I could never find the right way to start this story –I’ve been sitting and staring at my journal for the past two hours, writing and rewriting sentences and paragraphs, only to mercilessly tear the page and start all over again with a different approach. Personally, I could never pinpoint where exactly the story started, and maybe that’s the problem. However, I could be persuaded to start here.

Imagine something like this:

            You’re in your favorite bookstore, scanning the shelves thoughtlessly. You get to the section where your favorite author’s books reside –and there, nestled in so comfortably between the already-familiar spines, sits a very conspicuous and suspicious red notebook.

            What do you do?

The choice, I would think, is clear and obvious: you take down the red notebook(that is, if you didn’t live in Harry Potter’s Wizarding World, where suspicious notebooks turn out to be cursed or Voldemort’s horcruxes) and open it.  And then you do whatever it tells you to do(again, for the exception of those in the wizarding world).

It was Christmastime in New York City –probably the most detestable time of the year. The herd-like(I’m talking cows and sheep, mind you) crowds, the endless visits from hapless relatives who only become relatives at this particular time, the pseudo-cheer, the joyless attempts at joyfulness –my natural aversion to excessive human contact could only intensify in this context. Wherever I went, I was on the wrong end of the stampede. I was not willing to grant ‘salvation’ through any ‘army’. I would never care about the whiteness of Christmas –not that it ever really was white, it was white for about five seconds before it turned grey and repulsive. I was a Decemberist, a Bolshevik, a career criminal, a taciturn romanticist trapped by the abundance of outspoken debaters –whatever everyone else was not, I was willing to be. I walked as invisibly as I could through the Pavlovian spend-drunk hordes, the broken winter breakers, the foreigners who had flown across the world to see the lighting of a tree without realizing how completely pagan such a ritual was.

The only bright side  of the dim season was that the school was shuttered(presumably so everyone could shop ad nauseaum and discover that family –like arsenic, works best in small doses …unless you prefer to die). This year, I had managed to become a voluntary orphan for Christmastime, telling my mother I was spending time with my father, and my father, that I was spending it with my mother, so that each of them booked non-refundable vacations with their post-divorce paramours. My parents haven’t spoken to each other in eight years(they’ve been divorced five years –I lived a very silent childhood), which gave me a lot of leeway in the determination of factual accuracy, and therefore, a lot of time to myself.

I was popping back and forth between my father’s apartment and my mother’s new brownstone, while they were away –but mostly I was spending time either at the Bookleech or in the rented attic apartment I got in my parents’ divorce. The latter was a compensatory effort so I could be pacified with my pessimistic ranting to them. The earlier was a fortress of titillating erudition, not so much a bookstore as a collision of a hundred different bookstores with literary wreckage thrown over eighteen miles of shelves. All the clerks saunter-slouched around distractedly in their skinny jeans and their thrift store button downs, like older siblings who will never, ever be bothered to talk to you or care about you, or even acknowledge your existence if their friends are around …which they always are. Some bookstores want you to believe they’re some kind of community center, like they need to host a cookie-making class in order to sell you some Proust. But the Bookleech leaves you completely on your own. Caught between the warring forces of organization and idiosyncrasy, with idiosyncrasy winning every time. In other words, it was my kind of graveyard.

I was usually in the mood to look for nothing in particular when I go to the Bookleech. Some days, I would decide that the afternoon would be sponsored by a particular letter, and I would visit ever section to check out the authors whose last name began with said letter.

Other days, I would decide on a single section, or would investigate the recently-unladed tomes, thrown in bins that never really conformed to alphabetization. Or maybe I’d only look at books with green covers, because it had been too long since I’ve read a book with a green cover.

I could be hanging out with the other kids in my apartment building, but most of them were hanging out with their families or their Wiis(Wiis? Wiii? What is the plural?). I preferred hanging out with the dead, dying and desperate books –used, we call them in a way you would never call a person unless you meant it cruelly(‘Look at Clarissa –she’s such a used girl.’).

I was horribly bookish, to the point of coming right out and saying it, which I knew was not socially acceptable. I particularly loved the word bookish, which I found other people used about as often as ramrod or chum or teetotaler.

On this particular day, I decided to check out a few of my favorite authors to see if any irregular editions had emerged from a newly-deceased person’s library sale. I was perusing a particular favorite(he shall remain nameless, because I might turn against him someday) when I saw a peek of red. It was red moleskin, made of neither mole nor skin, but nonetheless, the preferred journal of my associates who felt the need to journal in non-electronic form. You can tell a lot about a person from the pages he or she chooses to journal on –I myself am strictly a blank-page sort of girl, having a slight inclination to illustrate several things(randomly) and a curly, slanting script that looked frivolously eighteenth century but seemed ridiculously messy on college ruled paper. This is usually the most popular –I only had one friend once, Philippe(he’s not French), who went for the grid. Or at least he did until the guidance counselors confiscated his journals to prove he had been plotting to kill our history teacher. (This is a true story.)

There wasn’t any writing on the spine of this particular journal –I had to take it off the shelf to see the front, where there was a piece of paper stuck inside some slip-in compartment(which was probably where you put your name –very mid-century) with the words ‘The Secret List’ written in a black curling script, much like mine, but much more fancy.

Either way, I turned the page and found a list of names in different handwritings –it was exactly like a journal(or a hitlist, I think, and the thought made me wonder if I’ve stumbled upon the mother lode of baddie lists) except it was just names. A lot of names. Curious, I flipped the pages and found it full of the self-same lists all in different scripts –I was beginning to think it was some kind of Death Note. There must have been a hundred pages of this.

I took the suspiciously fascinating journal with me(we’d grown rather close, and she was too interesting to leave behind anyway) and went to the information desk, where the guy sitting there looked like someone had slipped a few lithium in his Coke Zero. I decided that if I was going to go all Light Yagami on this, I should have something more concrete than what Light himself had taught me. Actually that’s a lie. I just really wanted to get it.

‘I want this,’ I declared.

He didn’t respond.

‘I meant I want to buy it, not get it for free,’ I said.

Nope. Nothing.

‘At the very least, can you tell me how much it is? Maybe I can just leave my money here and not bother you anymore?’

He looked at his computer, as if it had some way to speak to me without typing on his part.

‘Are you wearing headphones that I can’t see?’ I asked.

He scratched the inside of his elbow.

‘Do you know me?’ I persisted. ‘Did I grind you to a pulp in kindergarten, and you are now getting sadistic pleasure from this petty revenge? Charon, is that you? I was much younger then, and foolish to have nearly drowned you in that water fountain. In my defense, your prior destruction of my book report was a completely unwarranted act of aggression.’

Finally, a response. The information desk clerk shook his shaggy head.

‘No?’

‘I don’t think that’s one of our books,’ he muttered, looking at me through sleepy eyes. ‘Did you happen to pick it up off the floor or on the window –maybe it belongs to someone here? Or maybe you’re just trying to bother me. I don’t care. Just get on out with it.’ He remained completely unabashed. ‘And although I’m not Charon, you should be ashamed of what you did. Ashamed.’ He clucked twice and went back to whatever he was doing.

That was exactly how things started.