

ARE YOU OKAY?

Noor looked at that for a very long time.

She wasn’t, quite. It had been a hard autumn. Her dad had moved to a flat across town, and she’d spent three weekends in a row sitting on his sofa while he asked how school was and she said fine. She’d come away each time with an odd, flat feeling, like a drink left out overnight. She hadn’t told anyone. She hadn’t known how.

She picked up her pencil. She wrote:

Not entirely. But reading this helps.

And then, because she was terrified, she shut the book hard and left before she could see whether the radiator was clanking at her.

“Okay, it’s obvious,” said Priya Venkat on Friday, sitting cross-legged on Noor’s bedroom floor. “You’ve got a secret admirer.”

“I don’t have a secret admirer.”

“You’ve had your bag at the foot of your bed all week, and you’ve been smiling at it. Noor, you hate smiling. It’s off-brand.”

Noor made a noise of protest that had no actual words in it.

She had given in at last. It had been a long week. She’d gone through the whole story of the book with Priya, from the first pencilled line to the three bold capitals, and her best friend had listened with her mouth slightly open and her tea going cold. Now she was fully, dangerously engaged.

“Right,” said Priya. “Who’s got access to the annexe?”

“Anyone. It’s a library.”

“But who goes there?” Priya was counting on her fingers. “Mrs Abara, obviously, but I think we can rule out Mrs Abara. The Year Twelves doing their coursework. The Gaming Club, because the Wi-Fi’s better. That boy Jonah Reyes, because he reads Russian novels to look deep.”

“Jonah doesn’t read Russian novels to look deep.”

“Okay, he reads them because he is deep. It’s worse.” She gave Noor a significant look. “He’s in your English set. He sits two seats behind you. He’s never said a single sentence to you that wasn’t about homework.”

“That doesn’t mean—“

“Noor. He wrote you a note about a lighthouse.”

And that was the trouble. Because as Priya said it, Noor could see it too, with a sinking, tingling certainty: Jonah’s neat handwriting on a Post-it on her desk once. The faint grey smudge of a pencil on his hand. The way he’d gone quiet last week when she mentioned the book, and looked away.

Jonah Reyes was tall and calm and quietly, infuriatingly kind. He had the sort of face you could write poems about, if you were silly. Half the year fancied him, though none of them had ever said so out loud. Noor had always been faintly in awe of him and had never said so either.

“It’s him,” Priya said, with great satisfaction.

“It might be.”

“It’s him. I’ll bet you five pounds.”

“You don’t have five pounds.”

“I’ll bet you my dignity.”

Noor lay back on the carpet and stared at the ceiling. She tried the idea on, carefully, like a coat. Jonah Reyes, who is secretly funny, who draws lopsided lighthouses. It fit. It fit so well that she felt a hot, helpless swoop of delight, followed at once by a flash of something colder and more confusing. Disappointment? No. That was ridiculous. It was just that she’d pictured, without really meaning to, someone a little less . . . obvious.

Stop it. This is exactly what you wanted.

She went to school on Monday with her stomach in a knot.

It was a disaster almost immediately.

She tried to be casual. She tried so hard that by lunchtime she’d dropped her tray, said “sorry” to a pillar, and told Jonah Reyes in front of nine people that she “loved his shirt,” which was a perfectly ordinary blue shirt. He said thanks. He looked faintly puzzled. And that afternoon in the annexe, when she opened the book to the page where the last note had sat, there was nothing new. Not a smudge.

She checked three times. Then four.

He hadn’t written back.

“He’s playing it cool,” said Priya, at the bus stop.

“He’s not playing anything. He doesn’t know I’m—I think—“ She stopped. “What if it’s not him? What if I’ve completely made a fool of myself?”

“Then you’ll get over it.”

“You can’t say that. You’re supposed to say, ‘Oh no, Noor, you couldn’t possibly.’”

“I’m your best friend, not your PR team.” Priya bumped her shoulder. “Listen. What do you actually want from this? Do you want it to be Jonah, or do you want it to be the person?”

It was the sort of question that sounded simple and wasn’t. Noor chewed on it all the way home.

