The First Note
Ellie Parker was the kind of girl nobody noticed in the hallway. She was not ugly. She was not weird. She was just... quiet. She wore her hair in a simple ponytail every day, carried the same blue backpack since ninth grade, and always sat at the very last table in the cafeteria, alone, reading a book while everyone else laughed and threw fries at each other. It was a Tuesday morning in October when everything changed. Ellie walked to her locker, number 214, the same way she did every single school day. She twisted the little lock — 12, 27, 5 — and pulled the metal door open.Something fell out. It was a small white envelope. No name on the front. No stamp. Just her locker number written in neat, careful handwriting: 214. Ellie looked left. She looked right. Nobody was watching her. The hallway was full of noise — lockers slamming, sneakers squeaking on the floor, someone's phone playing music too loud — but nobody cared about the quiet girl and her locker. She opened the envelope with shaking fingers. Inside was a folded piece of paper. She opened it slowly, like it might explode. "I don't know if you notice me, but I notice you.Every single day. — Your Secret Admirer." Ellie read it three times. Then she read it a fourth time, just to be sure her eyes were not playing tricks on her. Nobody had ever written her a love note before. Nobody had ever written her any note before, unless you counted the time her science teacher wrote "See me after class" on her test, which was not romantic at all. She was thinking about the note. Jake was the kind of boy everybody knew. He was actually looking at her. Could it be him? The next morning, there was another note in locker 214.Really seeing her. "You laughed at something in English class today. One day, at her locker, Jake actually walked up to her. But her heart did not care. Her heart was doing cartwheels. "Thanks," she said, smiling so hard her cheeks hurt. From that day, Jake started saying hi to her in the hallway. He started sitting a little closer at assemblies. He even offered her half of his sandwich once, which — for a boy like Jake — was basically a marriage proposal. Ellie was sure of it now. Jake Reynolds was her secret admirer. He was just too shy to admit it out loud.She decided that when he was finally ready to tell her the truth, she would already know. And she would say yes before he even finished the sentence. What Ellie did not know — what she could not possibly know — was that every single note in locker 214 had been written by somebody else entirely. Somebody who sat two seats behind Jake in homeroom. Somebody who carried a pencil behind his ear and never said much in class. Somebody who had loved Ellie Parker quietly for two whole years, and was far, far too scared to sign his own name.His name was Tommy. And Tommy had a plan that was about to get very, very complicated.
