Read Online In Search of the Rose Notes by Emily Arsenault - Free Book Online

sky— / so far up you can barely see the ground…” The poem Charlotte had read me the night before. I was surprised to see it typed on a paper that was starting to yellow with age, with several staple marks in one corner.
    Oddly, I’d been under the impression that this year’s Looking Glass wasn’t finished yet, that Charlotte and the kids were still working on it. But here it was all typed up, with the number eleven on the right-hand corner of the page, as if it had already been printed up in a booklet. The torn edge indicated it had been ripped out of something bound already. I skipped to the next piece halfway down the page. “Dandelions” by Jennifer Glass. This poem began with the line “Thick grass tickles my bare feet.” Yawn. I turned the page over. A number ten in the upper-right-hand corner and, below that, “Pink-Fingered Heart” by Kelly Sawyer.
    Kelly Sawyer. That name was definitely familiar. You never forget the name of the biggest drip in your school. You always remember it pronounced with a mocking whine to it (Kel- leee SAW-yerrrr). Years afterward it still sounds like a disease you pray you’ll never catch. Kelly was in the same class as Charlotte and me. In high school she was even further down on the social ladder than I was, which was difficult to manage. While I hid behind my hair and my closed mouth, Kelly put herself out there in the most painful and embarrassing ways: singing “Sometimes When We Touch,” off-key at the school variety show freshman year, submitting vaguely sensual love poems to the school literary magazine.
    I even remembered “Pink-Fingered Heart.” How could I forget a gross title like that? The question was—what was it doing on Charlotte’s coffee table a decade later? She’d implied—or at least I thought she’d implied—that the clothesline thing had been written by a current student of hers. But this clearly wasn’t the case. This page was probably from an issue of Looking Glass from when we were in high school, and maybe Charlotte had written the clothesline piece. Either that or she and the other English teachers kept “Pink-Fingered Heart” on file to use as Looking Glass boilerplate—a notion that was only slightly less bizarre than Charlotte’s digging up our old school literary magazine to read to me upon our reunion.
    I threw the paper back on the table and placed my coffee cup next to it. It was way too early. I headed back to Paul’s old room. Maybe it would all make sense after a couple more hours of sleep.
    Transformations:
    October 1990
    Charlotte was busy making a diorama of The Witch of Blackbird Pond. I was annoyed with her for picking that book, which she obviously chose only because it was the sort of thing teachers liked—it was long, historical, educational, and it took place in Connecticut. This was our first book report of the year, and we were allowed to read whatever we wanted. I’d picked Blubber by Judy Blume and had already finished my diorama of construction-paper girls gathered around Blubber in the bathroom, with little white paper bubbles vomiting out of their mouths, saying cruel things in big, imposing Magic Marker letters. As I watched Charlotte fashioning cloth Puritans in an elaborate aerial-view court scene in a boot box her father had given her, I was starting to wonder if my own diorama might need some last-minute enhancements.
    “Hey. How come we never read this one?” Rose was flipping through one of the black books Charlotte had left scattered on her bedroom carpet.
    “Because that one is written for little kids,” Charlotte explained, tying a bit of string around a scrap of black cloth to create a waistline for one of her Puritans.
    “Are you sure?” Rose licked her finger and turned a page. “It looks like the rest to me. Long, boring articles and gross pictures.”
    “It’s about vampires and werewolves.”
    “And you’re not into that?” Rose asked.
    “Not really,” Charlotte replied,