That night, she opened the book again, and for a long time she did not write. She just read the old notes in order, slowly, from the first to the last. The jokes. The drawings. The three bold capitals that had said ARE YOU OKAY? and then, a week later, a single line she’d missed because it was written very faintly, down in the gutter at the very bottom of the page:

I think I’m quite alone, too. But this is better than alone.

She read it four times.

And then, very slowly, it came over her that none of this had anything to do with Jonah Reyes. Jonah, whom she liked fine, whose handwriting she’d never actually seen next to the capitals; Jonah, who had never once said the kind of thing the pencil said. The person in the book was not tall or calm or kind in an effortless way. The person in the book was awkward, and observant, and a little bit sad, and extremely funny when they thought no one was looking.

She had been so busy hunting for a face that she hadn’t listened to the voice.

Whoever it is, she thought, I’d rather it were them than anyone I’ve decided on.

She picked up her pencil. She wrote, small and fast, in the margin:

I think I guessed the wrong person. I’m sorry. I think I got excited. Can we start again?

Then she wrote one more line, and before she could talk herself out of it, she signed it.

— Noor.

On Wednesday morning, there was a notice on the library door.

THE ANNEXE FICTION COLLECTION (SECTION 3) WILL BE CLEARED ON FRIDAY. ALL REMAINING BOOKS WILL BE DONATED OR RECYCLED. PLEASE RETURN ANY LOANS BY THURSDAY 4 P.M.

Noor read it standing in the corridor with her bag half off her shoulder. Behind her, the bell rang for registration, and she didn’t move.

Friday. There was nothing in the world she wanted less than for them to take away that book. And there was something worse than that: the dreadful, creeping fear that her pencilled apology was the last thing anyone would ever read in it, and the person on the other side would never know.

She slipped into the annexe at break. The radiator clanked. Section 3B smelled of dust and old glue. She took the book down, hands not quite steady, and opened it to the page.

There was a new note.

DON’T APOLOGISE. I WOULD HAVE GUESSED WRONG TOO.

I’M NOT SURE I WANT TO BE FOUND OUT. I AM EXTREMELY BAD AT BEING LOOKED AT.

BUT THEY ARE CLEARING THE SHELVES AND I THINK THAT MEANS I HAVE TO DECIDE.

And below, in a different, more hurried hand:

Thursday. 4:00. Last shelf. I’ll bring the book back if you will.

Noor turned her head slowly. The bell for the end of break went. Nobody was there.

She stood in the empty aisle with the book against her chest and she realised her heart was going like she’d run up all the stairs in the building.

All Thursday, her head was somewhere else. In maths she copied the wrong homework off the board. In chemistry she put her hand up to answer a question, was asked, and said “the lighthouse.” She was put on a detention warning for laughing at nothing, which was, she thought, unreasonably harsh.

She noticed, vaguely, that Samir Okafor was looking at her.

Sam Okafor sat two benches ahead of her in chemistry, a thin, serious boy in glasses with an air of faint, permanent apology. He was in the Gaming Club, and the Chess Club, and the sort of person teachers called “no trouble at all.” She’d spoken to him maybe six times, mostly to ask for the Bunsen burner. Today he’d glanced back at her twice, gone red, and looked away again each time, like a man who had stepped on an exposed nail.

Odd, thought Noor, absently, and then the bell went.

At 3:58 she was in the annexe.

The shelves were half empty already.

Somebody had taken out the whole of Section 1, and a mournful man in a lanyard was stacking crates by the door. The light came slanting through the high window and caught the dust in a long gold beam. Noor stood in the last aisle with her bag clutched to her chest and The Lighthouse Year inside it, and she felt like she was waiting to be called into the headmaster’s office.

At 4:00, the footsteps came.

They were slow and nervous, the kind of footsteps that stop, start, and consider turning back. And then a boy came round the end of the aisle, holding a battered blue paperback of his own.

It was the same book. A second copy. Noor had no idea there had been two.

“Hi,” said Sam Okafor, extremely quietly.

