XIII: In Which Celeste Receives Her Amazon Order

This one can be read as a stand-alone story.

The wind whipped at her as Celeste reached the top of the rickety wooden staircase on the outside of the house which contained her small converted upper-story apartment.  The place was a steal and, though old and a little drafty, the apartment itself was cozy.  The big drawback was the stairs.  She always felt like these things could just collapse at any time, dropping her to her death, or trapping her in her place with no way down.

She made it safely up, for today at least, when she noticed the package from Amazon propped against the door.  Who had brought it up here?  Why didn’t they just put it by the mailbox downstairs?  Were they suicidal?

She snatched it up, unlocked the door and rushed inside.  Her backpack found itself unceremoniously dumped on the threadbare couch that had come with the place.  Dropping down into the dining chair which, along with the other chairs, table, bed and dresser had also been here when she’d moved in, she kicked off her shoes.  Having all the furniture here, plus dishes, microwave and coffeemaker, had been a godsend.  Just moving her few boxes of possessions up those stairs had been terrifying; forget a couch.

Distractedly, she noticed that the cabinet door under the kitchen counter had blown open again.  That was a major source of the draftiness, as the cabinet had no back, leading directly to attic space on the other side.  Her landlord had told her to keep it clear to allow access for any maintenance to the wiring and pipes in that part of the attic.

Sighing, she got up and closed it, pressing it firmly against the foam pads she’d glued to the frame and re-latched the hook and eye.  She’d have to do it again tomorrow, the pressure from the pads and the angle of the hook conspired to pop it loose every so often.  The pads were necessary, though.  She’d added the latch a week after moving in, but she was no carpenter, and the door had rattled all night, keeping her awake.  The padding had kept it from rattling, but caused the latch to pop.  she couldn’t win.

Sitting back down, she opened her package.  As she’d thought, it was the textbook for her next semester’s Advanced Programming course.  Four hundred dollars new, she’d gotten it used for $13.65 plus shipping.  As she pulled it out, she noticed that, along with the invoice, there was a black-and-white composition notebook included.  How nice of them!

Used textbooks always being a gamble, Celeste flipped through to make sure it was in good condition, without dicks drawn in the margins or anything like that.  There were the usual highlighted portions you would expect, but thankfully no dicks, just little notes.  Flipping a few pages, she started noticing a pattern to them.  Things like: “No!!! See 1-17” and “Too long!  See 4-7” were common.  She checked to see if the notes referenced the tables or figures, but they seemed unrelated.  Shrugging, she put it aside and started her homework.

She heard the staircase creaking in the wind outside her door while she worked, thinking about how long she could go before she starved to death if they fell off.  Halfway through the confusing assignment, Celeste decided she’d probably need to take notes before she got too lost and tangled, so she grabbed the nearest notebook and opened it.

It turned out to be the one from the package, and it was far from blank, rather, it was full of someone’s notes.  She nearly tossed it aside with a curse when one of the notes drew her attention.  “4-17 Shortened Form, less prone to coding error.”  followed by a short string of example code.  There were tons of similar entries.  Celeste grabbed the textbook and compared.  The notes matched up!

Merlin’s Beard!  It couldn’t be.  Nothing ever worked out in her favor, but if these codes worked like the notes said, she had her very own cheatsheet!  Excitedly, she flipped through.  There were so many!  Typo corrections, shortcuts, better codes, sample programs.  It just got better.  Some of the pages interspersed between were lecture notes and Celeste felt a little sorry for the professor, who the note taker considered incompetent and buffoonish.

At the midpoint of the notebook, where the papers’ fold caused a natural break, the format changed.  The latter half appeared to be a personal journal of some sort.  Feeling like a bit of a voyeur, Celeste started reading the first couple of entries, wanting to get a feel for who her unwitting benefactor might have been.

The handwriting and writing style appeared pretty feminine to her, looping rather than angular, that type of thing, contrasting the high legibility of the coding notes.  There were little tells that showed they were written by the same hand, but a hand that knew how to write for clarity when it was important.  Celeste found herself liking this girl even more already.

The journal started with the author expressing a great deal of culture-shock induced anxiety about moving to a big school so far from home.  She’d apparently been a big fish in a small pond, academically, and had a pretty sheltered upbringing.  The anxiety was tempered with relief about being away from her stalker ex-boyfriend, Ben, so at least she had that going for her.

Thunder crashed loudly outside, startling Celeste out of her reading.  She looked out the window and saw the rain starting to come down.  Setting the notebook aside, she grabbed one of her own and went back to the assignment, trying to focus past the howling wind and intensifying patter of the rain.

She was making good progress, having filled two pages with notes to cross-reference, when the lights flickered, followed by thunder that sounded like a car-bomb.  The windows rattled from a wind gust so heavy it made the outside stairs creak; a sound that reminded her of her ex-roommate’s bedsprings. What the hell, Brain?

Doubling down on her homework, Celeste grabbed her ear-buds from her bag where they briefly got tangled with another cord, plugged them in to her laptop and turned on study music to drown out the noise.  Over the next half hour, the lights flickered two more times before finally going out completely.

