Temporal Exploring 101 - Cultural Immersion

II.32 Remember me

For seventh period, Natty did not show up in the classroom after intermission.

This was not good. After learning that she was about to leave our school, teachers had become extremely lenient with her, but I was certain that this would change the moment she started to actually cut classes.

In the short break between seventh and eighth period, I left the classroom and walked to our dorm to check if she might be there.

Natty was not in our room, either. Otherwise, everything was as it should be: her textbooks, novels and records lined up on the bookshelves above her desk, the long T-shirt she liked to wear at night was lying on her bed and a math textbook was positioned next to her pillow.

Then, with a sinking feeling I registered the handwritten note deposited on my own desk. It was in Natty's handwriting, and addressed to me. I picked it up and read:

'Cathy,

I have never been good at saying good-bye, so I am going to skip that part and come straight to the point.
The time I spent here at St. Albert's has felt like a dream for me, a bright shining dream, and that brief time in your 23rd century even more so.
If this has to end now, I will end it on my own terms. I will not wait for them to ship me off to a new orphanage or foster home and some third-rate school somewhere in the country.
Through all this, you have been a true friend. I hope you will be able to go home.

Remember me.

Natty'

I felt as if I had been hit over the head with a heavy object. Numb with shock.

I walked over to our closet. If Natty had left, she had left behind not only all of her books and records, but also most of her clothing. At least she appeared to have taken her weird bag, and her notebook.

Then I happened to look under her desk, and that is where I found it.

Natty's blue notebook had been dumped into the trash basket. Her current notebook, the one she used for her math and for her personal notes. Being too large for the small wastepaper basket, the notebook had been shoved into the trash roughly. Its cover had a few ugly bends and the spine was cracked or even broken.

The notebook that contained the entirety of Natty's ideas, hopes and plans: discarded, put to the trash.

I sat down on my bed and cried. I cried for Natty, and for her bright shining dreams that now would never be realized. I cried as I came to understand that I had failed. Failed in every aspect that counted.

I knew that my Temporal Instructor Sara Jenkins and her grad student Mira would have a different opinion. They would give me full marks on my First Temporal Assignment, corresponding to an 'A+', rather than the 'F' I knew I really deserved.

They would be quick to reassure me that I had completed my assignment in the most satisfactory manner: not only had I helped to finally identify the famously elusive Natty Fogg, author of the Red Notebook. I had also helped to at least partially answer our 23rd century historians' questions about Natty Fogg's ultimate fate.

But the truth of the matter was that I had failed her. Granted, Natty had withdrawn into herself, making it difficult for me to reach out to her. But as her friend, I ought to have insisted on talking to her about her options, about what might still be done.

When I was done crying, I carefully retrieved the blue notebook from the wastepaper basket and opened it, intending to browse through the entries of the last few days.

I expected lots of mathematical equations, but instead I found only lengthy passages of written text. I had assumed that Natty had been working on her math when she had been ceaselessly scribbling in her notebook during classes, but that assumption turned out to be wrong.