After a sudden yawn comes out of him, Skylar finally nods. “Yeah, alright. Okay. I’ll crash here.”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks, man. I appreciate it.”
My heart is combusting into glorious flames of excitement. I’m not sure yet if it’s a good feeling. “I can pull down some blankets and a pillow, set you up on the couch out here. Or I can give you my bed and I’ll take the couch, or—”
Skylar’s eyes fly open suddenly and he turns to me. “Wait a sec. Do you still have it?”
I blink. “Have it? Have … what?”
“The book,” he states. “The book. Our book.”
I feel at once like I’ve fallen through a hole in time, my body plummeting deeply into a memory I didn’t even realize was there. “Holy fucking shit,” I hear myself say, overcome. “The book.”
“The book,” he breathes, fully awake, wide-eyed.
“The fucking book.”
I’m off the couch the next instant. Skylar’s right behind me. I go straight down the short hall and to my room, where I plunge into my closet and pull down a box off the top shelf. Ripping it open, I sift through mementos, souvenirs, and a half-cracked Frisbee until I at last find it.
“You do still have it,” Sky breathes from behind me, astonished.
It’s a spiral notebook with the Greek alphabet drawn in big block letters across its cover with a Sharpie. The original cover is a yellow smiley face, which you can see through the block letters. In its pages is an assortment of secrets that members of our fraternity had anonymously confessed. There was a tradition of making the pledges add secrets in it, and then weekly, some of the secrets would be outed at a party, but the tradition got confused and warped over the years before (and during) my time there, and eventually no one really knew the point of the book other than to drop funny secrets into it.
And it would still be with the frat if it weren’t for a particularly foolish game of pool the president of the fraternity challenged me to. With a crack of the eight ball into a corner pocket, I won the book.
And left with it.
“How many secrets did you have to put into it?” Skylar asks as we bust it open on my bed. “I’ve got to assume there is some seriously whacked-out controversy in these pages.”
“I only read the first three or so pages. Really, when was the last time I ever voluntarily picked up a book and actually read it?”
Sky snorts. “You’re a walking irony. A guy … who works in a bookstore … who doesn’t read.”
“Hey, to be fair, I work in a coffee shop that just so happens to be located in a bookstore.”
“Sure, true. Though, I’m not sure that makes it sound any better.” Skylar gives me a look. “So are you saying you … didn’t … read the whole thing?”
We’re lying on our stomachs on my bed like a pair of schoolgirls who found our older sister’s diary. “Nope. But one of the first entries was a confession about someone who still wet his bed as late as junior year of high school. Oh, and on the second page, there was a confession of this other guy who fucked his brother’s girlfriend.”
“Wow. That was probably Brian.”
I laugh. “C’mon. Brian wouldn’t do that. It was more likely Tyler or Jackson. Who knows.”
Sky keeps eagerly turning the pages, in a very obvious search for something juicy. He lands on a page, reads a confession to himself, then gasps. “This guy had a hard-on for Professor Brown!”
“Can you blame him? She was hot and only in her thirties. Didn’t she teach poli-sci?”
“Yeah, I think so.” Skylar turns more pages.
The memories continue to pour out of the little timeworn book as we dissect secret after secret. Just like that, all the awkwardness from before is gone, and we’re almost back to our old selves, laughing at everything, cutting jokes, and gawking at how many crazy weirdos were in that fraternity of ours.
In fact, we decide to get even more comfortable by kicking off our shoes and pants and lounging on the bed in just our loose shirts and boxer-briefs.
Teary-eyed from some other ridiculous thing that just cracked us up, he turns a few more pages and stops. When his eyes take in whatever secret is written there, his face changes.
I notice. “What’s up?” I ask, wiping a few tears of hilarity from my eyes.
He tosses the book to the floor suddenly, then rolls over onto his back. “I think I’ve filled my eyes with enough of my frat brothers’ secrets.”
I roll onto my back as well. Our heads are at the foot of my bed, and our feet by the pillows. One of the pillows was kicked off the bed, I guess, when we were laughing too hard at something. I don’t care. “Getting tired?”