Just Great.  She moved her mouse to check the charge on the laptop.  11%.  Wonderful.  She looked at her bag where the charger cord snugly rested and called herself seven kinds of idiot.  Frantically, she hit ‘Save’ on her homework, which the laptop interpreted as the perfect cue to shut down.

“What happened to eleven percent?”

The laptop didn’t respond.

With the music gone, she was suddenly thrust back into the center of the storm.  Rain was lashing the windows and roof with a fury and thunder crashed every few seconds, but those were nothing compared to the terrifying sound of the angry pterodactyl that seemed to have taken up residence outside of her door.

Slowly walking through the dark room, navigating by the lightning flashes and memory, she made her way to the door, nearly falling over the throw pillow she’d left on the floor the day before.  Pushing the curtain aside, Celeste could barely make out the stair landing as it wavered toward and away from her, with it’s saurian screeches.

I really am going to die here.  She mentally reviewed her ramen supplies again, then remembered the house’s water heater and stove were electric.  Carefully crossing the room again, she grabbed up her purse and found her phone.  It stared at her with its black, unfeeling screen as she repeatedly tried to turn it on.  Reaching World Six on Candy Crush Saga today suddenly seemed less thrilling.

Taking a few deep breaths, Celeste made herself relax.  The storm would end, the power would come back on, she could plug her phone in and call the fire department to come rescue her.  It would be fun to ride in the bucket of the cherrypicker, wrapped around a hot fireman because of her sudden ‘fear of heights’.

Lightning flashed through the window, illuminating her desk and books.  The composition notebook drew her attention and she snapped it up, went to the kitchen to get candles and a lighter, re-latched the cabinet door after bumping her leg on it in the dark, and went to her bedroom.

Candles lit, Celeste laid back in her bed and opened the notebook to the journal part.  She immersed herself in the girl’s writings, still feeling a bit guilty, but telling herself there was nothing else to be done as she waited out the storm.  It was a pretty interesting read, following along as the author adapted to college life.  There was some sorority-type named Mindee (with two E’s, of course) who had decided that her success in classes was a personal insult and made her life hell any chance she got, even going so far as to spread rumors that she’d been blowing her professors; three separate entries were devoted to calls from her parents about Ben, her oh-so-charismatic stalker ex-boyfriend, contacting them to ask about her; And running through it all was Creepy Chad.

She never mentioned when he came on the scene, the first entry about him began:  “Creepy Chad was waiting for me outside of Burke again today.”  Weird.  There was a Burke building on Celeste’s own campus.  She wondered if all colleges had the same names for things.  Creepy Chad started out pretty tame, if socially awkward.  He would wait in places he knew she’d be to talk to her, constantly ask her out for coffee or drinks no matter how firmly she said ‘No’, ask her questions that were too personal, that kind of thing.

Then the poems and gifts started coming.  Gifts like boxes of her favorite candies imported from England, which she’d never mentioned to him, and a stuffed bear (specifically Funshine Bear of the Care Bears which had been her favorite as a little girl.).  The poems were worse.  Creepy Chad professed undying love for her, describing himself as her Knight, King and even Master, while at the same time offering to serve her as a slave.  The line: “With my tongue as your cloth / Your body I would wash / e’en if you were with mud all a-covered.” pushed her to the point of contacting Campus Security.

Apparently, though, “unconventional courtship” was not enough for them to get involved, and it was her own fault for having been nice to him at first, nevermind that she had since told him to leave her alone countless times in no uncertain terms.

The stress of it was obviously getting to her.  The handwriting got sloppy and shaky as the journal went on and she constantly complained about her absent-mindedness, always misplacing things in her apartment, only to find them in odd places later.

Celeste was so engrossed that she sat up straighter when one entry mentioned the police finding an unidentified body floating in the river that appeared to be a college student just before first-semester finals.  She hoped it was Creepy Chad.

The next entry was almost illegible.

From what Celeste could decipher, the body turned out to be Ben.  Stalker ex-boyfriend from her hometown a thousand miles away, Ben.  His car was pulled out of the river a mile upstream, but nobody knew what he was doing there.  After that, the writer suffered some sort of nervous breakdown, hearing whispers at night, noises in the walls, losing things she swore she’d had.  She stopped going to class.  To make it worse, Creepy Chad decided this was his chance and showed up at her place with flowers.  She’d screamed and cursed at him and told him exactly how to sodomize himself with lawn care tools.  He responded by calling her an ungrateful b***h.

The next entry was the last, but it turned Celeste’s blood to ice.

“I’m going to have myself admitted to Kanetown General tomorrow.  I can’t even trust my own memories anymore.  Maybe Ben was right all along and I just remember things that never happened, but I swear I gave him back his promise ring when we broke up.  I don’t remember taking Chad’s flowers either, but the cabinet door blew open again and they were sitting inside with Ben’s ring tied around them.  I’m losing my mind.”

A strong gust of wind shook the house as Celeste looked out through her bedroom doorway into the kitchen where her own cabinet door popped open, causing a draft that blew out the candles.

The thunder covered her screams in the darkness.