For a second, neither of them said anything. Noor stared at him. He stared at the carpet. His ears had gone a deep and dreadful pink.

“You’re—“ she started.

“I know.” He winced. “I know. It’s—sorry, it’s not very dramatic, is it? Not a mysterious stranger.”

“You’re in my chemistry class.”

“Yes.”

“You’re in my chemistry class,” said Noor, and then, helplessly, started laughing. It burst out of her, a kind of relief and joy and sheer disbelief all at once. She clapped a hand over her mouth, and he looked up, panicked, and she said through her fingers, “No—no, I’m not laughing at you, I promise. It’s just that I’ve been trying to work it out for a week, and my best friend had a whole theory—“

“Jonah Reyes,” said Sam, wretchedly.

“How did you—“

“Everyone assumes it’s Jonah. Everyone assumes it’s Jonah for everything.” But he was smiling now, a small, crooked, rueful thing. “I saw you come in, the first Monday. You walked straight to Section 3B and ran your hand along the spines like you were reading a pulse. And you picked this.” He held up his copy. “And I thought: oh. Oh. Somebody else.”

“You’d been writing in the other copy. Before I came.”

“For two years,” said Sam, going pinker. “Nobody ever read the notes. It was just—a thing I did. Talk to a book.” He gave an embarrassed shrug. “Then I came back one Monday, and there was a single word at the bottom of the page. Yes. I think I read it about forty times.”

The dust drifted. Noor felt, absurdly, that she might cry.

“I’m bad at this,” said Sam. “Talking. Out loud. I’m much better on paper.”

“You’re doing all right.”

“I’m not. I’m holding a book like a shield.”

“So am I,” said Noor, and they looked at each other, and she saw his shoulders loosen a little and felt her own do the same.

“Here,” she said. She pulled out her copy, the blue one with the mug-ring, and held it out. “I’ll swap you.”

“Swap?”

“Yours has two years of you in it. Mine has a week of us.” She was surprised at how steady her voice was. “They’re going to take them away tomorrow. But I don’t think anyone would notice if two copies went missing out of a clear-out.”

His eyes were very wide behind his glasses. “That’s theft.”

“It’s rescue.”

“It’s—“ He started to grin. “Okay. Yes. It’s rescue.”

They traded. His fingers brushed hers, just for a second, on the exchange. Neither of them said anything about it.

“Can I ask you something?” said Noor.

“Of course.”

“The note. The faint one, at the bottom. I think I’m quite alone, too, but this is better than alone.” She hesitated. “Was that about the book? Or was it about—“

“Both,” said Sam. He didn’t look away this time. “I think it might have been both.”

The mournful man in the lanyard coughed at the end of the aisle, jingling his keys. The light had moved on the carpet. It was nearly half past, and the whole building had gone quiet around them, the way a school does when everybody has gone home but two.

“Walk to the gate with me?” said Noor.

“I live the other way.”

“Walk to the gate with me anyway.”

Sam Okafor, who was extremely bad at being looked at, took a deep breath, looked at her for what might have been the longest three seconds of his life, and said, in a voice that only wobbled a little: “Yes.”

They went out together through the empty corridors, past the notice on the door and the trophy cabinet and the flickering sign for the fire exit. At the gate he stopped, as if he’d lost the thread of what to do next.

So Noor, who was usually the kind of girl who waited, stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek, very quickly. It was like touching a hot kettle. She was gone at once, backing away, scarlet, clutching his book.

“Mondays?” she called, from the pavement.

He stood at the school gate, glasses askew, one hand against his face, looking like a man who had been hit very gently by lightning.

“Mondays,” said Sam. “Yes. And—and Tuesdays. And—“ He gave up. “Any days.”

She laughed all the way to the bus stop.

That night, in bed, Noor opened the blue paperback to the first page. Under the old pencil line, This book is better than its cover. So is everyone, a new line had appeared. She hadn’t seen him write it. He must have done it in the aisle while she was looking the other way.

It was small, and slanting, and in soft grey pencil.

Told you. — S.

She turned off the torch. She held the book against her chest in the dark, and listened to the quiet, and she did not feel lonely at all.